Peng Shui

Author: Alex Mason

  • Bookshop Tourism Is Britain’s Coolest New Travel Trend, Here’s Where to Go

    Bookshop Tourism Is Britain’s Coolest New Travel Trend, Here’s Where to Go

    People are planning entire weekends around a bookshop. Not a festival, not a restaurant with a three-month waiting list, a bookshop. Bookshop tourism UK is genuinely one of the most interesting travel shifts I’ve noticed recently, and I say that as someone who spent last autumn driving to Hay-on-Wye specifically to spend four hours in a building full of second-hand paperbacks. No regrets whatsoever.

    The numbers back this up. The Booksellers Association reported that independent bookshop numbers in the UK grew for the fifth consecutive year in 2025, with over 1,000 indie shops now trading. These aren’t just shops, they’ve become cultural destinations in their own right, with reading groups, author events, curated shelving that feels almost editorial, and the kind of considered atmosphere you simply cannot manufacture online. People are travelling for that feeling.

    Interior of a British independent bookshop with floor-to-ceiling shelves — bookshop tourism UK
    Photo by Beyzaa Yurtkuran on Pexels

    Why bookshop tourism took off in the first place

    Part of it is the broader shift towards buying preloved and independent that’s been reshaping British consumer behaviour for a few years now. Part of it is the slow-travel mood, more people wanting experiences that feel deliberate and unhurried rather than ticking off landmarks at speed. And part of it is genuinely aesthetic: independent bookshops photograph beautifully, they have personality, and they give you something to talk about.

    The high street angle is real too. Whilst big retail chains have continued to retreat from town centres, independent bookshops have moved into the spaces with purpose. Tools like TownCentre.app, a free UK app for town centres and high streets across England, help shops reach customers without the overhead of expensive platforms, local independent booksellers can take card payments, list their events, and sell for free to people in the area who are already browsing what’s on the high street. That kind of infrastructure genuinely makes a difference to whether a small shop survives long enough to become a destination.

    England’s unmissable bookshop destinations

    Hay-on-Wye, Herefordshire, technically sitting on the Wales/England border, but worth flagging for both sides. It has roughly 25 bookshops for a population of around 1,500. Richard Booth’s Bookshop is the anchor, a rambling castle of a building with a cinema inside it. The whole town is essentially one long bookshop crawl, and the annual Hay Festival (held each May/June) draws serious literary figures from across the world. I’d allow at least a full day, ideally two.

    Wigtown, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland’s official National Book Town, with around 12 independent bookshops serving a village of 900 people. The star is The Book Shop, owned by Shaun Bythell whose diaries about running it became cult reading during lockdown. Wigtown Book Festival each September is the main event, but the town rewards a visit any time of year.

    Much Wenlock, Shropshire, quieter, less well-known, and all the better for it. Wenlock Books is a genuinely lovely independent that punches well above its size in terms of curation and events programming. The town itself is achingly pretty, which doesn’t hurt.

    Alnwick, Northumberland, Barter Books occupies a Victorian railway station and is one of the largest second-hand bookshops in Europe. There are open fires, a model railway running along the tops of the shelves, and a café. On a grey Northumberland morning, there is nowhere I’d rather be.

    Second-hand books on shelves in a converted Victorian railway station bookshop, a classic bookshop tourism UK stop
    Photo by Mark Thomas on Pexels

    Stroud, Gloucestershire, the Cotswold town that quietly became one of the most creatively interesting places in England. Sub Rooms bookshop and the town’s wider independent retail scene make it worth the trip, and the Saturday market adds to the atmosphere considerably.

    Wales: Hay is just the beginning

    Beyond Hay-on-Wye, Wales has a handful of genuinely outstanding bookshop experiences. Tŷ Newydd, the National Writing Centre of Wales near Pwllheli on the Llŷn Peninsula, isn’t a bookshop exactly but sits at the intersection of literary tourism in a way that feels relevant. For actual shopping, Aardvark Books in Brampton (near the Welsh border) and the cluster of shops in Aberystwyth make that part of the country a legitimate bookshop tourism circuit on its own.

    Scotland’s literary geography

    Beyond Wigtown, Scotland rewards proper bookshop tourism planning. Edinburgh is an obvious anchor, Lighthouse Books on West Nicholson Street is a radical, community-run indie that’s been building a seriously loyal following. Typewronger Books on Leith Walk has a typewriter repair shop attached, which tells you everything about the vibe. For something more countryside-pace, Callander in the Trossachs has a lovely indie that makes a good stop on any route north.

    The UK high street revival story has a distinctly literary chapter, and Scotland is writing a lot of it. The Scottish Government’s funding for book towns and literary tourism infrastructure has given independent booksellers in smaller communities a genuine reason to stay open and invest.

    How to plan a bookshop tourism trip properly

    The Booksellers Association’s bookshop finder is genuinely the best place to start, you can filter by region and find independents you’d never stumble across otherwise. Most serious bookshop tourism is built around 2-3 anchor destinations with supporting stops on the route between them.

    Ring ahead if you’re visiting somewhere very small. Wigtown shops, for example, sometimes keep irregular hours outside of festival season. The same goes for some of the more remote Scottish shops. A quick call saves a wasted journey.

    Budget for more than you think. I’ve never left a good independent bookshop spending less than I planned, and I’ve stopped trying to fight that particular battle. It’s money well spent, and the shops genuinely need it. Apps like TownCentre.app mean that more high street shops, including bookshops across England, can now reach customers before they even leave home, helping people discover what’s worth visiting in a given town before they arrive. For shopping and browsing, that kind of local discovery tool changes how a day out works.

    The bookshop tourism UK trend doesn’t look like slowing down. If anything, as people continue to prioritise experiences that feel meaningful and a bit slower, the atmospheric independent bookshop is exactly the kind of place that fits the moment. The books are almost secondary to the feeling of the place, almost.

  • Why British People Are Finally Taking Annual Leave Seriously (And What Changed)

    Why British People Are Finally Taking Annual Leave Seriously (And What Changed)

    There was a time, not even that long ago, when burning through your full holiday entitlement was almost seen as a character flaw in British workplaces. You’d hear it framed as dedication: “Oh, I haven’t taken a proper break in three years” delivered with the faint pride of someone announcing they’d run a marathon on no sleep. The martyrdom was the point. I’ve watched friends rack up a fortnight’s worth of unused days by December, then scramble to book them before the financial year closed, too exhausted to actually enjoy the time off.

    That era feels genuinely over. Annual leave culture UK has shifted in ways that even the most sceptical HR departments are scrambling to understand.

    Woman relaxing in a park, reflecting the shift in annual leave culture UK
    Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh on Pexels

    The numbers that tell the story

    The change isn’t anecdotal. A statutory minimum of 28 days has been in place for years, yet for a long time a significant portion of UK workers left an average of 5 to 6 days unused per year. Post-2023, that figure has tightened considerably. CIPD data from 2025 shows that employees across sectors are claiming more of what they’re owed, and the reasoning has changed fundamentally. It’s not just about having somewhere to go. It’s about having somewhere to recover.

    Burnout became a word people actually used about themselves rather than others. The pandemic compressed years of productivity anxiety into a short window, and when things reopened, a lot of people emerged from the experience genuinely depleted. The body keeps score and so, eventually, does the savings account when someone exits a job they should have left two years earlier.

    Why rest stopped being a dirty word

    Something cracked in the collective mindset around 2023. You could feel it on social media first, as you always do. The “hustle culture” aesthetic that dominated the late 2010s started getting openly mocked. TikTok was full of thirty-somethings talking about burnout as if they’d personally survived something. “Lazy girl job” discourse, the “slow living” movement, the steady rise of what some called quiet quitting (though that term always felt overloaded), all of it pointed in the same direction: workers, particularly younger ones, had stopped buying the idea that overwork was inherently virtuous.

    British workers occupy a specific cultural position here. We’ve historically worked longer hours than many of our European counterparts, with a particularly complicated relationship to the concept of leisure. There’s a residual Protestant work ethic baked into the culture, the idea that rest needs to be earned rather than taken as a given. What’s shifted is the source of that permission. People aren’t waiting for a manager to tell them it’s alright to log off. They’re taking the leave and explaining the decision afterwards, if at all.

    How employers actually responded

    Plenty of companies made noise about wellbeing without changing the structural conditions that made leave feel impossible to take. You know the type: a “wellness Wednesday” email alongside a 6pm all-hands meeting. But a real shift happened in mid-sized businesses especially, where the talent retention crisis made ignoring burnout genuinely costly. Replacing an experienced hire isn’t cheap. Losing one to preventable exhaustion is worse.

    Some companies moved to unlimited annual leave policies, though the evidence on those is complicated. Without a baseline, people sometimes take less, not more, because there’s no floor to anchor expectations. The more effective intervention seems to have been simpler: managers who actively encouraged direct reports to book leave early in the year and treated rest as part of performance, not separate from it.

    The four-day week trials across the UK produced results interesting enough that several organisations made the change permanent. The logic is essentially the same: productivity doesn’t scale linearly with hours, and a rested person does better work than an exhausted one grinding through a Friday afternoon.

    The connection to how we spend time off

    What people do with leave has changed too, and this connects to broader shifts in how British culture relates to spending and experience. The secondhand and preloved economy has made leisure more affordable for people who previously felt holidays were financially out of reach. A staycation in a rented cottage near the Peaks feels more legitimate than it did five years ago, when the cultural script around “proper” holidays leaned heavily toward international travel.

    There’s also something happening with how people use leave beyond the classic two-week summer block. Mental health days, long weekends built around a bank holiday, taking individual days mid-week to decompress after a heavy period. The monolithic “summer holiday” is less the only model now. I’d argue that fragmented leave, taken deliberately and regularly, is actually better for recovery than saving it all for August and spending the first five days of it anxious about the inbox you left behind.

    The social dimension matters here too. Research consistently shows that isolation compounds burnout. People taking proper breaks are re-engaging with friendships and communities that had atrophied during long work stretches. The UK friendship crisis is real and well-documented, but time off is one of the few structural levers individuals actually control.

    What this looks like day to day

    My take is that the most meaningful version of this shift isn’t the big gestures. It’s the person who used to apologise for booking a week in October now just… booking the week. No lengthy explanation in the Slack message, no reassurance to colleagues that they’ll be available if anything urgent comes up. The psychological permission to rest without justification is, arguably, the real change.

    There’s a cultural ripple here too. The high street revival that’s been gathering pace across British towns is partly driven by people who are actually present in their communities on weekday afternoons, taking leave and spending it locally rather than being perpetually at a desk. Leave that gets used has economic consequences beyond the individual.

    Annual leave culture UK isn’t fully fixed. There are still industries and workplaces where the old pressures dominate: hospitality, some parts of the NHS, retail during peak periods. But the direction of travel is clearer than it’s been in a generation. Rest is having its reputation restored. Gradually, and with some resistance from the corners of corporate Britain that still equate visibility with value, but it’s happening.

    Taking your leave isn’t slacking. It’s paying attention to what keeps you functional for the long run. That the UK is slowly learning to treat it that way feels, honestly, overdue.

  • The UK Friendship Crisis Nobody Wants to Admit To, And What People Are Actually Doing About It

    The UK Friendship Crisis Nobody Wants to Admit To, And What People Are Actually Doing About It

    There’s a particular kind of loneliness that hits differently when you’re in your thirties, forties, or beyond. Not the dramatic, cinematic loneliness of a breakup or a bereavement, but a slow, creeping realisation that your social circle has quietly shrunk to almost nothing, and that you genuinely have no idea how to rebuild it. Making friends as an adult in the UK is, frankly, something most of us find mortifying to admit we’re struggling with. And yet, according to the ONS, around 3.83 million adults in England feel lonely “often” or “always”. That number has only climbed since the pandemic reshuffled where we work, where we live, and who we bother keeping in touch with.

    The problem is structural. School gives you friends by proximity. University does too. Then your mid-twenties hit, you move cities for work, start working from home, maybe have kids, and suddenly the scaffolding is gone. Nobody built you a replacement system, and somewhere along the line it became deeply uncool to admit you need one.

    Two adults having a genuine conversation over coffee, reflecting the challenge of making friends as an adult in the UK
    Photo by Mike Jones on Pexels

    Why adult friendships quietly disappear in Britain

    British culture doesn’t help. We are, as a nation, professionally awkward about emotional need. Admitting you’re lonely feels like admitting failure, as if everyone else is out there laughing over bottomless brunch with their tight-knit crew. They’re not. I’ve spoken to enough people in their thirties and forties to know that the majority of them are quietly in the same boat, just too proud to say it out loud.

    Remote working has accelerated things dramatically. When a significant chunk of the workforce clocks on from a spare bedroom in Swindon or a kitchen table in Leeds, the casual collisions that used to turn into friendships, a shared moan about the coffee machine, a Friday pint that became a tradition, just don’t happen. Bumping into people takes effort now. Effort that, after a long day, nobody’s got spare.

    Add to that the fact that many people moved to new towns or cities during the pandemic years, chasing cheaper rent or more space, and found themselves in places where they know essentially nobody. Starting from scratch in your thirties is its own specific nightmare.

    The new social formats Brits are actually trying

    Here’s the thing though: something is shifting. Quietly, slightly awkwardly, and very British about it, people are starting to try stuff. And some of it is genuinely working.

    Friendship apps

    Bumble BFF has been around for a while but has seen a noticeable surge in UK uptake over the past couple of years. It works essentially like the dating version, swipe, match, chat, but without the romantic pressure. I’d be lying if I said the idea didn’t feel a bit strange the first time I heard it. But talking to people who’ve used it, the barrier to entry is exactly what makes it work: everyone on there has already admitted they’re looking for new friends, so the awkwardness is pre-acknowledged and out of the way.

    There are also newer, more niche platforms like Friended and Yubo, designed for slightly different demographics, though the UK adoption is patchier outside London. The apps work best, it seems, when they funnel people towards a shared activity rather than just a chat. Which brings us to the next thing.

    Community dinners and supper clubs

    Communal eating as a social antidote is genuinely having a moment right now. Across cities like Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, community supper clubs are popping up where strangers book a ticket, sit at long shared tables, and eat together. The format works because it removes the one-to-one pressure: you’re not responsible for carrying an entire conversation, the food gives you something to talk about, and the atmosphere is usually relaxed enough that it doesn’t feel like a speed-dating event with pasta.

    Some of these are ticketed events at independent restaurants, some are run by community organisations, and a few are just people opening their homes to strangers, which sounds terrifying and also, by all accounts, brilliant. The high street is adapting to this too; as I explored in how Britain’s high street is quietly reinventing itself, more independent spaces are leaning into community programming rather than just retail, hosting regular events that give people a reason to come back and actually talk to each other.

    Sports and hobby groups

    Running clubs have absolutely exploded. Parkrun, obviously, has been doing this for years, 5km on a Saturday morning, free, welcoming, genuinely one of the better social inventions of the last decade. But beyond that, local running groups, cycling clubs, wild swimming communities, amateur five-a-side leagues, board game cafés, climbing gyms, all of them are reporting packed sign-up lists. The reason is obvious in retrospect: shared activity takes the pressure off conversation. You’re bonded by what you’re doing, not by having to be interesting.

    Craft and creative workshops have surged similarly. Pottery classes in particular seem to have become the go-to for the thirty-something professional who wants to be around other humans without it feeling like networking.

    Making friends as an adult UK: what the research actually says works

    Psychologist Robin Dunbar’s research on friendship suggests that turning an acquaintance into a genuine friend requires around 50 hours of time together, and a close friend needs closer to 200. That’s a lot of pottery. The point isn’t discouraging; it’s clarifying. Friendship takes repetition. A one-off event rarely does it. What works is recurring contact: the running group you show up to every Tuesday, the supper club you book monthly, the neighbour you wave at every morning until one day you’re having a coffee together.

    The formats that seem to convert best are the ones that have a built-in return. Not “come once and see how it goes” but “same time next week”. That rhythm is what school and work used to provide automatically. Now we have to build it deliberately.

    The social design of where we live matters too

    Some of this is an environmental problem. New-build housing estates with no pub, no café, no shared green space make community nearly impossible. I’d argue the physical design of where we live shapes our social lives more than we like to admit. There’s a reason people romanticise terraced houses and tight urban streets, the proximity enforces contact. Cul-de-sacs and car-first developments do the opposite.

    Interestingly, some people are finding that investing in their home environment helps them host more, which in turn creates the space for friendships to develop. The quiet luxury interiors trend I wrote about when looking at how to create an elevated home aesthetic on a budget has a social dimension to it: creating a home you actually want to have people round to is, for some, the first step towards doing exactly that.

    Dropping the embarrassment around it

    My honest take? The biggest barrier isn’t the apps or the formats or even the time. It’s the embarrassment. Admitting you’re lonely, admitting you’d like more friends, admitting you don’t know how to do that as a 38-year-old, none of it feels cool. But pretending otherwise is lonelier.

    The Brits doing best at this in 2026 are the ones who’ve quietly decided they don’t care how it looks. They downloaded the app, they booked the supper club ticket, they walked into the running group alone. It’s awkward for about twenty minutes and then, usually, it isn’t. That’s not a revelation. But sometimes stating the obvious is the most useful thing.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Why is making friends as an adult in the UK so difficult?

    Adult friendships lack the built-in structure that school and university provide. Once people move cities, work from home, or have children, those casual daily collisions that turn acquaintances into friends simply stop happening. British reserve around admitting loneliness also makes it harder to reach out in the first place.

    What apps can help you make friends as an adult in the UK?

    Bumble BFF is the most widely used in the UK, operating like its dating counterpart but specifically for platonic friendships. Friended is another option, particularly popular with younger adults. Both work best when they lead to a recurring activity or group rather than just one-to-one messaging.

    Are community supper clubs and social dinners actually a good way to meet people?

    They work well for a lot of people because the shared meal format removes the pressure of carrying a one-to-one conversation. Many UK cities now have organised supper clubs with ticketed events, Bristol, Manchester, Edinburgh, and London all have active scenes. Look for events with long shared tables rather than couples-style seating.