BY LIZ HODGKINSON
In the early 1960s, two small rural towns 160 miles apart faced similar problems. Their young people were going to university and never returning, leaving the places denuded of their brightest and best.
Today, these two towns, Hay-on-Wye (main photograph) on the Welsh border, and St Neots in Cambridgeshire, my own hometown, have very different outcomes. Hay is internationally known as the town of books and for its famous literary festival, where upwards of 200,000 visitors flock every year.
St Neots (see gallery below), meanwhile, is stranded. Although the place has swollen from an initial population of 5,000 to more than 40,000 today, this is made up of the vast housing estates that now surround the town. There are no arts to speak of, no culture and certainly no tourism.
What happened in each case? Hay was a tiny town of around 1,500 residents and on the edge of extinction when a maverick genius, Richard Booth, arrived to live in its castle after his family inherited a nearby estate. Instead of leaving to seek the bright city lights, he began to reimagine Hay as a place where people might actually want to come to, rather than being desperate to leave.
At the age of 23, in 1962, he set up his first bookshop, in spite of being told that ‘nobody reads books in Hay.’ Undaunted, he started buying up whole libraries of books from decaying country houses and in particular, American universities, which he had shipped over in containers. By 1978, Booth was the world’s largest secondhand bookseller and his carpenter reckoned he had built eight miles of shelves. The bookshops brought cash into Hay and saved it from going under, as many of the shops and most of the 15 pubs had already closed for lack of business.
But that wasn’t all. Booth had a distinct flair for publicity and before long hippies, famous people and rock stars began to descend on the little town. Marianne Faithfull became a regular visitor, and the early transgender woman April Ashley came to live there. Novelist Margaret Drabble paid a visit but said rather icily that she did not like Richard Booth. Not that this worried him, as his first two wives also decided they didn’t much like him and soon filed for divorce.
Booth hated the town councillors, who he reckoned were dull and stupid; the leftovers who were not bright enough to go to university and leave the place. So he decided to show them. On April 1, 1977, he declared Hay an independent kingdom with himself as king. The District Council, naturally, objected but Booth carried on, giving Hay its own currency, newspaper, nobility and a distinct flag, designed by local artist Alex Williams. Booth sold earldoms, dukedoms and baronetcies and created April Ashley Duchess of Offa’s Dyke.
The event attracted huge coverage and put Hay on the international map. It was a joke, but it certainly got Hay noticed. By 1986 there were 40 secondhand bookshops in Hay, and the area was starting to attract second homeowners.
And then in 1988 Norman Florence and his son Peter founded the Hay Literary Festival at which luminaries such as Prunella Scales, Ian McEwan, Ruth Rendell, Beryl Bainbridge and Michael Holroyd, all then at the height of their powers, came along to give talks and book signings.
Big money was now coming into Hay and in 1991 the festival sold over 20,000 tickets. It scored a major coup in 2001 when former US president Bill Clinton arrived and labelled Hay ‘the Woodstock of the mind.’ But American playwright Arthur Miller was bemused when invited to give a presentation and famously asked, ‘What is Hay-on-Wye? Some kind of sandwich?’ No doubt he was thinking of pastrami on rye, the all-American sandwich.
All this time book towns were also being established in other countries and Richard Booth often travelled to supervise their establishment. The town received a £7 million grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and became a major tourist attraction. In 2026, a record 210,000 tickets were sold at the Festival.
Booth died in 2019 but his legacy lives on, proving what one determined and unusual man can achieve. An admirer said: ‘Richard had a pretty dangerous side to him, and it was risky, but that’s how he built the town.’
Sadly, there was no such person to put St Neots on the international map, and although the town has more history embedded in it than Hay, practically nobody has heard of the place even while it keeps expanding and swallowing up the once separate surrounding villages.
The rot began during the late 1950s when the then London County Council offered money to certain towns to take the London overspill; families who had been made homeless from bombing during the war. St Neots was one of the towns that accepted the deal and this meant that estates had to be quickly built to accommodate the families that kept arriving.
At the same time as the population began to grow, the once unique town started to decline. It formerly had 47 pubs, the most per head of anywhere in the country. Today, in spite of the population expansion, there are just 15 pubs and several of those are under threat. All the family businesses that were once the pride of the place have disappeared and the high street, like so many others, is now full of charity shops, Turkish barbers and nail salons.
The main reasons many people give for living in St Neots is that housing is cheaper than nearby Bedford and Cambridge, and it is on a direct line to London King’s Cross. The town itself has little appeal.
Yet, with its history going back a thousand years or more, and with its attractive Georgian buildings surrounding the huge market square – one of the biggest in the country – St Neots could have become another Hay. But nobody bothered and the council just gave permission for ever more housing estates to be built, turning it into a dull dormitory town and requisitioning ever more farmland for the rapacious developers.
Strangely enough, Hay and St Neots have a bizarre tie-up. A Hay resident called Peter van Praagh, a writer and film maker, became a hopeless alcoholic and died in St Neots in 1988, aged just 37.
Richard Booth, educated at Rugby School and Oxford University, could have done what so many other small-town graduates did at the time, and left Hay for a professional career in a big city. Instead, he took the tiny boring place by the scruff of its neck and turned it into the thriving, exciting literary and cultural hub it has become today.
Is it too late for St Neots even if a Richard Booth were to come and attempt to shake the place up? I fear so. The latest blow is that Serco, the government contractor, is planning to house migrants in Eynesbury, a once-separate village that is now part of St Neots. There will no doubt be protests, but I predict that they will be overturned, and the migrants will arrive, creating a second wave of overspill inhabitants.
About the author
Liz Hodgkinson is a British author and journalist. Her books include A Mink Coat in St Neots: My Mother’s Flower Shop and the Mystery of a Wealthy Russian Princess (Mount Orleans Press), The Fashionable Guide to Life, Ladies of the Grand Tour, and The English Country House.
The Bookseller of Hay: The Life and Times of Richard Booth, by James Hanning, is published by Corsair.