We Look Back at the Mushroom, Nottingham’s Groundbreaking Anti-War Bookstore

It’s 1972. Swedish supergroup ABBA have just formed, the novel Watership Down has recently been published, and you find yourself flicking through a stack of paperbacks in Nottingham’s newly opened Mushroom Bookshop. Located on 261 Arkwright Street, couple Chris Cook Cann and Keith Leonard have rented the building off of the City Council for £5 a week and taken residence above the shop. Previously operating as a jeweller, it’s the tail end of the Vietnam War overseas (which will be over in 1975), and this is Nottingham’s first ever anti-war bookstore. 

An important decade, the Mushroom couldn’t have opened at a better time, with a rising sense of discontent at the establishment brewing - manifesting in anti-war protests in the US and the ‘Decade of Strikes’ as it was dubbed in the UK, in which postal workers, miners and dustmen are among the first to demand better conditions. A time slap bang between the Aldermaston anti-nuclear marches of the 1960s and the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp of the 1980s, there’s a feeling of change, crisis and public action. And, as usual, Nottingham, with its rebellious reputation, finds itself in the middle of things - with a radical bookstore where anarchists share ideas. 

Created with the intention of “love and peace”, Chris tells me as I sit in her living room, surrounded by bookshelves, “we thought we could create an alternative society if we ignored the mainstream and did enough of our own thing. We picked Nottingham because somebody I knew from university said it had cheap property and lots of students. So we hitchhiked up and I have lived here ever since.

“Perhaps we were naïve, but there was hope,” Chris continues. “There were plenty of other bookshops in those days that gave us advice, like Compendium in London and Orwell in Ipswich.” Describing an atmosphere of change, Chris remembers meeting other radical bookshop owners and being inspired by the exchanging of ideas. So, despite the fact that, as Chris writes in her memoir Face Blind, “it would be a considerable time before we could make a living at this,” and, “I babysat and cleaned houses, although I hated it,” the couple carried on with the bookshop as a passion project, printing leaflets and distributing them across the city for customers. 

But what did they actually stock? Well, obviously books, which lived in the front of the store, alongside “joss sticks, clothes, crafts and other paraphernalia in the back”, according to local literary historian John Baird. All of which had a special focus on anti-war, anti-nuke and anarchist sentiments. A member of the Federation of Alternative Booksellers, the titles ranged from books on vegetarianism, gay writing, drugs and feminism, all the way to banned books, including the illegal autobiography Spycatcher, written by former M15 officer Peter Wright, alongside Salman Rushdie's notorious novel The Satanic Verses.

Operating in a time before the internet, Chris describes it as a place where customers could buy books (of course), but also pass on information, saying that “people would come in with a pile of their leaflets and put them on a big noticeboard. And we knew who was interested in what based on what they were buying, so we would recommend groups to our customers,” making the shop a natural hotspot for radicals to meet - as well as a natural target for those who didn’t agree with leftist philosophies. 

Moving to Heathcoat Street in the mid-seventies, it was in this more central location that some of the more striking events occurred, as described by ex-worker (and current owner of Five Leaves Bookshop) Ross Bradshaw in the Radical Bookselling History Newsletter. “Most of my seventeen years at Nottingham’s Mushroom were spent unpacking parcels, serving customers, seeing trade reps… from time to time things got a bit more dramatic,” he comments. This was largely due to the controversial books sold, and Bradshaw recalls having “another batch of death threats to add to the file” after the shop stocked The Satanic Verses. Plus a run-in with the police, in which they confiscated the shop's entire drug literature section under the Obscene Publications Act - only to later give the books back when Mushroom contested the charge. 

Though it wasn’t until January 1994, by which time Mushroom had been running for 22 years, that the most noteworthy protest against the shop occurred, in which “fifty fascists attacked” the store after travelling to Nottingham to see white supremacist band Skrewdriver. Then, once at the Mushroom, they smashed up the shop monitors, broke glass and threw over the bookshelves, as the staff quickly tried to escort customers from the building. During this time, Ross was “beaten, but not badly” while trying to hold the door against the perpetrators - the whole event resulting in some minor injuries and 32 of the attackers being arrested, many of whom tried to escape by jumping on the bus to Derby.

After this, the Mushroom Bookshop lived on in relative peace, with Ross leaving in 1995, and it remained open until 2000, at which time it had to shut due to financial struggles. Even now, though, its impact can still be felt in the city, with many folk from that era remembering it as a place where they discovered new ideas for the first time and got involved in political action. And, of course, it acted as inspiration for the current radical bookshop in Nottingham, Five Leaves, which looks back on Mushroom as an ancestor. So, when I ask Chris if the bookshop made a difference and she replies “I would like to hope so”, I feel confident in saying that it definitely did.