Photo Journal: Cecil Court Home To Rare Bookshops

Come along with me as we take a stroll down Cecil Court in London, the ultimate destination for art, antiques, books, culture, and curiosities in London

Cecil Court, in London’s west end is a treasure hunters paradise. The quaint street lined with rare bookshops, antiquities, art and the occult is a hidden gem that even most Londoners don’t know about. Dating back to the 17th century this unique shopping street feels like stepping into the past. Imagine with me for a moment, the eternal tread of Londoners trampling through this passage on the search for their next novel - or travel back in time and think of Mozart tinkering on his piano from one of the apartment windows above. This tiny street has a huge amount of history steeped within it's cobbles - let’s wander there together.

It doesn’t take any great leap of imagination to picture Hogarth using Cecil Court as a shortcut between his house in Leicester Square and his Academy in St Martin’s Lane, or Johnson and Boswell hurrying the other way, from Old Slaughter’s Coffee House to a meeting of the Club on Gerrard Street. On Tuesdays, in the years before the First World War, a group of poets including W.H. Davies, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Walter de la Mare, and Robert Frost would lunch at Mont Blanc restaurant on Gerrard Street before taking tea at St George’s Café on St Martin’s Lane, adjacent to the Coliseum: a gaggle of far from starving poets could have been a regular Tuesday sight for the shopkeepers of Cecil Court, as they passed through.  

Fortunately an extraordinary array of people have left evidence of more tangible associations with Cecil Court. It was the first London address of W.A. Mozart and his family, arguably where he composed his first symphony.

Film pioneers such as James Williamson and Cecil Hepworth regarded ‘Flicker Alley’ as the heart of the early British film trade; a young Arthur Ransome honed his writing skills while doing as little work as possible for Ernest Oldmeadow at the Unicorn Press; long-term residents of the flats above Cecil Court include T.S. Eliot and actors such as Ellen Terry, and patrons of the shops below range from Aleister Crowley to Graham Greene, by way of T.E. Lawrence.

Then there are the ordinary residents of Cecil Court – not necessarily famous but often remarkably interesting – including coiners, arsonists and radical atheists; finally there are the booksellers who have made Cecil Court their own, beginning with John Watkins and the brothers William and Gilbert Foyle in the earliest years of the twentieth century.

One of the newer additions to Cecil Court is Goldboro Books, an emporium of signed hardbacks. Here you can browse their wide selection of newly published signed novels from authors such as Pat Barker, Matt Haig and Jennifer Saint. They even have their rare and collectable section which includes first editions of literary greats such as Agatha Christie & Roald Dahl.

Head to Marchpane and delve into a eclectic bookshop filled with children’s books and ephemera. Find beloved copies of Winnie the Pooh, Alice In Wonderland and Beatrix Potter.

Beyond the crates of secondhand scores is Travis And Emery, specialists in out of print, second-hand and antiquarian music. If you close your eyes you can almost imagine Mozart rustling through the forgotten scores in the basement, gathering inspiration for his first symphony.

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