Awen Teifi

Geraint and Siân James opened Awen Teifi on Cardigan's High Street in 1999 as a Welsh-language bookshop, and it has grown since into a shop spanning two floors, with a ground-floor room given over entirely to farm toys, from die-cast Britains models to Bruder tractors and Siku diggers. Welsh and English fiction, poetry and children's books share shelves with cards, jigsaws, wooden toys and Lego, while the shop's own Oriel Awen Teifi gallery hangs prints and paintings by Welsh artists including the late Aneurin Jones. The James family still run the shop day to day, describing it simply as Cardigan's Welsh bookshop, and it remains a rare high-street source of Welsh-language books in the area. Open six days a week, it draws trade from farmers in town on market days and from visitors browsing the farm-toy room downstairs.