I love this — I used to work down the street from a giant Chapters in Toronto and I'd go in almost once a week just to refocus.

At first I did my old student routine: flipping through the expensive design magazines looking for interesting imagery, but I eventually found the place for a quiet discovery (and the subsequent brain dominoes) happened in a less likely place: the kids section, the poetry section or the atlas & travel section.

Alas, in London all the bookshops are on Charing Cross Road, and I work in the East end. I've had to seek out non-bookstore lunchtime nothing-dates.