How London's Old Bookshops Stay Open

Just beyond another branch of Byron, which sits next to another All Bar One, which backs onto another Patisserie Valerie, are the second-hand and antiquarian bookshops that make up the bulk of Charing Cross Road.

As post-Olympics London finds itself becoming increasingly devoid of character – commercially-orientated and council-mandated tentacles lashing from Westfield to Westfield, taking out as many cultural outposts as possible – there's something powerfully symbolic about these musty places managing to retain an independence, in a time where near-neighbours, like Denmark Street or the warrens of formerly-seedy Soho, are crumbling in the face of rampant financial pressure.

I set out to discover just how a handful of shops that specialise in dog-eared Penguin Classics and 17th century vellum manuscripts are – from the outside, at least – laughing in the face of change. The answer took me further than I'd expected from the hazy visions of the trade I'd picked up from Black Books, Iain Sinclair books and my own time spent thumbing through tatty copies of Portnoy's Complaint.

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"A lot of people have a fantasy about working in a bookshop," says Natalie Kay-Thatcher, who works at Marchpane, a children's bookshop on Cecil Court, Charing Cross Road's slightly more salubrious cousin just a few seconds away. "They think we get to read all day and that it's not like work. Well, yes, it is like work, and you have to clean the loos, and you don't read all day."

As we begin talking a middle-aged man enters the shop, picks up a 1921 edition of an Italian translation of Alice in Wonderland and gives it a deep sniff. "The smell," he says, "I just love the smell. You can't beat it." That immediately elucidates one reason for the survival of places like Marchpane, or Peter Ellis, or Qunitos, or Henry Pordes, or Bryars & Bryars: obsession.

"There's a difference between someone who wants something as an investment, and someone who needs to have the book, the item," Natalie says. It is easy to spot these men – and they are usually men – rifling through the stacks. Hunched, shuffling, glasses closer to their lips than their eyelids, they hunt through pile after pile in basement after basement, day after day.

Often, I suspect, the search for that exact edition is little more than a justification for their fetishistic need to buy anything. The book, as an abstract idea, has become indivisible from the book as an actual, readable thing. They just want to own books, and lots of them. Whether the obsessives foster the shops or the shops foster the obsessives is a question for another day.

Of course, not everyone who puts money through the till at these places is carrying with them a Tesco bag heaving under the weight of a dozen remaindered copies of first novels that no one ever read. Stand facing the Charing Cross shops on any given day and you'll see the other IRL group who help keep the exorbitant business rates paid: tourists.

There's a hint of amused irony in Niamh Stroud's voice when she tells me how tourists often come in to ask about the whereabouts of 84 Charing Cross Road. "They ask for the book," she tells me, referring to the 1970 novel about life in the antiquarian book trade that was turned into a 1987 film starring Anthony Hopkins. "Then they ask me where it is." And she points them to a branch of McDonald's.

Once they've got over that initial shock, they'll often seek solace in a handful of established names. "They want to buy anything," Niamh says from behind the counter of Any Amount of Books. "They want to buy Austen, Dickens, the famous English authors."

"The shop fronts over the road," she says, gesturing towards the currently unoccupied frontage emblazoned with words like INTRIGUE and SPARK, "make somewhere like this even more important. Look at Berwick Street in Soho [which has become much more upmarket in recent years] as an example of how things can change rapidly round here."

The relationship is a symbiotic one: the tourists get their little postcard-pretty picture of a London that's not really real, and the shops get their cold hard cash. Everyone is happy, right?

Walking door to door, I encountered resistance from the staff of the majority of the area's other bookshops. Very few people were willing to talk to me about the realities of the book trade in 21st century London. Photos, however, were fine. At the time, the reticence had been frustrating. A few days later, when someone finally came forward to speak to me, it began to make sense.

Like any other industry that combines the alleged freedoms of creativity with the rigours of business, the bookselling trade has a problem with inequality. "There are literally thousands of naïve bookish types lining up to be exploited by this business," says one young bookseller who we'll call Patrick for reasons of anonymity and job security. The zero hours contracts, poor wages and fundamental lack of basic employment rights that plague many other industries extend to the rarified and allegedly cosy world of the second-hand bookshop.

Attracted to the trade, the young, artsy type, desperate to avoid the corporate machinations of life in a chain bookshop, finds themselves occupying a strange and unsatisfying middle ground "It's unclear what you are," Patrick says. "Are you a skilled cultural arbiter, offering advice to customers and pricing books according to their antiquarian worth and shifting cultural importance, or are you someone who carries boxes around and sits on the till all day?"

During our conversation, Patrick touched on something that had been niggling away at me during my time rifling through the shelves in bookshop after bookshop, here on the Charing Cross Road. Were we all – from obsessive repeat buyer, to one-off tourist picking up a copy of Jane Eyre, to canny shop owner, to poorly-paid graduate desperate to steer clear of a life in admin – complicit in a romanticisation of the past that only serves to preserve the industry in aspic, holding back the next generation of potential booksellers?

Anyone wanting to graduate from manning the till a few days a week in one of the shops on Charing Cross Road or Cecil Court to becoming a fully-fledged trader themselves is going to be stymied by finance, space and the looming presence of the internet. The London that these shops emerged in was entirely different from the city we find ourselves enduring in the present day. Rents and rates were cheaper, space was more readily available and the book-freaks, artists and outsiders who made the shops viable in the first place weren't as rapidly priced into exhaustion poverty and eventual escape as they find themselves in 2017.

So remember, every quid we spend on a yellowed Raymond Williams paperback might seem like a bookish fuck you to the cranes and chains that dominate the London skyline, but as Patrick puts it, we're inadvertently feeding an "almost parodic" sense of what these shops are, what they do, and what they stand for.

@bain3z