Surveyed
Camilla Francombe and Stuart Broad opened their first shop in Brighton in 1976 and the Eastbourne branch in 1985; the branch ate the business, in the best way, and Grove Road is now the whole operation — three floors holding somewhere between half a million and a million secondhand books, depending which floor you believe, with armed forces, transport and first editions the famous depths. In March 2020, days into the first lockdown, an arsonist set fire to it; the town's response and a long repair brought it back, and the shop trades on as if a million books were never in doubt. Every seaside town deserves one impossible bookshop; Eastbourne's is the reference example.