The Cafe at Foyles

Largest range of Books from the widest range of genres, FREE delivery to all Foyles stores & in the UK, specialist books, sheet music, signed copies and events.

Books, Fiction, Childrens & lots more | Foyles Bookstore

Foyles uses cookies to help ensure your experience on our site is the best possible.

Click here if you’d like to find out more about the types of cookies we use.

http://www.foyles.co.uk

The Cafe at Foyles

Foyles book shop moved in June 2014 from its home at 113-119 Charing Cross Road since 1929 to a new flagship at 107 Charing Cross Road.

Our starting point for the cafe design, located at the end of 4 miles of book shelves on the top floor, was to understand what made Foyles existing cafe so loved by their customers.

Working closely with Leafi, who operate the cafe, and Foyles we have created a new cafe which hopefully will be seen as a positive evolution of the old one and will become loved as much as it was by Foyles’ customers and the literary intelligentsia alike.

We have used utilitarian materials, plywood, raw steel and recycled boarding combine with features expressing the art of book making, like type-writer key signage and letter-press embossed panelling.

The gallery, adjacent to the cafe, provides a versatile space for temporary exhibitions throughout the year.

Covent Garden restaurants: A guide on where to eat in the West End ...

Your Instagram is about to go into overdrive… 231 Ebury Street, SW1W 8UT Read next The 7 best Chinese restaurants in London Restaurants The 7 best Chinese restaurants in London From delicious dim sum to sizzling Szechuan spice, we've rounded up the finest places for a Chinese feast OK, so this Pimlico institution isn’t in the West End, but it is a handily short walk away from the Victoria Theatre, where hit American musical Hamilton has just opened (bonne chance getting tickets if you haven’t already).

In light of the show coming to London, the charming French favourite is now offering a ‘Table d’hôte’ menu, with classics like cassoulet, steak frites and crème brûlée, and they promise your food on the table and in your belly in time for you to catch curtains-up.

39 King Street, WC2E 8JS Read next The 37 best restaurants in Soho Restaurants The 37 best restaurants in Soho We've eaten our way around Soho to bring you the very best in London food right now.

43 Drury Lane, WC2B 5AJ Read next Where to go for London’s best pancakes Restaurants Where to go for London’s best pancakes From feather-light beauties to ricotta hotcakes, we bring you the best pancakes to scoff right now... The latest addition to the wowza Barrafina collection is a second Covent Garden site - just 23 stools (that magic number; the original Soho branch has the same) around a marble-topped bar, and more of those fabulously fresh and authentic entremeses and platos that have already won exec head chef Nieves Barragán Mohacho a clutch of awards.

40-42 William IV Street, WC2N 4DD Read next Paul Raeside New life has been breathed into Les Deux Salons, the grand brasserie that many felt failed to live up to its early promise.

Curl Up With A Book And A Coffee In These Bookshop Cafes ...

Founded back in 1983, the brilliant Notting Hill-based bookshop and cafe cooks from the books they sell so you can quite literally try before you buy.

If you have time to spare and get stuck into all of those books you’ve been buying and don’t mind a bit of a wait, it’s one of the best bookshop cafes in town and a brilliant place for a catch up that might start with coffee and end in cocktails (there’s an enticing happy hour from 6pm).

If you’re just in for coffee and 5th View is busy, there’s a smaller cafe on the lower levels, but be quick - they run out of cake quickly.

Before you’ve even factored in the cafe, London Review Bookshop is a London favourite.

The wide range of books still feels carefully selected, which is handy because you’re going to buy at least two too many and enjoy reading them with a slice of cake in the cafe next door.

Foyles move could mean the end of the Café at Foyles we know and ...

In case you haven’t heard, Foyles flagship bookstore is moving from its home of 85 years at 113-119 Charing Cross Road to the old Central Saint Martin’s College building a few doors down at 107 Charing Cross Road.

The spanking new 37,000 square feet store promises to house 200,000 different titles on four miles (6.5km) of shelves (which they claim is the equivalent of lining one bank of the Thames with books from Battersea Power Station to the Tower of London).

But surely they will have a new Café at Foyles in this literature oasis I hear you cry?

I chatted to one of the shop staff who didn’t know much about the new cafe incarnation except that it won’t be run by the same people so will most probably be a whole different offering.

I’m sure it’ll be a nice new watering hole but I fear it will lack the well-worn wooden charm of the current spot.

The Café at Foyles, London

Foyles Charing Cross Road | Shopping in Soho, London

If the old Foyles was a bookish uncle in a soup-stained cardigan, the new Foyles is a hip teenage cousin: ahead of the curve where apps and indie cinema are concerned, but sporting a pair of off-puttingly flash trainers.

News that Foyles was moving, and its much-loved café closing, was greeted with understandable dismay by Time Out readers, but standing in the vast, updated premises (just a couple of doors down from the old one, in the former Central Saint Martins HQ) it's easy to understand the decision.

Foyles CEO Sam Husain describes the new store as ‘a bookshop for the twenty-first century’, with 37,000 square feet of floorspace laid out immaculately by architects Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands around an impressive central atrium, and eight levels (four actual floors) packed with more than 200,000 books.

It’s light years away from the dusty nooks and crannies of the old building, and a bold visual statement of Foyles’s ambition and new image.

Foyles veterans may find the new store a smidge anodyne, but any business making such a gutsy statement in favour of ink and paper, and bringing the printed word to life in such a sociable setting, deserves an exciting new chapter.