Wells Bookshop at 11 College Street in Winchester has become a city landmark to both College boys and citizens through the last 130 years but the business can be traced back to origins over a century earlier, one of the longest unbroken records of trading in the country.

In 1757, Thomas and John Burdon began trading as booksellers and stationers although there is evidence that the business was operating before they began.

In the mid-nineteenth century Charlotte Yonge and Rev. John Keble were customers and some decades earlier Jane Austen came to spend the last months of her life in a house two doors away from the shop; she surely would have bought from here as would John Keats whose walks through Winchester's water-meadows while he composed 'Ode to Autumn' would have taken him past the door.

Today, as in the mid-eighteenth century, the bookshop together with its adjoining bindery are both still in operation, rare survivors in present times.

Taken from Claire Bolton, A Winchester Bookshop & Bindery 1729-1994, 1991
(77 pages, ISBN: 0900 796049) Available from P&G Wells