There’s a new bookshop in town! Well, the town I used to live in. I always thought Southbourne (a Bournemouth suburb) would be a great location for a little bookshop. It gets plenty of tourists heading for the beach, is fairly middle class and has all sorts of hipster establishments cropping up of late. So BH6 is a wonderful addition to the high street.

Today is its first day of trading and the shop was very busy, and not just people being nosy but actually buying books too. This did mean there wasn’t much space to move around, but I imagine on a normal day it will be a calming place to browse. The owners have gone for a mostly paperback selection on a mix of old and new shelves. The obligatory card selection was really nice and included a pop-up card with a sloth on it. Unfortunately I could think of anyone’s birthday coming up I could use it for *sad face*. There was also a table with cute acrylic jewellery and embroidered brooches.

It passes the Wyndy Test, a mark of whether or not I’m going to get on with a bookshop. It stocked not just one, but three, different John Wyndham titles. The science fiction and fantasy selection was quite limited but they had some good core classics. And there was quite a gap on the shelves, so either they sold loads or are planning to stock more. They did say they had started off with less stock in general and are open for suggestions on what to stock. They seem keen to provide a good service to the local community.

The shelves were filled with a lot of books I have read or are already on my shelves, which is a good sign of matching taste but also meant it was harder to find something to buy. Fortunately there were a couple of books I had been planning to buy on the Oxford Bookshop Crawl anyway; The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss and Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter.

You can find BH6 Books and Home on Twitter and Facebook or pop into the shop @ 69 Southbourne Grove, Bournemouth, BH6 3QU.