Hi everyone,

Sorry we’ve been a little quiet since last week but as you may have guessed, our decision to temporarily close our sister shop, Pages of Hackney, means that Pages Cheshire Street is also now closed. Since we were already scheduled to leave the Cheshire Street site at the end of April, we’ve decided to effectively bring this forward, meaning that we will now not reopen at Cheshire Street.

We know you’ll share our disappointment, but since our priority is the safety and wellbeing of our staff, customers, and community, we recognise the urgent need for social distancing at this crucial time.

If you have tickets for any of our forthcoming events, we will be in touch soon with information regarding refunds.

While our shops are closed, we remain open by email at Pages of Hackney for orders and are delivering locally and nationally (with free postage for orders over £10). If you’d like to support us during this difficult time, we’d be very happy to order you a copy of the book for the cancelled event, or any other books you’d like. Please let us know your orders and delivery address via info@nullpagesofhackney.co.uk and we’ll forward you a link for secure payment. We’re also very happy to offer recommendations, and please remember you can still order titles from Our Alternative Canon as well as our Subscription for a year of great books by women, trans, and gender diverse writers.

If you’ve already ordered a book for collection, we’ll be in touch soon with a payment link and ask for your address to deliver it.

Thank you to everyone who has visited us at Pages Cheshire Street over the last year, we are hugely grateful for your support and positive messages. As soon as circumstances allow us to open in a new space, we will let you know. ❤️

Eleanor, Jo and Pema

We have had a hugely positive response to Pages Cheshire Street since we opened a year ago, with many people becoming emotional as they walk in. The shop has been a destination and for many, been a safe space to browse, have conversations, for meetings of minds. We worked hard to put the shop on the map, running over thirty literary events in under a year, including with gal-dem, Deborah Levy, Sabrina Mahfouz, Meg-John Barker and many more. We successfully applied for Arts Council Funding for our literary events programme, enabling us to pay speakers. We’ve established a collaboration with Virago, curated shelves with gal-dem and Bloody Good Period, and crowd sourced an Alternative Canon. 

It is therefore with regret that we have taken the decision to move on from Cheshire Street due to issues of unaffordable rents and punitive business rates, currently being fought admirably by the East End Trades Guild and the Booksellers Association. However, rather than continuing to fight these battles on Cheshire Street, we have chosen to regroup and actively look for a new space with lower rent. We will close the bookshop in its current physical space on 26th April this year.  While we look for new space, we will continue to foster our community as an online subscription ; to recommend new books by women, trans and gender diverse writers via social media; and to showcase our selection at books fairs, starting with the Radical Book Fair on 27th June. In the meantime, we continue to run our hugely successful event series from the Cheshire Street shop.

Our original award-winning shop, Pages of Hackney, continues to be an important part of the community on Lower Clapton Road and beyond, and will retain its emphasis on inclusivity, marginalised voices and intersectional feminism, as well as offering a diverse events programme, such as forthcoming events with Niven Govinden and trans activist Juno Roche.

If you know of a physical space we might rent or share, do get in touch. Likewise any organisation we could collaborate with while maintaining a financially viable business in line with our agenda. Please do continue to support Pages in our Clapton location or through our subscription service. All our Alternative Canon titles and recommended books will continue to be available to purchase online.