Fall – My Inspiration.
In the late 1990s, the sprawling Pepys Estate in Deptford, south-east London, built in the optimistic 1960s, was almost crumbling into the River Thames. As part of a regeneration plan, Lewisham Council decided to sell off the estate’s riverside Aragon Tower so a developer could turn it into luxury apartments. But one resident refused to leave. The legal wrangles went on for months, and the refusenik was finally paid a huge sum to move out.
This story of the dilapidated tower with its single resident lingered with me for years. So when I finished my debut novel – the Deptford-set Attend – I decided to write my own version of the Aragon Tower tale. The result was Fall. In it, the Pepys Estate is transformed into a brutalist concrete edifice designed in the 1950s and 60s by genius-slash-benign-dictator architect, Zöe Goldsworthy. The single resident of Marlowe Tower is her son, Aaron, and the developer buying it is his twin brother, Clive.
Written during a time when London was (and is) experiencing an explosion of redevelopment, and just as the Black Lives Matter movement came to the fore, I decided to add a new element to the story, in the form of black twins, Annette and Christine. When they re-enter Aaron and Clive’s lives in the present day, all four characters are taken back to the summer of 1976, and the moment that would define them forever…
***
Deptford is a fascinating mixture of the modern and the historical, which is why I’ve chose to set both my novels there. Several other authors clearly agree with me. Here’s a selection of Deptford-set books you might like to try – after you’ve read Attend and Fall, of course…
A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess – a historical novel about the murder of playwright (and Shakespeare’s mate) Christopher Marlowe (cf. Marlowe Tower in Fall).
Blood & Sugar by Laura Shepherd Robinson – eighteenth-century historical crime novel exploring the politics of the slave trade.
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar – also set in the eighteenth century, this one sees courtesans and mermaids mix in a historical fantasy.
The Family Arsenal by Paul Theroux – 1970s thriller in which a terrorist cell operates out of a quiet Deptford street.
The Deptford Mice by Robin Jarvis – children’s fantasy books following a community of rodents living in Deptford and warring with rats from the sewers.
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo – set more in Peckham, Camberwell and Brixton, I include this Booker-winning novel because one character lives on Deptford’s Pepys Estate – the model for the estate in Fall.
