Kate Noakes and Rosie Hayles talk to Tom Bullough

Kate Noakes combines memoir, anecdote, social history and arcane facts with subversive wit to provide an affectionate portrait of the town famed for its secondhand shops (and Hay Festival). She describes how it faces the challenges of any small market town, with a rich rural hinterland, and a landscape vying for attention with the best that metropolitan culture has to offer. Rosie Hayles has written the story of one street in Hay seen through history, in a narrative rich in the detail of everyday life, peopled with characters from Norman times up to 1980 when Broad Street had its first two bookshops. She has spent many years collecting stories of those who have lived or worked on Broad Street.