Words by Liz Schaffer & Photographs by Orlando Gili

There’s something magical about sitting in a hotel garden - glass of wine in hand, blooms bursting around you - and devouring a book as the sun descends. I don’t know if it was the setting, or the fact I was far from home, but ensconced here, I found myself imagining the stories of those around me, creating lives and intrigues from the snippets of conversation that wafted my way... I should drink in gardens more often.

I was in Hay-on-Wye, a prettier-than-a-picture border town transformed into the world’s first Book Town in 1962 by bookseller extraordinaire Richard Booth (who assumed the title of King of Hay after jokingly declaring it an Independent Kingdom), and adored by the literati as home of the Hay Festival, an annual celebration of books and ideas that was dreamt up around a kitchen table in 1987. Yet this enchanting destination offers so much more than paperbacks and festivities. For decades it has called to creatives of every ilk; from bakers and collectors to poets and environmentalists. It may be the ley lines, or perhaps there’s something in the water, but for whatever reason, a pioneering spirit thrives. If you ever need to be shocked out of the ordinary, to remember that vision and ardour exist in the world, then travel to Hay and strike up a conversation.

In the town of books, one must chat to Anne Brichto who created Addyman Books, a secondhand wonder, with her husband, Derek, in 1987. They began their bookshop in a windowless room off the Blue Boar pub, before taking over two rooms on Lion Street and slowly expanding - adding Murder and Mayhem (dedicated to detective fiction) and The Addyman Annexe to their repertoire. In the decade before they opened, Hay was the stomping ground of hippies and farmers, and things were still a little ramshackle in the late 80s when Anne and fellow booksellers (Booth launched his shop in 1963) would depart for boozy lunches, leaving customers accidentally locked in their stores.

Addyman Books feels like something from another era, a rare gem where cosy nooks are plentiful and curiosity runs amok. Which makes sense, because for Anne, running a bookshop is all about creating magic. “You’re making a space where the book chooses you; you don’t know what you will find. There’s happenstance, serendipity, the weight of nostalgia when you see books from your childhood. The whole point of a real life bookshop is that you can just wander round and be surrounded by books ... We have people who come in, people in the community, and just sit upstairs and read. That’s so nice, to have other people around.”

Anne and Derek do their own buying and have an eye for cult classics destined to become secondhand gold. Their approach is relaxed, everything is done with love, yet for Anne, it seems this profession was inevitable. “I was taught to read at two, at three I was reading chapter books, I was very precocious ... But then my mother died in a car crash when I was six and I was in hospital and because I loved reading so much, it sort of saved me. I was reading the Narnia stories and things like that, but I realised there were so many motherless children, or near motherless children, in fiction - because that’s the kind of person who ends up writing a book - that it was very therapeutic. Books saved my sanity. I was very lucky to have those stories, they’ve stayed with me. One of the last books I read with my mother was Alice in Wonderland and I’ve ended up collecting those. I’ve got a room full of Alice, so I suppose that sort of cemented it.”

As if summoned by this revelation, Father Richard enters Addyman Books, clutching two giant poodles and a pint of milk. He’s the parish priest at Hay’s St Mary’s, as well as at nearby Capel-y-ffin, a quaint, yew-framed chapel with a wonky belfry and graves adorned with Eric Gill’s calligraphy. Father Richard is renowned for his impassioned organ accompaniment to Nosferatu, which is screened in his church during the Hay Festival.

Leaving Anne and Father Richard to talk, I wander to Green Ink Booksellers. This is owned by Josh and Ellen Boyd Green who moved back to the area from Melbourne, Australia, where they’d run Alice’s Bookshop - a secondhand institution admired by Ellen’s granny. Green Ink Booksellers has slightly more academic offerings and although every surface is graced with pre-loved tomes, the aesthetic remains calm. Chatting to Josh and Ellen, you understand the allure of secondhand - how liberating it would be to ignore bestseller lists, infuse your store with personality and introduce people to the unexpected. As Ellen explains, “there’s something really nice about the fact these books don’t have a massive footprint. They already exist and you can help find them new homes or match people up to books without having to rely on current publishing trends. Witnessing somebody find a treasure they didn’t know existed is one of the joys of having a secondhand bookshop.”

A short amble away is Kate’s Bakery, which comes into its own every Thursday, Hay’s market day. As locals gather outside her bakery’s teal door, names are called and greetings exchanged - a reminder that the chance to connect, to be part of a community, may be a bigger draw than the market itself.

Kate Brotherton Ratcliffe began baking bread at home more than a decade ago and has allowed her business to grow organically since then. She now operates from her late-husband, Barty’s, workshop (as a furniture designer, he fitted out most of the stores in Hay). “It’s me making it and it’s me selling it. I’ve remained small, but that’s important, not to lose touch. I love it really, the contact. It’s like a social hub, a focal point in the town ... the product is very symbolic and representative - of nurturing, feeding, a connection - because the word companion comes from the Greek ‘with bread’, com and panis. The idea that someone you share bread with is a companion is deep reaching in most cultures. Bread symbolises a lot, it’s more than just the transaction of handing over a loaf.”

As we head off to explore Bartrums (a stationery store founded by Barty in 2013 to promote the joys of pen and ink), Kate notes that Hay is full of businesses run by enterprising women - from Tomatitos Tapas Bar to Shepherds Ice Cream Parlour. “It’s a great place to run a business, it’s full of interesting people.”

One of those is Layla Robinson, an artist inspired by the blooms of the Welsh borders. Layla crafts wreaths from dried flowers she grows in her garden - a haven where bees buzz and hedgehogs waddle. For years, she had her own garden design company and sold fresh-cut owers at Hay’s market, but with two young children and the demands of building an off-grid house with her husband, Rob, she never had quite enough time. So she turned to wreaths. “You can take your time, you can build up a collection of things, you can play around with colours, shapes, textures, it’s much more versatile. And I like the fact that it’s more sculptural. It’s all grown out of the garden, or in the hedgerows, so my house just fills up.”

It’s wonderful to spend time with Layla, who clearly adores what she does - constructing something beautiful from something completely natural. “It’s almost like the wreaths have a mind of their own. Sometimes the twigs go in a slightly different direction. Some of them are more messy. They’re still wild and they’ve got their own characters, it’s almost like a person. They start to build up their own personality and by the end they are their own thing, totally individual.”

Layla and Rob also manage The Majestic Bus, a revamped Panorama 68 that you can rent for a rustic escape. Although the bus’ chic interiors and tales of its transformation from rust bucket to boutique abode are fascinating, it’s the view that takes centre stage. Here, the landscape is never far from your mind. “The environment was always really important to us. With this place, we’ve tried to keep as many wild bits as we can and let nature go crazy, we’ve got wildlife coming out of our ears ... If you grow up in [this area], you realise how beautiful it is and how fragile it is and how much you can actually do to not damage it in any way.”

Many Hay stores display Layla’s wares, yet The Old Electric, founded by Hannah Burson, is uniquely charming - a treasure trove of retro and contemporary delights. “It started a bit more rough and ready, a bit more vintage, and I’ve added in a few new bits and refined it. There’s now also a cafe within the shop where we do a whole menu of travel inspired vegetarian lunches - and the best cakes in town.”

Hannah - once an underwater photographer - has always been a collector and seems keen to make her gallery-like store a platform for other makers. There are dungarees from Field & Found, vintage clothes sourced by Hay Does Vintage and the furnishings of Katie Tyler Upholstery (I was particularly enamoured with her tweed-jacket-turned-cushion). These appear beside books, prints, objets d’art and a rotating assortment of curious finds - like fairground slot machines. Fantastical and fun, it all feels very Hay.

Of course, you can’t visit Hay without talking to a writer - or three. First up for me was Oliver Bullough, a journalist and author whose works include Moneyland, which delves into the culture of money laundering, and The Last Man in Russia, inspired by his seven years in Moscow. Today, Oliver is interested in exploring the idea of corruption and I wonder, given the weight of this topic, if having Hay nearby is an antidote of sorts. It’s clear at least that he loves it here. “I think there’s a good combination of things that add together to create something very special. There’s obviously the landscape ... and the cultural side of things. And because we have a foot in Wales and a foot in England, there’s an interesting combination of cultures.”

Oliver has a long history with the Hay Festival. Not only has he been interviewed, presented and run an internship programme that connected Cardiff students with journalists, but it may have helped foster his relationship with writing. “The Hay Festival is an amazing thing. Growing up, it didn’t strike me as weird that world-class literary figures used to come to our doorstep and we could just go and see them talking. I have a very strong memory of seeing Ted Hughes speaking in a tent when the festival used to be held in the primary school. He was speaking in a storm. It was really hot and he was pouring sweat and the tent was battling this storm. It was like watching Moses coming down Mount Sinai.”

Owen Sheers is equally enamoured with the Hay Festival - which became apparent as we made our way to The Warren, a patch of river perfect for swimming and ‘in the wild’ interviews. “The Hay Festival was absolutely seminal in me becoming a writer ... To live that close to that kind of a festival, and to grow up alongside it ... it was sort of like going to university every year.”

I came to Owen’s work through A Poet’s Guide to Britain, an anthology of poetry inspired by the British landscape, andThe Gospel of Us, a fictional reimagining of his three-day play The Passion, which starred Michael Sheen and played out on the streets, beaches and hills of Port Talbot. His portfolio is immense, filled with hybrid film work, poetry, fiction, non-fiction and verse drama, yet over lockdown, it was the lyric poem that he returned to. “It felt like breathing out again, like seeking out the comfort of an old friend in troubling and uncertain times. What I love about it is that you have to try and make this equation of less being more ... Every phrase, every word, you want it to cast several shadows in several directions and have several associations ... One of the fundamentals of poetry is talking about the abstract world in terms of the concrete world. It’s what landscape gives you in spades, this physical metaphor all around you.”

The night before our meeting I’d read The Green Hollow - a film poem commissioned by BBC Wales to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1966 Aberfan disaster, which saw a coal mine waste tip collapse and bury the town’s school and surrounding homes. It is deeply moving, a work of beauty and compassion that honours those lost and those left behind. When I mention it, Owen comes out in goosebumps. Created after seven months of interviews with survivors, parents and rescuers, it’s clearly something he’s still processing. “I partly got through it because of the form, that dramatic poetry form. It’s a form in which the writer becomes a conduit for the voices of others and you become a vessel for lots of other stories, so there’s a very different duty of care.”

The Green Hollow is a brilliant example of poetry’s power - its ability to say so much with so little: “to question what it means to be alive.” It is a vital tool, an intimate form of communication long-synonymous with Wales, perhaps because, traditionally, it’s never been cast as anything ‘other’. Here, even poetry and sport are connected - seen in Owen’s appointment as Welsh Rugby Union’s first ever writer in residence. “You could not get more Welsh than writing poems for the match day programmes. Which I found out the team were reading before they went on the pitch, so I had the coaches coming in and saying, ‘just so you know, the boys do read them, so don’t make them too depressing - make it a bit uplifting will you’. I loved [the role] because it speaks to Wales, but it speaks to something outside of Wales ... Very recently, especially in the industrialised South Wales valleys, the cultures of art and sport were very close cousins. They were knitted together, male voice choirs and rugby clubs. And then since the sport became professional, Roger Lewis, who was the head of Welsh Rugby Union, felt that they were travelling apart. And so they said, ‘can we do something to bring art and sport together?’. And I was interested, on a broader canvas, in the fact that, completely unnecessarily, we sell the lie to kids, very early on, that you either follow the physical pursuits or the intellectual pursuits, and never the twain shall meet; which is just ridiculous, because as we’re now learning more and more, the intellectual and physical life are totally interwoven.”

This ethos - the idea that art, academia and activity can and should be linked - has helped shape Black Mountains College (BMC), a project dreamed up by Owen and fellow writer Ben Rawlence. It is now spearheaded by Ben, who I met as he emerged from his writer’s room, hidden beneath an apple tree in a paddock beside his home. BMC is an immense undertaking - a new form of education created in response to the current ecological crisis. But given Ben’s history, I doubt there’s anyone more qualified to make it a reality. He is known for his non-fiction book City of Thorns, which chronicles the lives of nine people in Northern Kenya’s Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp. It was written after he spent a decade working with Human Rights Watch, and his transition to art felt necessary - a chance to help change a situation in a way that policy making and lobbying could not. “Everything I’ve done has been motivated by a sense of social justice and social change - my politics, my journalism, my human rights work, the non-fiction writing. BMC comes from the same place. We’re all trying to answer the same question which is: what’s the best thing I can do at this point in my life where I am?”

BMC is inspired, in part, by Black Mountain College, a pioneering school established in North Carolina in the 1930s by refugees from Bauhaus. One of its teachers was Josef Albers who, along with other renegade American academics, wanted students to work on the land, grow their own food and do visual arts, believing that one had to learn to see before they could begin to appreciate anything. “Everyone had to do dance, history, politics and work with their hands - what people call a holistic education. So when I moved to the Black Mountains I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we had a new BMC actually in the Black Mountains that drew on that history and applied itself to the challenge of our time, which is climate change.”

The curriculum will focus on unlearning and understanding nature. “Undergraduates will come, they’ll learn about themselves, and then they need to situate themselves in relation to the natural world, and then in relation to human society, and they need to figure out their place within it.” Right now, everything feels a little fragile and precarious, and this college strikes me as a necessary and fascinating way forward - and something that could only exist in this glorious corner of Wales.

Visiting Hay and its surrounds, and talking to those who call this area home, you’re reminded of the talent and flair that flourishes when given an extraordinary, supportive setting; but also that as people, we are all connected - to one another, the past, our creative potential and the world around us. Few things will reveal the power of an art-book-and-nature-centric conversation more than a handful of laid-back days in Hay.

This article first appeared in our Wales magazine, which you can order here.