Norwich has deep literary roots: the city is England’s first UNESCO City of Literature (one of only 20 globally), the National Centre for Writing, where I took part in a Flash Fiction Writing Workshop at the National Centre for Writing in Dragon Hall back in 2019, and home to 13th/14th century Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich, the first woman to write and publish a book in the English language: Revelations of Divine Love is one of the earliest surviving English-language works written by a woman.
115–123 King Street, Norwich, NR1 1QE (photo taken in May 2019)
Other writers who have also called Norwich home include Thomas Browne, Thomas Paine, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Emma Healey, Eimear McBride and Sarah Perry. I’m always thrilled to find a new secondhand bookshop, and this one is really impressive.
Tombland Bookshop, opposite the Norwich Cathedral, is a characterful bookshop, housed in a medieval 15th-century beamed building. They sell academic, secondhand, and antiquarian books across two and a half floors. The ground floor is split level and the open plan provides a sweeping entrance of bookshelves.
As well as buying and selling rare books, Tombland also offers book valuations, binding and restoration. It is the largest bookshop of its kind in East Anglia with books selling for between £1 and over £10,000.
Tombland owes its name to the Tombland area of Norwich in which it resides, and finds its origins in the Danish word for ’empty space’ or ‘open land.’ This area was home to an Anglo-Scandinavian marketplace in the 11th century.
Staff are helpful and knowledgeable. It’s the kind of bookshop that you could spend hours in, and I wondered what it might be like to spend the day there, reading and writing.
The last Drif’s Guide to Second Hand Bookshops rates Tombland as the ‘best bookshop in East Anglia’ and one of the dozen best in the UK. It’s not difficult to see why.
The Independent also included them in their most recent guide as one of the 50 best bookshops in the UK.
Although the building itself is medieval, the bookshop has been established for over 35 years, and includes books on art, architecture, local history, natural history and music, poetry, children’s books, travel, and academic books.
I picked up some poetry books from Philip Larkin, Anna Crowe, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes to add to my collection.
F C MALBY 
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