Housmans Bookshop, 5 Caledonian Road, London N1 9DY

Housmans Bookshop was founded in 1945, at a time when anti-war sentiment pulsated through the streets of London. The shop’s founder was writer and playwright Laurence Housman, who was also a sponsor of the Peace Pledge Union, one of the UK’s oldest pacifist organisations. His aim was to start a shop that would stock books promoting notions of peace and human rights. He got others on board and found the shop’s initial premises; a bombed but repaired space they could rent cheaply.

The years that followed presented serious challenges for Housmans. The bookshop closed, moved and reopened. In 1974, an IRA bomb exploded a pillar box outside it, shattering its windows; years later, a letter bomb caused a staff member to suffer burns. This was all followed by a long period of libel actions targeting the “anti-fascist” literature on its shelves.

Today, Housmans has become one of the UK’s longest-standing radical bookshops. It is the place for bold ideas and conversations, and a space in which activism and bookselling intersect. “Housmans was founded as a shop to make available literature that could play a part in creating a peaceful and just world,” co-manager Nik Gorecki tells me. “That spirit continues to inform what Housmans is and does to this day.”

Gorecki is one of four co-managers; other members of the “non-hierarchical” team include Catherine Barter, Al Anderson and Cristina Ros. “Laurence was a very interesting figure, a playwright, atheist, humanist, openly homosexual man and leading male supporter of the Suffragette movement,” Gorecki says of the shop’s founder. “However Laurence was just one of many people involved in the shop, and over the bookshop’s now 78-year history, there have been so many people who have contributed enormously to its survival and flourishing.”

Coming from various different backgrounds, what unites the team is their “political drive”, as well as their desire to get books into the hands of readers. The staff all have pay parity and the same job title, but their roles do differ. Each member has their own area of expertise and Gorecki explains that they try to divvy up the workload.

“I’ve never worked anywhere like Housmans before,” Anderson tells me. “As a queer, neurodivergent person I was always haunted by the notion that things didn’t have to be the way they are in working environments,” the bookseller explains. “When I started at Housmans I finally felt vindicated; the collaborative, non-hierarchical management structure creates an atmosphere of genuine support and inclusion that I’ve never experienced anywhere else.”

The shop carries a range of titles on topics such as queer politics, feminism, Black politics and anti-racism, as well as socialism and environmentalism. Beyond non-fiction, it also stocks poetry, fiction and children’s books, but all the titles on its shelves are “socially engaged and political in some way”, as Barter tells me.

“Looking at the publication calendar it’s often easy to spot the things which will be relevant because we are so specific, but we also know that certain authors and publishers (such as Pluto Press and Verso Books) will always publish titles our customers are interested in,” Barter says. Reviews and prizes are not as important to how the team selects the books the shop sells; what they pay close attention to is their customers’ reading interests.

“Our stock is much broader than anti-war and pacifist books now, but it remains focused on books that advocate for social justice and collective liberation—and our belief is that a more equal world is also a more peaceful one, so our core values haven’t changed,” Barter says. “Although we’ve expanded in recent years to stock more poetry, fiction and children’s books, it’s vital to us that we retain our political focus—partly because there aren’t many bookshops like ours anymore, and partly because the world needs these sorts of books more than ever.”