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 of Cubitt Town and the West India Docks in particular, serendipity has played a part.
In my spare bedroom hangs a destination blind from a London bus. It is quite appropriate, because bus blinds were the initial inspiration for some of the settings used in The Likes of Us novels. Many photographs of Walthamstow taken around a century ago feature trams or trolleybuses with their front blinds indicating ‘Royal Docks’, or simply ‘Docks’. These spawned visions of that lost world of great ships, teeming quays, towering warehouses, exotic cargoes and rough dockside communities of people from all over the world.
Imagine sitting in the front seat on the top deck of a trolleybus, seeing cranes and funnels in the distance and drawing ever closer and perhaps having one’s journey delayed by a swing bridge opening to allow a freighter to slide in or out of the dock. How I wish I’d seen that - although it would no doubt have been dreary routine for many passengers. Now of the five Port of London dock systems, only Tilbury remains a working dock, and Tilbury is hardly London at all.
Most of the names on a destination blind are quite famous for one reason or another, but I was intrigued when I first saw Cubitt Town on one. How could there be a part of London so rarely mentioned, so little discussed that even some Londoners aren’t entirely sure where it is. For the visitor, there is precious little left of the Cubitt Town that existed before the Second World War. It's proximity to two major docks ensured that it was flattened by the Luftwaffe. The photo shows a surviving terrace on Manchester Road, but languishing in the shadows of the Canary Wharf towers, today it mostly consists of local authority (or ex-local authority) estates and luxury riverside apartments. It was never a draw for tourists anyway - it was all terraced housing, warehouses and factories and was dominated by the West India and Millwall Docks. It was exactly the kind of lost working class East End settlement I wanted to recreate. I decided that it is where Alfie Atwood, one of my main characters should be born and raised, so I just had to find out more about the place.
This choice of Cubitt Town turned out to be a very happy accident, because my research led me to just about the most engaging local history blog I have ever encountered - Isle of Dogs - Past Life, Past Lives by Mick Lemmerman. His approach is one that should, in my opinion, be copied by anyone wishing to document local history effectively. There are few daunting chunks of text to wade through, but rather he uses photographs and maps extensively to recreate the Isle of Dogs as it was in a thorough and systematic way - street by street. It has enabled me to walk around the island with a mental picture of how it was, superimposed over what is there today. I'm sure my picture will at times be inaccurate, but hopefully it is refined with every post. The blog compliments the Museum of London Docklands brilliantly - or maybe that should be the other way round.
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