The 15 best bookshops in London, according to a luxury travel magazine

London is a book-lover’s paradise. Any one city would be blessed with such bookish treasures as Daunt Books Marylebone, the South Bank Book Market and Europe’s biggest bookstore – but London has all those and much, much more. There’s a reason Time Out’s list of the capital’s top bookshops stretches all the way to 45 (and could go even further).

If you’re looking for even more places to hunker down with a hardback, here’s just the thing. Posh travel magazine Condé Nast Traveller has just published its list of London’s top bookshops ‘to get lost in’, selecting 15 stores specialising in everything from travel and cookery to amplifying LGBTQ+ voices.

Of those 15 bookshops, 10 can be found in our Time Out list (Daunt Marylebone, Libreria, Kirkdale Bookshop, Books for Cooks, Stanfords, Gay’s the World, Newham Bookshop, Brick Lane Books, The Broadway Bookshop and Word on the Water). So, what of the other five? 

Burley Fisher in Haggerston got a nod for being the ‘ultimate community bookshop’, Soho’s The Second Shelf was deemed ‘a shrine to women writers and the rare-book trade’ and diversity-focused children’s bookshop Round Table Books in Brixton made the cut, too. Rounding out the five was Pages of Hackney – ‘a firm favourite among authors’ – and West End Lane Books, ‘a place with as much heart as history’.

Here is Condé Nast Traveller’s full list of the top 15 bookshops in London right now 

The 15 best bookshops in London

• Daunt Books Marylebone
• Burley Fisher Books
• The Second Shelf
• Round Table Books
• Libreria
• Pages of Hackney
• Kirkdale Bookshop
• Books for Cooks
• Stanfords
• Gay’s the Word
• Newham Bookshop
• Brick Lane Bookshop
• The Broadway Bookshop
• Word on the Water
• West End Lane Books

The best bookshops in London, according to Time Out.