Why we need radical bookshops more than ever

The loss of radical bookshops does not just stifle the spread of radical ideas. What replaces these spaces is isolation. Yet across the UK, radical booksellers are now fighting back.

The far right in the North East

Increasingly, political life is pushed online, where it can connect, but just as easily fragment. Without physical spaces, it becomes harder to build trust, confidence, and solidarity. And in that vacuum, disillusionment can be redirected. People who are rightly angry about declining living standards are bombarded with online propaganda that encourages them to blame migrants or trans people, rather than billionaires and corporate power.

Here in Newcastle upon Tyne, the far right has been protesting every Saturday for months. Organised neo-Nazis travel in from across the country, attempting to convince people already deprived of community, services, and quality of life that migrants are to blame.

Their short-term aim is to recruit, radicalise, and normalise anti-migrant sentiment. The long-term vision is grounded in fantasies of mass deportations and race war. At the same time, Reform UK looks set to gain ground in upcoming local elections. Like elsewhere in Britain, the far right is growing.

Many of us have tried to understand this moment by looking to history, particularly the rise of fascism in the early 20th century. For me, one lesson stands out sharply: fascist movements did not only fight their opponents in elections or on the streets. They systematically destroyed the physical infrastructure that made left-wing organising and ideas possible.

Fascist tactics

In Italy, from the outset, Benito Mussolini’s forces targeted trade union halls, socialist presses, and meeting spaces. They understood that these were the places where people gathered, built relationships, spread ideas, and developed collective power.

The same pattern unfolded in Germany. The Nazi Party dismantled the institutional and cultural life of the left, crushing unions and banning socialist literature. When they consolidated power, socialist organisers were quickly driven underground, imprisoned, or killed. By that point, it was too late. The only movement capable of halting fascism without mass death and destruction was already disempowered.

Today’s far right doesn’t even need to carry out that same level of coordinated destruction. Decades of neoliberalism have done much of the work already. Rising rents, weakened unions, the erosion of public life, and the dominance of multinationals, have hollowed out the spaces that once sustained collective organising. ‘Third spaces’ have steadily disappeared. The Alliance of Radical Booksellers lists no less than eight now-closed radical bookshops in Newcastle in its UK map of historical radical bookshops. Today there are none.

Bookshops fight on

Shops like Housmans in London, Bookhaus in Bristol, and Lighthouse Bookshop in Edinburgh remain strong as hubs for organising, education, and community-building: hosting meetings, distributing radical literature, and connecting movements. New community-owned radical bookshops are opening across the country, as communities gather to resist neoliberalism’s regime of isolation.

Newcastle once had its own versions of this. Days of Hope (affectionately known as “Haze of Dope”) was the city’s last radical bookshop. It closed in the 1986, before I was even born. Like others of its kind, it was more than a retail space. It was a base for socialist political education, for organising, and for building relationships that extended beyond individual campaigns. That absence has been felt ever since.

A new radical bookshop in Newcastle

That’s why a collective I’m part of is crowdfunding to launch Books From Below – a new radical bookshop and community space in Newcastle.

The aim isn’t nostalgia but necessity. In a city with such a strong history of struggle, but also limited access to spaces that can sustain it, the need is urgent. Instead of leaving space for far-right voices to dominate, we can fill our streets, our conversations, and our communities with radical ideas. Then we can build the collective power to turn them into reality.

All radical bookshops start this way, with ordinary people pooling what they’ve got to create something for everyone. If we can do this here in Newcastle, so can anyone in any other town or city that still doesn’t have a radical bookshop.

This isn’t just about books. It’s about collectively rebuilding infrastructure: places where people can meet face-to-face, share ideas, and organise collectively to win against the far right. 

For this, we need places that are visible, accessible, and rooted in our communities. In an age of not just mass inequality but also an increasingly empowered far-right, we need radical bookshops and other left-wing community spaces more than ever.

Featured image via the Bookseller