Cecil Court: London's Victorian Bookshop Alley, and the Diagon Alley Myth

There is a fifty-yard alley between Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane where you can buy a signed first edition, a Weimar banknote, a Victorian magic-lantern slide, an eighteenth-century sea chart and a book on ceremonial magic, all without crossing a road. No cars. No chain shops. No coffee. Just twenty-odd bow-fronted Victorian windows, most of them lit from inside, most of them selling one very specific thing extremely well.

Cecil Court is the best five minutes in central London, and thousands of people walk past the end of it every hour on their way to Leicester Square. Here is what is actually in it, why it survived when everything around it did not, and the one thing everybody says about it that is not true.

Why This Street Still Looks Like This

The short answer is one landlord. The land belongs to the Cecil family, the Earls and Marquesses of Salisbury of Hatfield House, and it is named after Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury. They still own it. A single freeholder in the West End is now so rare that it has effectively preserved the street: no unit has ever been merged into a bigger one, no rent review has cleared out a dealer to make room for a phone shop.

The court itself dates back to the 1690s, though what you are looking at is late Victorian. The 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, then Prime Minister, had the old buildings pulled down and rebuilt between the late 1880s and 1894, producing Burleigh Mansions and Charing Cross Mansions with shops at street level and flats and offices above. Those shopfronts, the curved glass, the fluted pilasters, the gold serif lettering on painted timber, are the originals.

It is sometimes called Booksellers' Row, which it inherited rather than earned. The original Booksellers' Row was Holywell Street, demolished for the Aldwych and Kingsway scheme, and the displaced dealers came here.

Mozart Lodged Here, Aged Eight

At number 9, then the premises of a barber and staymaker called John Couzin, the Mozart family took lodgings in 1764. Wolfgang was eight. Tickets for his first London concerts were sold over the counter of the shop downstairs, which is a detail I think about a lot.

He is thought to have written his first symphony, K.16, during this period, while his father Leopold was ill and the children were forbidden to touch the keyboard in case the noise disturbed him. He also met Johann Christian Bach in London, which mattered rather more to his music than anything that happened in Cecil Court. There is a plaque, unveiled in 2011 by Simon Callow.

Flicker Alley: When Cecil Court Was the British Film Industry

This is the bit almost nobody knows. From 1897, the newly rebuilt shops filled up not with booksellers but with film companies. At its peak around 1900 to 1914, there were more than forty film-related businesses packed into this one alley, including Gaumont, Nordisk, American Vitagraph, Hepworth and Williamson. It was the first real concentration of the film trade in Britain, and it had a nickname: Flicker Alley.

The trade eventually moved up to Wardour Street, where it stayed for most of the twentieth century, and the books moved in behind it. John Watkins opened his esoteric bookshop here in 1901, and it is still trading. The Foyle brothers opened their first West End shop here in 1904 before decamping to Charing Cross Road. Arthur Ransome, later of Swallows and Amazons, worked for the Unicorn Press in the court around 1901.

There is also a very good eighteenth-century scandal. In 1735 a fire started in Elizabeth Calloway's brandy shop and destroyed three or four houses here and up to fifteen in neighbouring St Martin's Court in about two hours. Calloway had heavily over-insured her stock and had arranged to be elsewhere. She was tried and acquitted, to widespread disbelief. Queen Caroline sent fifty guineas to the victims. Hogarth's mother, who lived nearby, died the following morning of what a contemporary account calls a fright.

The Shops, Door by Door

There are around twenty-three units and the specialisation is the whole point. A partial walk along it:

Alice Through The Looking Glass at number 14, a dark blue front with gold lettering and a painted Alice in the window, dealing in Lewis Carroll: first editions, rare illustrated editions, objects. Exactly as charming as it sounds.

Goldsboro Books at 23, signed first editions of contemporary fiction, which is a serious collectors' business dressed as a normal bookshop. Their window changes constantly and is always worth a look.

Watkins Books at 19 to 21, founded in 1901 and one of the oldest esoteric bookshops in the world. Occult, mysticism, mind-body-spirit, and the only shop in the court reliably open on a Sunday.

Travis & Emery at 17, out-of-print and antiquarian music: scores, libretti, opera programmes, music prints. There is a bench outside it, which on a warm day is the best seat in the street.

Colin Narbeth & Son at 20, on this street since 1987, dealing in world paper money. The window is full of defunct currencies, and it is far more absorbing than a window of banknotes has any right to be. Stephen Wheeler Medals and Coin Heritage share the premises.

Panter & Hall at 22 to 24, a teal-green corner gallery showing modern and contemporary British and Scottish painting. Marchpane at 16 for children's and illustrated books. Storey's at 1 to 3 for antique maps, prints and caricatures.

Plus Sotheran's, Bryars & Bryars, Tenderbooks, November Books, Daniel Bexfield Antiques, the London Medal Company, Darnley Fine Art and the Art Deco Gallery.

Two losses worth knowing about before you go looking: Peter Ellis at 18 no longer has a shop and trades online, and David Drummond's Pleasures of Past Times, the theatrical ephemera shop, closed in January 2020 after decades. Tindley & Chapman now trades as Tindley & Everett.

About That Diagon Alley Claim

Every Harry Potter walking tour in London stops here and tells you this is the inspiration for Diagon Alley. It is not true, and the person who would know has said so. In May 2020, responding on Twitter to fans arguing about which London street inspired it, J.K. Rowling wrote that she had no idea how many different streets were claiming to be the inspiration, and that neither Diagon Alley nor Knockturn Alley was based on any real place. No Potter film was shot here either. The Leaky Cauldron's entrance was filmed at Leadenhall Market.

I mention it not to be a killjoy but because the street does not need it. It looks the part, obviously. Narrow, Victorian, lit, full of odd specialist shops and old books. That resemblance is the reason the myth stuck. But the real history, forty film companies, an eight-year-old Mozart, an arson trial, and a 1901 occult bookshop still trading, is stranger than the invented one. Incidentally, Marchpane does stock rare signed Harry Potter first editions, so the pilgrimage is not entirely wasted.

Visiting Cecil Court: Practical Notes

Where it is: Cecil Court, London WC2N 4HE, running between Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane. It is L-shaped and pedestrian, so you cannot drive through it and will not hear traffic in it.

Getting there: Leicester Square is the nearest tube station, about fifty yards. Come out of exit 1, turn left down Charing Cross Road towards Trafalgar Square, and the court is on your left. Charing Cross and Piccadilly Circus are both a few minutes further.

Opening: most shops run roughly from half past ten or eleven in the morning until six or seven in the evening, Monday to Saturday. Most are shut on Sundays. Watkins is the reliable Sunday exception, opening from midday. Colin Narbeth opens from eleven to five, Monday to Saturday.

Cost: free to walk down, which is the correct answer to the question. Browsing is expected, and nobody will hurry you. Prices in the shops run from a couple of pounds for a print to five figures for a first edition.

Food: there is none in the court itself. That is deliberate, and it is part of why the street feels the way it does. St Martin's Lane at one end and Charing Cross Road at the other have everything.

Best time to go: late afternoon in winter, when the windows are lit, and the street is empty, or a weekday morning if you actually want to talk to dealers. Avoid Saturday afternoon unless you like being in a queue of people photographing a shopfront.

How long to allow: fifteen minutes if you walk through. Two hours if you go into three shops, which you will.

Nearby: the National Portrait Gallery and Trafalgar Square are five minutes south, Covent Garden five minutes east, and Chinatown five minutes north. For more London bookshops, Hatchards on Piccadilly is the oldest in the country, and Daunt Books in Marylebone is the most beautiful; if you want a reading room rather than a shop, the Maughan Library is extraordinary. And Cecil Court earns a place on any list of London's prettiest streets.

Go in, pick something up, ask what it is. Everybody behind those counters knows a frankly unreasonable amount about one subject, and most of them are delighted to be asked.

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