Welcome to the first of what I hope will become an occasional series of Book Crawls. The idea is simple: choose a town, take a handful of books, and spend a day exploring one chapter and one café at a time.
There is a peculiar guilt that can come with reading Not because we don’t enjoy it. Quite the opposite. Most of us would probably like to read more than we do. The guilt creeps in because reading asks something modern life isn’t always very good at giving us: permission to stop.
To sit still. To spend an hour doing something that doesn’t tick off another job, empty the dishwasher or move us on to the next appointment.
We live in a world that quietly applauds busyness. Even our hobbies seem to become achievements. Walk further. Run faster. Visit more places. Make the most of every minute.
So where does sitting in a café reading a book fit into all of that?
Somewhere between a late-night scroll through social media and reading Alice Loxton’s Eleanor, I stumbled across the idea of a book crawl. The premise is gloriously simple: choose a town, take a handful of books and spend the day wandering between cafés, reading a little in each one.
Immediately I loved it. Not because it sounded efficient, it sounded wonderfully inefficient. It wasn’t about fitting reading around travelling. It was about letting reading become the way of travelling. Every café would become another chapter in the day.
For my first attempt, Oundle felt like the perfect place to begin. One of Northamptonshire’s oldest market towns, Oundle is the sort of place that encourages you to slow down before you’ve even parked the car. Honey-coloured limestone catches the sunshine beautifully, independent shops still thrive and cafés appear around almost every corner. Add a school that has occupied these streets for almost five centuries and the town has the slightly surreal feeling that Hogwarts has quietly opened a branch campus in rural Northamptonshire.
The school holidays had emptied the classrooms, but not the streets. Union Jack bunting drifted lazily overhead beneath an endless blue sky, people wandered between independent shops and the whole place possessed that rare quality of feeling busy without ever becoming hectic. My younger colleagues would probably describe it as boujie. I simply found it rather lovely.
Chapter One – Beans
My first stop was Beans Coffee Stop.
Technically, I’d missed breakfast. Fortunately, nobody had told the waffle.
A single golden waffle arrived beneath gloriously crisp bacon and enough maple syrup to make a Canadian nod approvingly. Having already swum a mile that morning, I decided the normal laws of nutrition had temporarily stopped applying.
Beans buzzed: Coffee machines hissed. Cups clinked. Friends chatted over steaming mugs. Yet despite the bustle there was no sense of hurry. Everything felt premium without becoming intimidating. Better still, I wasn’t the only customer quietly reading.
Perhaps this book crawl wasn’t quite as eccentric as I’d imagined.
My first companion was Kokun: The Girl from the West by Nahoko Uehashi, a birthday present I’d deliberately been saving for a special occasion. I knew very little about the story beyond loving Uehashi’s previous work, and within pages I remembered exactly why. Her prose is wonderfully rich. Characters, landscapes and action arrive with such confidence that you almost need to stop and catch your breath before continuing. One character experiences the world primarily through smell and, somehow, that heightened awareness felt entirely appropriate for a day devoted to noticing things.
The chai demanded sipping. Kokun demanded my attention.
Halfway through my drink I realised something unexpected. Normally, by now, I’d have begun wondering whether I should move on. Not because I wanted to but because that’s what we’re conditioned to do.
On a book crawl, lingering isn’t laziness. It’s the whole point.
Wandering Between Chapters
Rather than heading directly to another café, I wandered slowly along West Street and quickly discovered that Oundle’s greatest attraction isn’t any single building, it’s the wonderful survival of independent businesses.
Art galleries displayed local artists. Little Blue proudly advertised its Teddy Bear Hospital. Coleman’s stationers proved deeply dangerous territory. Somewhere at home are enough beautiful notebooks to document the next decade of my life, yet another Leuchtturm journal and a Lamy fountain pen still whispered, Go on…
Fortunately, I escaped. Barely.
Then came Oxfam Books. This time I wasn’t so fortunate. One book became two.Two became… well… enough. As the gentleman behind the till packed them into a bag, he smiled.
“Are you sure you’re going to be able to carry all of them?”
It was a perfectly reasonable question. My wallet felt noticeably lighter. My backpack considerably heavier. I wasn’t just carrying books; I was carrying the optimistic belief that I’d eventually read them all.
At the end of the street stood Oundle Museum. Unfortunately, it was closed, opening only at weekends throughout the summer.Oddly, I didn’t mind. Good travel should always leave you with a reason to return.
Chapter Two – The Lemon Tree
Walking into The Lemon Tree felt like stepping into a little corner of the Mediterranean.
Dark green walls, warm timber and sunlight pouring through the windows gave it an entirely different atmosphere to Beans. Rich roasted coffee filled the room before every few minutes being interrupted by the sharp freshness of citrus as another lemon disappeared beneath a knife behind the counter. For a brief moment the whole café smelt of freshly cut lemons before gently surrendering once more to coffee.
Heroically resisting the cakes (possibly my greatest achievement of the day) I ordered an English Breakfast tea served in a gloriously oversized tiger-striped mug.
My reading companion this time was Pablo and Splash’s Roman Holiday. Two time-travelling penguins exploring Ancient Rome somehow suited the Mediterranean atmosphere perfectly. It’s a children’s graphic novel, though judging by the fact I snorted with laughter at one point, and received an amused smile from one of the servers, it clearly works just as well for adults.
Bells and Breathing
The walk towards St Peter’s Church took me through Oundle School. Ancient stone archways opened into quiet courtyards. Cloisters cast welcome shade across worn paving. History didn’t feel preserved behind glass here; it simply carried on getting on with its day.
Above everything rose the spire of St Peter’s. Inside was a different world.
Outside there had been conversation, footsteps and café doors opening and closing. Inside…the loudest sound became my own breathing. The cool air was an immediate refuge from the relentless heat outside. Sunlight drifted through stained glass while children’s toys, community notices and stacked boxes quietly reminded visitors that this wasn’t a museum but a living church at the heart of its community.
Chapter Three – The Greedy Piglet
If The Lemon Tree felt sophisticated, The Greedy Piglet felt like the friend who insists you stay for just another cup.
Stone-flagged floors, exposed brickwork and cosy snugs somehow combined with the relaxed feel of an American diner. Radio 2 murmured in the background while BBC News rolled silently across a television screen. It was astonishingly quiet for somewhere that deserved to be much busier.
Everything here arrived with just a little more than expected. The glass of tap water was enormous. The teapot seemed capable of producing at least five cups. The Greedy Sub – filled with bacon, sausage, egg and beans – was less a sandwich and more an engineering achievement.
Book three was Jon Acuff’s Procrastination Proof. Ironically, I’d bought it on publication day before successfully procrastinating reading it for months. His practical optimism somehow suited the café perfectly. Both seemed quietly convinced that life becomes better once we stop making it more complicated than it needs to be.
Next door, Stupots continued the day’s determined assault on my bank balance before another walk (less leisure by this point and more medical advice) led me out of town.
Chapter 4 – The Kingfisher
Ship Lane carried me towards Barnwell Country Park. The transformation was immediate. The reflected heat from Oundle’s stone streets gave way to cool breezes drifting across the lake. Birdsong replaced passing traffic.
The Kingfisher Café perhaps lacked some of the individuality of the cafés in town, but it possessed something they couldn’t compete with: its setting.
The air carried the unmistakable scent of warm water, reeds and generously applied sun cream. Baby moorhens explored nervously along the reeds while a heron swept gracefully across the lake.
Settling down with a chai latte, I returned to Kokun. Its rich, layered prose rewarded exactly the same patience as the drink beside it.
Partway through a chapter, a group of excited children bounded towards the lakeside. Seconds later an apologetic parent hurried after them.
“I’m so sorry!”
“Honestly,” I laughed. “I’m a primary school teacher.”
Her shoulders visibly relaxed. We both carried on smiling and I got back to my book.
One Final Chapter
Eventually I wandered back into town beneath the lazy circling of a red kite. My final stop was The Coffee Tavern. By now the afternoon heat had made sensible decision-making increasingly difficult.
“Do you do ice cream?” I asked.
“Our sundaes are amazing,” came the reply, “and the milkshakes are great too.”
I considered this information carefully. “I’d better have one of each then.”
Reader… I regret absolutely nothing.
The Coffee Tavern instantly transported me back to the five happy years I spent living in Exmouth and Dawlish. It had that same relaxed Devonian seaside confidence, painted timber, easy-going music and absolutely no desire to hurry anybody out of the door. All it lacked was the smell of salt on the breeze.
As Of Monsters and Men drifted gently through the speakers, a gloriously thick mango milkshake and equally indulgent strawberry sundae appeared before me.
Through the open door, St Peter’s bells rang out once more. Nearby, a group of ladies happily caught up over lunch while another diner declared her gravy-covered meal “absolutely gorgeous” with such infectious delight that half the café seemed to smile.
It struck me then that every café had offered something different.
Beans had energised.
The Lemon Tree had focused.
The Greedy Piglet had comforted.
The Kingfisher had refreshed.
The Coffee Tavern had celebrated.
Every café had become another chapter in the day.
Closing the Book
Nine thousand five hundred and forty-nine steps after setting out, I returned to the car park.
Mine was the only vehicle left. Perhaps that represents the point of a book crawl. It isn’t efficient: it’s gloriously inefficient.
It gives you permission to sit still in places that deserve to be noticed. To order another pot of tea. To read one more chapter. To notice the smell of freshly cut lemons, the echo of your own breathing inside an ancient church, a bookseller teasing you about buying too many novels, birdsong drifting across a summer lake or the sound of old friends putting the world to rights over lunch.
We spend so much of modern life trying to fit reading around everything else. A book crawl quietly reverses the equation. Reading becomes the destination. The cafés become punctuation. And a town unfolds one chapter at a time.
Will I do another?
Without hesitation. Because perhaps the greatest thing a book crawl gives you isn’t another café to visit or another book to finish. It’s the permission to slow down.
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