Visit Mysteries Shop in Covent Garden

Author note from Meantime in Greenwich

Stella’s day out in Covent Garden

When Stella has her day out in Covent Garden, she visits ‘a quaint emporium selling mystical paraphernalia’. While Meredith and the shopkeeper are my own inventions, the emporium was inspired by the shop, Mysteries, which is sadly no longer there.

I first visited this shop in 1989, when it was sited on Monmouth Street by Shaftesbury Avenue. I used to go there often as a treat and picked up some excellent books over the years. Mysteries later moved to nearby Short’s Gardens and more recently shifted to being an online presence only. If you’d like to look around the old shop, please click here. (This link will take you to Google Maps.)

Useful astrology courses and resources

Stella learned astrology from her late mother, but I learned it by reading a wide range of books in my youth and by later attending classes at the Faculty of Astrological Studies in London. In those days, getting to class meant an atmospheric evening walk past the high prison wall of HMP Pentonville, but nowadays classes are held in Bloomsbury as well as online.

Stella goes to Chelsea to meet the Constellations (a rather mean-spirited group made up by me), but you’ll find lists of more welcoming local groups on the Astrological Association website.

Of course, neither of these august organisations are responsible for any astrology-related errors in this book. I claim sole responsibility for those.

Stella’s flat

For a few months in the late eighties, I was fortunate enough to live on Abbey Road in St John’s Wood, in a pleasant flat overlooking the recording studio. Despite frequently lurking on the balcony, unlike Stella, I never once spotted anyone famous coming or going.

The Astronomers

The astronomers are all fictional, as is the skinflint Saturn Committee, who insisted on taking their own wine/paint-stripper to the lecture at the planetarium. Of course, the real-life Peter Harrison Planetarium serves only the highest quality wines at its events. Information about Saturn’s vanishing rings came from NASA’s website. Once again, any errors are all my own work.