Hatchards to open bookshop in Cheltenham

Hatchards is to open a new bookshop in Cheltenham, bringing the number of the chain’s shops to three, with Cheltenham being the first location outside London.

The bookshop will open its doors to customers in early October, occupying the former Jack Wills premises on The Promenade.

The town is a strategic choice, with a strong literary tradition; it perennially hosts the Times and the Sunday Times Cheltenham Literary Festival, which runs this year from 6th–17th October.

The new branch will have a strong focus on history, art, biography and coffee-table books, and will feature an events space, which will hold year-round talks. It is designed to be a "complementary bookshop experience" to the nearby Waterstones.

Francis Cleverdon, general manager of the original Hatchards store in Piccadilly, London, said: “We’re so proud to be coming to the heart of literary Gloucestershire for our third shop. We’ve been a centre of literary life for 225 years in London, with customers ranging from Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde to Virginia Woolf and William Boyd, and having the honour of holding the Royal Warrants since they were invented in the 1850s.

"Cheltenham has its own marvellous literary traditions, which we hope to reflect and expand with our books, our booksellers and our own literary heritage.”