GOODS & SERVICES • FOUND Shop
I experience stationery shops the same way I imagine other people experience casinos: with awe, sensory overload and a distorted sense of time. I leave far poorer than I walked in, the sun having long disappeared o’er the horizon.
The place I most frequently have this dazzling, financially crippling out-of-body experience is Choosing Keeping in Seven Dials. Among the throng of stag dos, endless (but worthy) queues for Humble Crumble and tuk tuk tourism lies this oasis of inky joy.
This is a million miles from your local high street WH Smith. Choosing Keeping houses analogue and epistolary romance, with a range of handmade marbled notebooks and inks, artisanal chocolates, wax seals and Italian fountain pens so beautifully made they could probably script a sonnet unaided.
Not just a top destination gift stop – anyone would squeal opening one of their bowed and gift-wrapped composition ledgers, hint hint – Choosing Keeping is also a proper artists’ resource, stocking Seymour Wallace oil paints, Japanese watercolour sets in charming palettes and Sennelier pastels that glide like silk. Everything the store sells is considered, 'favouring goods from small, mostly family-owned businesses looking to achieve the golden triangle of historicity, quality and aesthetics.' It may feel like the shop has been there forever, but it only moved from Columbia Road in 2012.
Covent Garden has changed so much in recent years – now more Covent Circus than anything – but Choosing Keeping is reason enough to brave the crowds and support the independents that still remain. –Amy Rose Holland
→ Shop: Choosing Keeping (Covent Garden) • 21 Tower St • Sun-Fri 1030a-530p, Sat 1030a-6p.