Newham Bookshop

Newham Bookshop is a community bookshop. It grew from local community action in the early 1970s, when Newham was short of school places and a group of parents got together to tackle the issue head on. They called themselves Newham Education Concern or NEC because they were sticking their ‘necs’ out. They fiercely challenged the orthodoxy that parents in Newham had low expectations for their children.

By 1975 NEC had opened the first Newham Parents’ Centre in an old eel and pie shop in Prince Regent’s Lane. In 1978 the centre moved to Barking Road and began to sell educational materials and books to families, in recognition of how difficult it was to access these things in the area at the time. This was how the bookshop began. Current manager Vivian Archer joined ten years later. Newham Parents’ Centre expanded over the next 20 years to run 12 services, focusing on under-fives, reading support and career guidance. Once the Centre closed in the late 1990s the bookshop remained on Barking Road.

Newham Bookshop remains a local institution, still not-for-profit and strong in the face of competition from corporate and online booksellers. It has a double fronted shopfront, with one half dedicated to children's books. The bookshop organises bookstalls across London, puts on signings and events and works extensively with local schools and other community groups. When issues with the lease forced the bookshop to move premises two doors down the road in 2018, thousands of pounds were donated to finance the move and teams of volunteers spent days sorting through books and restocking the shelves.

On the Record ran an oral history project about Newham Bookshop from 2019 -2020 and published A Bookshop for All (2022), which was an oral history of Newham Bookshop.

Newham Bookshop are members of the Alliance of Radical Booksellers.

Source:

Rosa Schling, A Bookshop for All, (2022), On the Record