Foyles sounds like a bigger version of Carnforth Bookshop. This small town Bookshop used to be stuffed with shelves to the ceiling on two or three floors. Seriously I could never work out how many floors because there were so meant levels, half height stairs and rooms made of shelves of secondhand books. You could actually get lost, walk into a dead end thinking it was the way out only to have to double back via a twisting chain of linked rooms and corridors of shelves. If there was space between the shelves and ceiling there were stacked books. In every nook and cranny with spare floor space you might have a stack of books waiting for shelf space.
It was amazing! I didn't have the money to buy much but I just loved exploring it. I think the staff didn't mind me doing that. It was a real treasure trove of books, maps and other things too. Including books ticketed at p in 5 figures! Real rare books!
Then it declined a bit, not much but a little. Then covid. When it reopened I think it got sold and downstairs for new books, toys, gifts, cards etc seemed to be the direction the new owners wanted to go. I think someone else took over the secondhand books too. Then after a gap in visiting I went there and whole rooms made of shelves disappeared. No more a warren of shelves. Stock dropped probably from 6 figures to mid 5 figures. Drastic change in feel and stock levels. More popular fiction, maps and more popular books. Out went obscure or very niche books. Mining technology went, certain biological or pharmaceutical books disappeared. Geology halved with all the geological maps gone. The classics used to be a big roomlet but now two half empty shelves in a far corner. There used to be two, large shelves of Loeb classical library books dating from the 1930s to more modern editions. Natural history, guidebooks, history books, engineering books, transport books, etc. All halved in stock. They've only got a placeholder page on abebooks now too which I see as a sign of the times.
It is really sad the decline in these secondhand and antiquarian bookshops. Then you have bookshops like the big Alnwick one that seems to be doing well but they're simply not as good as those little ones like Carnforth Bookshop used to be.