A famous West End institution is reborn on the site of another

Foyles’ new premises on the former site of Central Saint Martins art school

Charing Cross Road used to be built as much from books as it was from bricks. Outside almost every shop were barrows and ad hoc shelves loaded with second-hand volumes, while the windows behind them were stuffed with anything from pulp novels to rare tooled leather bindings. Evocative photos from the 1930s show men in macs browsing beneath tired awnings, lights glowing warmly in the night-time fog.

The West End’s book trade was, like everything in England, layered through with class. The posh bookshop was Hatchard’s in Piccadilly (established 1797); Charing Cross Road was for cheap second-hand stuff. At its centre was Foyles, billed a century ago as “the largest bookshop in the world” and still, at least in terms of the number of different titles stocked, the UK’s most expansive. The multilevel store, now the flagship of a seven-strong chain, once resembled a part of the Soviet Union. Nearby Collett’s might have been the left’s favoured bookshop but it was Foyles that retained the extraordinary Moscow-style triple queueing system: customers had to line up to receive a chit, then again to pay at an Edwardian-style till, then once more to collect the book from where they had started.

While this arrangement was designed to have as few booksellers as possible with their hands in the till, it failed spectacularly. Thefts were legendary, by both surly staff and customers (Elizabeth Taylor once lifted a copy of AE Housman’s A Shropshire Lad as she was being snapped by the paparazzi). Foyles was a kind of familiar chaos, with books piled up on stairwells and in cupboards. What you were looking for might just as likely be under a table as on a shelf, or at the bottom of a huge pile, layered with dust and sun-bleached. But it would, almost certainly, be there.

Today, a generation away from those arcane practices, the bookshop is reopening in a huge new building a couple of doors away from its historic home. I met up with Christopher Foyle, the latest family member to own the store, in a cosy timber-panelled corner room looking out on to Manette Street and Charing Cross Road. “This used to be my aunt’s sitting room” he tells me, referring to the formidable and eccentric Christina Foyle, who ran the shop like a dictator for more than half a century. “After she died [in 1999] it was left behind a locked door and shut away, filled with books and papers – no one even knew it was here.”...Continue Reading

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