We all miss Webberleys Bookshop dont we?
Webberley's Bookshop was based in Hanley, the City Centre of Stoke on Trent.
It closed in Jan 2016 after trading in Hanley for 102 years following the retirement of it's family business owners Robert and Nigel Webberley.
The Potteries.org describes it as "A really good independant book shop spread over two floors of books, both fiction and non-fiction, on all sorts of subjects. A large craft materials section makes it even better."
It was a really popular independant bookshop based in a beautiful Victorian building called The Free Trade Buildings. This department store gave a feeling of a bookshop from years gone by. It reminded of a place like Foyles Bookshop in London and was of a similar size if not bigger.
The closure of Webberleys Bookshop left a massive gap in the availability of cultural, poetry and art books particularly linked to North Staffordshire and South Cheshire. In 2019 during lockdown Barewall developed a new section on the website with the aim of building up a book collection space to help to support writers, authors and poets that relied on Webberleys Book shop to sell their books but also to provide a space where books and supporting reference material surrounding artists and their life and work can be purchased by collectors and those interested in art. Its also makes for a great place to buy books as perfect gifts by loved ones and a way for people to learn about the cultural history of the area in which we as a gallery specialise.
In lockdown whilst we were unable to open the gallery it made sense to develop this part of the offer at Barewall, I imagined people at home wanting to read and spending time lamenting the closure of Webberleys Book Shop.
Although Barewall is a much smaller business than Webberleys with thanks to the reach of the internet we are able to offer a selection of rare, limited run and signed books which cover areas of interest which our customers and collectors may be interested in. Covering topics like art, history, heritage, architecture, culture, poetry, play scripts, people, place, politics, travel, biographies and autobiography linked to North Staffordshire and South Cheshire we hope to be able to offer a wider field of vision surrounding the landscape of culture we already work within. We are also able to offer the chance to buy books out of print, art exhibition catalogues as well as newly published books, DVDs, CDs (media) and art exhibition posters.
Please visit Barewall's The Book Shop collection to view the growing range of books available from the gallery.
If you are a writer, poet and playwright, local historian or a local publisher and have books of local interest please do get in touch with the gallery via shop@barewall.co.uk with details, or if you love to read and can recommend any titles for the gallery please do get in touch.
Thanks for reading the text and we look forward to hearing from you.
With love and best wishes from Amanda and Paula
Barewall Art Gallery
January 2021