Barter Books is one of the best secondhand bookshops in Britain, housed inside what was the Victorian-era Alnwick railway station — a large and handsome building with high ceilings, open fires in winter, a cafe, and a model railway that runs continuously along the upper walls of the main hall. The shop has over 350,000 books arranged across multiple rooms, with a good mix of fiction, non-fiction, history, and children's books, priced reasonably for a shop of this reputation.
The building alone is worth seeing: the platform canopy is still intact, and the model trains make a pleasing circuit overhead as you browse. It is the sort of place you arrive intending to spend 20 minutes and leave two hours later. True to its name, Barter Books accepts books as part-payment — bring a box and trade for credit.