Behind the business at Books on the Lane: The Wakefield bookshop set up to support local youth music

Located on Oakenshaw Lane in Walton, about three miles south of Wakefield city centre, the bookshop is conveniently placed for visitors to stop after a walk on the neighbouring nature reserve.

Outside, it grows its own herbs to sell in the warmer months, and inside, you’ll find a cosy log fire and shelves stacked with a wide range of books, from history and nature, to contemporary literature and more.

Although a successful bookshop in its own right — it was chosen by Guardian readers in 2021 as one of the UK’s best independent bookshops — Books on the Lane opened as a way to help local young people access live music experiences, and is a trading arm of the Yorkshire Live Music community interest company (CIC), which was set up in 2009 to support youth music and performing arts.

Sandra Carlon, manager at Books on the Lane, explained how her lifelong passion for music motivated her to provide similar opportunities for young people today.

Sandra said: “My great passion is music, [I] played piano and the violin.

“That grabbed me at a very early age.

“Wakefield used to have a flourishing youth music education programme, so I was lucky enough to be at school in the early seventies and to be able to take part in that, and that’s certainly fed into a lifetime’s pleasure from it, which you’re wanting to share with other people.”

Through the CIC, Sandra helped provide live classical and jazz music events to young people across the county, but one year, the group’s application for funding from the Arts Council failed.

The application had taken a lot of time to put together, and rather than starting another one from scratch, Sandra decided to set up the Walton business as a way to generate yearly donations for the music project.

Speaking about setting up the business, Sandra said: “It was essentially needs must, because we’d been turned down for an Arts Council application, and we’d devoted a lot of time to the application — it had taken a good few months to put it all together.

“We are mainly voluntary, so time and use of time has to be as efficient as it can be, and when we started looking at resources which we had available to us which weren’t financially costly, then we looked at what was then an unused former workshop, [a] joiner’s shed, these premises, and the garden.”

Every year, Books on the Lane donates to a different youth music organisation, and this year donated £500 to the HD9 Community Music group in Holmfirth.

With the shop’s main goal being to generate donations for the CIC, Sandra said the off-the-high-street location was chosen primarily to keep overheads low and avoid an expensive city centre rent.

But Sandra said the location could also be one of the reasons it was chosen by Guardian readers as one of the best independent bookshops in the country, adding that the media coverage had a “massive” impact on the business.

Sandra said: “I think a lot of that has to do with the location and the premises.

“At the time, high streets were a little bit more the norm than they are today, so at the time it was a relatively unusual thing to do.

“But essentially we did it to keep our overheads low to enable the profit donation.

“We could never have afforded a city centre shop, so the Guardian piece was just huge, I mean it made such a massive massive difference to us, and the link to the country park and to everything that the local area has to offer in terms of access to nature and the natural world.”

The shop has gradually changed over time, starting out by selling tea, coffee, vintage items and cakes, and delivering herbs to people over the pandemic before becoming the bookshop it is today.

Keeping up with change and adapting is something which has shaped the business, and Sandra said people in business today need to be flexible.

She said: “I think anybody in any kind of business today, the work changes just become a matter of course [...] you’ve just got to be out there and on it and as far as you’re able to just keeping pace with changes that are put upon you.”

About the owner

Name: Sandra Carlon

From: Wakefield

Favourite thing about your job: I love every aspect of it, all of it, but most of all I love the customers, then the books.

Fun fact about you: Plays the piano and violin