What is now Charing Cross road was originally two narrow streets in the West End, Crown Street and Castle Street. The development of Regent Street in the mid-18th century coincided with not only the building up of great fields west of the area but also Westminster Bridge which was built as central London and the wider estuary's second bridge after more than a century of pressure, in 1750. These pressures therefore congested the north-south axis of the inner West End almost as much as the relieved London Bridge area. Specifically a major increase in traffic occurred around Piccadilly Circus, Charing Cross and Oxford Street, much of it destined from/to Tottenham Court Road, Bloomsbury and nearby routes to all northerly directions. Charing Cross Road was therefore developed, in conjunction with Shaftesbury Avenue, by the Metropolitan Board of Works under an 1877 Act of Parliament. The Act's total costs, including demolition and rebuilding of many rows of buildings across London was £778,238. The two streets and others such as the Thames Embankment, Northumberland Avenue and the Kingsway-Aldwych superstructure were built to improve traffic flow through central London. The scheme abolished some of the worst slums in London which delayed progress in construction while they were rehoused. The new road met the disapprobation of Mervyn Macartney who said of it in an 1899 article: "Perhaps the worst is Charing Cross Road. It has no beginning and no end. Amorphous, hideous in its tortuous course, it is a monument of the ineptitude, parsimony, and incompetence of its creators."
Bookshops
Charing Cross Road is renowned for its specialist and second-hand bookshops. The section from Leicester Square Underground station to Cambridge Circus is home to specialist bookshops, and more general second-hand and antiquarian shops such as Quinto Bookshop, Henry Pordes and Any Amount of Books. Smaller second-hand and specialist antiquarian bookshops can be found on the adjoining Cecil Court. bookshop on the west side of Charing Cross Road in 2006 The northern section between Cambridge Circus and Oxford Street includes more generalist bookshops such as the venerable Foyles. A long-standing correspondence between New York City-based author Helene Hanff and the staff of a bookshop on the street, Marks & Co., was the inspiration for the book 84, Charing Cross Road. The book was made into a 1987 film starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins and also into a play and a BBCradio drama. 84 Charing Cross Road, located just north of Cambridge Circus, has not been a bookshop for many years; at street level it is now a restaurant, but the upper levels of the building remain as originally constructed. A small brass plaque, noted by Hanff in her book "Q's Legacy", remains on the stone pilaster facing Charing Cross Road.
