For a short street Earlham Street has a high concentration of very good shops. There's a branch of
Oddbins booze shop, a traditional
ironmonger, a
butcher, an oriental carpet shop and a couple of
newsagents. It also contains a branch of the
Dover Bookshop, with a huge collection of graphics and
copyright free image resources, cheap reprints of the
Andrew Lang fairy books, and more
origami manuals than you can shake a stick at.
It's also the home of one of the best
graphic design book shops in London,
magma, and one of the best
florists,
The Wild Bunch. (the florist is a store front and a collection of market stalls, with a gorgeous array of unusual flowers and fantastically helpful staff who are happy to put together the strangest combinations for you.)
The
market stalls that line one side of the street on Saturdays contain a mishmash of cheap and funky clothes, and cheap and ugly clothes, some
Hello Kitty goodies, some low-priced silver, and odds and ends of luggage.
There are some fabulous clothes shops too: quirky small ones, as well as
Diesel, a
Stussy outlet, an
All Saints shop, and a very good
army surplus store. There's a camping supplies shop that is much cheaper than the bigger and busier stores down on
Southampton Street (the other side of
Covent Garden market).
In the stretch between the
Seven Dials monument and
Neal Street is the
Donmar Warehouse, one of the most interesting small theatres in London.
Sam Mendes was the artisitc director here when it was opened in 1992. The
Cambridge Theatre focuses more on trashy
West End productions and low budget
musicals.
Oh, and there are several outbreaks of small
mosaics, inclusing the elusive
space invaders, over by one of the entrances to an indoor shopping centre,
Thomas Neal's.
Although Earlham Street is in the Borough of Camden, it's really in the Covent Garden, the West End, Westminster area. It's nowhere near Camden at all. It's just across the road from Soho.