It’s not going to be a long post.
I’m besotted with Charles Dickens at the moment, listening to his novels as audiobooks and seeking out places he describes or experienced and thought I would check in on this old place.
Although it claims to be the model for the shop immortalised in Dickens novel The Old Curiosity Shop, this almost certainly is not. It is however one of, if not the most ancient of all London shops having survived the Great Fire of 1666 and the attention of the Luftwaffe in the Second World War. Today there is a huge buidling project next door to the shop which has caused chaos to Portsmouth Street. The little shop looks horribly exposed and vulnerable to anything dropped from the huge red crane that works overhead. The building work must be having a bad effect on trade of the shoe shop that now occupies 13/14 Portsmouth Street – it’s difficult to even enter the shop at the moment.
Fingers crossed that it survives this onslaught and continues its quirky existence amidst London’s ever-changing sky-line.
