My book, Blood Drunk, has two central characters. One is Freddie Burns, a hard-bitten, hard-drinking young Londoner with the world-weary cynicism of a sixty-year-old vice cop and the emotional intelligence of a toddler. He does his best, but it doesn’t always go very well. The other – sort of – is London itself, or at least a version of it. The book is set in the 1990s, a decade when London faced huge challenges – riots, homelessness, and a level of crime something like 90% worse than today – but also when it began to recover from its long-post war slump; a vast animal emerging from hibernation, cleaning the coal soot off its buildings and blinking in the bright lights of Cool Brittania. London has reinvented itself many times since the Romans, layers of history deposited then fractured by the tectonic forces of technology and money – a place of cracks and fissures under the concrete where all sorts of hidden stories play out in the dark. Here are a few of my favourites.
The Borribles by Michael de Larrabeiti
The books of the Borribles trilogy are tough, violent and hard-edged. They are also – nominally – for children. I first read them in the 1980s when they were passed round the school playground with something close to religious fervour. Borribles are children who wake up one morning with points on the top of their ears, stop growing up and run away from home, off into an eternal outlaw life in the abandoned houses and nighttime streets of a grimy and broken London – a tempting prospect for any self-respecting eight-year-old. Even better, a lot of the action is set in Wandsworth, the part of London where I was brought up and where our school was, and the places where the Borribles laugh and steal and fire catapults at police were places that we knew, had played, could smell and taste. I think we thought we were Borribles.
They are also very political books. The second and third of the trilogy were written at the height of Thatcherism in the UK, when a lot of the post-war welfare state was ground up and fed to the free market, unemployment soared and strikes and riots were met with increasingly draconian policing, particularly of minority communities – and writer Michael de Larrabeiti made it very clear which side of the picket line he stood. The Borribles stay young forever unless the police of the Special Borrible Group – a blunt satire of the feared Special Patrol Group of London’s Metropolitan Police – catch them and clip their ears, forcing them into a grey life of adult responsibility. The Borribles are multi-cultural, fiercely anti-authoritarian and proudly working class; no long-lost princes or magical caste-systems here. The Borribles survive on their wits, bravery and loyalty to each other, and represent London’s particular combination of brutality and bruised tolerance better than any other characters I can think of.
China Mieville wrote the forward to the Borribles when it was reissued in 2003, and his Un Lun Dun has echoes of the same anarchic spirit, though washed through Mieville’s astonishing imagination. Two girls, Zanna and Deeba, stumble into a parallel dreamscape version of London, the Un Lun Dun of the title, where half the houses are constructed from the rubbish that Londoners leave on the streets, a tailor with pins and needles for hair makes clothes out of books, and they end up with a pet milk carton named Curdle.
Zanna is revealed to be destined to save the city from the encroaching threat of the Smog – malevolent sentient pollution – only to be summarily knocked out and sent home, leaving Deeba, the UnChosen one, to find her own way past murderous giraffes, Brokkenbroll the lord of broken umbrellas, binjas – ninja bins, obviously – and a talkative and frequently incorrect book of prophecies. It’s a young adult book but one that holds a fairground mirror up to London’s absurdities and contradictions, wrapped into a story about everyday heroism and the mad beauty that can be built amid the grime.
Capital is the second in Maureen Duff’s London trilogy, and combines the first person reflections of an unnamed academic writing to a wife who may or may not have left him with the third-person story of Meepers, an aging and homeless self-taught archaeologist who can see London’s dead pushing up from the pavements and is obsessively trying to prove that the city has been continuously occupied since the Romans – and that therefore might hope to survive a looming catastrophe. All of it is interleaved with vignettes from life in London over thousands of years; a hunter-gatherer giving birth by the Thames, a gender-swapped King Elizabeth, the flea that carried the Black Death.
Written in 1978, Duffy was looking towards to the neo-liberal economics that Thatcher was about to unleash, and Capital is unflinching about London’s injustices – at the novel’s opening Meepers is squatting in a shed outside the flat where he grew up but can no longer afford to live – but perhaps allows the smallest chink of light right at the end; the epilogue is a post-apocalyptic vision of London in rubble, but where millions still cling on to their fierce independence and traditions of acceptance. ‘That’s why they don’t let no one in’, says one of the observers, ‘unless they can prove they’re genuine refugees.’
London’s history is alive in Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor as well, a book suffused with the psycho-geographic idea that that places – neighbourhoods, streets, and in this case churches – have an enduring energy, a character; some hidden mechanism letting the past bleed through into the present. It is a familiar feeling in London, where the gleaming skin of modern development is made lumpy by the older, darker bones poking through from underneath. Hawksmoor sees a contemporary detective investigating a series of murders at churches built in the early 1700s by Nicholas Dyer, a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren – and a secret satanist who arranges a human sacrifice to sanctify each new church. Told in chapters that alternate between the two periods, the contemporary policeman and historical murderer begin to drift together as the novel progresses and finally merge; past and present overlaid.
Six of the seven churches in the novel are real and were built by an actual architect named Nicholas Hawksmoor, who was indeed a pupil of Wren. The churches are beautiful and slightly ominous and certainly have rather more obelisks and pyramids than you would expect. They inspired Iain Sinclair’s 1975 prose-poem Lud Heat – a seminal work of London psycho-geography acknowledged by Ackroyd as a direct antecedent to Hawksmoor – as well as Alan Moore’s later From Hell. It is unlikely that Hawksmoor was a practicing satanist who succeeded in encoding occult symbolism into the very fabric of the city. But it is impossible to be sure.
Satan Wants Me by Robert Irwin
Satan Wants Me also speaks to London’s occult history, this time through the legacy of Aleister Crowley, called ‘the most evil man in Britain’, who for a time lived with his mother in Streatham – a very ordinary South London neighbourhood – and conducted rituals and orgies at his ‘Temple’ on Fulham Road in the 1930s; satanism in suburbia and in a place that thirty years later was right at the heart of swinging London. These historical antecedents are woven together in the diary of a self-absorbed, arrogant and fairly unpleasant sociology PhD student as he takes drugs, shags to Pink Floyd and gets drawn deeper into an occult group of Crowley’s acolytes, who are based in a beautifully described and deeply depressing house in Swiss Cottage.
The book nails the lazy misogyny sitting underneath the new age platitudes, the way the drug-addled revelations of the 60s slid off the bedrock of the English establishment, and the drabness of a satanic cult seen from the inside – the banality of evil indeed. Though the last third takes the action out to the countryside – after a brilliantly handled plot twist – Satan Wants Me catches something of the way that London’s brash, creative edge can hide all sorts of darkness hiding just out of sight.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre
I don’t have to tell anyone how good Le Carre’s books are, and Tinker Tailor is one that he himself considered among his best. The first of the ‘Karla trilogy’ that narrate the epic hidden confrontation between George Smiley – rumpled, taciturn and distinctly English – and his cold war nemesis at Moscow Central, Tinker Tailor takes a tale of compromised people so used to operating in the grey areas of espionage that they’ve forgotten what colour looks like and drapes it across an equally grey London, full of an end of Empire melancholy. There is a casino, but even that is entirely without glamour. Bond this is not.
From a spy HQ in an unremarkable office block on Cambridge Circus to a down-at-heel hotel in Sussex Gardens near Paddington Station and the drab Camden safe-house where Smiley at last runs his man to ground – all invoke the slightly faded, anonymous buildings that are everywhere in London, if you look. They have imposing front doors that never seem to open and net curtains behind grubby windows – and could be hiding anything. In my book, Blood Drunk, they have vampires and death magicians living in them; spies are marginally more likely.
The Bricks that Built the Houses by Kae Tempest
Where Le Carre’s prose is spare and elegant, Kae Tempest brings a wild poetic energy to his tale of drug dealing, family and escaping. Tempest is a ludicrously talented polymath – rapper, poet, playwright – and the book is an adaptation of (or companion piece to) his narrative album Everybody Down; his lyrical sensibility shines in the depictions of cocaine-dusted nights in London’s grimier corners.
It’s also deeply rooted in Southeast London and offers glimpses of the ordinary lives being lived in an ordinary neighbourhood, presented with sympathy but no sentiment, people struggling but not quite vanishing under a tide of gentrification. These characters are not hidden, except in plain sight – they are all around, on the bus, in the café – but are rarely allowed space to exist in fiction. Tempest lets them speak.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ben Shepherd was born and brought up in South London. He had a 20-year career as a diplomat, editor and policy analyst, specializing in conflict and politics in Central Africa, while secretly (and slowly) writing a book about magic, vampires and organized crime. He now writes for a living, and spends his free time running and cycling around London’s forgotten corners, thinking up stories. He still lives in South London with his wife and daughter.