South Londoners are notoriously protective of their local haunts, so when Grove Lane Deli announced its closure last summer, the neighbourhood was left briefly unmoored. It was a rare case of a restaurant becoming simply too popular; the queues for its roast chicken sandwiches had become victim to their own momentum, and for founder Danielle Moylan, its scale had become a gargantuan task.
A former UN spokesperson, Moylan saw the deli as a move toward something local and repeatable, a sort of counterweight to the abstraction of international work. “I thought I might have more impact working at a local level”, she said. Naturally, as it expanded, that proximity began to erode.
In its place, reopening in the same thirty-square-meter corner plot, Lala Books has established itself with unusual speed. Within a year, it hosted International Booker authors, introduced a ‘pay it forward’ scheme, and reinstated Grove Lane as a consistent Saturday point of congregation.
That unusual pipeline from deli to bookshop, a lateral shift into the literary, mirrored a broader cultural return to smaller, more considered spaces that operate as informal civic anchors. Moylan traded the frantic pace of the kitchen for a living room-esque aesthetic, its charming interiors rejecting the rigid, back-to-spine sterility of Waterstones.
Books are instead found in baskets or stacked in low-slung piles that prescribe slower, physical engagement, shaped by proximity rather than efficiency. You have to crouch, and flick through, and shuffle. It is a layout that privileges attention over throughout.
Coffee remains part of the offer, but the absence of indoor seating ushers activity onto the pavement. The threshold dissolves, and the shop expands into its immediate surroundings without altering its footprint. What emerges is a loosely held public realm, par structured by habit, par by design. This model addresses a specific modern malaise.
Gen Z, frequently dubbed as the ‘loneliest generation’, are finding an anti-phone sanctuary in Lala. You cannot scroll on your phone while reading a physical book; it demands a singular focus. “You cannot do that with a book. It is impossible. It demands your whole attention.” And while they say Netflix’s biggest competitor is sleep, the bookshop is perhaps the phone’s. And a more chic rival at that, non?
The curation is equally deliberate. Moylan describes the selection as a ‘spatial archive’ of her own reading life, shaped by time spent in Lebanon and Afghanistan. The shelves foreground translated fiction and voices from the Global South, bringing together International Booker winners such as Banu Mushtaq alongside titles from Africa, the Middle East and South America.
What Lala Books demonstrates, in times of isolation and overconsumption, is a reassertion of community. “It’s often not the people closest to us, but small interactions with strangers that shape our day-to-day happiness”, Moyan tells me.
The independent bookshop, long positioned at the margins, is returning as a viable form of cultural infrastructure, and one that accommodates both commerce and collective use without fully resolving either.
On Grove Lane, the pace has altered, the duration of stay extended, the space itself reoccupied: “I knew expanding would take me further away from the customers, and the whole thing becomes less personal”. And Lala Books holds its very shape by staying small.