The Last Bookshop on the High Street

Hay-on-Wye is a small town on the Welsh side of the border with England that has, for decades, made a living out of an unlikely commodity: second-hand books. Visitors come for the festival, the castle and the river, and they leave with carrier bags full of paperbacks they will never quite get around to reading. Bronwen Hughes had run Hughes and Daughter on the High Street for thirty-one years, and in that time she had watched the number of bookshops in town rise, fall and rise again. She had never imagined that hers might be the one to go.

The letter came on a Tuesday. The building, which she had rented from the same family since 1993, had been sold to a developer called Castlegate Homes, which intended to convert it, along with the empty bank next door, into "six high-specification holiday apartments". She had six months. Bronwen read it twice, folded it into quarters and put it in the till, as though it were a bill she could pay later.

Her assistant, Facundo Ledesma, read it a third time and then went outside to smoke a cigarette he had officially given up two years before. Facundo had come from Rosario to do a master's degree in Cardiff, had visited Hay for a weekend, and had simply never left. "In Argentina," he said when he came back in, "when someone tries to close something we love, we do not write a polite letter. We make noise." Bronwen pointed out that this was the Welsh borders, not Buenos Aires. "Then we will make polite noise," he said.

Their first idea was a petition, which collected four thousand signatures and achieved, as far as either of them could tell, absolutely nothing. Their second was a public meeting in the town hall, which was well attended and mainly served to confirm that everyone in Hay already agreed with them. It was Facundo who pointed out the obvious. "We are persuading the persuaded," he said. "The people who decide are not in this room. And they do not read petitions. What do they read?"

The answer, it turned out, was planning documents. Castlegate's application would go before the planning committee in the spring, and the committee would weigh it against a list of policies that Bronwen had never heard of: the protection of town-center retail, the character of a conservation area, the risk of flooding, the local need for housing as opposed to holiday lets. She spent two weeks reading them at the kitchen table, with a dictionary of planning jargon and a pot of tea that went cold every evening.

What emerged was not so much a protest as an argument. Facundo designed it; Bronwen wrote it. They called it The Case for Shelf, and they printed it as a small paperback, sixty pages long, in an edition of five hundred. Every chapter began with a question. What is a high street for, if not for the people who live on it? How many holiday apartments does a town of fewer than two thousand people need before it stops being a town? If a building has stood for two hundred years, what is the carbon cost of gutting it, and who pays?

It was careful not to overstate its case. It conceded that Castlegate was within its rights, that Hay needed investment, and that a bookshop is not, in itself, a public service. Then it set out, with figures, what the shop contributed: the school visits, the free reading group for older residents, the books shipped to prisons and hospitals, the visitors who came for the shop and spent their money in the cafes either side. Rather than asking the committee to save something sentimental, it asked them to apply their own policies to the letter.

The unusual part was the distribution. Instead of sending the book to councilors directly, Facundo hid copies of it in every bookshop in town, slipped between the pages of other books, with a card that read: "You have found a free book. Please read it, then lend it to someone who has power over something." Visitors took them home to London, Bristol and Manchester. One reached a journalist, who wrote a column about it. Another, rather more usefully, reached a retired planning inspector who lived twenty miles away and offered, by email, to help them prepare their objection.

By the time the committee met, there were more than three hundred written objections, most of them citing specific policies rather than simply expressing outrage. The inspector had helped Bronwen draft a five-minute statement, which she read aloud in a voice that shook only at the beginning. She did not say that bookshops were magical, although she believed it. She said that the proposal would remove an active retail unit from a protected frontage, that the bank building sat partly within a zone at risk of flooding, and that the town had, by the council's own figures, a serious shortage of homes that local people could afford.

The committee deferred its decision, which Facundo considered a defeat and Bronwen, who had read enough by then to know better, considered a small victory. Six weeks later, Castlegate withdrew the application and put the building back on the market. It was bought, after some months of uncertainty, by a community trust that had been set up in the meantime by a group of residents, with a loan from a regional bank and a great many small donations from people who had found a free book.

Hughes and Daughter still occupies the ground floor. The apartments above it are let, on long tenancies, to a nurse, a teacher and a young couple who run the bakery on Castle Street. Copies of The Case for Shelf still turn up occasionally, tucked inside detective novels and gardening manuals, and Bronwen never removes them. "Why would I?" she says, when customers ask. "Somebody might need it."