21 Bookshops in London

The Atlantis Bookshop is an esoteric bookshop in Museum Street, London. Established by Michael Houghton in 1922, it is currently owned and run by Bali Beskin and her mother Geraldine.

Cecil Court is a pedestrian street with Victorian shop-frontages in London, England, linking Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane. Since the 1930s, it has been known as the new Booksellers' Row.

Charing Cross Road is a street in central London running immediately north of St Martin-in-the-Fields to St Giles Circus and then becomes Tottenham Court Road. It is so called because it leads from the north in the direction of Charing Cross at the south side of Trafalgar Square, which it connects via St Martin's Place and the motorised east side of the square.

Compendium Books was an independent bookstore in London specialising in experimental literary and theoretical publications, from 1968 until its closure in 2000. The Guardian's John Williams described it as "Britain's pre-eminent radical bookstore. Whether you wanted books on anarchism, drugs, poststructuralism, feminism or Buddhism, Compendium was the place to go."

Daunt Books is a chain of bookshops in London, founded by James Daunt. It traditionally specialised in travel books. In 2010, it began publishing. Its initial Marylebone branch, opened in 1912, claims to be the first custom-built bookshop in the world.

Dillons was a British bookshop founded in 1932, named after its founder and owner Una Dillon. Originally based on Gower Street in London, the bookshop expanded under subsequent owners Pentos plc in the 1980s into a bookselling chain across the United Kingdom. In 1995 Pentos went into receivership and sold Dillons to Thorn EMI, which immediately closed 40 of the 140 Dillons bookstore locations. Of the remaining 100 stores, most kept the name Dillons, while the remainder were Hatchards and Hodges Figgis. Within Thorn EMI, Dillons was placed in the HMV Group, which had been a division of Thorn EMI since 1986. EMI demerged from Thorn in August of 1996, and Dillons-HMV remained an EMI holding. Dillons was subsumed under rival chain Waterstones' branding in 1999, at which point the brand ceased to exist.

Robert Dodsley was an English bookseller, poet, playwright, and miscellaneous writer.

W & G Foyle Ltd. is a bookseller with a chain of seven stores in England. It is best known for its flagship store in Charing Cross Road, London. Foyles was once listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's largest bookshop in terms of shelf length, at 30 miles (48 km), and for number of titles on display. It was bought by Waterstones in 2018.

The Foyles Building at 111–119 Charing Cross Road and 1–12 Manette Street, London, was the flagship store of the Foyles bookshop chain from 1929 to 2014, and at one time, the world's largest bookshop. The business moved next door to 107–109 Charing Cross Road in 2014, in a redevelopment of the old Saint Martin's School of Art building. The building was demolished in 2017.

Freedom Press is an anarchist publishing house in Whitechapel, London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1886, it is the largest anarchist publishing house in the country and the oldest of its kind in the English speaking world. It is based at 84b Whitechapel High Street in the East End of London.

Gay's the Word is an independent bookshop in central London, and the oldest LGBT bookshop in the United Kingdom. Inspired by the emergence and growth of lesbian and gay bookstores in the States, a small group of people from Gay Icebreakers, a gay socialist group, founded the store in 1979. Various locations were looked at, including Covent Garden, which was then being regenerated, before they decided to open the store in Marchmont Street in Bloomsbury, an area of the capital with rich academic and literary associations. Initial reluctance from Camden Council to grant a lease was overcome with help from Ken Livingstone, then a local councillor, later Mayor of London. For a period of time, it was the only LGBT bookshop in England.

Thomas Guy was a British bookseller, investor, member of Parliament, and the founder of Guy's Hospital, London.

Hatchards is a branch of Waterstones, and claims to be the oldest bookshop in the United Kingdom, founded on Piccadilly in 1797 by John Hatchard. After one move, it has been at the same location on Piccadilly next to Fortnum and Mason since 1801, and the two stores are also neighbours in St. Pancras railway station as of 2014. It has a reputation for attracting high-profile authors and holds three Royal Warrants.

Helter Skelter Publishing is a British publisher specialising in rock music.

Heywood Hill is a bookshop at 10 Curzon Street in the Mayfair district of London.

James Lackington was a bookseller who is credited with revolutionizing the British book trade. A shoemaker's son trained as a cobbler, he showed early initiative by selling pies and cakes in the street when aged 10 and teaching himself to read. In August 1773, Lackington arrived in London with two shillings and sixpence, and would eventually become a wealthy man. He is best known for refusing credit at his shop which allowed him to reduce the price of books throughout his store. He printed catalogues of his stock; according to Lackington's biography, the first edition contained 12,000 titles. He bought whole libraries and published writers' manuscripts. He also saved remaindered books from destruction and resold them at bargain prices, firmly believing that books were the key to knowledge, reason and happiness and that everyone, no matter their economic background, social class or gender, had the right to access books at cheap prices.

Paternoster Row was a street in the City of London that was a centre of the London publishing trade, with booksellers operating from the street. Paternoster Row was described as "almost synonymous" with the book trade. It was part of an area also called St Paul's Churchyard.

Thomas Payne (c.1718–1799) was an important bookseller and publisher in 18th-century London.

Stanfords is a specialist bookshop of maps and travel books in London, established in 1853 by Edward Stanford. Its collection of maps, globes, and maritime charts is considered the world's largest. It has also supplied cartography for the British Army and for James Bond films.

Jacob Tonson, sometimes referred to as Jacob Tonson the Elder (1655–1736), was an eighteenth-century English bookseller and publisher.

Watkins Books is London's oldest esoteric bookshop specializing in esotericism, mysticism, occultism, oriental religion and contemporary spirituality. The book store was established by John M. Watkins, a friend of Madame Blavatsky, in 1897 at 26 Charing Cross. John Watkins had already been selling books via a catalogue which he began publishing in March 1893. The first biography of Aleister Crowley recounts a story of Crowley making all of the books in Watkins magically disappear and reappear.