A Photographic Memorial – Greenwich 1978-1996
What This Site is: A photographic memorial to the Hegaro — a Humber keel barge that arrived on the Thames at Greenwich in August 1978 to sell children’s books. And a Bristol Lodekka – that arrived in June 1981, a mobile charity delivering books, writers and illustrators to local schools.
Hegaro became, for eighteen years, the Book Boat: a children’s bookshop moored between Gypsy Moth IV and Cutty Sark, the only specialist children’s bookshop south of the river, and the most improbable, joyful, and now almost entirely forgotten institution in the history of children’s literature in Britain.
This is not a history book. It is a memorial, a recovery of something that left almost no trace. More than a hundred photographs, a higgledy-piggledy scrapbook, two inspired founders and a handful of friends. An inspection record in the Hull Heritage Archive and a Hants & Dorset bus put out to graze. One Flickr caption, an Instagram page, a boat-sales listing placing the Hegaro in Rochester Kent at some later date and the bus in Brighton then Winchester. A Facebook page and an obituary in The Guardian. Pretty much the sum total of the public record. But many of those involved live on and have submitted their collection of memorabilia to complete the picture.
What This Site is Not: Neither a comprehensive account of children’s publishing in the 1980s nor a study of independent bookselling. Not a biography of the people involved, it makes no claim to completeness. It is a memorial. In the old sense. A gathering of what remains, arranged with care, offered to the record.
One hundred photographs are not enough to hold eighteen years. Many of the children who came aboard were never photographed, many of the days that mattered most went unrecorded. Faces that everyone knew at the time are now unidentified, yet the photos that survive are the names that survive. Where something is named, it is named because someone remembered. Whatever I cannot account for here was still real, maybe somewhere I have been and where it is not, silence is the record.
The Hegaro, last seen at Rochester or perhaps Gillingham in Kent, may still be afloat. The bus is back in Hampshire, restored by enthusiasts, the Jøtul stove sits cold in a barn in France. The children grew up, the founders have passed. But I once saw a film.
Old Maude, given a ring by young Harold who loved her, threw it without ceremony into the sea. The horror on his face was the conventional response, but she said: “That way, I will always know where it is.”
This site has become the sea.
Colin Hicks, May 2026