Foyles bookshop in London - London - Places of Interest

Charing Cross Road has always been known for the bookshops along it, but the most famous is Foyles on the corner of Charing Cross Road and Manette Street, just a few blocks down from Tottenham Court Road station on the right hand side.

Foyles was started in 1903 by the two Foyle brothers, William and Gilbert, who began by selling second hand books. They moved into the current store in 1906 and for a long while Foyles was recognised as the largest bookshop in the world. Its still one of the biggest in Britain, spread over five floors with a huge stock of books and is still privately owned.

Foyles was always different from other bookshops, apart from the size of the shop they had so many books on just about every topic under the sun and they were all piled everywhere. It definitely wasn’t the slick marketing style of somewhere like Borders, the philosophy seemed to be order as many books as you can and let the customer root around for the one they want.
It was a great shop because they would have the book you wanted when 99% of others would not.

If you were a university student looking for some little known book on an obscure topic Foyles would be likely to stock it. They’d have a huge amount of fiction but also covered subjects like medicine, science, anything technical in depth. They also had a system where the books on shelves were arranged by publisher rather than author or subject.

One of the really idiosyncratic things they had going that always threw me when I went there was that when you bought a book you had to go to a counter and get a written invoice for the book and take that to another counter to pay for the book. Confusing and annoying if you didn’t know where the counters were or there were long lines.

Foyles has had a major makeover in the last few years and walking around it now there’s none of the books piled high clutter there used to be. They’ve also added a cafe and an art gallery which I guess they had to do to keep up with the competition.

It still a great shop to browse around and they’ll most likely have something you’ll want. Foyles is open Mon-Sat 9.30am-9pm(10pm in the run up to Christmas), Sun 12-6pm, they’re closed Christmas Day.