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JeffV
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 09:49 am: | |
This may be lazy, but, then, I don't see any travel guide giving me the kind of info I need. I'm writing a story in which a character is constricted to traveling up and down Charing Cross Road and its tributaries--a couple blocks to either side. As well as on the road Charing Cross Road becomes farther up. (Tottenham? Probably not. Please do laugh.)
Anyway, this is what I need: What would a non-tourist discover about that area if they lived there long enough? Just a few specific details. I am going to make some stuff up, of course, but any info from someone familiar with those environs (I've been on vacation there twice, but that's not enough) would be great. Whether it's a hidden street, an alcove, a pub, or even just a secret mural on a wall, or some personage well-known in that neighborhood.
Thanks.
JeffV |
Richard Calder
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 10:29 am: | |
Jeff -- Actually Charing Cross Road *does* become Tottenham Court Road (that is, after you come to Oxford Street and pass Tottenham Court Road tube station). If you're travelling up Charing Cross Road from the Strand, Embankment, or Charing Cross mainline station (you'd be travelling south-north) the streets on your right will take you to Covent Garden. The streets on the left would take you into Leicester Square, Chinatown, and Soho. Plenty of famous people have lived in the area. Derek Jarman once lived in a Charing Cross Road flat. (And had a high time of it, I believe, when Robert Mapplethorpe came to stay ...)
Some unspecified building in Cambridge Circus was (if I remember correctly) used by John Le Carre as a fictional HQ for MI6.
There's not many interesting pubs of note -- however, I could give you details of pubs in Soho and Fitzrovia that have plenty of character. Denmark Street is 'Tin Pan Alley' -- a street filled with music shops and publishers. There's Centre Point (a rare example of a tall building or 'skyscraper' [though not tall by American standards!] in London's West End). And there's plenty of pedestrian walkways lined with second-hand and antiquarian bookshops.
I know the area pretty much like the back of my hand (indeed, I'll be there tomorrow), so if you have specific questions, or if I can help in any other way regarding research, please e-mail me.
Richard
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Tamar
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 10:49 am: | |
Don't forget the theatres, and the odd bright energy there is about a London theatre when you pass by it at night and there's a performance going on inside... |
Liz Williams
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 11:57 am: | |
Up Cecil Court there's an excellent occult bookshop which has been there for years, called Watkins. Murder One (one of the main genre bookshops) is up CC Road under a block of modern flats or something, and as Richard says, it isn't far from Soho, where such drunken luminaries as Dylan Thomas used to hang out.
Quite a few old pubs along the actual road itself: typical London, with etched windows and high lacquered ceilings in various shades of filth.
Pubs such as the French House are just around the corner, and so is Valerie's, which is a patisserie dating back to the Fifties and possibly a lot longer. I think that's in Old Compton Street. To get there, I go through a little modern piece of Chinatown, where there are lots of veg stalls, and where I once saw a fashion shoot with a model so inhuman that I initially mistook her for a plastic dummy, until she moved.
Then you get to some modern Chinese gates (you'll know the kind - a big arch) and lots of restaurants with steamrollered chickens in the windows.
Usual scene: filthy streets and gutters. I always manage to step in something nasty.
This is all from memory, and my memory is notoriously buggered. Richard can probably fill in the gaps better than I can. However, if you need to know more about people, I have a non fiction book on Fitzrovia which deals with various 20th century literary poetasters, novelists, artists and drunks. Oh wait a mo - I'm thinking of the British SF Scene. (Just kidding). |
Cheryl Morgan
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 01:00 pm: | |
You need http://www.streetmap.co.uk/. Ask it for Leicester Square and you'll get all of Charing Cross road ands its environs.
There's bad stuff as well as good. The hideous Centre Point, and Foyles, possibly the world's worst bookstore.
There's a club just south of TCR on the west side that does lots of gay party nights. Village People. That sort of thing. Probably very interesting queues outside on those nights.
Parallel to the west is Greek Street, home of Milroy's, the best source of whisky outside Scotland. Also the Gay Hussar restaurant (which has been gay long before the word had anything to do with sexual preference), a favorite hang out of left wing thinkers such as Michael Foot. Polish food. Very good, I'm told.
China Town is very close too. A resident will quickly discover that the flashy restaurants around the arch cater for tourists. For the good Chinese food you go to the little places in Lisle Street which are converted houses: several floors, half a dozen tables on each, narrow stairs. Look for places serving wind dried duck.
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Liz Williams
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 01:32 pm: | |
Foyles.
Just baffled me. I've never bought a thing in there. |
John Coulthart
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 02:01 pm: | |
My impression of CC Road as a non-metropolitan is that the traffic is as hazardous as London usually gets and is especially bad because the pavements are quite narrow in places. Kamikaze taxis bearing down at 70 mph. And the streets around Centre Point and that whole crossing area are possibly the filthiest in the city, seems like a thousand years of fast food and dead pigeons have been ground into the paving stones. I like the side streets, however, always lots of small cafes and things.
Denmark Street is home to Helter Skelter, London's music bookshop. Some of the remainder shops opposite Foyle's are okay as well. And I have an especial fondness for Foyle's since it was the biggest bookshop in the world once. I was amazed when I first went there as a kid on a school trip: a shop with several floors selling nothing but books. And most of the place looked like something from H.G. Wells' shop days, loads of wood and brass fittings.
Greek Street is the location of some of the events in Max Beerbohm's Enoch Soames. |
Liz Williams
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 02:05 pm: | |
A thousand years of fast food. What a thought. Actually it's probably more like 2 thousand, given the Romans and their fishpaste addiction.
At a complete tangent - I am really interested in the history of food. There's some quite good stuff in the Museum of London relating to Roman diet. |
JeffV
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 02:55 pm: | |
I think that's Brendan's cue--he knows a lot about the Roman diet...unless, Liz, you'd like to enlighten us? Or disgust us, rather? 
Thanks, John. This is exactly what I need--various perspectives. Each of you tends to emphasize something different.
JeffV |
Liz Williams
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 04:05 pm: | |
Nope, Brendan can fire away. I have only a very general view of the Roman diet (time spent on archaeological sites). |
Cheryl Morgan
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 04:09 pm: | |
Hey, one of my Roman cookbooks includes several receipes for cheesecake. Decandent maybe, but disgusting no.
Of course they ate squid too. And cuttlefish.
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Liz Williams
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 04:19 pm: | |
>Decandent maybe, but disgusting no.
Unless it's squid cheesecake. |
Cheryl Morgan
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 04:43 pm: | |
Squid cheesecake, now there's an idea...
No luck yet, but I have found a restaurant in Florida that offers caramel coated tentacles as a dessert.
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JeffV
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 04:51 pm: | |
Cheryl:
Thanks for your input and the link re Charing Cross, etc.
Of course, I refuse to believe you re caramel coated tentacles.
JeffV |
Cheryl Morgan
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 05:11 pm: | |
Would I lie to you, Jeff?
The restaurant is called Squid Row, and you can find their menu here: http://keysdining.com/squidrow/dinnermenu.htm. They do chocolate covered oysters too.
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JV
| | Posted on Monday, June 23, 2003 - 05:28 pm: | |
Oh...my...god... |
Liz Williams
| | Posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2003 - 12:41 am: | |
This is much, much more than I want to know at this time of the morning.
Jeff, what is it with all of us? It starts off at lunchtime with a query about London street plans and by the following morning, we're onto chocolate octopi. |
Colin Brush
| | Posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2003 - 02:35 am: | |
Now, this does virtually every street except Charing Cross Road and Tottenham Court Road, but it gives you photographs of each side of the street in the environs:
http://www.streetsensation.co.uk/
Obviously, it's just shops, but if you use it together with streetmap (a godsend that site) it might give you some idea of the area (especially the bit around Seven Dials).
As for thoughts, having worked in this area on and off for six of the ten years I've been in London, the first thing that struck me about the area, and still does, is the rank smell of fat which oozes out of the drains. There are so many crappy restaurants and fast foot outlets in and around Leicester Square that special cleaning crews apparently have to go and remove the rancid oil and grease that accumulates and blocks up the sewerage system. It is especially bad late in the day in summer.
Also, the phone boxes in Charing Cross Road have their insides, more than any other street in London, covered in postcards advertising the services of ladies, TVs, transexuals etc - all just minutes away. The phone companies apparently employ people who remove these bills daily - though I've never seen that happen - which would imply that people stick them up again just as quickly (though I've never seen that occur either).
The bookshops are fabulous. I love the higgldy-piggledy diversity of Murder One, but also the crumbling basements of the secondhand places across the road. And the way their proprietors look at you like you don't know your arse from your elbow and couldn't afford the really important merchandise (whatever obscure, occultish stuff that might be) that they keep behind the counter for those in the know.
Mmm. I'm not entirely sure what this makes me sound like. Some grease-sniffing connoisseur of prostitutes' calling cards who likes nothing more than to frood around in the dusty basements of sinister booksellers?
There are worse callings, I suppose. |
Liz Williams
| | Posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2003 - 03:07 am: | |
>Some grease-sniffing connoisseur of prostitutes' calling cards who likes nothing more than to frood around in the dusty basements of sinister booksellers?
You will love Milford, Colin. You'll fit right in! |
Colin Brush
| | Posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2003 - 06:48 am: | |
Is it too late to get my money back? The last thing someone in my delicate psychological condition needs is more of 'that sort' egging him on. Friends and family already despair.
I don't think Milford's a writing workshop at all. You people are luring innocents away from their loved ones and practising your dark arts upon them.
When I come back, people will look at me strangely and many years later say to themselves: 'He was never the same after that week in Milford. He's Colin, but not the Colin of before.'
I'm worried about the difference between Pre-Milford Colin and Post-Milford Colin. It worries me greatly. |
Liz Williams
| | Posted on Tuesday, June 24, 2003 - 07:34 am: | |
MWHAHAHA!
You have divined our cunning plan (the Royal 'We', this is). You are quite right. We take copies of writers and render the originals down into a serum of their distilled ideas, with which we inject ourselves.
Don't worry, though - they'll never notice the difference and may, indeed, find that you have become disquietingly normal. |
Martin
| | Posted on Wednesday, June 25, 2003 - 04:00 am: | |
I walk from Tottenham Court Road to Trafalgar Square down CC road and back every day. As others have said the rancid stench of the streets is pretty impressive, particularly at the TCR/CCR junction. Every morning there is an army of cleaners spraying and scrubbing the pavement but all it does is make the bottom of your trousers wet.
What a non-tourist would discover is that they violently hate tourists and that if you wish to use CCR as conduit to get from A to B you had better be prepared to walk on the curb/in the road/over people. TCR is quite wide and spacious but as soon as you cross the junction the buildings close in around you and everything becomes cramped. So really it should be synonymous with misanthropic rage.
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Roy Tuvey
| | Posted on Friday, December 16, 2005 - 10:19 am: | |
Are you still looking for Tin Alley Tales from The Fifties? I had a recording studio there 1953-1959, knew all the faces, remember many facts and stories.
Roy |
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