After thirty years at the heart of Lowdham village, The Bookcase — an independent bookshop founded and owned by Jane Streeter – has now closed its doors. Selling an abundance of local and global books, the shop supported local schools in the community, and also welcomed a few famous authors over the years, along with founding the Lowdham Book Festival which happened for over twenty-six years. Jane told us about the journey of the bookshop, along with the highs and core memories, over three decades…
After working as a bookseller in London after finishing university, Jane Streeter moved back to Nottingham to be closer to home. While walking past an empty shop in Lowdham village she casually remarked to her husband how she wished somebody would open a bookshop there. His response (“Well, why don’t you do it?”) led Jane to contact the building owners, and from there the story of Lowdham’s The Bookcase began.
When the bookshop had its official grand opening in September 1996, the busy event proved there was an appetite from locals, encouraging Jane to work closely with fellow book colleagues to create literature-related events. One of them hosted Scottish poet and musician Don Paterson and novelist A. L. Kennedy. With roughly sixty people attending the event, this snowballed into more customers, and more events over the next three decades.
Another casual conversation about events The Bookshop could offer, with Five Leaves’ Ross Bradshaw, who was Literature Development Officer for Nottinghamshire County Council at the time, led to a few book-related events over the course of a week in the summer, which became a festival. The idea was supported by local people and organisations with funding from the County Council for seven years, as well as Arts Council funding for a further three years.
When the funding stopped, Jane was able to keep the festival running through ticket sales, community support and self-funding – one year attracting over two thousand people to it.
“The festival has been a real highlight of the area,” says Jane. “It was good for the local economy, and it developed into a film festival as well. The village hall still shows a film every month, and that’s really popular, so we've had a kind of a legacy from these things, which is really nice.”
When asked about some of her favourite memories of the bookshop, Jane described Harry Potter midnight parties she would host when a new book in the series was released. “We weren’t allowed to sell the books until midnight,” she says. “So, we had these incredible parties, three years running, each with over a hundred children outside on the pavement at midnight.” These parties saw magicians and real owls in attendance, which for Jane was “magical”.
Over the years, this little bookshop in Lowdham has hosted famous authors, like Michael Morpurgo, Carol Anne Duffy, Stuart Maconie, Ben Fogle, Hamza Yassin, and Alan Sillitoe.
“They’ve been great people to work with,” Jane says. “I think they like coming to a smaller place – they’re often sent to big bookshops, and big venues, [which are] not very personal. We’ve had comments where they’ve said it’s so nice to come somewhere that’s a bit smaller and they get a bit more looked after.”
I want to go to things that other people organise… I’ll visit other bookshops and be in the audience at events
One name remained special to Jane. Alan Sillitoe – the Notts writer who penned Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - was the first author to attend the first Lowdham Book Festival. Jane wrote to him to thank him, and the pair went on to write letters to each other over many years which led them to being “really good friends.”
Despite this, Jane’s ‘favourite day’ was just a normal day in the bookshop; receiving deliveries, unpacking boxes, ringing customers to tell them their books are in, and getting to know families.
For Jane, the bookshop’s closing party was “unbelievable” – crowds of people waiting for the shop to open were like “bees on a honeypot.” With queues outside the shop pretty much all day, attendees dressed up as their favourite book characters. Jane’s eldest daughter, who was nine when she opened the shop, dressed up as Alice in Wonderland – the same character she dressed up as when the shop opened, and her granddaughter also dressed up as Alice, giving a special, full-circle moment. The event received free books from various publishers, which Jane and the team gave away, and saw speeches from Jane, cards and presents from local people, and cake and champagne for attendees.
Though Jane will no longer be running The Bookcase or The Lowdham Book Festival, she still plans to be on the book scene. “I want to go to things that other people organise, I want to go to lots of other book festivals because I haven’t really been to any,” she says. I’ll visit other bookshops and be in the audience at events”.
She is also looking forward to more time for revisiting some of her favourite classic books, from authors like George Orwell and Charles Dickens. “Retirement is a stage of life that we have to embrace,” she says. “As much as I will miss it, and I know the village will, you just have to accept that’s the point we’ve reached.” Even so, the Bookcase and Lowdham Book Festival’s legacies live on, ensuring that a love for words pervades people of all ages in that small corner of Nottinghamshire.
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