Welcome to
Gower Street

Europe's largest academic bookstore. Located in the heart of Bloomsbury, our Grade 1 Listed building, described by Pevsner as 'a wild block very elaborately detailed in a restless, flamboyant, Franco-Flemish Gothic style' was designed by Charles Fitzroy Doll in 1908. Originally a row of small shops with houses above, there have been an colourful mix of tenants over the years, including a harness-maker, wallpaper merchant and dealer in poultry and game.

The first bookshop on the site, Dillon's, opened in a small area of the ground floor in 1956. Now half a century later Waterstones occupies the entire five floor building, with over five miles of shelving and 160,000 titles.

The ground floor is devoted to Fiction, Biography, Travel and other areas of general interest, while the other floors hold specialist departments in medicine and sciences, and all areas of the arts and humanities. A unique feature is our secondhand and remainder department stocking many out-of-print and hard to find items. Additionally we offer a buy-back service for students and usually carry a large range of secondhand textbooks. We also have a Costa Coffee shop, a Fopp! store and Ryman's, the stationery specialists, on the lower ground floor.

Over the years Gower Street has played host to a large number of prestigious authors, statesmen, Booker and Nobel prize winners including Mikhail Gorbachev, Desmond Tutu, Peter Ackroyd, and Stephen Jay Gould. We hold small informal events on the shop floor and in the coffee shop, and host larger scale events in outside venues. A recent highlight was a sell-out lecture by Professor Stephen Hawking on A Short History of Time.

Unfortunately you can't ride a steam locomotive up and down Gower Street as Richard Trevithick did in 1802, or worship at the 'Temple of the Occult' at No.99 as was the case early in the nineteenth century, but you can visit one of Europe's most striking bookshops at No. 82!