The MargateBookshop

Francesca Wilkins opened her bookshop on Margate's Market Place in May 2019, in a Georgian building scaled exactly to the job, and stocked it with intent: translated fiction, underrepresented writers, the presses the supermarkets have never heard of. Upstairs, the Writers' Room gives the town's writers somewhere to work and meet, with a book club and poetry evenings running through the calendar — a bookshop behaving as civic equipment, which is what the good ones are. The trade press has profiled it twice over; Margate's revival gets talked about in art terms, but the word trade holds a corner too.