“This Is Exactly What We Hoped to Create”: The Heath Bookshop
This interview is part of a new series from Arkbound, created to celebrate independent bookshops and the communities that sustain them. Through conversations with booksellers across the UK, we’re exploring what makes each shop distinct – from their ethos and curation to the challenges they navigate and the communities they help shape. By sharing their experiences and perspectives, we hope to celebrate their work, increase their visibility, and strengthen the connections between small presses, local communities, and readers.
Let’s dive in!
The Heath Bookshop is a vibrant, award-winning independent bookshop in the heart of Kings Heath, Birmingham – a space known for its strong sense of community and packed programme of events. We spoke with co-owners Catherine Gale and Claire Dawes to learn more about the story behind the shop, the people it serves, and how it has grown into such a vital local hub.
If you live in the Birmingham area, you may remember 2024’s brilliant Literature and Music Festival! The festival is returning this month, between 15-19th April, with 35 events (yes, thirty-five!) taking place over just 5 days.
How would you describe the ethos of your bookshop in a sentence or two? What’s at the heart of what you do?
We opened in September 2022, and we met on the Booksellers Association course, which focused on how to start and run a bookshop. They linked us all in a WhatsApp group, and Claire and I realised we both live in Birmingham – and then we found out we’re both in Kings Heath. We wanted to open a shop in the same place, so we met up and just hit it off! We visited lots of bookshops together and got to know each other, and then we thought, let’s head on this adventure together. It all happened really organically, because we both had a similar vision at the same time – we had a clear idea of how the shop might look.
We sell mainly new fiction, and some non-fiction. The key driver for us is that we live in a really diverse area, and we wanted to create a space where people can come into the bookshop and see something that represents them – something by an author from a similar background, or about characters they can relate to. We wanted it to feel welcoming to anybody. It’s a space where people can come in for a drink, have a coffee and a chat, and feel safe. We also do lots of community events and work with local organisations on charity events, so it’s really become a community space. It’s kind of gone way beyond what we could have imagined.
How do you select the books on your shelves? What criteria is particularly important to you, be it authorship, genre, impact or something else?
Claire: Initially, when we opened the shop, we chose all of the books individually – there were about 1,000. Now it’s more of a mix of what we read, what our customers are reading, and what reps tell us is coming out. It also helps that there’s a WHSmith’s opposite us, so we don’t stock anything too mainstream. We’ve got a really good LGBT section, but it’s also spread throughout the shop. There are areas where people can stand and browse, but you’ll also see those books all over the shop – without it being a ‘thing’, they’re just there. It’s partly organic, but we do curate it to make sure representation is consistent.
Catherine: And that’s true both in our stock and in our events. We also have a lot of contact from publishers and authors – a huge amount, which can sometimes be difficult to keep on top of. Unfortunately, we do have to say no quite a bit, especially with events, because we can run up to three a week. On average, we’ve done 70-plus events per year. We try to keep a balance between local authors and those coming through publishers.
We’ve done really big events, like the Alexandra Theatre for Rick Astley, which was for 900 people, and then we also do much smaller ones in the shop – anything from 15 to 40 people, and everything in between. We try to mix it up. If someone contacts us and it’s something we love, it might not make us any money, but we still want to do it. Or we might think, “This is great – we know our audience will love it,” and it gives strong representation to underrepresented voices.
Are there any local, diverse, or underrepresented authors or publishers you’re especially proud to support?
Claire: We’ve had a lot of local, diverse and underrepresented authors reach out to us, and it’s been great to work with them. We’ve worked with Kasim Ali – we really love his books. Shon Faye came in as part of Queens Heath Pride, so that was really special.
Catherine: And then more locally, we have our Literature and Music Festival, which we started in 2024, and we had Arts Council funding for that, which was amazing. We asked two local poets – both queer poets – M.L.Walsh and Bradley Taylor. At that point, neither of them had books out.
Claire: They were performance poets. We asked them to put together a night and told them, you can do whatever you want.
Catherine: They called it the Big Gay Poetry Night, which is amazing, and such a beautiful event. We’re going to have it close the festival again, because it brought together people from every kind of background, all age groups – just every kind of person. And now the Big Gay Poetry Night has become its own thing. Maddy and Bradley now run it in different places, and they’ve both since published books. We’ve done events with them for their book launches as well, which has been really lovely.
Maddie and Bradley are putting on a Big Gay Poetry Night this month, Sunday 18th April at Hare and Hounds − check it out!
Catherine: And then there was another event for the festival, based on a book called Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture, and Criminalisation of UK Drill by Adele Oliver. She was living locally at the time and mentioned she’d written a book. We read it and thought, “This is amazing.” We asked her to create a show as part of the festival, built around the themes of the music. It was a specially commissioned event and it was incredible – packed with poets, Capoeira dancers and musicians. It was just a fantastic celebration.
Claire: With both of those events, there were people who’d never been to any of our events before, or even heard of the book, and they were just so comfortable. It was really lovely. People were quite overwhelmed by how friendly and welcoming everything felt.
What are the most pressing challenges your bookshop faces in the current climate? What strategies have you employed to maintain financial sustainability while staying true to your mission?
Claire: We're lucky that we opened after COVID, so that’s all we've really known. We've always worked within our means, so I don’t think it’s been too difficult for us so far – but I think that could change.
Catherine: It has been a bit hand-to-mouth, though, in terms of paying ourselves. It’s always, “What have we got in the bank?” It’s not like we have a fixed salary. If we do a big event, we might think, “Okay, we can put that aside,” and then pay ourselves during the leaner periods. So it’s not easy.
Another thing we do is a lot of external selling. We keep track of what’s happening in Birmingham, especially as we’ve got some big theatres. For example, Harry Baker was performing at The Crescent Theatre, and we were asked of sell copies of his book Tender and run the booksigning. That meant we could take a reasonable amount in one night, which helps subsidise the shop.
We do have to work really hard and lug a lot of books around, but it’s quite nice in a way – it means you’re not always panicking if you have a quieter day in the shop. We can make it up at one of the events. We feel very lucky.
Do you have a memorable story or interaction with a customer that sums up what the bookshop means to you?
Catherine: We have lots of lovely interactions with customers. It’s always nice when someone comes in for the first time and they’re really excited to be there. We recently had a customer who is a trans woman, and she told us that outing was the first time she’d gone out in a dress. She said she came to the shop because she felt safe there. It was just so beautiful that she felt able to do that. Moments like that make you feel like – this is exactly what we hoped to create.
Claire: And we had a man who came in for a cup of tea every day. Just for a cup of tea and a chat. Sadly, he passed away last year. For some people, it really isn’t just a bookshop. Sometimes we might be the only people they see all day. We’re really happy to be that space for people.
Which book have you found yourself recommending recently?
Catherine: I mean, there are a couple we recommend a lot in the shop, but at the moment, I’d say Ali Smith. We recently did an event with her, and she’s one of my all-time favourite authors, so that was a real dream come true. Her latest book, Gliff, is probably the one I’m recommending most at the moment.
Claire: I’m not sure what I’m recommending most, but possibly Night Swimmers by Roisin Maguire – I really liked that. I didn’t know Ali Smith at all before the event, so that’s been a bit of a revelation. It was such an incredible event, and now I’m reading lots of her work as well.
Do you have a favourite spot in your bookshop, and what makes it special to you?
Catherine: Mine would be the coffee table – it’s got Kate Bush’s face on it (ha!) and pages from Wuthering Heights, with some comfy chairs around it.
What is a common misconception about running an independent bookshop that you'd like to dispel?
Claire: Oftentimes, people walk in and say, “Oh my gosh, you’ve got my dream job!”
But I think sometimes they imagine we just sit and read all day and have nice chats with people. There’s so much more that goes into it than that. If Catherine isn’t in the shop, she might be doing ten hours of admin at home. I don’t think people realise how much is happening behind the scenes – organising events, ordering books, talking to authors and publicists, returning stock, booking venues. When we’re running three events a week, we’ve got so many spreadsheets to keep track of everything. I think the main misconception is that it’s this beautiful, relaxed dream job – and while that’s part of it…
Catherine: You’ve got to run it as a business and make it work.
Claire: We also get a lot of people coming in and asking us to stock their books, which is difficult, because it’s their life’s work. But it might not be right for our customers. We once had someone try to gift us 300 copies of their book.
Catherine: And we don’t have a back room or anything. We’ve got a small space for boxes, but a lot of stock ends up at Claire’s house. We don’t really hold much stock – we order day by day because we just don’t have the space. So sometimes we have to manage expectations.
How do you balance the creative aspect of the work with the business needs of the shop?
Claire: When we choose our stock, we think about whether we’d read it ourselves and whether we’d want to see it on our shelves. We’re also really lucky that we do so many events. It’s a lot of hard work, but it means we can really promote and sell books that might not perform as well if they were just sitting on the shelf.
Catherine: Events allow us to be genuinely enthusiastic, because they’re usually with people we’re really excited to work with. It’s a balance, though – sometimes we’re offered things that could sell really well, but we don’t feel we can get behind them because they’re not something we’re interested in. In those cases, we have to make a judgement rather than just saying yes.
Claire: A lot of the external selling we do isn’t always part of our brand – for example, selling a Formula One book at the NEC. But that then allows us to put on things like a death café for the community, which we won’t make any money from and which actually costs us to run. It’s about balancing one thing with another.
The Heath Bookshop Literature and Music Festival returns from 15-19 April 2026, bringing together over 35 events across four days. From author talks and workshops to music, poetry, performance, and children’s events, the programme reflects the same energy and openness that defines the shop itself – there’s truly something for everyone.
You can explore the full programme and upcoming events on their website, with authors including Douglas Stuart, Maggie O’Farrell, and more.
If you can’t make it in person, you can still support the shop by browsing their stock online, or by following them on Instagram or Facebook.
