I am the author of five books, including the New Angles Prize shortlisted, Low Country, London’s Lost Rivers and Camden Town: Dreams of Another London. I write about forgotten history, lost places, and strange landscapes in London and on the coast. I have appeared on television (including PBS) and radio and have written for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, among others. I also write about music and theatre.
My book brings London’s lost neighbourhoods back to life. Cities consist of layers of accumulated and discarded past, visible and invisible, and London more so than most. The ten forgotten neighbourhoods in this book are a few of the many versions of lost London.
Each place explored was once well-known to the average Londoner and is now forgotten. From the spectral White City to Cripplegate, an ancient neighbourhood that burned down in a single night, to the first port at Ratcliff, my book shines a light on the traces in the modern city of places that are long gone.
BS Johnson was a brilliant London writer who broke conventional writing apart. Albert Angelo is a powerful account of teaching in a hard Islington school in the mid-1960s.
It is also an audacious experiment in form, as narrative voices break apart and unravel, but always anchored in a London that feels both very close and very different.
Why don't you take a permanent job, Albert? You're twenty-eight now, you know," his mother remarks when he goes on his weekend duty visit home. Albert Angelo is by vocation an architect and only by economic necessity working as a substitute teacher. He had thought he was, if not dedicated, at least competent. But now, on temporary assignments in schools located in the tough neighborhoods of London, Albert feels ineffectual. He is failing as a teacher and failing to fulfill himself as an architect. And then, too, he is pained by the memory of a failed love affair. "I'm trying…
Published in 1957, this book is one of the few comic novels about London, and it is genuinely funny.
In a dead-end suburb, variety entertainment is dying a painful death in a flea-pit cinema that attracts a parade of fantastical characters, from the Falstaffian impresario Sam Yudenow to a pair of Greek caterers and bomb makers.
It makes a lost world seem both alluring and deeply unsavoury.
"One of the great comic novels of the century." - Anthony Burgess
"[A]n exuberant romp with a parcel of grotesques in a truly horrible nor'-nor'-easterly suburb of London . . . great fun." - Manchester Guardian
"Rabelaisian, vigorous, readable, inventive and bizarre." - Simon Raven
"The very best of his works." - Harlan Ellison
In the worst, poorest, most benighted corner of London is Fowlers End, one of the most godforsaken spots on the face of the earth. It is here that young Daniel Laverock, starving and nearly penniless at the height of the Great Depression, takes the only job…
In the early 1990s Soho, Robinson is a charming, possibly Satanic character who leads film editor Christo into a world of sleazy bars, drink, drugs, and general depravity.
It is the last gasp of Soho that died with the old century—the mysterious, legendary neighbourhood that London somehow revolved around. Petit makes it gleam darkly.
Iris Murdoch’s first novel makes the pubs of 1950s London key characters as a down-at-heel writer roams the city from a shabby Earl’s Court base, trying to square philosophy, political ideas, and reality.
It brings to life a London where people without money could live in the center, and social life was all about who you ran into. This was a place that was still as much a village as a global city.
Iris Murdoch's debut-a comic novel about work and love, wealth and fame
Jake Donaghue, garrulous artist, meets Hugo Bellfounder, silent philosopher.
Jake, hack writer and sponger, now penniless flat-hunter, seeks out an old girlfriend, Anna Quentin, and her glamorous actress sister, Sadie. He resumes acquaintance with the formidable Hugo, whose 'philosophy' he once presumptuously dared to interpret. These meetings involve Jake and his eccentric servant-companion, Finn, in a series of adventures that include the kidnapping of a film-star dog and a political riot on a film set of ancient Rome. Jake, fascinated, longs to learn Hugo's secret. Perhaps Hugo's secret…
A tale of West London in the 1930s, Westerby brings to life a lost world of gamblers looking for mugs at the long-gone White City dog track.
Local teenager Jim teeters on the edge of the criminal underworld in a thriller woven into a London you can almost taste—teeming with life and the inevitability of death in the shadow of the coming war.
First published in 1937, Wide Boys Never Work brings the streets of pre-war London alive in the tradition of other great low-life novelists such as Gerald Kersh and James Curtis, and is a forgotten gem rich in both its snappy dialogue and vibrant prose style. This new edition from London Books comes with an introduction by the respected chronicler of the capital, Iain Sinclair, who cites Wide Boys Never Work as one of his favourite London novels.
I write historical crime fiction, and my latest novel is set in a hospital, a real place, now closed. The South London Hospital for Women and Children (1912–1985) was set up by pioneering suffragists and women surgeons Maud Chadburn and Eleanor Davies-Colley (the first woman admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons) and I recreate the now almost-forgotten hospital in my book. Events take place in 1946 when wartime trauma still impacts upon a society exhausted by conflict, and my book choices also reflect this.
A historical thriller set in south London just after World War II, as Britain returns to civilian life and the men return home from the fight, causing the women to leave their wartime roles. The South London Hospital for Women and Children is a hospital, (based on a real place) run by women for women and must make adjustments of its own. As austerity bites, the coldest Winter then on record makes life grim. Then a young nurse goes missing.
Days later, her body is found behind a locked door, and two women from the hospital, unimpressed by the police…
One cold dark night, as a devastated London shivers through the transition to post-war life, a young nurse goes missing from the South London Hospital for Women & Children. Her body is discovered hours later behind a locked door.
Two women from the hospital join forces to investigate the case. Determined not to return to the futures laid out for them before the war, the unlikely sleuths must face their own demons and dilemmas as they pursue - The Midnight Man.
‘A mystery that evokes the period – and a recovering London – in…
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