She makes sure they have meat (sometimes fresh, sometimes in tins), eggs, raisins, and nylon stockings. In the early years of correspondence, Hanff sends food parcels to the staff at the bookstore, who are all still receiving rations. London is everything she hoped for and more. She is disappointed by multiple martinis, meets fans who wish to show her around, and drinks in pubs where Shakespeare once did. She eats lobster thermidor, visits theatres, and walks down Charing Cross Road (the bookstore sadly no longer exists by the time she travels over). Her time in London allows her to finally explore the city she had dreamt of for so long: “the England of English literature”. The edition I read happily also includes Hanff’s follow-up, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, which chronicles her first trip to London, nearly 25 years after she started writing to Frank Doel. I desperately wanted to meet these two mid-20th century pen pals, corresponding across the Atlantic through letters, books and food. I read it while journeying home, and felt, immediately, that I had found my people.

I didn’t pick it up in time, but I took it down from my friend Liv’s bookshelves last week. Very quickly I felt certain that I would be here indefinitely I had found the place I was supposed to be.īefore I visited California recently, someone recommended I find a copy of 84, Charing Cross Road, a series of letters between a New York bibliophile and a London man working in an antiquarian bookshop. And, despite feeling homesick for my family in Brisbane, it really did. I had formed such a clear image of it in my head and knew, somehow, that it was going to feel like home.

I had dreamt of it my entire life: of visiting the park where the Darling children played, the streets the Artful Dodger ran down, the station that gave Paddington Bear his name.

84 charing cross books