The Old Curiosity Shop: Hidden Gem In Central London
The Old Curiosity Shop can be found at 13–14 Portsmouth Street, Holborn , London.
The Old Curiosity Shop’ is a wood-beamed cottage, with an upper floor that slightly overhangs the pavement, like a piece of Tudor England.
Built around 1567, it's one of the oldest surviving buildings in central London and is said to have inspired a famous Charles Dickens novel.
It’s said that Charles Dickens visited the quaint shop on a number of occasions.
Although the name was added after the novel was released, it is thought to have become the inspiration for his 1841 novel, The Old Curiosity Shop.
By the 1930s, ‘The Old Curiosity Shop’ was essentially a Dickens-themed gift and general antiques shop, aimed at tourists (with a sister gift-shop beside Anne Hathaway’s cottage at Stratford-upon-Avon).
At one time it also functioned as a dairy on an estate given by King Charles II to one of his many mistresses.
It was built using timber from old ships, and thankfully survived the devastating bombs of the Second World War.
The shop was recently restored in 2023 to repair structural problems and will be rented out again as a shop.
According to the Dickens Museum, a series of press articles in the late-1883 reported that it was under threat of demolition, after a neighbouring building had partially collapsed.
The Daily Telegraph inaccurately claimed that the site was ‘long popularly identified with the “Old Curiosity Shop”’ and noted the irony of the threat of demolition coming at such a season (‘of all times in the year, seeing what DICKENS did for Christmas’).
American collectors of Dickensiana were purportedly ‘quite ready to purchase the ruins, and fix them up in Boston or Philadelphia’, while others demanded loose bricks as mementoes.
Such was the shop’s new-found fame that a stage version of The Old Curiosity Shop, scripted by Charles Dickens Jnr, already in pre-production at the Opera Comique hastily introduced and advertised a painting of the Portsmouth Street shop as the backdrop to one of the scenes.
Meanwhile, more reporters, sketch artists and photographers lined up outside to record this piece of ‘Dickens’s London’ before it vanished.
And yet it never did, it still stands strong today.
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was an English writer and social critic.
He is considered one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian era and created some of the world's best-known fictional characters.
His works, often serialised for publication, captured the social issues and conditions prevailing in 19th-century England.
Some of his most famous works include: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House.
His writing often addressed social injustices and the plight of the poor, drawing attention to the harsh conditions of the working class during the Industrial Revolution.
Dickens' vivid characters and intricate plots, combined with his keen observations of society, continue to captivate readers worldwide.
His works have had a lasting influence on literature, and his themes of social reform and compassion remain relevant today.
We strongly recommend visiting the Dickens Museum, situated at 48 Doughty Street, Dickens’s London home from 1837-1839.
He moved there with his wife Catherine and their eldest son Charlie, pictured below.
While living in Doughty Street, Dickens finished writing The Pickwick Papers, wrote Nicholas Nickleby and most famously of all, Oliver Twist.
These early publications made Dickens an international celebrity, even Queen Victoria was a fan!
After the Dickenses left Doughty Street, the property was largely used as a boarding house until the Dickens Fellowship purchased it as their headquarters in 1923.
The house opened to the public in 1925 and houses a significant collection linked to Dickens and his works.
Today the Charles Dickens Museum is set up as though Dickens himself had just left.
It appears as a fairly typical middle-class Victorian home, complete with furnishings, portraits and decorations which are known to have belonged to Dickens.
A visit to the museum allows you to step back into 1837 and to see a world which is at once both intimately familiar, yet astonishingly different.
A world in which one of the greatest writers in the English language, found his inspiration.
One recent review of The Old Curiosity Shop on TripAdvisor says: “Love this little shop...straight out of Dickens' novel.
”Tucked away in the midst of the London School of Economics and near Lincolns Inns Fields. Very picturesque.”
Another person added: “In some locations it would not stand out so remarkably but set here surrounded by modernity it is just that - a curiosity made famous by Charles Dickens.
”Not signposted and not so easy to find.
”However if in Lincolns Inn area then worth a small diversion to see.”
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