House of Books & Friends: The community cafe that makes a massive difference.

National World - LocalTV

We went down to the House of Books and Friends to talk to manager Naomi about the store, the cafe and why some of their amazing community schemes are so helpful to the regulars there.

Transcript

00:00Hello and welcome to Manchester World. My name is Theo Hewson-Bertz and today I'm at the House of

00:04Books and Friends to do a little piece on some of the amazing community initiatives that they have

00:08here. It's a cafe and bookstore with a wonderful purpose and a wonderful story. So let's talk to

00:14Naomi who's going to tell us a little bit more about it. My name is Naomi Self. I'm the bookshop

00:19manager at House of Books and Friends. Okay so House of Books and Friends is an independent

00:25bookshop and cafe. We are also a community interest company which means that we are set up with a

00:31specific social mission. So we try to prevent loneliness and social isolation. We are funded

00:38and founded by a law firm called Gunna Cook and one of the founders, Daryl, he's particularly

00:44passionate about the cause of loneliness and social isolation and he came up with the idea of

00:50merging his two passions, the reading and loneliness prevention and came up with the idea to connect

00:56people via a bookshop. We opened a week before Christmas in 2022 which was a bold move but it

01:04worked for us. It worked for us. It was nice to be there just that week before Christmas when perhaps

01:09people had kind of got all of their, most of their shopping and they were just looking for the odd

01:14things. They had a bit of time to look around and enjoy a brand new bookshop. Did the pay-it-forward

01:19the coffees are there? We have a lot of really kind and generous customers who donate to that. We

01:24also have a pay-it-forward book scheme as well where we collect books for local organisations and

01:31charities and our customers are really generous with those as well. And I think for people knowing

01:38that that option is there, we have some groups who come in and use the pay-it-forward coffees. We even

01:48have some people who maybe go through different, I guess, financial situations in their life. So

01:57maybe one month they'll be redeeming a pay-it-forward token and like maybe next month when times are a

02:05little bit better they say, well I'd like to give one now because I'm in a better position. So

02:09it's nice to see, it's nice to see that they want to pay it forward to the next person who's in their

02:14positions. Loneliness is a very, I guess, it's almost a very slippery kind of issue because it

02:20affects people of all different ages, backgrounds and what we try and do here is create kind of

02:29different ways for people to connect and interact with us, interact with other customers. So we run

02:35our book clubs. Some people may just be looking for one book club meeting a month and that fills their

02:41social battery and that's what they're here for. And for some people that might be all they need for

02:46the day. They might be on the more introverted side but they do enjoy just talking about the book

02:52they're buying for two minutes to someone. And so we try and just make it as open as possible.

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