Aldeburgh Bookshop

Christopher Rowan-Robinson founded the bookshop in 1949, and John and Mary James have owned and run it since 2000 — a quarter-century of stewardship that took a Nibbie for Best Independent Bookshop in 2006 and has kept the shop central to a town whose festival culture buys books the way other resorts buy rock. The stock leans literary with the deep local shelf a Britten town requires, and the doors open seven days a week, because Aldeburgh's readers do not observe weekends. High Street, number 42: the answer, appropriately.