Photo shows some of the ‘site team’ who did the building work to prepare 11 Market Place to be a bookshop
Moving to Market Place was merely the next chapter in a pretty extraordinary story.
Wymondham has had a bookshop for as long as even our oldest customers can remember. In summer 2013 Ray Rumsby heard that the previous bookshop was going to close forever on Christmas Eve, so he and Tracy got together to start planning how it could be run as a community business.
In September a group of strangers got together in the pub to explore whether a group of volunteers could actually run a bookshop, and we agreed that where we lacked experience, we had goodwill and enthusiasm, and as it turned out quite a lot of determination!
We moved quickly – in only eight weeks we’d formed the Friends group, raised funding, formed as a company with our name and logo, and had the keys!
From our wonderful home in Wharton’s Court, we ran the community bookshop from February 2014 to the end of September 2023, with thousands of volunteer hours happening in a pretty snug space!
Particularly after lockdown we realised that we wanted to be able to reach more customers and to offer more activities to get people back out. We knew that if anything could reach them, the books could, so we wanted to offer more space to browse, more events, and more volunteering opportunities.
When the property at 11 Market Place became vacant, we knew that we had found a place that matched our dream. The Friends of Kett’s Books backed up the plan, and with additional help from South Norfolk District Council, the Norwich Freemens Charity, and the Booksellers Association, and after an awful lot of hard work from our volunteers, we opened the doors to our new home, to a cheering crowd on Saturday 30 September, 2023.
At the time of writing (Oct 2023) our plan is still being realised. Kett’s Yard, the shared office spaces, is still in development. Our book groups are on hold until the rest of the building is complete. And we are still putting together our programme of events. Even though we’re only a few chapters into ‘part two’ of our story, we still think it’s a pretty good one. We hope you’ll join us for what happens next!