Hills Books in Workington: supplying books for 130 years

Over time keen walkers can amass a growing library of books, guides and maps as they tick off routes and venture further afield seeking new challenges. But anyone who believes they have the ultimate collection of the genre needs to visit Hills Books, in Workington.

Here they will surely find every title currently in print about Cumbria’s walking country in every size, from the smallest fold out map to the largest hardback, full colour showcase of Lake District landscapes.

Hills is not a conventional book seller, but a wholesale supplier to independent bookshops and other retailers including Booths supermarkets, garden centres, post offices, museum giftshops and major tourist attractions. Local walking and outdoor titles as well as Ordnance Survey maps – it is an official supplier – are its speciality.

Hills is also the main supplier of books and teaching resources to Cumbrian schools and colleges.

Ron Hill with the Wainwright Guides that he started supplying (Image: Sheenah Alcock) At its base neat stacks of individual titles line up on tables; everything from Forty Farms to The Ullswater Walking Companion to Peak Bagging Wainwrights and many, many more. Reprints of the original Wainwright guides are given pride of place in a bookcase, revered for their importance in the history of the fifth-generation family business.

The guides were the first outdoor books Ron Hill started selling when he began to diversify the family newsagents and newspaper wholesale enterprise into books in the early 1960s having joined his brother John and parents Francis Leslie and Gladys Hill in the business.

“I went into books when my father said, ‘I haven’t got enough work for you’. I was working in the morning for them then started going out with a van,” explains Ron, who is retired now but is still the patriarch of the business and turned 80 in June.

Its origins date back to 1890 when William Coulson Hill, Ron's great grandfather, started delivering newspapers from a wheelbarrow to steelworkers in Workington. By January 1920 he had a paper shop in Corporation Road.

William Coulson Hill (Image: Supplied) Elsie and John Hill ran the shop for a while before Ron’s parents took over and under them the business started to grow. At its peak they had three shops, in Finkle Street, another in Pow Street and later a third in the new precinct.

Once it became predominantly a wholesaler, the business moved to Clay Flatts trading estate, in Workington, in 1976.

The magazine-based annual was a popular phenomenon in the late 1960s and 1970s and Ron began by delivering them to customers by van. “There was a shortage of DC Thomson at the time and I was going as far as Dumfries with them,” he explains.

As holidays to the Lakes grew in popularity, he soon spotted an opportunity to supply Wainwright guides to his Cumbrian customers. “I had them in my van and when I called at shops I was just handing them over.”

Paul featured in Extreme Lakeland by Cumbrian photographer Tom McNally, one of the many outdoors titles supplied by Hills (Image: Sheenah Alcock) Surprisingly, the idea did not come from his love of books. “I’ve never been an avid reader. I read now, but I didn’t then,” he admits. “I didn’t want to have an opinion on what I was selling. You just see what’s selling and decide what to supply from that.”

His brother had gone to Loughborough University to study to be a PE teacher and, on joining the business, John started supplying books to schools, colleges and libraries. From 1970 Hills had a contract with the education authority to supply textbooks, revision guides and fiction set texts.

With changes in education schools can now choose where they buy their books but most continue to work with Hills, knowing they will receive orders the following day and that they can order a single copy of a title if necessary. July is a particularly busy time as teachers reorder fresh sets of books for new intakes in September.

Ron and John both retired when they were 60 in around 2000 at a time when multiple newspaper distribution contracts with smaller wholesalers in the UK were scrapped.

Siblings Zoe Williams and Paul Hill (Image: Sheenah Alcock) Paul Hill, Ron’s son, was an outdoors instructor at Calvert Trust, teaching canoeing and climbing to disabled visitors. He had led an expedition to Nepal, taking people with spinal injuries down Sun Kosi river, and worked ski seasons in Colorado.

However, he took the noble decision to step into and continue the family business. “I thought it would be nice to keep it going. Dad had built it up so well to get it to where it was. A lot of family businesses go after two or three generations, and I wanted to keep ours going.

“I started with not much background in business, but all my staff had been here so long that they could have run it without me.”

They include Helen McGuirk, who has been at Hills Books for 49 years and, together with Elaine Hayhurst and Peter McMinn, is one of three employees to clock up over four decades. Helen joined straight from school and even lived above one of the family shops when she was first married.

Hills Books supplies to dozens of schools and colleges across Cumbria (Image: Sheenah Alcock) Paul ran the business on his own for four years but then his sister Zoe Williams, who had studied French and German at university in Manchester, suggested she would like to join him.

Ron, who had his wife Ann as “good back-up”, says: “I was really pleased when they came in because I thought I could leave it in good hands.”

Zoe says: “I’d always just wanted to travel. I worked for AstraZenenca but had reached a stage of life where I was ready to settle down and have a family and thought the centre of Manchester wasn’t the place to be.

“I had happy memories of the business. We remember being here as kids and being pushed around the showroom in a trolley, and I loved the fact that there was such a lovely, family atmosphere with staff who had been here so long. Our cousins Andrew and Sarah also work here.”

Paul welcomed her with open arms, admitting that he is happy with his role driving one of the three company vans and delivering to customers across Cumbria. He and each of his colleagues cover around 700 miles a week delivering to Booths supermarkets, Lake District National Park centres, Forestry Commission shops, gift shops and museums.

Hills not only supplies to long-standing customer Hayes Garden World, in Ambleside, but Paul also looks after its books department.

Its independent bookshop customers include Fred’s Bookshop, Ambleside; Bookends, in Carlisle and Keswick; Sam Read, in Grasmere; New Bookshop, Cockermouth, and Michael Moon, in Whitehaven.

Zoe is more office based, working with customers and publishers, although she occasionally gets drafted in to help with deliveries too.

Hills now supplies Lakeland Lights candles to its customers (Image: Sheenah Alcock) She does recall being apprehensive about taking on the business, however. “We were a bit worried about it thinking, ‘what if it fails under us? What if we are the ones who mess it up? But dad’s response was, ‘well if you do it’s had a good run’, so there was never any pressure.

“And although there is always pressure running a business because you’re responsible for other people’s livelihoods, it’s probably the least stressful place to work.”

Happily, her fears were unfounded in any case and the business, which has 11 staff, has gone from strength to strength under the siblings. Hills has 120 trade accounts to which it supplies 150,000 items in a typical year, as well as 250 school and college customers.

It works with publishers to buy in bulk back list titles that it can offer to its customers as bargains, so fiction paperbacks can be picked up for £4.99 against a full price of around £8.99. They did the same with the reprint of A Year Like No Other by Steven Watts, saving 1,500 copies with a proportion of its continuing sale going to charity.

Hills Books has the contract to supply Ordnance Survey maps and merchandise (Image: Sheenah Alcock) Hills deliberately does not supply much in the way of new general fiction, with the exception of local authors, so as not to compete with its independent bookseller customers, who are able to source these titles direct from publishers. For a similar reason, it does not do sell online, but retail customers can visit the showroom in Workington.

Alongside the books and Ordnance Survey maps, Ron had the idea of offering stationery gifts bearing images of the Lakes such as memo note boxes, notebooks and sticky note collections.

They have extended the range considerably to include calendars, prints, fridge magnets

and diversified into complementary, Cumbria-related gifts like Peter Rabbit plush toys, the Lake District Monopoly game and, most recently, Lakeland Lights candles from Cleator Moor, whose collection is named after villages and towns, lakes and fells and, thanks to Hills, is now sold in Booths. Hills also stocks Ordnance Survey’s merchandise range. And it still does a strong line in hardcopy road atlases that remain popular.

Paul ready with another delivery (Image: Sheenah Alcock) It is all thanks to Cumbria’s position as a major tourist and outdoor sports area, a place of iconic locations and views and plenty of local authors who visitors are keen to read while here or take home as holiday souvenirs. Crime writers like MW Craven, Rebecca Tope and Rachel Lynch are especially popular, along with Kerry Irving, Helen and James Rebanks, who has a new book out this autumn.

It works closely with local publishers like Inspired by Lakeland and, thanks to personal relationship with local authors, Hills can often supply signed copies of the most sought-after titles.

All of this adds up to a local business that, says Paul, does not need to go out of the county. “There is enough business for us here with the way we have diversified,” he explains.

“We say we probably wouldn’t still exist in another county,” adds Zoe.

Some of the additional products supplied by Hills Books (Image: Sheenah Alcock) The unique books market in Cumbria together with their personal customer service and competitive pricing ensures that Hills Books is able to compete with the likes of Amazon.

“It hits individual booksellers more, but when we look at prices for the quantities we supply to schools it's actually cheaper for them to come to us,” says Zoe. “We are a one-stop shop and means they don’t have to waste time buying from all different publishers.”

Hills came into its own for schools during the floods and the COVID-19 pandemic when workbooks for children were in high demand.

Its plastic jacketing service is also popular with schools since the protective covers ensure books last longer, and it is able to pre-label titles in the Accelerated Reader scheme.

Zoe and Paul at Hills Books HQ, in Workington (Image: Sheenah Alcock) It has continued to perform well in the face of other challenges for the books market such as digital downloads. Zoe adds: “When Kindles first came out there was definitely a downturn in sales of hard copy books and it was worrying at one point. But now schools and parents are pushing back on it because kids are on devices all the time and they would now rather see them reading a book.

“It remains a tough world for independent bookshops though. I was talking to a friend in Singapore recently who asked me, ‘people are still buying books?’. But if you talk to readers, they still like a physical copy.”

The good news for them is that the books keep on coming. Hills responds to customer requests and ideas for titles by working with publishers to fill any gaps in the market, whether it be walks books based around teashops or the best routes for dogs.

When it comes to new books on Lakeland, you never get to the end.

hillsbooks.com