OPEN DOORS | LRB

Open doors
Changing highstreets post-lockdown

How to manage uncertain times and changing regulations as high streets re-open post-lockdown? London Review Books is no different to anyone else on the highstreet in juggling safety of staff and customers with the urgent need to get the business working again. The answer is subtle shifts.

In the book shop we introduced face-out books with bookseller reviews for increased look-but-don’t-touch display, and acrylic screens of course but installed for minimal visual impact. So important to keep an informal feel in a store designed for milling about and coming across a new author haphazardly, the very opposite of one-way signposting and hands-off plastic barriers.

The cake shop has extra store cupboard goods and takeaway food plus a new a mini doorway counter: fitted into the existing opening, ingeniously installed, a useful demountable addition connecting Terry and her team with Bury Place and the neighbours.

All done quickly and inexpensively, working with the existing fabric, leaving the essential experience little changed, and easily adapted or removed as new normal becomes clear.

London Review Workplace
London Review Cakes