Whatever about being paved with gold, Charing Cross Road is a street that feels like it's paved with books. Displayed in shop windows and piled in dusty basements, crammed on shelves and overflowing onto the pavement, books are everywhere. And with massive chain stores next to specialist, second-hand and antiquarian shops, the famous London street is a haven for book lovers of every persuasion.
Charing Cross Road has been associated with bookselling for more than a century. Book traders started to move their premises there when the nearby Booksellers Row was demolished in 1899. 1907 saw the opening of the Charing Cross Road institution, Foyle's bookshop, after brothers William and Gilbert Foyle failed their civil service exams, sold off their textbooks and decided to enter the book trade instead.
In 1930, William Foyle's daughter Christina launched the legendary Foyle's Literary Luncheons. These gatherings continue to this day and have featured speakers as diverse as H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Barbara Cartland, Kingsley Amis and Doris Lessing.
The entrepreneurial Christina Foyle is also said to have written to Hitler asking him not to burn books but to send them to her instead - a family legend, perhaps apocryphal.
The heyday of bookselling on Charing Cross Road was during the inter-war years. By 1937, the street was home to the first "Penguincubator", a paperback vending machine launched by Penguin Books. Sadly the contraption was deemed a failure and removed after it was discovered that dishonest customers could get more than one book out of it for their sixpence.
In 1949 began the correspondence that immortalised number 84 Charing Cross Road. New York writer Helene Hanff originally wrote to Marks & Co Booksellers to request rare books and was delighted with what they sent: "Old, mellow leather-bound books with cream-coloured pages, but not so opulently fine as to make me feel guilty if I underlined a phrase here (in pencil) or made a margin note there when I felt like it."
For nearly 20 years, Hanff continued to purchase books from Marks & Co and to write to its staff, the garrulous New Yorker striking up an unlikely friendship with the reserved bookseller, Frank Doel. After his death in 1968, Hanff published the correspondence in book form as 84 Charing Cross Road.
Marks & Co is gone now, the site occupied by a trendy restaurant. But it is still possible to experience, not far away, the aura of musty old-world bookishness that attracted Hanff to Charing Cross Road.
Turn just off the traffic-choked main road into the alleyway called Cecil Court and it feels like stepping into a Merchant-Ivory film. This tiny pedestrian thoroughfare has been a centre for antiquarian bookselling since John Watkins set up his esoteric bookshop there in 1900. It's a bibliophile's delight, each shop with its own specialisation, from music to travel and from Italian to dance.
If you have time for a browse and a chat, each bookshop also has its own story to tell.
