Magical Windows

Everything in Chorlton Bookshop is moving up a gear. The team will have already ordered the Christmas cards and gift wrap, while Jo, who buys the books, will work her way through all the festive new releases to compile a gigantic shopping list.

The big focus, though is the Christmas window. “When your shop is all about escapism and firing the imagination, we try to create a window that reflects that same magic,” says Victoria Johnson, the shop’s owner. “We know that our customers look forward to seeing it each year, so we put lots of work into it.”

The shop has won the Civic Society’s Christmas Window trophy a number of times over the years. There have been winter woodlands and ice skaters; Santa and the Snowman; Inuits, a little match girl and even a working train set.  

The 2025 window features a towering Christmas angel – and it’s all hand made, including every single feather on her wings.

Victoria designs and builds every Christmas window display herself, with work starting as early as October. She’s a gifted craftswoman, photographer and artist with a talent for styling.

Everything in the window is handmade, from barn owls crafted out of old books to a woodcutter’s cottage made of pallets and a particularly grumpy plasticine Scrooge. She’ll also spend ages working out the mechanics of how the window will work too. How do you make a real carpet (with a full-sized model of a child sitting on it) look like it’s really flying?

The shop team say they can always tell it’s coming up to Christmas, because weird things start arriving in the post.  It might be a disembodied hand, a pair of slippers, fake fur or boxes bursting with sparkles: that’s Victoria, gathering treasures from Ebay and Etsy. The whole place is full of props and treasures – there’s a polar bear in the shed and a reindeer in the cellar!

And the secret behind winning the Christmas Window Trophy? “A lot of late nights – and miles and miles of fishing line!”