PROPERTY SPECIAL:Literary London

Until recently, a lively sub-genre of English literature was that devoted to London’s creepier, darker back streets. Peter Ackroyd took us on a grim tour of early 1980s (and early 1700s) Shoreditch and Limehouse in Hawksmoor; Iain Sinclair angrily traversed the weed-sprouting, rubbish-strewn streets of Hackney and Tilbury and what he called the ‘sumplands’ of Dagenham in Downriver.

Angela Carter peeked through the yellowing net curtains of dowdy south London, while Michael Moorcock beckoned us to explore the gentle sadness of peeling suburban avenues. Go further back and you will find Patrick Hamilton’s malign vision of Earls Court, Arthur Conan Doyle’s all-pervading fogs, Dickens’s appalling rookeries. The point is that it is very hard to find examples of writers who have viewed London as a city of light.

But the creepier parts of town that have (perversely) inspired so many London writers and artists are disappearing. Those alarming, dilapidated streets at the back of King’s Cross, for instance, have vanished, been pulled down and forgotten about in happy anticipation of the new Channel Tunnel rail link.