#99 A Slow Sunday Scroll ☕️

a celebration of helene hanff & london's bloomsbury

May 24, 2026

∙ Paid

Last week I took part in an event at Foyles on Charing Cross Road celebrating one of my favourite books of all time, 84, Charing Cross Road — a short collection of letters between New Yorker Helene Hanff and Frank Doel, who worked at the antiquarian London bookshop Marks & Co until it closed down in the 1970s. There is a plaque commemorating the Marks & Co. location (which is now a McDonald’s.) It reads:

84 Charing Cross Road. The booksellers Marks & Co. were on this site which became world renowned through the book by Helene Hanff.

The author Virginia Evans, who wrote the recent smash-hit The Correspondent, credits 84 Charing Cross Road as being a big inspiration. Who doesn’t love reading cosy and humorous letters written by quirky older women?

The event was organised by my new friend Rebeka Russell, founder of Manderley Press, who recently released a beautiful new edition of Underfoot in Show Business — Helene Hanff’s endearing and witty memoir about her “failed” theatre career before she became a beloved author.

A few years later, in 1973, Helene Hanff wrote a follow-up memoir, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. She finally makes a trip to London after all those years pining for it. She was finally going to visit all the landmarks of London, even though her beloved Marks & Co. was sadly no more. She stayed in a hotel in Bloomsbury, home to many of her favourite English writers. Clearly, Hanff LOVED London.

I was recently invited to stay at a hotel in Bloomsbury, called The Academy, and it felt like some sort of alignment. I’d been so engrossed in the pages of the book; imagining Helene Hanff roaming around Bloomsbury and discovering the historical landmarks of her favourite British literary heroes (like Virginia Woolf who was part of The Bloomsbury Set and Charles Dickens who lived and worked in Bloomsbury).

And now here I was: in a hotel room on Gower Street covered in blue plaques. I thought of Helene Hanff. When I arrived, there was an old Imperial typewriter on the desk and an old school green lamp. (The exact lamp that I swear features in Frank Doel’s office in the film version of 84 Charing Cross Road.) I enjoyed walking around Russell Square in the sunshine; discovering Treadwell Books, the Brunswick Bookshop and an excellent second-hand bookshop called Skoob Books.

For years I’ve slipped into taking London for granted. Now I’m trying to look up more and notice things, as Helene would have done.

Anne Bancroft played Helene Hanff in the film adaptation of *84 Charing Cross Road* in 1987

Another London-y thing: I was invited to a garden party at Buckingham Palace last week to celebrate The King’s Trust’s 50th anniversary. It was a really lovely afternoon of walking the palace grounds with my husband, and I wore a jacket that used to belong to his nan: bright green with black faux fur trim around the sleeves. We bumped into an old friend Mel Hemsley and her husband Henry (who we also saw at the last King’s Trust gathering in 2018) and we ate a lot of miniature scones and tea and little cucumber sandwiches. It rained (and hailed) but then a huge rainbow showed up and the whole thing was a fun experience, even walking back to the tube under umbrellas through a bright and lush Green Park.

And one more London rec, especially for a little writing staycay. The Hoxton in Shepherd’s Bush. My room was a ‘cosy park view’—so I had lovely green views outside the window and the room service was really good and speedy. I finished a rough first draft of a book here. I live East; so I just had to sit on the Central Line for half an hour and voilà — a little city break in my own city.

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