Turning the Pages: A Bookshop Crawl from Broad Street to Cowley Road

Oxford has a reputation for bookshops the way it has a reputation for spires: broadly deserved, slightly overstated, and hiding several very different things under one label. People arrive, go to the big one on Broad Street, buy a tote bag, and leave convinced they've seen Oxford's book trade. They haven't. They've seen about a fifth of it.

This is a crawl, not a checklist. It runs roughly a mile and a half, north to south-east, with two coffee stops placed where your bag starts getting heavy. Opening hours shift with the seasons and with staffing, so check before you set off — a couple of these places keep unusually short days.

Stop one: Blackwell's, Broad Street — the cathedral

Start with the obvious, because you can't understand the rest of the crawl without it. The Norrington Room underneath the shop is one of the largest single rooms of books in Europe, and no photograph does it justice: you come down a staircase and the floor keeps going.

What it's good for: anything you actually need. Academic titles, university press editions, the deeply obscure subject a relative has asked for. This is a working bookshop and it behaves like one — the staff will find things, order things, and know the difference between editions.

What it's not good for: bargains. You're paying full retail, and a Penguin Classic here costs roughly what it costs anywhere else, which is to say £8 to £10. That's fine. Buy the one book you genuinely came for and treat the rest of the crawl as your second-hand budget.

Stop two: the antiquarian room — glass cases and grown-up money

A short walk away, the trade changes character completely. Oxford's antiquarian booksellers are proper, old-fashioned operations: glass-fronted cases, brown paper, a person at a desk who knows exactly what they've got and is not going to be talked down.

This is where you go for theology, church history, early printing, county maps and anything with a bookplate. Prices start around £15 for a decent nineteenth-century volume and run into the hundreds without much effort. It is not a browsing-for-a-tenner shop — but it is the best place in the city to ask a question. Get one of the booksellers going on a subject and you'll learn more in ten minutes than in an hour of reading.

If you want the flavour without the outlay, buy a single print or a small pamphlet rather than pretending you're going to spend £180.

Stop three: the charity bookshop on St Giles — the honest bargain

Here's where the crawl pays for itself. Charity bookshops are hit and miss nationally; the ones in Oxford get a better class of donation than most, because the city is full of people who buy hardbacks and then move house.

What to expect: paperbacks at £2 to £3, hardbacks at £3.50 to £5, and the occasional art or academic book that would be £40 new, priced at £6 because the volunteer on the till has no idea what it is and neither does anyone else in the shop that morning. That is the entire game. Go in with no list and a tenner and see what happens.

Specialism, for what it's worth: literary fiction and history, reliably, plus a surprisingly good poetry shelf.

Coffee stop one: the Covered Market

Cut through the market and stop at the book-and-coffee shop tucked inside it, which is exactly the sort of hybrid Oxford does well — half second-hand stock, half café, entirely unbothered about being either. Paperbacks are cheap and the shelves are chaotic in the good way: sci-fi next to art monographs next to a battered children's annual.

Sit down. Have a flat white. This is the point in the crawl where sensible people abandon their bag and start reading the thing they bought at stop three.

Stop four: the print shop on the High — for the non-readers

Not strictly books, but book-adjacent and worth ten minutes: the city's long-standing print and map dealer on the High, with racks of engraved Oxford views outside and boxes of topographical prints inside. You can spend £15 on something genuinely charming, and it'll survive the bus home better than a paperback will.

Stop five: Cowley Road — the cheap end, in the best sense

Walk east, and the crawl changes register entirely. Cowley Road's charity shops and the books-and-music shop on it are where the £1 paperback lives. Crates outside, three-for-a-fiver deals, and a turnover fast enough that the stock is different every fortnight.

This is where you buy holiday reading, cookbooks, and the complete works of someone you've never heard of but might like. It's also where you go if you want to feel that a physical book is still a cheap thing to own, which after Broad Street you may well need.

Coffee stop two, and a rule about carrying

Somewhere on the way back into town, stop again — and apply the rule that experienced crawlers know: never buy your heaviest book first. Blackwell's is a trap in this respect. Anyone who buys three hardbacks at eleven in the morning and then walks to Cowley Road will regret it by two. Do the academic shopping last, or leave it for another day.

If you'd rather not carry at all, ask about bags at the counter. Most shops will happily give you one, and a couple will hold purchases behind the till if you're coming back.

What the crawl actually costs

Two coffees, roughly £7 to £8. Books: entirely up to you, and the range is enormous — £1 in a crate on Cowley Road, £200 in a case with a lock on it, half a mile apart.

Which is the point. Oxford's book trade isn't a single experience with a single price, and the visitors who enjoy it most are the ones who work out early which end of it they've come for. Buy one good book at retail. Find two better ones for £2 each. Ask a bookseller something you've always wondered about. That's the whole crawl, and it's been working for a century or two.