To the northeast of Charing Cross Road are the music shops on Denmark Street (known as Britain's Tin Pan Alley). The music venue the Astoria was located here, as is one of the sites of St Martin's Arts College, opening in 1939. A brass plaque on the stone pilaster facing Charing Cross Road commemorates the former bookshop and Hanff's book.

As of 2022 the building is a restaurant at street level, entered around the corner in Cambridge Circus, but its upper levels of the building remain as originally constructed. The book was made into a 1987 film starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins and also into a play and a BBC radio drama. A long-standing correspondence between New York City-based author Helene Hanff and the staff of a bookshop on the street, Marks & Co., was the inspiration for the book 84, Charing Cross Road (1970). The northern section between Cambridge Circus and Oxford Street includes more generalist bookshops such as the venerable Foyles. The Foyles Building bookshop on the west side of Charing Cross Road in 2006 (closed 2014) The scheme abolished some of the worst slums in London which delayed progress in construction while they were rehoused. The two streets and others such as the Thames Embankment, Northumberland Avenue and the Kingsway- Aldwych superstructure were built to improve traffic flow through central London. The Act's total costs, including demolition and rebuilding of many rows of buildings across London was £778,238. Specifically a major increase in traffic occurred around Piccadilly Circus, Charing Cross and Oxford Street, much of it destined from/to Tottenham Court Road, Bloomsbury and nearby routes to all northerly directions.Ĭharing Cross Road was therefore developed, in conjunction with Shaftesbury Avenue, by the Metropolitan Board of Works under an 1877 Act of Parliament. These pressures therefore congested the north–south axis of the inner West End almost as much as the relieved London Bridge area.

The development of Regent Street (parallel to the west) in the mid-18th century coincided with not only the building up of great fields west of the area but also Westminster Bridge which was built as central London and the wider estuary's second bridge after more than a century of pressure, in 1750. It connects via St Martin's Place and the motorised east side of the square.Ĭharing Cross road was originally two narrow streets in the West End, Crown Street and Castle Street. It leads from the north in the direction of Charing Cross at the south side of Trafalgar Square. Charing Cross Road, London, looking north from its junction with Cranbourn StreetĬharing Cross Road is a street in central London running immediately north of St Martin-in-the-Fields to St Giles Circus (the intersection with Oxford Street) and then becomes Tottenham Court Road.

Charing cross road 84