Free Imagined London by Anna Quindlen Page B

Street, Cadogan Terrace, Lavender Sweep, Leadenhall Market, Half Moon Street, Queen’s Circus, Queen’s Club Gardens, Queen’s Gate Mews. The London A to Z is a tone poem that could easily be arranged as blank verse of a high order. In fact, the Scottish mystery novelist Anne Perry has cribbed from it unashamedly, naming her novels after London localesin which they are set, Southampton Road, Rutland Place, Cardington Crescent, and the like. (London does not rename things; while America is now rife with John F. Kennedy Boulevards, there is no Churchill Street or Princess Diana Avenue.)
    Meanwhile the American mystery writer Martha Grimes has chosen to name her books after pubs, a decision that is so sensible, given the richness and variety of public house names, that the only wonder is that it wasn’t done years before. In just a week in London, a tourist making a haphazard list comes up with the Shakespeare, the Samuel Pepys, the Bag O’Nails, the Dog and Duck, the Friend at Hand, the Porcupine, and the Coal Hole. In his magnificent book, London: A Biography, the novelist Peter Ackroyd writes that in 1854 there were seventy King’s Heads, ninety King’s Arms, seventy Crowns, fifty Queen’s Heads, thirty Foxes, and thirty Swans. There were some twenty thousand pubs to chose from in all at the time.
    (One Friday evening, wandering through Shepherd Market, we came upon a crush of people in one of the narrow cobbled back alleys laughing and chatting and holding glasses in front of a cattycornered establishment called Ye Grapes and concluded that we were intruding on an office party or some other kind ofofficial gathering. “Probably just an evening out at the local,” said a friend, quite correctly, as it turned out. Reading about public drinking and drunkenness, especially the liberal use of gin, is an essential part of knowing London through books. It turns out that that, too, has changed little, even in a more abstemious time.)
    The A to Z was assembled originally by a woman who walked nearly twenty miles a day and covered three thousand miles of streets. Perhaps at the end she felt as if she truly knew London. If so, she might be alone in that. “London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh,” writes Ackroyd in his introduction. “It cannot be conceived in its entirety but can be experienced only as a wilderness of alleys and passages, courts and thoroughfares, in which even the most experienced citizen may lose the way.” Ackroyd’s book, in my worn and spotted paperback edition, is more than eight hundred pages. After walking the streets of London, it does not seem excessive.
    And his point about experiencing the city episodically may be the key to why it is such a spectacular starting point for fiction; the episode is, after all, how we novelists do what we do. Virginia Woolf once said in a letter to her sister, “To write a novel in the heart of London is next to an impossibility. I feel as if I werenailing a flag to the top of a mast in a raging gale.” But that’s nonsense, made more nonsensical by how many wonderful things the writer managed to produce while in the midst of the storm of the city. In fact it may be exactly the opposite: The small and quiet spot offers so much less, so many fewer of the telling details that are so critical to a sense of place. These are the details that are right there for the observing in a city so diverse, so polyglot, so hodgepodge.
    In a sweetly elegiac memoir entitled Winter in London published more than a half century ago, a writer named Ivor Brown wrote quite correctly, “Great men have lifted their fictions from these pavements; the ghosts of any London lane are infinite.” It is impossible not to feel them peeking over your shoulder and, if so inclined, to find inspiration in their generations. To sink down on a bench with the inscription “From members of hall in memory of the first