New Independent Bookshop in Barnsley

Thursday, December 26, 2019

I live in Barnsley in South Yorkshire, and although the town itself stayed Labour in the recent election, my constituency, on the west of the town, went Tory. I was absolutely devastated - I still am. I immediately started thinking of things I could do to make a difference. One of the things I will do is email my new MP a lot - if she wants to represent me she can hear my voice. I'll be polite, don't worry! But she can definitely hear me.

I thought of a couple of other things I can do that I will be putting into place in 2020. They both require applying for things, but I would love to make a difference in some way or other. Then I saw a tweet about a new independent bookshop opening in Barnsley town centre on Monday6 16th December, and I decided I would put my money where my mouth is and go support an independent shop.

Barnsley has only had The Works or supermarkets to buy books from since WHSmith shut down a couple of years ago. We don't have any other bookshops. It's a pretty poor state of affairs, actually. So I'm really happy The Book Vault has opened up.

I asked my friend Sarah to come along too and said we could get some lunch afterwards. She then had to pick me up because my car was broken - I have had the worse luck with my car this year, this is the third thing I've had go wrong with it - but she was happy to and then we headed into town.

The shop was busy when we got there. There was a member of staff greeting us and we told her we had seen them on Twitter and decided to visit. There's quite a few books. Nothing was labelled when we visited which I found strange, but this may change. There was a big crime/thriller section. There were a few YA books filed in with the adult books, but I think kinks like that might get ironed out as the weeks go on.

I headed across to the YA section and thought it had a good selection of books. There were titles I haven't seen in shops before, as well as some popular books, and lots that I've read! I liked the section.

I bought three books and will definitely go back!

The outside of the shop. It's on a street that has a lot of charity shops on it, and it seems to get a lot of footfall. I hope people go into the shop!