coddie

  • Loyalty Cards

    You can earn loyalty points from your first purchase. A £5 purchase gives you 1 point. Once you have accumulated 20 points, we give you a £5 voucher to spend at Red Lion Books. You will be pleased to know that we have tweaked the system to round numbers up in your favour; i.e. a £9.99 […]

  • Dave Rowntree from Blur visits the book club he knew as a child

    Click here for Ben Howard article

  • Seasonal Opening Hours

  • The Appetite Book Club Reading List

    Established in 2007, the Appetite Book Club continues to grow. There are evening and daytime options, meeting over supper twice a month or in the morning, on the last Thursday of the month, to discuss our book choice over a cuppa. We wonder how many of our book choices you have read and enjoyed? Or […]

  • Local Authors

    Your Books, Our Shelves We are proud of our history of supporting authors from our area and carry a wide variety of self-published, small press and print on demand titles.  Locally published books often feature amongst our best selling titles each year. Books that sell particularly well are non-fiction titles with a strong local interest. […]

  • Giving Children the Freedom to Choose Their Next Story

    Guest writer Brogan Tuxford, Primary School Teacher at St Mary’s School for Girls I was an avid reader as a child. I went to Narnia and to Hogwarts. I travelled back in time to solve mysteries and visited places far, far away (places that I now understand may not actually exist!). The pursuit of discovering […]

  • Christmas in Colchester: “Surprising Mrs B” – the story continues

    This is the conclusion to a story published in Christmas in Colchester 2025 magazine. If you would like to read the story from the beginning, click here. Otherwise the story continues here: ….After tea, Cally lay on her bed digesting and scrutinising Fleabags, who  was sitting beside her cleaning himself vigorously. He was a long-haired  […]

  • How Did I Get Here

    Hello, I’m Lucy. This is the story of how I got to be holding a copy of my book, in Red Lion Bookshop It’s been a strange time, and while I might look calm on the outside, I can assure you that my insides look a lot more like this:  First, some background. I’m a […]

  • Wild Essex Imaginarium

    Wild Essex Imaginarium University of Essex – 27 September 2025 This event will appeal to academics, art practitioners, heritage workers, activists and policy makers. The Wild Essex Imaginarium aims to re-engage/re-enchant the relationship between the arts and conservation practice in Essex over the next five years of this ‘critical decade’. We begin by asking how […]

  • Renaturing

    Contributor: Author James Canton So, just for a moment, imagine your most idyllic literary festival event… a marque packed full of an intelligent, wise and interested audience, a fellow speaker who fits perfectly, a chair who coordinates the chat with wit and ease. Then throw in a castle as venue, a little over two miles […]