I popped in to mention this as well. Wonderful book AND movie, which is pretty damn unusual.
SHRUG Chaos is inevitible. 
I was born north of London, but because of my family’s history, I associate “Charing Cross” with the hospital. It was also the first hospital my mother worked at after she became an SRN (which had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that her foster parents were both doctors there…).
At the time Charing Cross Hospital was located in, and named after, Charing Cross in central london (it was later moved out to West London). So geographically it doesn’t make much difference whether he was referring to the monument, the area or the hospital - they were all in the same place. But the hospital would certainly make a lot of sense in the context, could certainly be an allusion at the least.
Is there in fact a Charing Cross Road as referred to in the book and movie title?
Oh yes indeedy, see post #17. And it has lots of bookshops.
Quite possibly the most original opening of Mornington Crescent I’ve ever seen.
25 rounds and everyone has played the same move - Charing Cross! Astounding! I don’t even know if that’s legal.
Yep. It’s a main road going up from Charing Cross to Oxford Street.
People have gotten into a broader discussion of the meaning of Francis Thompson’s Poem The Kingdom Of God. I’d like to offer something of my own on this. Like Francis. I suffer from mental illness and chemical dependency. I can tell by some of the opinions offered that some of you haven’t shared our experience. I think this poem means something very different to people like me and Francis than maybe to ordinary people. I’m really not trying to be hurtful I’m only trying to explain.
O WORLD invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
(I kind of think this is about the Spiritual
and we all can see that)
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air–
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there?
(I’m not sure what this means. Maybe that, it’s obvious
that God is there.)
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!–
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
(He’s telling us where we don’t find God
or answers about Him)
The angels keep their ancient places–
Turn but a stone and start a wing!
'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangèd faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.
(And he tells us still more about what direction not
to look in)
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry–and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
(I think what he’s talking about here is being
on the edge of death. He’s maybe nearly overdosed
drugs. He might be suicidal. He’s near death or wishing
he was dead. He’s in horrible despair and pain.
He’s given up on life and him self.)
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry–clinging to Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Genesareth, but Thames!
(As he lay taking his final breaths
whether of literal air or of hope; and
as his eyes begin to close for the final time
he looks upon Thames and sees Jesus walking on
the water toward him coming to rescue, save, and heal
him. Someone who is the lowest kind of person (in his own
mind) is deemed so precious that Christ Himself condescends to
come and attend to his need)
I can’t get through this poem with out a tissue box. The last part of it I understand very very very very well indeed.
Did have.
There’s also another Thomson, James Thompson, whose City of Dreadful Night offers a despairing atheist perspective on the dear old town…
- At length he paused: a black mass in the gloom,
A tower that merged into the heavy sky;
Around, the huddled stones of grave and tomb:
Some old God’s-acre now corruption’s sty:
He murmured to himself with dull despair,
Here Faith died, poisoned by this charnel air.* - Then turning to the right went on once more
And travelled weary roads without suspense;
And reached at last a low wall’s open door,
Whose villa gleamed beyond the foliage dense:
He gazed, and muttered with a hard despair,
Here Love died, stabbed by its own worshipped pair.*
It’s not unlong, but I can see influences on the fin-de-siècle poets later, including Wilde, and Lionel Johnson, whose greatest poem is a meditation on the statue of the Great King at… Charing Cross.
By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross
SOMBRE and rich, the skies,
Great glooms, and starry plains;
Gently the night wind sighs;
Else a vast silence reigns.
…
*Armoured he rides, his head
Bare to the stars of doom;
He triumphs now, the dead,
Beholding London’s gloom. *
Dear friend,
I’m uncertain as to what most English would mean by it. I think Francis Thompson’s use of it would be the equivalent to the American term “Skid Row”.
Charing Cross is the last of a series of crosses, known as 'Eleanor crosses, built by Edward I after the death of his wife, Queen Eleanor of Castile. Theirs was an unusually happy marriage (they has 16 children) and Edward was distraught when she died on her way to join him in Scotland, in November 1290.
The grief-stricken Edward ordered her embalmed, and her entrails were buried at Lincoln Cathedral. Her body was then carried in a somber procession to Westminster Abbey in London.
At each place where the procession stopped for the night, Edward had built a memorial cross in her honour. They are not cross shaped though, more like monuments. Today only the crosses at Waltham Cross (Hertfordshire), Geddington, and Hardingstone (both Northamptonshire) remain. The cross at Charing was demolished in 1647; it stood where there is now a statue of King Charles I on a horse at the north end of Whitehall. A replica of this cross was erected in the forecourt of Charing Cross station in 1863.
The locations of the 12 crosses were as follows: Lincoln, Grantham, Stamford, Geddington, Northampton, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St Albans, Waltham, Westcheap, and Charing.
She has a tomb in Westminster Abbey, but a similar one at Lincoln was, sadly, destroyed by Cromwell’s men. A replica was built in Victorian times, based on the 17th century engravings.
I have visited the surviving three crosses and I believe that they may be getting some much needed restoration. Hard to believe that all this happened over 700 years ago.
So Charing Cross is actually quite a romantic place really.
There’s nothing skid rowish about Charing Cross. There’s no ambiguity for English readers – it’s a specific place in London, and the marker for the centre of London.
The Victorian replica of the cross can be seen to the right of this photo of Charing Cross Station.
I was there nine months ago and there were lots of book stores. You couldn’t walk a block without running into multiple shops.
You may be thinking of retail modern bookstores, which don’t count. Although before my time. Charing Cross would probably have had over 100 book shops in the 1940s and '50s. Ten years ago I reckoned it about 15. More have fallen since.
Second-hand bookshops. where I spent as much of my youth as I possibly could have been dying over Britain for the last decade. Often replaced by charity shops, which sell seond-hand modern paperbacks. I can count three closures around here in five years.
We are in the last days of the bookshop. Gradually, they have been disappearing from our high streets and melting away into oblivion. Sometimes it can be hard to detect the sense of decay as you browse around Waterstones or…I’m struggling here. With their rich array of published authors to choose from and three-for-two deals the market looks healthy. People are reading books in vast quantities every year and yet the end is in sight.
Upper Street in Islington – one area you’d think could sustain a good second-hand bookshop – no longer has one and Charing Cross road has few of the shops left that once made it famous as a Mecca for collectors.
-
Secondhand and antiquarian bookshops are undoubtedly an endangered species. It used to be the case that, travelling round the country, most market towns and villages would have a used bookshop, where a grumpy and omniscient proprietor would hold court, and it might be fun to browse or to hunt for bargains. You’ll remember the sort of place: bit cramped and dusty, with shelves categorised by type of book: old sets, antiquarian books in tired leather bindings, separate sections for poetry, travel books, art books and catalogues for long-forgotten shows, perhaps a (locked) glass case with some “rare” books in it, usually a back room in which the dealer kept his uncatalogued books, recent acquisitions, and a handful of the most expensive items, which he guarded as if it were Fort Knox.*
PhotoStories | The Book Shops of Charing Cross Road
You can see they mostly sell modern crap. And quite expensive it is. For the same purchasing power you could buy an 18th century work in a leather binding back them.
I ran across exactly two “retail modern” large bookshops—Foyles and Blackwells, if I recall correctly. The rest were specialty stores, second-hand, and antiquarian.
Foyles seems to be going from strength to strength. The replaced their old store on Charing Cross Rd with a new building a few doors down. It is huge and they seem to have a full program of readings, book launches and other events. They saw off bagatelles like Borders and they give Amazon a run for their money. Books shops are under pressure, for sure, but they are still to be found and they can win new customers if they innovate.
For the crusty traditional bookshop experience maybe a short break in Hay on Wye is what you need.
Charing Cross road still has enough places for a good afternoons browsing.
If you love books - go to the Hay festival. It is a wonderful place for any bibliophile.
A guide to the bookshops of London’s Charing Cross Road and Cecil Court ( 2013 ), a tiny travel webpage lists them — and remember this is for a city of 13 million, with no second-hand bookshops much in the suburbs, and remember there used to be hundreds.
Foyles
Soho Original Books ( part sex shop )
Blackwells ( academic )
Lovejoys ( part sex shop )
Koenig’s
Quinto & Francis Edward
Henry Pordes
Any Amount of Books
And over in Cecil Court 4 specialist bookshops, motoring, music etc…
Getting a bit off-topic; but – no matter how scarce second-hand bookshops may be getting in London – I find myself no friend to the above-bolded outfit. My experience with it happened several decades ago; and I see cerebrally, that I can be absurdly hyper-sensitive and timid. Nonetheless, what I gut-feel re this establishment, is not positive.
I was looking for a rather foolish-and-frivolous book, published circa a hundred years ago as of now – hoping that even if the shop did not have a copy, they might be able to give me some kind of a “lead”. I went into Henry Pordes: the guy then “on duty” in the shop, was deep in a snotty-and-snarky-and intellectually-superiorly-sounding conversation with a chum, and had no attention to spare for a potential customer. This went on for some minutes, with me being totally ignored. I got – rightly or wrongly – the “vibe” that if this fellow ever found time to acknowledge my existence: the thing that I was enquiring after, would cause him to dismiss me, with total lack of interest or helpfulness, with a more-politely-worded variation on what would boil down to, “fuck off and die, you brain-dead imbecile”. Consequently, I ended up walking out of the shop without any attempt to engage with this individual.
I “see with my head”, that it could very well be that in the intervening decades, this person (whom I might, in fact, have on-the-spot misjudged) went off to piss other people off, elsewhere; and that if I were to go into Henry Pordes tomorrow and tell the staff what I was looking for, I would receive great courtesy and helpfulness. Humans tend, though, to emotional reactions and prejudice, more than sense and logic and fairness; and I have spent the past few decades feeling that if Henry Pordes and all its contents were to go up in flames and be totally consumed thereby, I would feel pleased / satisfied / avenged.
The one at Waltham Cross is actually a Victorian replica, the original being inside the library if I recall.
Shopping for books in Foyles used to be an experience. Few of the staff knew anything about books (most of them didn’t even speak English). They were poorly paid and treated abominably, thanks to Christina Foyle’s eccentric employment practices, which was why the staff turnover was so high and only foreign students would take the job. If you found, by some miracle, what you were looking for, you took it to the desk where the foreign student wrapped it in a paper bag and scribbled an invoice. You took the invoice to another part of the floor, or a different floor, where there was a cash desk manned by one of the few people who were trusted with money. Having paid, you took the receipt they issued back to where you had just come from, presented it and claimed the book.
In recent times Foyles had a modernisation and got rid of this sort of stuff at the same time. Haven’t seen the new premises yet. The Crossrail project and the redevelopment of Tottenham Court Road station have seen a lot of changes in this area.
Rents in Charing Cross Road have been greatly raised in recent years, and many of the second-hand bookshops have gone.