Save a small bookshop – it could change your world

Books came to me in several ways. There was an excellent public library in the local town. The schools I went to had surprisingly good libraries, too. There was an inspiring English teacher, as there is so often. And then there was also a local independent bookshop. At the time when I was beginning to discover what I really wanted to read, it became enormously important to me, enlarging my world, even giving me a sense of where I might belong. It's one of the institutions I still feel real gratitude towards.

That's not such an uncommon experience among readers. Small independent bookshops have a quite different life than the big chains now dominating bookselling — Waterstone's, WH Smith, Borders — let alone the supermarkets, now taking an ever increasing slice, or Amazon. It would be impossible to feel anything like the same affection for them as one naturally does for a good independent.

For years they've been steadily disappearing under the pressure of discounting and rising rents and the homogenisation of our high streets. Now that trend seems to be in reverse at last. In 2007, remarkably enough, 81 new independent bookshops opened, outstripping the 72 which closed. And some of these highly committed independents are pioneering areas the chains have shunned.

This weekend, an independent is opening in Hackney — not in gentrified Stokie but at 70 Lower Clapton Road, among the fast-food shops and tyre-replacement depots, in murder mile. The premises were once the local post office — until the postmaster was shot dead there in a robbery. Then it became Mickey's Barber Salon. Now it has been elegantly converted into something like a perfect small bookshop under the name Pages of Hackney. It has that special sense of being like a personal library, a living room that happens also to have a cash register, as one independent bookshop fan once described it.

When I lived in Hackney in the late Eighties, you had to go to Islington to buy a book. To have had a shop like this then would have seemed a dream. Now the situation is reversed. Although Islington has a Borders and a Waterstone's, it has lost the great independents it used to have, like the Angel Bookshop, and become soulless.

It was just off Lower Clapton Road that Harold Pinter grew up, reading himself into becoming a writer, many years ago, in another world. But perhaps Hackney now has a literary future as well? Tomorrow afternoon, the Speaker for Hackney is opening Pages, perhaps to recognise what a welcome and improbable addition it is to the borough, there only because of the commitment of the owner. Long may it last.