All the Tiny Moments Blazing: A Literary Guide to Suburban London

by Ged Pope

From Evelyn Waugh to P. G. Wodehouse and Lawrence Durrell, a sweeping celebration of literature set in and inspired by the suburbs of London.

The London suburbs have, for more than two hundred and fifty years, fired the creative literary whether this is Samuel Johnson hiding away in bucolic preindustrial Streatham, Italo Svevo cheering on Charlton Athletic Football Club down at The Valley, or Angela Carter hymning the joyful “wrongness” of living south-of-the-river in Brixton. From Richmond to Rainham, Cockfosters to Croydon, this sweeping literary tour of the thirty-two London Boroughs describes how writers, from the seventeenth century on, have responded to and fictionally reimagined London’s suburbs. It introduces us to the great suburban novels, such as Hanif Kureishi’s Bromley-set The Buddha of Suburbia , Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book , and Zadie Smith’s NW . It also reveals the lesser-known short stories, diaries, poems, local guides, travelogues, memoirs, and biographies, which together show how these communities have long been closely observed, keenly remembered, and brilliantly imagined.

480 pages, Hardcover

Published November 8, 2020

Reviews

[Chris Fowler]

When we speak of London and seek out literary references, we too often talk of Kensington & Chelsea, Mayfair, Bloomsbury and Park Lane, or perhaps the pungency of the East End, as if everywhere else is deficient in history. But many London authors were raised in the overlooked suburbs – the first in the world – and wrote about them with affection or loathing.

The book takes a clockwise tour through the London suburbs, quoting extensively from the writers who lived there. Here’s Dickens crossing Blackheath;

‘A clammy and intensely cold mist made its slow way through the air in visible ripples that followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all.’

Pope points out good reasons for certain areas being considered ‘low’. They protruded into the diminishing countryside surrounded by brickworks, the ground churned up, the air rank. To live there was cheap, and so class enters the picture, for the wealthy can afford clean air and wide vistas. His range of literary sources is egalitarian, from George Gissing to Alan Bennett, from Drabble and Orwell to Arthur Machen and Christopher Isherwood. The selections are surprising and enlightening.

I thought this would be a dipping book but it encourages end-to-end reading. For anyone remotely interested in London and its people, it’s an essential and highly enjoyable volume. I can’t imagine why nobody ever thought of it before.

[Blimey O'Reilly]

Love London? Take an armchair tour of all 32 suburbs.

This volume journeys through a huge variety of moments which have taken place in London’s suburbs (an area generally ignored in guides to literary London and seen as ‘just one featureless mass’).

A satisfyingly wide range of texts and writers have provided source material, from novelists, poets and playwrights, to diarists, journalists and social commentators. It’s this tapestry of texts which makes for an especially lively read but - be warned - it will also leave you with a long list of new books on your To Be Read list!

The twelve chapters weave their way around the suburbs of London, most falling within a 3-6 mile radius of Charing Cross and within the sphere of the cabbies’ ‘Knowledge’.

Each chapter begins with a useful map of the area and proceeds chronologically through texts which shine a light on the area in question.

However, there is no need for the reader to proceed chronologically through the chapters. This is a read-straight-through book or a dipping-in book – either approach works equally well.

I found myself taking a tour through the locations familiar to me, and then taking deviations along the way, skirting around and branching out.

Having spent three student years living in Woolwich, I was fascinated to read Iain Sinclair’s account (Woolwich is a ‘townscape in a liquidiser’) alongside Woolwich-born Stella Duffy’s account (‘as a child, Woolwich was a fairy ground to me!’) and Bernadino Evaristo’s autobiographical novel ‘Lara’ which reflects on themes such as race and identity in the Woolwich of the 1960s and 70s.

Up the road in Blackheath, the area is explored via two Dickens novels and a 1970s murder mystery set in the Victorian era (Julian Symons’ ‘The Blackheath Murders’ – I added that one to my TBR list). And up the road again is Charlton where Italo Svevo lived for ten years at 67 Charlton Church Lane (knowing an exact address or location is so satisfying for the flaneur). Apparently James Joyce partly based the character of Leopold Bloom on him.

This journey through the suburbs takes the reader to many surprising and unexpected corners and moments. Michael Palin in a 1960s Camberwell boozer with local resident Terry Jones who is ‘accused’ of ‘coming from Wrexham’. The only partial explanation and comment is what makes this one memorable. In Holloway we can follow Joe Orton to the men’s toilets under the bridge. More spiritually, we witness William Blake experiencing his first vision of angels in a tree at Peckham Rye and then learn – from Sandi Toksvig – of 1930s local resident William Margrie and his belief in ‘The Peckham Man’, a new evolutionary stage (Toksvig comments, ‘He must have been insufferable.’) Hampstead is admired by Daniel Defoe in 1724, is where Keats wrote ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ in 1819, and provided the location for Orwell’s 1936 novel ‘Keep The Aspidistra Flying’.

There are many reasons that the book hangs together successfully. The chronological format of each section works well, the variety of texts and the unexpected neighbours keep each suburb’s depiction fresh and original, and Ged Pope’s own pleasing turn of phrase adds to the entertainment along the way. I especially liked his description of Blackheath – ‘dramatically large-skied and kite-filled open heathland’ with ‘its dark, muddy, edge-of-things setting’.

This is a book I’ll return to and take a stroll through many times in the future. It will also make the perfect gift for my father-in-law who thinks he already knows ‘everything there is to know’ about London. I feel that even he will be in for a few surprises.

[Debbie]

A very interesting history of both literature and the suburbs of London- a good book to read in daily chunks.