It transferred to the West End, where it opened to universally ecstatic reviews. In 1981, James Roose-Evans adapted it for the stage and it was first produced at the Salisbury Playhouse with a cast headed by Rosemary Leach as Hanff and David Swift as Doel.

It was first broadcast on 4 November 1975, starring Frank Finlay and Anne Jackson. Hugh Whitemore adapted 84, Charing Cross Road for the BBC's Play for Today, a television anthology series. In New York, the apartment house at 305 East 72nd Street, near Second Avenue, Hanff’s home from 1956 and from where she wrote her later letters, has been renamed “Charing Cross House” in her honor. In 2009 they housed a Med Kitchen restaurant and now form part of a McDonald's restaurant. The premises were occupied by a music and CD shop in the early 1990s, and later other retail outlets. A circular brass plaque on a pilaster on the street frontage acknowledges the story and marks the site. The five-story building where Marks & Co. Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. Hanff postponed visiting her English friends until too late Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix, and the bookshop eventually closed in December 1970.

Their letters included discussions about topics as diverse as the sermons of John Donne, how to make Yorkshire Pudding, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the coronation of Elizabeth II.

In time, a long-distance friendship developed between the two and between Hanff and other staff members, as well, with an exchange of Christmas packages, birthday gifts and food parcels to help with the post- World War II food shortages in Britain. She first contacted the shop in 1949 and it fell to Doel to fulfil her requests. Hanff was in search of obscure classics and British literature titles that she had been unable to find in New York City when she noticed an ad in the Saturday Review of Literature. 84, Charing Cross Road is a 1970 book by Helene Hanff, later made into a stage play, television play, and film, about the twenty-year correspondence between the author and Frank Doel, chief buyer of Marks & Co antiquarian booksellers, located at the eponymous address in London, England.

Charing cross road book