Fitzrovia’s contribution to the World Wide Web

On 16 November Tottenham Court Road was mentioned at least four times in BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. The guest was Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web; and I was delighted to hear his life story as well as his musical choices. To me TBL is a hero. By persuading his employer not to charge for the web, and by donating his intellectual property to the public domain, he ensured that anyone who has access to a computer can get onto the Internet without paying for it. As a result, unlike Bill Gates or Steve Jobs — both born in 1955, as was Berners-Lee — the WWW’s inventor didn’t become a multi-billionaire, or indeed particularly famous. Both of these circumstances are fine by him. 

In the radio programme Berners-Lee recounted how in the 1980s he got a job with the physics research organisation Cern, based in Switzerland. At first the only way he could find out what his colleagues were working on was by arranging to meet up with them for a coffee. He decided that there had to be a more time-efficient route to the same end. So in 1990 he designed the first web page, web server and web browser so that people at Cern could quickly exchange information and ideas. The result of his efforts was eventually christened the World Wide Web, the global system of interconnected documents and websites accessed via the Internet. Millions of people use it every day. Some of us, I have to admit, use it every fifteen minutes or so.  

Nowadays this “intelligence at your fingertips” is controversial, of course. But I can only say that it has improved my own writing life, enormously. Knowledge that might have taken me literally weeks to acquire, even in London with its many libraries, can now be accessed in a matter of minutes. Imagine the plight of a would-be writer living in Orkney, for example: without the Internet she would probably have had to travel by car, ferry and train to Inverness to get hold of the relevant books and journals. Now Orcadians and others have the same opportunities as everyone else with a computer. I’m not denying that the WWW, like Frankenstein’s Monster, needs to be kept under control. But if we can manage to do so, it can achieve a vast amount of good.

So what part did Tottenham Court Road play in all this? TBL was born in London, and lived with his mathematician parents and his siblings in East Sheen near Richmond. As a teenager in the early 1970s he and his close friend Nick Barton started getting interested in electricity and electronics. “At that point the transistor … became sufficiently ubiquitous that you could go to the stores down Tottenham Court Road and get packets of fifty of these things.” Just around the time when the pair had enough experience to understand “the usefulness of the identifying function of the transistor,” they could “get a box of a hundred transistors and sort of empty them out on the table, and stick them to a little breadboard” to figure out which ones actually worked. (https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Tim_Berners-Lee, accessed 9/12/25). Here my own knowledge of electronics is beginning to run out, but I do know — thanks to the Internet — that transistors are vital to computing. And early computers were what TBL and his friend were building on the kitchen table.

TBL got his hands on those transistors just in time. I don’t imagine that many residents of Fitzrovia know this now, but before redevelopment in the mid-1970s the south west end of Tottenham Court Road, between Tudor Place and Hanway Street, was occupied by a row of single-storey shacks which were home to “the sort of junk electronic shops (where) you could buy transistors, some of which worked, some of which didn’t” (https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Tim_Berners-Lee).

I myself remember those shacks quite well, and hopefully I’m not the only one. TBL has certainly not forgotten them. If by any chance he is reading this article, it would be wonderful if he could get in touch with The Fitzrovia News. I would really love to know if one of the shops he frequented was the glorious Proops, supplier of a huge range of tools for crafts, model-making and DIY, and trading also in war surplus and job lots, including medical equipment, aircraft instruments, spare parts for radios, and electrical components. The mind boggles. This family business, founded in 1946, moved out of Fitzrovia in the 1970s, but as far as I can tell a version of it survives in rural Leicestershire.

For this information, many thanks once again to the amazing Internet, and to the great Tim Berners-Lee, one of my heroes.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Computer Scientist. Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4, 16 November 2025.

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