Charing Cross Station to Fitzrovia

On one of the hottest days of the year, Sunday 29th June, four of us braved the heat for a Literary-themed walk from Charing Cross Station to Fitzrovia. We met at 10.00am and hoped to finish before the temperature became too unbearable. Our route took us to Trafalgar Square, up Charing Cross Road (with a couple of detours into Cecil Court and Litchfield Street) before zigzagging our way to Rathbone Place, Charlotte Street, the lovely Colville Place, Whitfield Street and then into Tottenham Street where we finished just round the corner from Goodge Street Station. The stops along our walk covered multiple subjects and points of interest, noted below.   

Trafalgar Square: We learned of Charles Dickens' impressions when it was first laid out ('abortive ugliness'), heard about George Orwell sleeping rough here (documented in The Road to Wigan Pier) and also how Joe Simpson recovered sufficiently from the severe injuries sustained in the Andes (described in Touching the Void), to scale Nelson's Column on behalf of Greenpeace to protest about acid rain. 

84 Charing Cross Road, which was once the offices of bookdealers Marks & Co; the address became well known due to the book of the same name and its subsequent radio, TV and film adaptations, all based on the correspondence between Helene Hanff (an early writer of television dramas in the US) and the shop's manager, Frank Doel, who was tasked with fulfilling her requests for obscure classics and British literature that she was unable to find in New York.  A long-distance friendship developed between the two from 1949 until Doel's death in 1968. Hanff finally visited Charing Cross Road in the summer of 1971, but the bookshop had closed in December 1970.  It is now a McDonalds.  

On Charing Cross Road, we also talked at length about the renowned bookshops: Blackwell's (the first to offer online book purchasing), Foyles (the convoluted nature of finding or buying a book until they had a sensible re-org about 20 years ago, letters from Hitler, their literary luncheons), Dillons (who ran adverts, referencing the chaotic purchasing system at Foyles, that said "Foyled again? Try Dillons") and then about Waterstones (the rise, fall and rise of the eponymous ex-owner and how the chain that bears his name is intertwined with all of the aforementioned).  

Tottenham Court Road was described by the British writer V S Pritchett as ‘the ugliest and most ludicrous street in London’, but that hasn't stopped it featuring in a number of literary works including Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Ian McEwan's Saturday and several of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. The ending of Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, where Rigaud is killed by a falling house, was thought to have been inspired by a real-life disaster on Tottenham Court Road.  

Bookshops (current): that have rare collectors' items and / or signed copies (Any Amount of Books and Henry Pordes), one specialising in first editions, old and rare children's books, particularly Alice in Wonderland (Marchpane) and another that deals in 'all things spiritual and esoteric' (Watkins Books). 

Bookshops (past): the art and design bookshop that once gave Charing Cross Road its character and whose owner had another shop round the corner where some of the first exhibitions of Miro and Dali were held in the UK (Zwemmer's), the left-wing booksellers, founded in 1933 to import communist and radical publications, that remained on Charing Cross Road until it went bankrupt in 1993 (Collets) and a first-edition specialists whose visitor's book had many distinguished signatures (Bell, Book and Radmall).  

Locations for footage & plays linked to literature: Admiralty Arch (Howards End), The Garrick (Brighton Rock and An Inspector Calls), The Wyndham Theatre (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie), St Martin's Theatre (Agatha Christie's unpublished short story The Mousetrap), an antiquarian map and book sellers that once stood in Cecil Court and is now an art gallery (the film 84 Charing Cross Road, the Beatrix Potter film Miss Potter and the ‘J.R.Hartley Fly-Fishing’ TV advert for Yellow Pages). 

Pubs & restaurants associated with authors: The Ivy, where multiple noted authors have celebrated milestone birthdays, knighthoods and more, The Black Horse pub described by Anthony Burgess (author of A Clockwork Orange) as “too funereal to be convivial” and The Bricklayers Arms pub which he said “was quiet, small and a good place for assignations”, The Fitzroy pub where Dylan Thomas met the artist Augustus John plus The Wheatsheaf pub, nearby, where John introduced Thomas to his future wife. We also saw The Marquis of Granby that was 'the last pub of the night' for George Orwell and others in the 1930s as it was located in Marylebone whereas The Wheatsheaf and The Fitzroy were in Holborn and closed half an hour earlier. Further along the road, we stopped in front of The Lisboeta which stands on the site of L'Etoile, a French bistro which had been T S Eliot's favourite restaurant as it was a short stroll from where he worked at Faber's offices in Russell Square. 

Other buildings associated with authors: where Ian Fleming once worked (Admiralty Arch), the home of the Beefsteak Club whose members have included Rudyard Kipling, Sir Harold Nicolson and Sir John Betjeman (facing Charing Cross Road), an art gallery that was once a tearoom where Edward Thomas, Walter de la Mare and Rupert Brooke used to congregate - it had previously been a barbers where Amadeus Mozart had his hair cut, aged 7, on a visit to London (Cecil Court), the picturesque 18th century passageway where a young George Gissing, considered one of the three greatest novelists in England by the 1890s and said to be George Orwell's favourite writer, lived in 1878 (Colville Place) as well as the street where Jerome K Jerome shared a cramped bedsit with George Wingrave, the future bank manager with whom he made the trip that was to become Three Men in a Boat (Whitfield Street). 

Other mentions: inspiration for Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books (Cecil Court), the 'Penguincubator' machine that was briefly installed on the pavement outside Collets to dispense Penguin paperbacks, until it was realised that customers could get more than one book out for their sixpence (Charing Cross Road), code poems written by the son of Marks & Co's founder that were used to encrypt messages in WW2 and were based on his father's use of book pricing codes (Charing Cross Road) and also Pollock's Toy Museum, now closed, that once also had a shop on the ground floor to contribute to its support and was written about by Robert Louis Stevenson in his essay A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured and for which J B Priestly wrote a play The High Toby (Whitfield Street).  

Afterwards, we retraced our steps a little to the The Fitzrovia pub, which has no literary connections that I'm aware of but does serve a good Sunday roast and had cold drinks. 

Jill S, 30th June 2025