Blaenafon Booktown - Now We Are Two

The journey up the valley from Newport to Blaenavon is enough to sap anyone’s spirits. The grey ribbon development of road-hugging communities melancholically echoes the colours of what was once their source of wealth. Even the pure brightness of an early May morning is no match for the bone chilling miles of colour-drained pebbledash.

I so want to be pleasantly surprised; hoping that Blaenavon’s Booktown has worked some sort of magic, opening up like a spring flower in the grey soil: confounding its critics.

But the town still looks tired. A significant number of run-down or empty properties remain, shabbily contributing to a down-at-heel air. Opposite the closed Corner House Book Gallery are buildings encased in scaffolding, but this is the only obvious sign of activity. The claim made on the Blaenafon Booktown website, that every shop in the town centre will be occupied and open for business by this summer seems at the very least, optimistic.

The website also claims that there are ten ‘Bookshops’, which is simply not true. (22.05.05 - now redued to eight on their new and much improved site.) There are only five shops I would describe as ‘Bookshops’; i.e. mainly having books in them. The Railway Shop, a pub and a café also have some books but that’s about it. The currant Booktown leaflet claims that there are thirteen bookshops, a figure even more inflated by the inclusion of bookshops that never actually opened.

It’s clearly a subject that exercises Joanna Chambers of Broadleaf Books; still the best bookshop in the town. She thinks that these exaggerated claims are counter-productive, encouraging over-expectation and almost ensuring disappointment. But she also feels that five existing shops form a firm base on which the Booktown can grow, albeit with a lot of nurturing. The extent to which this will happen remains to be seen, now that James Hanna has embarked on another similar project at Atherstone in Warwickshire.

Joanna has very clear views about James Hanna. She says he was a brilliant publicist and that without him, she simply wouldn’t be there - that none of it would have happened. However, she is concerned both about the future of her own Booktown and for those being sold a similar Booktown package.

She certainly doesn't share Hanna's view that neither knowledge or experience of the secondhand book trade are necessary to succeed in a Booktown. If anything, she sees it as the principle reason why Blaenafon has fewer shops now, than it had a year ago. Put simply, the novices have upped and left and no new ‘professional’ booksellers have been lured to the town to replace them.

The main difficulty for Joanna has been finding the money to buy out her own business partner, who it transpired didn’t share her vision, or commitment to the long haul, and this has brought the issue of novice booksellers very close to home. Despite her experience she remains optimistic, with, I think good cause, as we left her shop with a box of books.

Keith runs Blaenafon Books, James Hanna’s shop, doubling as a Booktown office and tourist information provider. I asked him about the closures and enquired about future openings, but I left not much wiser and having failed to buy a book.

Browning Books continues to take the business of selling children’s books seriously and they also stock the usual range of new local interest titles.

Chatterton’s books have morphed into Quality Books, which now contains the stock of a number of different booksellers. One of them, A Warren of Books in Abersychan, is providing military history titles, and there’s transport, history, some literature and general stock. I found one Gloucestershire local history title at a very reasonable price.

Serendipity Books purports to specialise in spiritualism and the occult but seemed to have a lot of fiction and miscellaneous secondhand books, which were the only ones I looked at.

So there you have it. For some visitors, Blaenafon Booktown amounts to a couple of reasonable bookshops in a rundown town in the middle of nowhere. Others see it as a brave attempt at book-led urban regeneration.

Does it live up to the Booktown hype? – No. Could it grow into a successful town by exploiting its industrial heritage, proximity to glorious countryside and, of course books? – Yes.

As we leave the town by the Abergavenny road and descend into the valley, the views are breathtaking and the countryside verdantly beautiful. Blaenavon has still to throw off the grey shroud of its past and reinvent itself for the twenty-first century. After two short years they are still at the beginning of that process, all I can do is to wish them the best of luck.

Mike Goodenough
Editor
13.05.05

Previous Articles:
Blaenafon - The Booktown Experiment Fails 17.03.06
Blaenafon Revisited 01.11.03 & 26.10.04
Blaenafon Booktown - A Book Buyer's View 04.07.03

Links:
Blaenafon Booktown 01495 793093  website
Blaenavon articles by Maev Kennedy in the Guardian:
02.06.2004: Chapter eleven: May concern
01.05.2004: Chapter ten: April is the cruellest month
23.03.2004: Chapter nine: Winter of our discontent
02.03.2004: Chapter eight: From fetes to the fates
31.12.2003: Chapter seven: 'A couple of bob for Christmas'
22.12.2003: Chapter six: Nothing going on but the rent
04.11.2003: Chapter five: Local poet scores on first try
13.10.2003: Chapter four: Grishams Grishams everywhere
02.09.2003: Chapter three: Blood, sweat and tears
30.07.2003: Chapter two: 'We can't have too many witches'
30.06.2003: Chapter one: First day
28.06.2003: Books open new chapter for Plywood City
10.03.2003: Books could help town to turn over a new leaf
ic Wales Ex-iron town delves into books
ic Wales New 'book town' booms
The Independent Town opens 10 new bookshops in a day
BBC News Bookish Blaenavon opens new chapter
International Organisation of Book Towns booktown.net