The death of east London's most radical bookshop

Summary

This article was published by The Londoner: a new newsletter covering the capital. Join our free mailing list below to get great writing and big scoops in your inbox. Join The Londoner for free It was 4am on the 1st of July as Jack Parker bolted upright in the basement below the Scarlett Letters bookshop. From above, Parker could hear drilling. Then a “thunderstorm” of footsteps. Startled and bleary-eyed, they hurriedly dressed, then crept up the stairs into the main bookshop. What they saw “horrified” them.Dozens of people hurriedly packing books into boxes and unscrewing bookshelves. Amongst the torrent of people, maybe the strangest thing they noticed was the face of Blaise Agüera y Arcas: author, AI researcher and the vice president of Google’s research arm. Peculiar though it was to see one of the most senior staff at one of the world’s biggest tech giants busting into a bookshop occupation in Bethnal Green, maybe what was more peculiar was how it all came about in the first place. The setting for this bizarre scene was the Scarlett Letters, named for its owner Marin Scarlett, a radical east London bookshop that was greeted with widespread fanfare by many of the capital's left-wing activists.And here Scarlett was, with a team of people, bursting into the bookshop in the middle of the night in an attempt to disrupt an occupation by a radical cohort of the shop’s staff. To Parker's mind, for a project started with the aim of platforming sex workers and being a “hub for resistance, community, stories and imagination” to have reached such a point was mortifying. How had things gotten so bad? Well, at least in Parker's telling, it started with a clogged toilet.Sporting a black T-shirt, cropped hair and anticapitalist and LGBT-rights tattoos on each arm, the former bookseller meets me in the bare, debris-littered unit that used to house the bookshop. We’re here to talk about the whole sorry saga of Scarlett Letters — the rise, the fall, the union disputes, the rows, ...