Bookshop marks 40th birthday

10:04am Monday 29th October 2007

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FROM the outside, the Barbican Bookshop in Fossgate gives no hint of the treasures within.

But if you continue past the shop's bright front room, which sells mainly new Christian books, you enter a labyrinth which is almost like a journey back into York's past.

The shop goes back astonishingly far. Room opens off room, cubbyhole off cubbyhole, alcove off alcove: all of them stocked from floor to ceiling with books old and new, on subjects ranging from local history to aviation and rail travel.

The shop is actually seven buildings knocked more-or-less into one, says former owner Les Bingham proudly.

Les, now the shop's assistant manager - it is run by his son Andy - takes me out into Straker's Passage, which runs alongside. There, in the stone wall, you can still see the outlines of doors and windows where once stood a series of tiny one-up, one-down slum cottages. "Whole families lived in these," Les says. "It's amazing how many people were born and died in Straker's Passage."

Behind the passage looms the bulk of the telephone exchange - with Hungate, a notorious Victorian slum, beyond that.

Five of those cottages have now been incorporated into the Barbican Bookshop - plus a couple of other outbuildings. It is forty years since the shop opened here in Fossgate. Originally it was just the main front room - but it has expanded gradually, taking over a workshop and an antiques restoration business in the outbuildings and cottages behind.

It was actually October 1, 1967, when the Fossgate bookshop first opened its doors. Les remembers the day well. Then a young 20-year-old, he popped in to have a look - and found himself holding the fort while owner Dick Rollinson went for lunch.

It became a habit - especially when Mr Rollinson employed a young woman called Jean, who was later to become Les's wife.

The history of the bookshop goes back much further than that day in 1967, however.

Mr Rollinson, a Plymouth Brother who worked as Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths in York, started the business "out of an attaché case," as he once described it.

Demobbed in 1947, he decided to run a Christian bookstall at York Market in addition to his job as Registrar.

The stall proved a success, and he became secretary of a chain of Christian book stalls in towns throughout Yorkshire.

In 1963, he opened a bookshop in Walmgate Bar, naming it - for obvious enough reasons - the Barbican Bookshop. When he opened the second shop in Fossgate a few years later in 1967, that also took the Barbican name - and keeps it to this day, though the original shop in the bar closed down in 1969.

Mr Rollinson eventually retired, having sold the shop to Les and Jean and their friends Derek and Dorothy Reed. It has now been bought out by the Wesley Owen group but continues, under Les and Andy's management, to be the unique York shop it always has been.

* Staff at the Barbican Bookshop will be celebrating the shop's 40th birthday this Saturday.