Heygates Bookshop to temporarily close ahead of move to new venue

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The independent bookshop has announced it will be temporarily closing at 5pm this Saturday (May 22) in preparation for a move to a new venue in the railway station.

Owner Jason Passingham said he decided on the closure in order to give himself time to move into the new venue.

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“We’ve been here 53 years and it’s just grown and grown and we’ve had to face the reality that we’ve outgrown the space,” he said.

“So, during lockdown, we tried to make a positive out of a negative and what we did was we looked for another building of character, we didn’t want to move to just any shop. We wanted something that had the feel of this shop, a square box wouldn’t have worked for us. So we hunted high and low and then the train station became available, we entered negotiations and the move date is imminent.”

Despite moving away from a venue is has occupied for more than fifty years, Mr Passingham believes he will preserve the ‘essence’ of Heygates Bookshop as it moves from one unit to another. He said: “We’ll still doing the part-exchange programme, we’re still keeping the name. None of that’s changing. The essence of Heygates is staying exactly the same, we’re just maybe organising it better so customers can find what they want.”

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Mr Passingham hopes to use the extra time to make his transition to Heygates’ new home as smooth as possible. He said: “We’ve already moved a lot of stock. About 15-20,000 books already, but now it’s got to a stage where we need to start allocating space on shelves, so we physically can’t operate the shop without taking too much stock out. It’s a case of carefully moving it across, merging some sections, demerging others and making this shop as nice as possible to hand it back to the District Council.”

The bookshop’s reopening state, though imminent, is still to be announced. To find out more, visit it’s Facebook page.

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