Novel places - London

Since the dawn of the novel the vast spread of London has always been of inspiration to all types of authors. Tracy Chevalier and James McGee resurrect the dark and fascinating world of 18th century London in their novels Burning Bright and Hawkwood.

Ratcatcher, Resurrectionist, Rapscallion by James McGee

Christened the Holy Land by its inhabitants, the St Giles Rookery was a world within a world. Bounded by Great Russell Street to the north, Oxford Street in the west and Broad Street to the south, and occupying nearly ten acres, it was a festering sore deep in the heart of the city. Built on a foundation of poverty and vice, its impregnability lay in the sheer congestion of its dilapidated buildings, alleyways, and sewers. Between them ran dark passages, some so low and narrow it was impossible for two people to walk abreast. Entry into this rat run could be gained from a hundred directions by way of the dives and alleys around Leicester Square and the Haymarket and from the dank tunnels leading off  Regent Street. To the east lay a timber yard, beneath which it was rumoured there existed a passage that ran all the way to High Holborn...  (Extract from Ratcatcher)

James McGee writes...

The rookeries, the so-called nurseries of crime, may have disappeared, but there are still parts of the city that stir memories of Georgian London’s grim and violent past and which provide a slew of possibilities for a writer. That’s why I created Matthew Hawkwood, a Bow Street Runner who tracks his prey through the dark shadows of the Regency underworld. From the Thames - the Rogue’s River - with its smugglers, mutineers and press gangs and the flash houses - drinking dens that were the haunt of footpads, fraudsters, beggars and rakes - to the back street operating theatres where fledgling surgeons practised their trade upon corpses supplied by the resurrection men, this was a city inhabited by criminals plying every know vice; and probably a few we wouldn’t want to think about. Which is why walking in Hawkwood’s footsteps is such an adventure. All you need is an eagle eye and a little imagination...

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Man and Boy by Tony Parsons

It was still light when we came out of the film, but only just. We bought slices of pizza in the NFT café and ate them at those long wooden tables outside where you have to share with other people and you feel like a student. 

The NFT is an ugly building in a beautiful part of town. It’s inside a dumb concrete sixties block plonked down just where the Thames curls south as it passes under the shadow of Waterloo Bridge, and it faces right across the river from the lights of the Victoria embankment and St. Paul’s. That’s where Cyd told me that she had grown up in a home full of women and movies.

‘The first film my parents saw together was Gone with the Wind,’ she said. ‘And after my dad died, my mom saw it sixteen times alone. She would have seen it more often. But she was trying to ration herself.’  (Extract from Man and Boy)

Tony Parsons writes...

Not all human life is in London, but for the novelist it can feel that way.

London is my inspiration because it is a city with ten million hearts. People are born, live and die here. But they also come from all over to world – to find love, to seek their fortune and to create a better life for themselves and their families. Every story is here, every variant on the human experience.

And it is a beautiful city. London never gets the credit for that. But the parks, the old neighbourhoods, the great palaces, the grand hotels, the backstreets, the bars and the river, the bright lights melting in the rain at night – all these conspire to give London a magic for me, and the element of mystery that you feel when you love someone, and yet never ceased to be amazed by them.

You will find your own London. Everyone does. And then it will be a part of you forever.

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Falling Angels, Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier

Ignoring the curious passersby as best he could, Jem fixed his eyes instead on the nearby river, which Mr Smart had decided to wander along, “to see a bit o’ London,” and on Westminster Bridge, which arched over the water and pitched into the distant mass of square towers and spires of Westminster Abbey. None of the rivers Jem knew in Dorset bore any resemblance to the Thames, a broad channel of rocking, choppy green-brown water pulled back and forth by the distant tide of the North Sea. Both river and bridge were clogged with traffic – boats on the Thames, carriages, carts and pedestrians on the bridge. Jem had never seen so many people at once, even on market day in Dorchester, and was so distracted by the sight of so much movement that he could take in little detail.  (Extract from Burning Bright)

Tracy Chevalier writes...

I always visit the places where I set my books. I know other writers have successfully recreated landscapes from their armchairs, but that seems like such hard work to me. I’d rather walk around and record what I see left of the past. Getting down and dirty in Lambeth, however, turned out to be less than helpful, and indeed, counterproductive. The area was a victim of the industrial revolution in Blake’s time, with factories and warehouses and slums rapidly springing up along the Thames. It is even worse now. What the railway didn’t cut through when Waterloo Station was built in 1848 and expanded in the early 20th century, World War II finished off with bombs. There is virtually nothing left of the 18th century in Lambeth’s streets. Only a spattering of buildings – Lambeth Palace, a row of houses along Walnut Tree Walk, a green in St Mary’s Gardens – remind us of its past.

I found so little of Blake in today’s Lambeth that I stopped going, taking refuge once more in scholarship. Maps and engravings from the period have also proved immensely helpful. There is a marvellous map of London made by Richard Horwood between 1792 and 1815, in which he drew every building, every field, every cut-through. It was in comparing the various editions of this map that I discovered a little street near Blake’s house that had been called Lovers’ Lane and became Cut-Throat Lane. I jumped on the detail, and it became crucial to the story in Burning Bright.

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