Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street has the best chair to read in across central London — and unlike every other contender, the chair comes free with the building. The bookshop is housed in what is widely claimed to be the world's first purpose-built bookshop: a 1912 Edwardian back gallery with two-story oak balconies, leaded skylights, and a stained-glass clerestory window. The trick is to walk past the new releases at the front and keep going.
The Front of the Shop Is Not the Shop
The first thing most visitors do at Daunt is stop at the front. There's a long table of new releases under a low ceiling, a till to the right, a tidy hardback display, and the kind of well-stocked recommended-reading section every good independent bookshop in London has. It's nice. It's also not why you're here.
Keep walking. About twenty feet in, the ceiling lifts away from you. The narrow modern front opens into a long, tall, skylit Edwardian back gallery — two stories of polished oak balconies lined floor-to-ceiling with hardcovers, a single uninterrupted parquet floor running the length of the room, the soft cool daylight from the skylights mixing with the stained-glass blue from the far window. It is, plainly, one of the most beautiful interior rooms in London. And it's a working shop you can sit in for an hour without buying anything.
The Building Pre-Dates the Bookshop by 78 Years
The Edwardian section was completed in 1912 and is widely claimed to be the first custom-built bookshop in the world. It was built for Francis Edwards, a noted antiquarian booksellers' firm that had been on the site since 1860 in earlier premises. When James Daunt — a former JP Morgan banker — bought the lease in 1990 and opened the current shop, he inherited a room that had already been a bookshop for 130 years.
He kept it that way. The oak galleries are the originals. The skylights are the originals. The William Morris–style prints on the upper balcony, the leaded clerestory window at the far end, the brass railings, the parquet — all original. What Daunt added is the organizing principle: the travel section, which fills the entire back gallery, is shelved by country. Not by author, not by genre. By country. The Argentinian fiction sits next to the Bruce Chatwin essays sits next to the Argentinian birds-of-the-Andes field guide. You read about a country as a vertical column of writers — its novelists, its journalists, its poets, its cooks — all in one bay.
Why "Filing by Country" Made the Shop What It Is
In any other bookshop, you walk to the "travel" section and find Lonely Planet guides. At Daunt, you walk to "Argentina" and find Borges. The shelving is the editorial. Once you understand the principle, the room reads as a sort of three-dimensional anthology of the world: 200-odd countries, each one a five-foot vertical column you can stand in and read your way down.
This is the part that makes Daunt the chair to pull up to. Most bookshops are organized so you can find something specific. Daunt is organized so you can wander. You stop in front of Italy because you went there once in 2018, and you spend the next forty minutes pulling down everything Italo Calvino wrote, the new translation of Natalia Ginzburg, an Elena Ferrante you hadn't heard of, a small book on the history of espresso, and a 1957 travelogue by an English cleric who walked from Naples to Calabria. None of that was on your list. You came in for a present.
The Two Best Seats
There are no formal armchairs in the back gallery — Daunt is a working shop, not a reading room — but there are two specific seats you can take without anyone bothering you.
The first is the low oak window seat at the south end of the upper balcony, just below the stained-glass clerestory. You reach it by climbing the narrow oak staircase on the right. The seat is built into the gallery rail, the light from the clerestory falls on your shoulder, and the only person who'll come near you is the staff member doing a quiet restock. You can read here for an hour.
The second is the bench-step that runs along the base of the lower gallery's middle bay. It's technically a kick-step for staff to reach the upper shelves, but it's also low enough to perch on with a book in your lap. From there, you have a head-on view down the length of the gallery to the stained-glass window. It's the seat for thumbing a book to decide if you'll buy it.
The Half-Hour That Works Best
Daunt opens at 9am Monday through Saturday, 11am on Sunday. The shop is busy at lunchtime — Marylebone office workers crossing over to buy a paperback — and busy on Saturday afternoons when the high street is a destination. The two windows that work best for a long sit are 9:00–10:00am on a weekday and 11:00am–12:00pm on a Sunday.
The weekday-morning version is the one to remember. The light through the skylight is at its softest. The staff are still setting up, which means the room is empty enough that you can hear your own footsteps on the parquet. The till at the front handles the trickle of commuters grabbing a hardcover on the way to a meeting; the back gallery is yours. By 10:30 the room fills with prams and Marylebone shoppers and the volume rises to a polite hum, which is fine but is not the version of the room you came for.
The Coffee Trick
There's no café inside Daunt — the shop has never added one, on principle. But the back of the gallery opens (via the original 1912 internal staircase) onto Moxon Street, and you're a 90-second walk from two specific small coffee places that exist mostly because Daunt is around the corner. The Conran Shop café and Monocle Café Marylebone are both within five minutes. The civilized move is to buy your flat white at one of them, walk back into Daunt, and read your new book at the upstairs window seat until the cup is empty. The staff have seen people do this for thirty years. They don't mind. They'd rather you stayed.
Why It Works as a "Pull Up a Chair"
Almost every "best bookshop in London" list will hand you Daunt as the prettiest, which is true and also slightly the wrong reason to go. The reason to go is structural. Daunt is one of the few central-London shops where the building, the staff, and the shelving principle all combine to slow you down. Almost nothing else about Marylebone High Street will slow you down — it's a high street designed for hand-bag carrying.
What Daunt gives you is permission. Permission to walk into a room, ignore the front of the shop, climb a small wooden staircase, sit down on a 1912 oak step under a stained-glass window, and read a chapter of a book you have not yet decided whether to buy. The transaction is implicit and patient. Read for an hour, leave with two hardcovers, walk back out onto the high street.
Practical notes
- Address / Location: 83 Marylebone High Street, London W1U 4QW
- Hours: Mon–Sat 9am–7:30pm · Sun 11am–6pm (confirm by phone 020 7224 2295)
- Admission: Free — it's a shop. No purchase required to sit and read.
- Getting there: Baker Street (Bakerloo/Circle/Hammersmith & City/Jubilee/Metropolitan) is a six-minute walk north; Bond Street (Central/Elizabeth/Jubilee) is an eight-minute walk south.
- Best window: Weekday 9:00–10:00am (first hour after opening) is the quietest version of the back gallery. Sunday 11:00am–12:00pm is the alternate window.
- The seat to look for: The low oak window seat at the south end of the upper balcony, directly under the stained-glass clerestory. Climb the narrow oak staircase on the right.
- What to bring: Nothing. Buy a flat white at Monocle Café Marylebone (77 Chiltern Street, two minutes away) or the Conran Shop café (Marylebone High Street, one minute away) and bring it in.
- What to do nearby: Walk five minutes north to the Wallace Collection (free) for the inverse experience — a museum-room with reading chairs but no books. Chiltern Firehouse and 108 Brasserie are both within a ten-minute walk for the long lunch.
The point
London has more famous bookshops — Foyles is larger, Hatchards is older, Persephone is more cult — but Daunt is the only one that gives you the room and the chair together. A 1912 Edwardian back gallery, organized by country, with two seats most visitors never notice and a half-hour every weekday morning when the room is almost yours. Walk past the front table. Climb the stairs. Sit down under the stained glass. The book will find you.
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Sources consulted: dauntbooks.co.uk · en.wikipedia.org · blogs.ucl.ac.uk · countryandtownhouse.com · timeout.com
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