GET Free Books has reopened at Colebrook Street in Winchester, less than a five-minute walk from its previous location in The Brooks Shopping Centre.

Operated at a former hair salon by the Global Educational Trust (GET), it vacated its former premises last year.

Gentian Developments which owns the building on Colebrook has offered the premises to the charity.

Now GET is back up and running and wants everyone to know where they are.

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The shop currently opens on Thursdays from 10 to 2pm and Fridays from 10 to 12noon and wants to increase the hours on Fridays and also open on Sundays.

However, the bookshop is reliant on volunteers, and desperately needs more.

Volunteer coordinator Amy Alexander said: “We used to have a lot of volunteers, including ones that ran it, and we haven’t got that anymore.”

The same cannot be said for the number of books, with Amy saying they currently have enough and have had to build new bookcases to keep up.

Amy encourages that even if people take a book and bring it back to swap it for another or pass it along to someone else, then that is brilliant as they want to see that the books are being used as the Trust’s mission is to ‘make reading free and available to all’.

The plan is for the front of the shop to be fiction and the back for non-fiction. They hope to have a children’s area again after having to get rid of numerous kids' books after the closure in 2022. 

“When the time is right, I will be asking again for children’s books, then we will make a big thing that we have the children’s area again, and we need to get some of the little bookcases again.”