Booksellers row: The tiny London street filled with bookshops

We speak to some of the most famous book shops in the capital, on a magical London street.

Transcript

00:00 This is Cecil Court, one of London's hidden gems. Its nickname is Booksellers Row,

00:06 with bookshops on the street that are over 100 years old.

00:11 I think it's a rather lovely thing, you know, there aren't that many bookshops

00:16 concentrated into one particular area in London anymore, and although Charing Cross

00:20 Road used to be full of the most exquisite bookshops all the way up and

00:25 down Charing Cross Road, this is now the one tiny area that's left, and we were

00:30 the original, this bookshop in particular, was the origins of Foyle's Bookshop,

00:34 which was the largest bookshop in the world at one point, but which is now a

00:39 little bit further up on Charing Cross Road, but it started in our shop.

00:43 So it was founded in 1989 by a man called Kenneth Fuller, and we've

00:49 specialised in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass ever since we

00:53 opened. We have an original Dalek from 1975, and we buy and sell all sorts of

01:01 different rare children's books dating back to the late 17th, early 18th

01:07 centuries right through to now. We have a lot of people who come in asking about

01:11 Harry Potter or Grimm's Fairy Tales or the Moomin books, and we have plenty of

01:17 those examples as well as many other things, so it's a lovely bookshop to work in.

01:22 At the moment we have a lot more people bringing books into the

01:26 shop to sell rather than the people want to buy. Well, we're in a

01:33 recession. It's the most exquisite book, it's Grey's Elegy, illustrated by a man

01:40 called Owen Jones, but it has the most exciting, most beautiful cover, which

01:47 looks like carved wood but it's actually leather, tooled leather, and it was

01:52 published in 1842, 1846, and it's just one of the most exquisite illuminated

01:58 manuscripts I've ever seen. It was published as an illuminated manuscript

02:02 but it is printed, but it has the most delightful work in it. I'd be heartbroken

02:08 if someone wanted to buy it. I love

02:12 sitting on some of the stock we have and I enjoy it. Yeah, so Watkins Bookshop

02:18 started 130 years ago down on the Strand near Trafalgar Square and moved to this

02:24 location about a hundred years ago basically, and they've been doing pretty

02:29 much the same sort of books which are esoteric, occult, comparative religion and

02:34 all the sort of connected subjects around those. People who love this type

02:40 of subject, they definitely know Watkins and we are one of

02:46 the three bookshops of London. Also Treadwells and Atlantis Bookshop are both

02:53 up by the British Museum, so we cover similar subjects, but we

02:58 very much are proud of the range of our material.