The town that decided what it was

Richard Booth came back to Hay-on-Wye after Oxford in the late 1950s and found the place emptying out, with young people leaving for the cities and the town going the way a lot of small towns go. In 1962 he opened a second-hand bookshop in the old fire station.

From there he simply kept buying, books by the lorryload from closing libraries and country houses, enough of them to fill an old cinema, and eventually Hay Castle, which he filled as well. Other booksellers followed him in, until a town with nothing in particular to offer had become a town you went to for one thing.

On the first of April 1977 he declared Hay an independent kingdom and himself its king, handing out dukedoms, issuing passports and having a national anthem written. The stunt worked. The press came, and then everybody else did.

Hay remains a small town on the Welsh border, though the formula has since been copied by more than fifty towns and villages across twenty seven countries, and people now plan holidays around a place that was, within living memory, on its way to being nowhere in particular.

What that suggests is that a town's reputation is a good deal more movable than it looks. Hay had the same buildings and much the same people the year before Booth started as the year after, and what changed was that somebody made what was already there findable.