Ed Franklin and Celeste Dodwell at Funny Weather in Grove Terrace off Highgate Road

THEIR eyes met across a West End stage – and their journey has found its way now to Highgate Road.

Celeste Dodwell and Ed Franklin are the proprietors of Funny Weather, a new book and coffee shop – and they first became friends when they starred together in the Noel Coward play, Hay Fever, at the Duke of Yorks in 2015.

The pair have now turned their talents to creating the bookshop. It opened just before Christmas and has already found a special place in the literature-loving area, which is home to numerous authors including Tracey Chevalier and Julian Barnes.

Funny Weather is their first book shop – and the couple have been working all hours since they opened just before Christmas, with hundreds of curious book lovers making a bee-line for it.

Ed has bookshop experience – between acting jobs he worked at Waterstones – and has seen first-hand how books are still greatly treasured.

He said: “There was that fear when we started selling Kindles at Waterstones that we had let the fox into the hen house. Bookshops were seen to be in trouble.”

He says people enjoy having a relationship with the printed word and the sense of having a physical object in their hands.

He added: “But in the same way there has been a massive vinyl revival, people are still buying books – and particularly at independent bookshops.”

The couple had discussed as friends that they might go into the book trade together.

A friend had opened a place in Barnsbury selling books and coffee where they worked for a time, and they felt if they found the right space, they could make it work too.

Before finding the Funny Weather site – once a photographer’s studio and then a personal gym – they looked around north London.

Celeste said: “A friend then told us about this place as it was near where we live. We felt it was just right. It had been empty for years and was in quite a state.”

Celeste said: “There is a real creative community here. We wanted to have a hub where people can come together. It is a real joy to watch.”

The couple drew on friends’ help, hosting a painting party to get the walls done up.

Choosing the books has been both a task and a joy, added Ed.

Celeste said: “Ed eats books for breakfast, lunch and dinner, so that was a good starting point.”

Ed added: “We did not want only to cater for people coming in for something specific. They are looking to be surprised, to find something they did not expect.

“It is a very well read area and we found with mainstream titles people will either own them already or have read them. We thought we’d include more left field, esoteric titles.

“I wanted to make sure we stock things that are sometimes missed, including European fiction.”

In Hay Fever, Ed and Celeste played characters who are about to be engaged and in real life the pair are also set to be betrothed – though they say they have yet to set a date.

Instead, they say they are concentrating on their current baby – a bookshop.