Foyles bookshop is a 101-year-old London institution that is slowly looking to expand out into the rest of the country. Noella Pio Kivlehan speaks to its Monaco-based chairman Christopher Foyle about surviving the recession, growth plans and the new Charing Cross Road store
It’s all about the books. The amount of books and the selection. Plus loyalty. Then add history. That’s what has kept the famous London-based bookstore Foyles afloat through the recent recession: a recession that claimed the scalp of some of the largest names in the bookshop world, including Borders, and saw Waterstones slim down.
Foyles – London’s oldest bookstore – is best known for its Charing Cross Road branch, but it is on the expansion trail and is keen to find sites. Chairman Christopher Foyle describes the latest opening in June – a new flagship on Charing Cross Road as “buzzing”.
Foyle admits he was disappointed at losing the London St Pancras site (see box, p34) after failing to agree a lease renewal with the landlord. But the firm is nothing if not robust, not only has it come through the recession, it survived having a main artery into its Charing Cross Road branch cut off during an economic downturn.
The Tottenham Court Road end of Charing Cross Road was closed in 2010 ago for the £1bn Tottenham Court Road station Crossrail development. “Our takings went down 20% [about £1.5m in yearly sales] which was quite serious. But we have got through that and they are opening the road in October, so we are very hopeful we will see lost footfall being recovered. When Crossrail itself opens in 2016 all indications are there should be an enormous increase in footfall.”
On surviving the recession, Foyle, speaking from his Monaco base, says: “Foyles is unique – when I say Foyles, I am referring to the flagship store in Charing Cross Road… it was always known as the world’s greatest bookshop, as it had the largest range of titles on every subject you could think of of any physical bricks-and-mortar bookshop in the world.
“And we have a very loyal following… some of them are loyal in a sentimental case, but simply they love going to Foyles and finding such a large spread of books on their chosen subject and they won’t find that anywhere else. That has stood us in good stead and continues to.”
Admittedly, Foyles, with six UK branches, is not the size Borders/Books Etc was when it finally closed its doors on its 45 stores in 2009. But it could be argued that a downturn is more dangerous for independents.
“Competition is enormously fierce now. You’ve got Waterstones, a chain of nearly 300 stores which has been around for a while, you’ve got supermarkets selling books at a half or a third of the normally published price, you’ve got Amazon, of course… and you’ve got electronic books. So independent bookshops have all that, coupled with the fact that most independent bookshops don’t own their own properties.
“They pay rent to separate landlords, and in city centres quite a lot of those landlords have been upping their rents. As bookselling has become a less profitable model because of the intense price competition, and the fact that resale price maintenance disappeared about 15 years ago.”
Foyle says his brand was protected from landlords because it has always owned its own real estate – apart from shopping centre sites – held in a separate company called Noved, which involves most of the same family shareholders as the bookshop.
Now Foyles is slowly, but steadily expanding. “What we have always been looking for when we open other branches elsewhere is not simply to replicate some of the other chains and opening bookshops in very expensive sites up and down the country in big cities. As I say, the bookselling financial model is not a terribly healthy one at the moment,” says Foyle.
“We look for sites like the Royal Festival Hall, SE1, where there is synergy with bookshops because of the activities going on. Railways station sites are 3,000 sq ft.” Anywhere else, 5,000-5,500 sq ft.
Foyle says there is no optimum number of stores for the company. “It’s not like that. It’s just simply if we can find the right opportunity at the right place at the right rent, we’ll go for it. Whether it’s one or 10 doesn’t matter,” he says.
The company is already outside London, in Bristol, and Foyle admits to recently looking at other areas. “I can’t say where, but we have looked at one or two major cities, and we may do something in one of them.”
He says the company likes talking to landlords who “while commercial of course, just have a slightly more lenient view of wanting Foyles”.
He adds: “Some landlords actually like the Foyles brand. They want us to be present and understand we can’t pay as much as Topshop or Harrods, yet they are prepared to take a view because they like our brand and the kinds of people it brings into their site. We have found – I won’t say who – but with some of the landlords that we pay rent to, they are not quite as hard as other landlords, and we are always looking for opportunities like that.”
The new store on Charing Cross Road, which opened in June just down from the original store, is something of a new beginning for the company, and one which is embracing both the modern book world and the traditional, while giving something back to the community (see panel).
One thing Foyle is convinced of: physical books have a future – as the investment in the new store shows. Giving an analogy, he says: “I read a book about six years ago called The Book is Dead, the Digital Revolution – something like that, a small book written by an American, and his view was in the same way you take the candle which 200 years ago was the sole source of illumination in houses and properties generally, and today you have electricity but the candle didn’t disappear. Shops, supermarkets and big stores are making a lot of money selling lots of candles.
“The author used that as an analogy and he thought in 20 or 30 years’ time the book wouldn’t die but it would be 90 or 95% electronic and five or 10% physical books. We are not of that view, because we have noticed a marked tailing-off in the acceleration into e-books over the past couple of years.
“Yes, there will be a diminished market in physical bookstores selling physical books, but we want to retain a larger market share of perhaps a diminished market.”
And that is a philosophy that promises plenty of new chapters in the Foyles story.
Foyle on Foyles: Christopher Foyle assesses his stores
Charing Cross, WC2 “Performs very well.”
Royal Festival Hall, South Bank, SE1 ?“It is a good branch.”
London Waterloo Station, SE1 “We only opened in February and it is our best performing branch.”
Westfield Stratford, E15/Westfield London, W12 “Curiously, Westfield ?Stratford performs better than Westfield London. You would think with the demographics, being in the East End, that it wouldn’t perform so well, but it is actually performing better than the store in White City – which is on the edge of an affluent part of west London. That’s a bit anomalous, we don’t know why that is.”
Cabot Circus, Bristol “It is not one of the best performing branches. But it’s not in a very good area. It’s in in part of the pedestrian area, which isn’t particularly well visited. You learn from experience with these things.”
The loss of St Pancras
“We are not very happy about it.” Those seven words sum up Christopher Foyles’ feelings about losing the lease on the London St Pancras store in July. A store he describes as trading very well. “Sadly, it was a good one,” he laments.
“Our lease came up for renewal on 31 July and obviously they wanted to review the terms, and the terms that they were quoting were ones we couldn’t really absorb as per our bookselling financial model.”
The “they” is St Pancras owner High Speed 1, which is in turn owned jointly by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Borealis Infrastructure.
Foyle says: “We were offered another site half the size. It meant doing a lot of internal change, capital works, capital expenditure, and unlike some of our other landlords they found themselves unable to help us with that. If we had spent all that money on this small site to amortize that over the period of the lease, it would have meant us making a significant loss. So, unfortunately, ?it’s very sad, we couldn’t come to terms.”
Wendy Spinks, commercial director at HS1, says: “We are sad to see [Foyles] leave the station. However, we were delighted to welcome Hatchards… on 1 August. The proud literary tradition of St Pancras continues.”
Foyles’ history
Foyles was established by brothers William and Gilbert in 1903 in a store in Peckham. They opened at Charing Cross Road in 1906.
Christopher Foyle says: “We first started in 1903, and within about three or four or five years my grandfather had shops in several other places in London and later he had one in Dublin, in Belfast, in Johannesburg and Cape Town [in South Africa]. And we had twopenny lending libraries all over the country, which were kind of franchises.
“Those all gradually closed under my uncle and aunt as they got older, after they took over from my grandfather. I don’t know why – it just didn’t suit them to run branches. These closed in the 1960s and 1970s. When I took over in 1999 all that was left was the flagship store, so beginning to open other shops has been a new thing.
“We also had a shop in Selfridges for a while – that was nice – and working with them was fine but that didn’t work out terribly well as a financial model and when the lease renewal came up we couldn’t agree terms, so we just bowed out gracefully.”
The new Charing Cross Road Foyles store
In February 2011, Noved, the Foyle family’s real estate arm, bought the former Central St Martin’s School of Art building at 107-109 Charing Cross Road, WC1, to replace the existing flagship at 113-119 Charing Cross Road, WC2.
The 75,000 sq ft block was then redesigned by Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands and the new store opened in June. Foyles chairman Christopher Foyle says the ambitious project shows the commitment and faith Foyles has in the physical book store.
“We have just opened this new store, which is an enormous investment for us, as we had to buy the building and then spend a similar amount of money on the redevelopment over two years.”
Foyle says the company wanted to make the new premises “a buzzy place that is an experience to visit”.
He explains: “We have this big atrium in the centre with lots of activities – we have more than 150 author events a year, where people come and listen to authors speak and then debate with them and buy signed copies of the books.
“We have two galleries, two event spaces – one commercial and one non-commercial, which is something we did for Westminster city council. So we have a gallery space which is non-commercial, where we can have different, interesting art exhibitions.
“There is an even bigger and more attractive restaurant/café, which is doing extraordinarily well – its turnover is about 50% up on the café in the previous store – literally within a week of opening, and we just want to make it a hub of buzzy culturally interesting activity, and I think we are achieving that.
“On the one hand, it’s a big, light area, architecturally interesting space, but at the same time we don’t want to lose the nooks and crannies and the intimacy of the old Foyles – which I think we have recaptured in some of the areas if you go up higher into the various departments.”
