For the last eleven years of my government service, I worked for the Department for Transport (DfT) in Great Minister House (GMH), overlooking Horseferry Road, a dreary thoroughfare. At my previous department I'd once enjoyed a view of the river, so this was a comedown. But in London, nowhere is truly dull. Great Minister House, built in 1995 Rise and Fall of the Horse Ferry There are many blue plaques in the City of Westminster showing where the famous once lived or worked,

Years ago I had a debate with an acquaintance who insisted he would never read a work of fiction because it is not true, and therefore by definition, it is a lie. But although characters and events may be made up, fiction can still help us see the truth in a way that whole volumes of facts and statistics cannot. A history book can accurately tell us what happened when and where, but it cannot take you there and make you feel it, unless your powers of imagination are truly ext

When people ask me what I most like to photograph, the word I find myself using often is ‘survivors’ - I like to record examples of things that have largely been swept away over the years - a ghost sign, a telephone box, an old shop front or a traditional pub. We hear so much nowadays about communities losing their pubs, but here is the story of The Palm Tree, a pub that lost its community. Bethnal Green 1922 Imagine for a moment that it’s the early summer of 1922 and you’ve

When people come together to drink there is a change in them, a loss of inhibition, some call it ‘Dutch courage’. Conversation thrives, offering sympathy, empathy, and a good deal of humour. Ideas abound - art is conceived, businesses spawned, romance blossoms. But sadly, only misfortunes are considered newsworthy. The Warrington Hotel (1857) , an opulently decorated Victorian palace in Maida Vale, often used as a location for television and films, has endured many such misfo

When I moved to London in the mid 1980’s I was introduced by housemates and colleagues to many pubs in North London. The Island Queen was...

'Nothing of the Sort' On Wednesday, October 24th 1934 at the Old Bailey, Carmen Fernandez stood in front of the dock, where she was to...

In November 1984, within a month of moving to London, I attended a music and film show at the Barbican Hall, marking seventy years of the...

Thinking of one of the other officers in the Italian camp in which they were prisoners of war, novelist Dan Billany wrote: "He is...

Cigarette Cards In the 1930's they had their ‘celebrities’ just as we have today, but to a modern eye, most of their household names seem...

I often claim that London boozers are my natural habitat. Centuries of dramas, great and small, from just one pub can feed the...

The everyday experience of ordinary people in any era has little to do with the words and deeds of monarchs and politicians, and everything to do with work, transport, shops, food, sport and pubs. These things are so common that an appreciation of them only seems to grow as they change or fade and disappear. In recreating the past, I aim to recall these things and immerse the reader in the period, which means getting the details right, as far as I can. Take a simple bus ride.

In the late 1980s, when I lived in Wood Green and worked at King’s Cross, the underground line I used most was the Piccadilly Line. Between Caledonian Road and King’s Cross, if you look out of the correct side of the train, a break in the cables that run through the tunnels heralds a fleeting glimpse of the deserted platforms of a disused station. This was York Road which was closed on 17th September 1932. It certainly caught my imagination and I desperately wished that I co

Those who have read Until the Real Thing Comes Along and When Summer is Gone sometimes ask about Charlie Brown’s pub, which is heavily...

A few readers have been kind enough to comment that the London I have tried to recreate in the first two novels seems real - in the case...