Even when inside on a murder charge, Percy is still dreaming of pulling off the big job that will allow him ‘one day (to) have my own racing team - Boon Specials’. Despite an uncertain future in a time of war, the Jossers end the book back in the ground-floor rooms of 10 Dulcimer Street, se11, determined to sit it out where they belong, in Mr Josser’s beloved London. The most unconventional resident of all arrives in response to Mrs Vizzard’s newspaper advertisement, to take that empty room. For much of the novel, Squales is the answer to a widowed maiden’s prayer, but ultimately his actions seal his fate when he exploits Mrs Vizzard’s vulnerability and provokes her to revenge.

His eventual fate is a reminder that no-one can throw off the dictates of conscience as he has done and expect to get away with it. It’s certainly an extraordinary cover, not least because it says almost nothing of the book: the two figures in the foreground could not be any of the characters in London Belongs to Me. It also shows us something of Norman Collins’s courage in writing and publishing this novel when he did.London Belongs to Me is Norman Collins’s best-known book, first published in 1945, regularly reprinted throughout the fifties and sixties, once in 1977 and most recently by Penguin in 2008. small oily mermaids (reduced to) only tiny white fragments left clinging to the ingenious spring framework of fine bones’. One of literature’s memorable charlatans, his poverty acute, his powers questionable, Henry Squales, aka Enrico Qualito the medium, is an actor’s gift. It was such a personal and indulgent moment between my parents and me as nobody else recognised the names.

There is crime, - a central crime, and we know who did it, - there are romances, some of which are doomed to fail, others of which are more hopeful - there is seediness, there is deception, class-consciousness, socialism and fascism on the streets, penury, near-penury, greed - and oodles of affection for London itself, for ordinary people living ordinary lives, and displaying all the wonderful combination of nobility, generosity and mean-mindedness which we all do, all-mashed up together. However, the mirroring of wider concerns is perhaps more successfully pulled off in the case of Percy Boon than Mr Josser. London Belongs to Me is a love letter to London and even the most skeptical or cynical readers will surrender to the many delights of this compelling narrative. Mr Squales testifies against Percy, but in the process exposes to his fiancée Mrs Vizzard the falsity of his claims to be able to contact the dead and to predict the future.Writing in 1836 Dickens had the irrepressible Sam Weller sum up Whitechapel as ‘Poverty And Oysters’; almost exactly a century later, Collins did the same for Kennington - ‘Gentility And Fish Paste’; prior to the séance beginning, as the plates are handed round at tea amongst the petit-bourgeois Kenningtonians of the South London Psychical society, the eternal question is posed: “fish paste or sandwich spread? The main street was an interior set, but additional location filming took place around London, [2] and at Burnham Beeches in Buckinghamshire. We get a glimpse of the City itself through Mr Josser, as he retires from his job; we encounter London’s more Bohemian elements through the eyes of his daughter as she seeks an independent life for herself. Well, how about Norman Collins – as well as author of 16 novels, he was controller of television at the BBC, and co-founder of independent television in the UK. The theme of food recurs, and there is an almost Zolaesque relish in the depiction of detail: the ‘soapy yellow’ texture of Mr Puddy’s over-processed cheese; Grosvenor pie with ‘.

This is where I belong’ he told himself, an almost aboriginal instinct for the inseparability of people and place surging within him: ‘I belong to London. Also known as Dulcimer Street, Norman Collins’s London Belongs to Me is a Dickensian romp through working-class London on the eve of the Second World War.Dickens likes to give his characters eccentric mannerisms and quirks and then hammer them into the ground so that every time the character appears his quirk never fails to get a mention.