4 Of Our Favourite Shops In Ambleside

We love visiting the Lake District, and one of our favorite towns is Ambleside. It’s a bustling place on the edge of Windermere, and it’s full of shops, their colourful awnings standing out against the grey stone facades. If we had to spend a rainy day indoors, we’d have to choose these 4 places to stop. All of them are along Rydal Road, which makes for a quick walk if you visit them all.

The Apple Pie Bakery

This delightful bakery is located in the heart of Ambleside. It holds delicious Bath buns and gingerbread, as well as various pastries and pies. We enjoyed taking their delicacies on hikes as snacks.

Little Walkers

Packed full of kids rain gear and hiking supplies, Little Walkers saved us when the rain caught us in Ambleside one day. All of the kids got rain trousers – pants that are water resistant and go over your clothes – and the 2nd youngest got a pair of coral rain boots. These are super fun because the rain drops change color when they get wet! The rain pants were very useful when the little ones went to a playground and slid down several rain-soaked slides.

Fred’s Ambleside Bookstore

This bookstore is chock-full of books featuring the Lake District. We love the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome, and when we found a whole shelf of these books, we were delighted. We purchased a copy of Winter Holiday, one of the books in the series, and The Fairy Caravan, a little known novel by Beatrix Potter. Other books not of the Lake District abound as well, and there is a special loft with only children’s books. The bookstore also offers relief maps as well as books.

The Armitt

This one isn’t exactly a shop, but we definitely couldn’t leave it out! The Armitt is a museum containing stories and records of the Ambleside’s history, including a multitude of Beatrix Potter’s drawings, a whole floor devoted to a reference library holding a collection of rare books, and exhibits about the poet John Ruskin and Charlotte Mason, the homeschooling pioneer. In the front, we discovered Beatrix Potter postcards. We each picked out a few we particularly liked. This would be a perfect short stop after visiting Hill Top, and it’s not far down the road from the Apple Pie Bakery.

What are your favorite stops in Ambleside?