10 years of the magCulture Shop
Today marks 10 years since the magCulture Shop opened its doors for the first time. Jeremy Leslie looks back at the origins of the shop, and compares real physical spaces with printed magazines.
Above: this week’s window display features Christmas-red editions of some favourite magazines from the past 10 years.
Where did the last ten years go? I remember thinking about opening a shop, and spending weekends through 2015 driving around London with my wife Lesley looking at different parts of the city. I’d had a loose dream of having a design studio with a magazine shop in front of it, and it’s easy now to look back and build a neat narrative around what happened, but the reality was messier.
I’d begun selling a few magazines online a couple of years earlier; our website had been reviewing the new indie magazines since 2006, and in response to readers asking where could they buy the magazines, we’d started selling a few online. That led to being invited to have a stall at Monocle’s then biannual Fairs—one in summer and one at Christmas. At the 2014 Christmas Fair, Monocle founder Tyler Brulé looked through our display of magazines and nonchalantly suggested that I could open a real shop; my dumb reply echoed around my head for the rest of that day: ‘I don’t know anything about retail, that’s not for me…’ The reply was instant and ill-considered; perhaps I could open a shop?
A few weeks later I was in the car with Lesley, looking around a wintery London at shops with ‘To Let’ signs above them. The first option was an ex-gallery space in Dalston Junction (now a late night supermarket). When that fell through, I met with an estate agent who explained how the retail market really worked (don’t ask). Over a period of weeks, he showed me a series of weird, over-secure spaces in Hatton Garden, and Victorian shops with basements in Whitechapel (cold and damp, not great for magazines and even worse to run a design studio from.) Then he showed me a space on St John Street, Clerkenwell.
The magCulture Studio had been based in Clerkenwell for a couple of years, in Panther House behind Grays Inn Road. An old printworks, it was an ideal and cheap base for a bunch of studios and businesses. Which meant it was soon deemed perfect to be renovated and turned into apartments. We now had to move out, and staying in Clerkenwell made sense.
270 St John Street was a newsagent (above), which amused me, one of a small parade of shops at the base of the first government-built (1958) tower block in London. I loved the area, and the space was promising, but it wasn’t until I realised that behind the suspended ceiling there were sloping ceilings and roof lights that I began to take it seriously. Meanwhile I flew to Berlin to meet with Mark and Jessica at Do You Read Me?! and interrogate them about magazine retail; Martin at Magazine Brighton was helpful too.
I began to consider who to work with on the fit out; Vitsoe were soon on board with their 606 shelves, an architect friend helping with insulation and structure, and South London Makers came on as carpenters.
I announced the shop plans at that year’s magCulture Live conference, held at CSM in October, boasting of a big shelf and November opening. The shelf happened, not the November opening.
A wrangle over an ATM machine in the window almost stopped us, but we finally got it removed and I signed the lease on 2 November, the day I also discovered the beautiful terrazzo floor (above, and see the interview below) that has not only become such a key part of our identity, but also allowed us to construct a shelf on skate trucks that could move back and forth to expand the space for events (below.)
Six weeks of build and fit later, we had converted this…
…into this.
We launched the shop with a party on 10 December 2015, and opened to customers the following morning. Two weeks before Christmas was a ridiculous time to open, but lease negotiations and building works forced us late and I wanted to get going.
The years since have flashed by. Running a shop alongside writing, designing and producing events makes for a busy time. I recently did a count of all the magazines we’ve stocked—all 1530 titles are listed alphabetically on our anniversary ALL THE MAGAZINES T-shirt. We’ve hosted over 60 events at the Shop, with guests from across the world presenting their magazines, plus a series of online masterclasses (The Flatplan). Offsite, magCulture Live has continued—there have now been 13 London editions and we’ve organised six NYC editions since starting in 2018. Add in 43 podcasts, regular student field visits, and Journal posts… it’s a busy place, and everything is organised from the space behind the shop by our small, dedicated team.
Every day is a mix of hassle and joy—the drudge of invoices and spreadsheets on one hand, the thrill of daily magazine deliveries on the other—but the thing that keeps me engaged is the effect the shop has had since day one. It was exciting to launch the magCulture blog in 2006 and see it develop an online audience. But a shop is an actual space, not a virtual one, and that brings a higher level of excitement and empowerment. Customers visit from a block away and from around the world; publishers pop in to share a new project or drop off a new issue. Students ask for advice, people of all types swing by for inspiration. Each event attracts newcomers alongside familiar faces.
I’m proud of our online shop, but I also know the physical shop is the heart of what we do (it also gives authority to our online presence.) A real life shop is better than an online one in precisely the same way a printed magazine is better than a website. It is tangible, physical and solid. Our IRL visitors can discover things naturally, enjoying serendipity and avoiding the lazy direction of algorithmns. We want people to spend time with us browsing, discovering the new generation of magazines. And whether they’re magazine makers or readers, it’s just wonderful welcoming them to do just that.
I’ll finish with a huge thank you to everyone who has been part of the magCulture Shop over the ten years: the staff (particularly our trio of shop managers: first Jamie Atherton, then Danielle Mustarde, and now Bella Robathan; and longterm events producer Stephanie Hartman) the brilliant editors and designers (what would the shop be without your magazines?), distributors, partners and customers. Thank you all for your support!
What next? It’s been lovely reaching our 10th birthday, but the immediate task is to renew our lease for another 10 years.
Before that, we’re celebrating our birthday with an evening of late night shopping and a glass of bubbly for all. Join us tonight, 11 December, until 7:30pm. The first 10 customers after 6pm will receive a free ALL THE MAGAZINES anniverary T.
Below is an interview with Jeremy Leslie about the anniversary of the magCulture Shop, recently published in free magazine Broadsheet, written by John Sunyer.
Magculture: 10 Years of Keeping Print Alive
More than just a shop, Clerkenwell’s magculture is one of those rare London addresses that makes the city feel smaller, in a good way.
On a cold November morning in 2015, Jeremy Leslie almost walked away. He’d found a space on St John Street in Clerkenwell for his new business, but as the moment to commit arrived, panic set in. “As I was picking up the keys I thought, ‘I know nothing about opening a shop, I can’t do this,’” he remembers. But when he arrived, the old newsagent’s refrigerator had been moved, revealing a hidden terrazzo floor, unexpectedly elegant beneath cheap blue plastic tiles. “At that moment I realised it was right – I had to do it.”
Ten years on, Magculture has grown into something of a London institution. The shop—part storefront, part meeting point, part archive—has evolved into a cult space for people who live and breathe magazines. The shelves are stacked with around 700 titles: the ones Leslie and his small team believe are worth your time. “The ultimate criticism is omission,” he says. “We sell a lot of magazines, but they are the best magazines.”
Walking in, you’re just as likely to see a design student leafing through Apartamento as you are a visiting editor from The New Yorker. Customers pull together unexpected stacks—The Fence alongside a football zine and a niche architecture title. Staff are often making their own publications on the side. Boxes arrive every day, and the team slices them open with the excitement of discovering something new. The shop is less about transactions than sustaining a community of obsessives.
Leslie himself has been one for decades. He came up as a designer, working as creative director at a big London publisher. Alongside that he wrote books on magazines, started the Magculture blog and became a commentator on what print could be in the 21st century. At a time when everyone seemed to be proclaiming “print is dead”, Leslie noticed something different. “Mainstream publishing was dying,” he says, “but brilliant independents were coming through—Fantastic Man, 032c, The Gentlewoman—and they were successful. That’s where the energy was.”
His own initiation into the medium was through NME. As a teenager, the weekly music paper wasn’t just functional – gig listings, record reviews—it created a complete world. If it sold out at the local newsagent, he’d be forced to grab Sounds instead. “It was the difference between a friend and an acquaintance,” he says. “You could put up with it, but you weren’t going to hang out too long with them.” Later, The Face arrived and changed everything again. Only afterwards did he learn that its founder, Nick Logan, was also behind Smash Hits and had once been editor of NME.
Talking about those years—often referred to as a “golden age” of magazines—Leslie is both nostalgic and pragmatic. Magazines, he says, were never just about information, they were about identity. “Magazines were our internet,” he says. “They guided you through teenagehood. They told you who your people were.”
To work for US Vogue editor Anna Wintour in the 1990s, staff had to take a 178-question culture quiz—recently made public online—that shows just how seriously magazine culture was taken. If Leslie were to design his own version, it might sound something like this: Which magazine’s tagline was “The magazine of gourmet bathing”? (Wet.) Why are the cover stars of i-D always photographed winking? (The facial expression echoes the magazine’s emoticon logo.) What’s a MacGuffin? (A plot device, like Rosebud in Citizen Kane, that drives the action at first but proves to be a red herring.) Which periodical first described itself as a “magazine”? (The Gentleman’s Magazine, London, 1731.)
The shop is an extension of this kind of curiosity, but also of Leslie’s taste. “I encourage the idea that everyone has a magazine in them,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean we’ll stock just anything.” He draws a line between supermarket glossy magazines and the kind of independent titles magCulture champions. These are magazines that feel closer to limited-edition art objects: carefully designed, often priced more like books, and meant to be kept.
magCulture is rooted in London but international in scope, with titles from Seoul, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Los Angeles and beyond arriving every day. Visitors would recognise a similar spirit here to London stores like Idea Books and Shreeji News, and Casa Magazines and Iconic in New York.
Over time, the shop has quietly become part of the city’s fabric. Clerkenwell locals drift in on Saturday afternoons, sometimes just to browse and talk. Designers bring in visiting friends. The regulars treat it like a club, a place where they might bump into someone they’ll later collaborate with.
In a city where much of publishing has been absorbed by corporate offices in glass towers, magCulture is an antidote: human-scale, idiosyncratic, unmistakably physical.