Reading Paul Morley’s The North has left me flooded with memories of childhood in my hometown of Stockport in the late seventies. Then it was possible to spend a blissful Saturday afternoon wandering round Stockport’s ragbag collection of bookshops, some of which would be thought of as junk shops nowadays, and all of which have vanished. Many of my happiest moments have been spent in bookshops and very many of the most magical shops that graced those streets are (impossible to have imagined at the time) vanished without a trace:

Grass Roots Bookshop, run by a radical collective, and housed in a basement just off Manchester Picadilly is my personal favourite and the teenage hours spent in there generated much of my political education.

In London there are bookshops that are now just ghosts and legends such as Compendium Books in Camden and Bernard Stone’s Turret Bookshop, crammed with poetry pamphlets, in Floral Street, Covent Garden.

Every time a bookshop dies a little of our collective spirit fades away.