A new Bookshop Crawl is coming to Liverpool this summer

A new Bookshop Crawl is coming to Liverpool this summer, featuring some of our best-loved bookstores.

The event, on Thursday August 13, will be the first in the city organised by Bookshop Crawl UK, which was started 10 years ago by book lover Bex Hughes.

It includes a wide range of bookshops, from indies to secondhand, specialist, antiquarian and chains, and is a chance for people to meet each other and chat about books, often with some fun extras along the way. 

Bex came up with the idea because she wanted to bring together a community of fellow fiction (and fact) fans, to share the experience of discovering or revisiting a fabulous bookshop.

Since then it’s kept on growing, there’s now a three-day weekend London Bookshop Crawl and Bex has expanded to other parts of the country, including Liverpool.

She explains:

“Bookshop Crawl UK was started by me in 2016, after I sent a tweet out asking if anyone wanted to come and explore bookshops in London with me. 

“I didn’t have a lot of people in my real life who wanted to spend hours in bookshops with me, and I wanted to find a community of people who would. 30 people did and from there the annual London Bookshop Crawl was born, The Big Bookish Quiz, book swaps and more in over 100 bookshops. 

“We began by doing one roaming summer bookshop crawl a year, in different locations, and have expanded so much that in 2025 we ran 12 bookshop crawls in locations across the country.”

Bex says the appeal is simply in bringing together people who have a shared passion.

She adds:

“People love coming to meet other bookish folk, and we provide a ‘socially antisocial’ experience designed to make it easy to make new book loving friends, and connect over a shared love of books and bookshops,”

“Our events are designed to be a comfortable, safe space for those who crave connection and community but find it hard and overwhelming to know where to get started. 

“I’m now ably assisted by my husband Rhys and a team of volunteers and group leaders from our Bookshop Crawl UK community, and in 2025 we established as a community interest company, meaning all of our profits go back into our work supporting bookshops and the community of people that love them.”

Each event will usually involve visiting between five and nine bookshops. “We generally choose bookshops for the group routes based on their proximity to each other – visiting lots of bookshops over a short period of time gets tiring so we usually try to make sure they are in short walking distance from each other, with occasionally one short journey by public transport,” says Bex.

“We also provide a Self-Guided Bookshop Crawl Kit which includes a Big List map of bookshops with opening hours, accessibility and general info about the shops as well as the bookshop crawl ID card that people can use to claim any of the extras. This is always available for free or pay as you feel.”

With Liverpool’s culture-rich heritage, Bex says they’re excited to be bringing the next Bookshop Crawl to Liverpool soon.

“This will be our first in person event in Liverpool, after we ran a socially distanced summer bookshop crawl there during covid so we are really looking forward to getting to meet some of the book lovers of the city and discover bookshops with them.”

Find out more about the Liverpool group Bookshop Crawl on August 13, 1-4.30pm, or how to get a Self-Guided Bookshop Crawl here.

Find more events across Liverpool is on our calendar.

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