History
Green Pages started way back in the 1980s in an Oxford bookshop called EOA. People used to come in and ask things like: “Where can I get acupuncture?”, “Is there anywhere I can buy local organic veggies?”, “Is there a support group for people with cancer?” The shop owners, Ruth and Antony, who still run the bookshop today (now called The Inner Bookshop) started to keep information in a ring-binder at the counter to answer those questions.
After a while, they published it in the form of a small “alternative to Yellow Pages” called The Oxford Grapevine. With Green Pages as its subtitle, it grew and grew each year. After a few years, the publication was taken over by a good friend Dave Billings, who did a fantastic job of increasing the number of listings and broadening the content. Over the following 10 years, Jane and Philip Rogers put their energy into and it continued to grow with each new edition.
When Jane and Philip decided to leave Oxford, our friends Simon Blackbourn and Ishka Michocka took over in 2005. They immediately set to work improving the print quality, increasing sales and advertising and attracting many new outlets and readers. Their enthusiasm was contagious and, in 2006, we started to talk about making a new Bristol & Bath edition, got excited together, made a plan and published the first edition in Dec 2006. From there we went on to make the 2nd edition (Dec 2007) as well as developing ideas to publish other editions of Green Pages.