Cecil Court

Cecil Court is a pedestrian street with Victorian shop-frontages in Westminster, England, linking Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane.

One of the older thoroughfares in Covent Garden, Cecil Court dates to the end of the 17th century and earlier maps clearly identify a hedgerow running down the street's course.

Cecil Court bookseller Tim Bryars consulted original source material, including the parish rate books of the time and a number of antique maps, to establish where in the street the young Mozart lived.

The first film-related company arrived in Cecil Court in 1897, a year after the first demonstration of moving pictures in the United Kingdom and a decade before London's first purpose-built cinema opened its doors.

It was the location for the UK's first concentration of film-related businesses, which were almost exclusively new companies, bringing new skills to the industry and sharing products, resources, information and clientele (for example, dividing the costs of transporting the film reels themselves, and offering joint screenings to the showmen who hired them).

[8] In December 2012, Simon Callow returned to Cecil Court to unveil a plaque celebrating "Flicker Alley" and the street's significant role in the British film industry.

The street is still owned by the Cecil family and the buildings one can see today were laid out c. 1894 during the tenure of long-serving British Prime Minister Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury.

[9][10] On film, Cecil Court bookshops feature in Victim (1961), The Human Factor (1979), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), Miss Potter (2006) and Last Christmas (2019).