The bookshop hidden in a ‘railway station’, around the corner from Hogwarts…

We drop in on yet another candidate for our favourite bookshop ever..in Alnwick, Northumberland, England.

200 years ago, not that far from here, in the North East of England, George Stephenson gave us the world’s first railway.

Here in Alnwick, Northumberland, no trains run through this the beautiful Victorian station anymore - it’s ‘just’ a bookshop.

I say just a bookshop; it’s one of the biggest and most beautiful secondhand bookshops in the…world? (If he’s ever visited one, maybe only D Trump would disagree).

If we are guilty of any exaggeration, judge us after you have visited. This is not just your average second hand bookstore. There’s first editions here we could never afford.

But equally, there’s quality reads for a few English quids.

And you’re not even paying for the pleasure of the surrounds. The awesomeness that pervades: people getting excited about books, in a place as pretty as this, as historic as this, as relaxed as this - that part is free to enjoy.

The poem on one wall, by Katrina Porteous:

If my train will come,
Quietly, in the night,
With no other sound than the slow
Creak of wheel upon wheel;

If, huge as a house but brighter,
Crouched at the edge of the fields
Like a steaming beast, it is waiting
Down the deserted road;

Through the colliery gate and the church
Where my mother and father were wed
Are all grown over at last
And the people I knew there dead now,

If a stranger alights
And, holding my breath, I see
That he has your eyes, your hair,
But does not remember me;

And if there follows a girl
With my face from years ago
And for miles by the sides of the tracks
The Durham grasses blow -

O, if my train will come
With its cargo of souls who have passed
Over this world to find me,
Will I go? Will I want to?

If you’re ever in this lovely Northumbrian neck of the woods, do not miss the opportunity to visit Barter Books. With Hogwarts just around the corner, Harry Potter himself would want you to visit this magical place first, I have no doubt.

What did I buy? …’The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country’ by Tom Hazeldine. What was the question? I’ll let you know…