IN their latest newsletter the Electric Shadows Bookshop’s owners have explained they’ve been forced out of gentrifying Braddon.

Welcome to our FINAL EDITION of esb News. You may have already heard that our building, 40 Mort Street Braddon, has been sold for redevelopment and that all the tenants have been given notice to quit by June so that demolition can proceed.

The need to move and find new premises has forced us to assess our situation and so we have decided that after 27 years in business now is really the best time for us to call it a day, turn off the lights and shut the doors forever at Electric Shadows Bookshop.

Eight years ago when we moved to Braddon after Electric Shadows Cinema closed, many people scoffed at the idea, but it now seems that we are victims of our own perspicacity. Market rents have more than doubled in Braddon and effectively the redevelopment boom has now priced our small bookshop out of the area – and at this stage in our lives neither of us has the energy to pioneer yet another suburb! And there is a certain fitting symmetry in the fact that both the cinema and the bookshop will have each lasted for 27 years.