Hay-on-Wye: The Little Town That Bet Its Future on Books
Hay-on-Wye is a small market town on the Welsh side of the border with England, surrounded by the green hills and farmland of the Wye Valley. Its streets are lined with stone buildings and painted shopfronts, the restored Hay Castle rises near the center, and the River Wye curves quietly past the edge of town. It would be an appealing place even without its unusual claim to fame.
But Hay is known around the world for one thing: books.
More than twenty independent bookshops are packed into a town small enough to explore on foot. They occupy former commercial buildings, narrow storefronts, old chapels, and rooms filled from floor to ceiling with new, secondhand, and antiquarian titles. Some shops are large enough to occupy several floors. Others specialize in a single subject or resemble private collections that have gradually opened to the public.
Hay-on-Wye is not simply a pleasant town that happens to have several good bookstores. Books became the idea around which the town rebuilt its identity.
The Man Who Saw a Future in Books
That transformation began with Richard Booth, a local bookseller whose ambitions extended far beyond opening a single shop. In the early 1960s, Booth began buying large collections of secondhand books and filling vacant buildings around Hay with them. He believed that a struggling market town could turn itself into an international destination by concentrating on something overlooked and undervalued: used books.
His idea helped transform Hay into what is widely described as the world's first book town. The town's literary identity ultimately became larger than Booth himself. New booksellers arrived, each developing its own specialty, and Hay became known not for one remarkable bookstore, but for an entire town devoted to books.
Exploring the Town of Books
Richard Booth's Bookshop remains one of Hay's essential stops. Its landmark building on Lion Street contains three floors of new, secondhand, and antiquarian books, organized into departments overseen by specialist booksellers. The scale gives it the feel of a library, but the pleasure comes from the unpredictability of the shelves: a familiar title beside something obscure, a modern edition beside a much older copy, or an entire section devoted to a subject a visitor had not intended to explore.
Hay Cinema Bookshop offers a very different experience. Housed in a former cinema, it contains an enormous collection of secondhand and antiquarian books spread through a large, open interior. Addyman Books is known for its distinctive rooms and carefully curated collections, while Murder and Mayhem specializes in crime fiction, detective stories, and mysteries. Other shops focus on poetry, children's books, maps, natural history, music, art, and local history.
For Travelreads readers, the travel shelves are naturally worth seeking out. Broad Street Book Centre has long carried books on travel, transport, railways, and exploration, while the larger shops maintain extensive collections of travel writing and guidebooks. Rather than searching for one definitive travel bookstore, visitors quickly discover that Hay functions almost like a town-sized bookstore, with each shop contributing another department.
The bookshops are close enough together that very little planning is required. A visitor can begin on Lion Street, continue through the center of town, stop at the castle and market square, and simply wander into whichever shop looks most interesting. Hay rewards curiosity more than a rigid itinerary.
Hay Castle and the Honesty Bookshelves
Hay Castle gives the town a visual center as well as another connection to its literary identity. The site combines a medieval keep, a seventeenth-century mansion, and new cultural spaces created during a major restoration. After centuries of private ownership, the castle reopened fully to the public in 2022 and now hosts exhibitions, performances, workshops, and community events.
Outside the castle, the famous honesty bookshelves have become one of Hay's most recognizable sights. Books line open-air shelves built into the castle walls, and visitors simply leave payment in an honesty box. It is a charming tradition that somehow feels perfectly suited to a town built around trust, browsing, and the simple pleasure of discovering another book.
The castle also reminds visitors that Hay is more than a collection of bookstores. The weekly market, cafés, pubs, galleries, and independent shops give it the character of a living market town rather than a literary attraction created solely for tourists. Its Welsh name, Y Gelli, appears alongside the English one, reflecting its position on the border between two countries and cultures.
Beyond the Bookshops
Hay sits just north of Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, still widely known in English as the Brecon Beacons. The surrounding countryside makes it easy to combine a bookstore weekend with walking, cycling, or time along the River Wye. The long-distance Offa's Dyke Path passes nearby, and the river itself is popular for canoeing and kayaking.
This setting is part of Hay's appeal. Although it feels removed from Britain's major cities, it is easy to explore on foot and compact enough that visitors can spend a relaxed day moving between bookshops, cafés, the castle, and the riverside. Many people come for the books and end up appreciating the town itself.
The Hay Festival
Every spring, Hay-on-Wye's literary reputation expands dramatically during the Hay Festival. Founded in 1988, it has grown into one of the world's most respected celebrations of books and ideas, bringing together novelists, historians, journalists, scientists, musicians, and public thinkers for more than a week of conversations and events. The main festival site sits just outside the town center, making it easy to move between scheduled talks and Hay's permanent bookshops.
The next Hay Festival Hay-on-Wye will take place from May 27 through June 6, 2027, marking the festival's 40th anniversary.
Festival week offers the fullest expression of Hay's international literary identity, but it also brings much larger crowds and accommodations often book well in advance. Travelers interested primarily in browsing the bookstores may prefer another time of year, when the streets are quieter and booksellers have more time to recommend an unexpected discovery.
A Literary Pilgrimage
Calling Hay-on-Wye a literary pilgrimage may sound ambitious for a town of only about 1,500 residents, but it captures why readers continue to make the journey.
There are easier and faster ways to buy almost any book. Hay offers something different: the opportunity to spend a day wandering between independent bookstores, browsing shelves without a particular destination, and enjoying a place where books are woven into everyday life.
Visitors may arrive with a shopping list, but Hay is best experienced with room for detours. The most memorable purchase is often not the book someone intended to find, but the one discovered in an unfamiliar shop along the way.
For anyone traveling through Wales or the English border country, Hay-on-Wye is one of Britain's most distinctive small-town destinations.
Reading Hay-on-Wye
No single book tells the story of Hay-on-Wye, but these titles capture the pleasures of bookselling, browsing, and literary travel.
My Kingdom of Books by Richard Booth — Booth's own account of the vision that helped transform Hay-on-Wye into the world's first book town.
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell — A witty and insightful memoir of life in Wigtown, Scotland, another celebrated book town.
84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff — A timeless correspondence celebrating the relationship between readers and booksellers.
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald — A classic novel about opening an independent bookstore in a small English town.
The links above take you to Bookshop.org, our preferred bookselling partner. Every purchase supports independent bookstores, and we're proud to partner with an organization that shares our belief in the enduring value of books and local bookshops.
Continue exploring Britain's literary landscapes with our United Kingdom bookshelf, featuring books that bring the country's history, culture, and remarkable places to life.
