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Open Tuesday to Saturday from
10 am to 5 pm.

We can send books by post, usually £3 in the UK.
Newham Bookshop logo (2015) The Wanstead Tap logo
Newham Bookshop events at The Wanstead Tap, Spring/Summer 2024
  • Thursday 18 April at 7.30 pm

    Sarah Wise
    The Undesirables

  • Thursday 25 April at 7.30 pm

    Andrew Whitehead
    A Devilish Kind Of Courage

  • Thursday 16 May at 7.30 pm

    Viv Groskop
    One Ukrainian Summer

  • Wednesday 29 May at 7.30 pm

    Iain Sinclair
    Pariah Genius

  • Wednesday 5 June at 7.30 pm

    Laura Laker
    Potholes and Pavements




Newham Bookshop by Pete Fallan
Newham Bookshop, Pete Fallan, March 2021.


Tuesday 23 April at 7.30 pm
at The Wanstead Tap


The Festival of Brexit
The Festival of Brexit is published in hardback by Thames & Hudson at £12.95.
Buy ticket online
Tickets £10 online
from Newham Bookshop

The Wanstead Tap logo
“One of London’s largest selections of craft beers and a range of local, small batch spirits. We pride ourselves on buying limited-release gins and vodkas as well as a range of mixers to suit every taste.”

Collage-maker Cold War Steve and political cartoonist Martin Rowson discuss Brexit

Christopher Spencer
Cold War Steve
aka Christopher Spencer
(Camden New Journal)

Cold War Steve
The Festival of Brexit

In conversation with Martin Rowson

Cold War Steve has been acclaimed as the Brexit Bruegel and a modern-day Hogarth or Gillray. His Twitter feed, McFadden’s Cold War, has become a cult phenomenon, with over 120,000 followers (and counting). This book contains the prime cuts of his elaborate, satirical photo collages from his Twitter feed, with further exclusive, unseen new work.

Begun as a personal reprieve from an often-bleak political climate, Cold War Steve – Christopher Spencer in real life – started collaging images of longstanding Eastender Steve McFadden (aka Phil Mitchell) into Cold War-era scenarios, using a £3 smartphone app while commuting. As Brexit Britain begins to take shape his output has taken an increasingly surreal, satirical turn – in what some are calling “furious absurdism” – creating dystopian, absurdly funny Brexit-era landscapes populated with a rotating cast of political, cultural or otherwise newsworthy (or not) figures, and ever-present Fray Bentos pies. A pitch-perfect marriage of internet meme culture and the political lampoon, Cold War Steve satirises our increasingly incongruous-seeming popular-political culture with quintessentially British humour.

In a time when the UK’s exit from the EU looms large, Cold War Steve offers us a satirical escape from a world that seems to have slipped its moorings from reality.

Martin Rowson

Martin Rowson’s cartoons appear regularly in The Guardian where he has been commenting on Brexit for several years. He has also worked for The Times, the Independent on Sunday, the Daily Mirror, The Spectator and the Morning Star, as well as many other publications. He won the Cartoon Art Trust’s Political Cartoonist of the Year Award in 2000 and 2004, the Political Cartoon Society’s Cartoon of the Year in 2003 and 2007 and was their Cartoonist of the Year in 2010. Martin discussed his latest book, The Pen is Mightier than the Word, at The Wanstead Tap in 2018.

Praise for The Festival of Brexit:

“Exemplifies an angry new movement… the new furious absurdism” – The Economist.

“Online therapy for those beaten down by political despair.” – The Guardian.

“A modern Hogarth or Gillray… He’s newsy and angry. It’s what Brits do best. Don’t engage with these people’s arguments because they don’t have any. Just flay them alive with humour, sarcasm and art.” – Jon Savage.

“No one has caught the mood of Brexit Britain as acutely as Cold War Steve.” – The Art Newspaper.

Watch out for online events


Family lessons for
Writing and Reading Newham
available here

On the Record logo

Interested in learning more about Newham Bookshop and some of the people connected with it? We have four lessons for classroom or family use developed from On the Record’s oral history project centered around Newham Bookshop, Writing and Reading Newham. Click here for full details.


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Newham Bookshop is LoveReading’s
Bookshop of the Month

We are proud that Newham Bookshop is LoveReading’s Bookshop of the Month. The article features a Q&A with Vivian Archer, which you can read here.


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