Barefoot Books, Oxford

When Barefoot Books opened its north Oxford branch a couple of years ago, there was a ripple of interest around the parental circles – a genuinely baby friendly café/bookshop is a real find – and it soon became popular with the buggy-pushing trendy mothers in the area. Since I aspire to be trendy, and have a bit of a thing about books (and cake), I thought I’d feel at home there.

The ground floor is designed in three sections which flow front to back: first a bookshop, then a café, with plenty of high chairs, space for pushchairs, and a low table supplied with paper and crayons for toddlers to test their new teeth on, and beyond that there is a story “tent” – a carpeted area with benches around the walls and heaps of cushions, a throne for the story-teller, and drapes hanging from the ceiling to look like a colourful nomadic tent. Outside the front doors is a small area with more café style tables, which has recently been fenced off from the pavement, to prevent free-range children escaping.

It’s colourful, bordering on garish, it’s welcoming, and the books are an interesting mixture of modern and traditional stories from all around the world. Barefoot Books has an impressive reputation so far, and an ethos it would be hard to argue with. The founders say they want to give children nourishing “soul food” in the form of art and story. It's a way of life for Nancy Traversy, Owner, co-founder and CEO of BB) who says:

Living Barefoot for me is creating beautiful, magical and authentic stories and art and bringing these to a grassroots, global community of people who care about how our next generation of children is raised.   

So far, so good. But I have to confess I don’t like the Oxford studio (as they call it) as wholeheartedly as I want to. More bluntly, if it weren't for the baby-friendly nature of the place, I wouldn't go again. My main bugbear is the enormous TV screen on the wall of the café area, which is permanently on, showing the DVDs that tie in with many of Barefoot Books’ titles. At best it’s distracting, at worst downright intrusive. The words scroll along the bottom of the screen with a little bouncy ball to tell you which one to sing along with, karaoke style. I accept that DVDs are a significant part of their marketing strategy for their books (this makes me uneasy in itself, but that's another matter), but if I’ve gone to a bookshop/café, the chances are I haven’t gone there in order to watch TV. It makes me feel really cross just being near the bloody thing. When it's really busy, they turn the volume down slightly, but today, with the café surprisingly quiet, it was loud enough to make conversation difficult, and no-one was watching it at all. They even left it playing while a shop assistant led a story session in the tent area just beyond the café. She did her best, but it was difficult to concentrate on her with tinny singing coming from the TV the whole time.

I've also been disappointed by the café itself. It is styled in keeping with the rest - bright colourful crockery and a family friendly space, but having been there three times, I’ve had bad food twice: first, in the very expensive fresh fruit platter, a pear so unripe as to be crunchy and inedible; and more recently, carrot cake that was both stale and strangely bitter. The café is a big selling point here, so why these basic errors? It’s pricey too, even by north Oxford standards (and that's saying something). Oh, and did I mention there’s a whacking great TV on the wall? Maybe it’s to distract you from your food…

That said, they do run an impressive-looking series of events, both in the story-telling area downstairs, and a larger studio area upstairs, and they have definitely fulfilled a need in providing such a child-friendly place for parents to hang out, especially now the fabulous Summertown Wine Café has sadly closed down (sob!). Doubtless I will go there again, despite these bugbears, but maybe next time I'll smuggle in my own food, and pluck up the courage to ask them to turn off the screen.