Waterstones Bookshop

Cambridge has three bookshops, Waterstones, Heffers, and Cambridge University bookshop. There are branches of Waterstones in many towns and cities. This Cambridge branch is big for the size of the town, with three floors and a cafe tucked at the back on the ground floor and another cafe on the second floor.

Heffers is big as well, opposite Trinity College, with a wide frontage and a huge space inside.

Then there is Blackwells, with branches in Oxford and Edinburgh among other locations. There is no branch of Blackwells in Cambridge. but read on.

What is not obvious is that through a steady march of acquisitions – Waterstones, Heffers, and Blackwells are all owned by the Elliott Investment Management hedge fund, along with Barnes and Noble in the USA, and Foyles in London, a brand that has been around since the early nineteen hundreds.