You want to know exactly how people lived, what they wore, what they ate, their furniture (furniture takes up more than a few paragraphs), how they ducked and dived and scraped a living in 1938 – look no further. Perhaps it isn’t strange after all; this article came to be written in the month that the remains of Roman baths were discovered at Borough Market, so perhaps the author could have added, ‘and in Caesar’s day before that’. As Glinert observes, it would scarcely last him a week and, regrettably, the wall-mounted vessel encompassing this gallery of delights slips her moorings, thus precipitating one of the novels’ finest comic moments.

This looseness comes despite lovely touches such as the sparky dialogue when Percy Boon takes a shine to a girl working at the funfair (“She wasn’t good looking, judged by the top standards. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. In all Norman Collins wrote 16 novels and two plays, including London Belongs to Me (1945), The Governor’s Lady (1968) and The Husband’s Story (1978). Her face perpetually made up in a doll-like mask, she forces her way into the lives of the inhabitants of Dulcimer Street, never one to miss the opportunity for a gossip, or a free meal, living hand to mouth as she does since the boards have given her up.The novel touches on the lives of all the residents of 10 Dulcimer Street, with a number of sub-plots intertwined throughout, but there is no central character or single continuous plot. A gigantic Dickensian epic about the lodgers in 10 Dulcimer Street, Kennington, in the run up to the Second World War. With the assistance of Mr Josser's staunchly socialist Uncle Henry ( Stephen Murray), they gather thousands of signatures on a petition to win him a reprieve.

If you enjoy well written stories about London, about Britain in the 1940s, and the vagaries of human nature, then it's hard to imagine you wouldn't enjoy this book.Mr Puddy, the curve of whose decline in employment status intersects with the upward trajectory of Percy Boon’s meagre ambitions in the criminal underworld, has a cluster of gastronomic habits which shock us into a realisation that junk food – like the futility of elementary education – is not an entirely modern phenomenon.

The narrative is held together however by the activities of young Percy Boon, who begins his nefarious career respraying stolen cars, then turning his hand to stealing the cars himself, and finally, through a concatenation of misadventures with a peroxide blonde, to the capital offence of murder. This is one of those books that truly sweeps you away, and though it is by no means high literature, I would say it is very well written and one of the most entertaining and absorbing books I’ve ever read. Today it is mostly forgotten, a cult classic, rather than a staple on the must-read list … although it was introduced to a new generation by retro chic pop group St Etienne with their 1991 track of the same name. None of the characters however is bigger than the setting – from the train, trams, and offices, to the tea warehouse, where Mr Puddy, the lazy, but loveable nightwatchman has his chance to prove himself bigger than his flaws, to the grotty nightclub where Connie is forced to eke out a living for herself, this is where London comes alive.To Doris, Camden Town is a disappointment and ‘appears exactly the same as the Elephant and Castle on her side of the river’. Among them are the landlady, Mrs Vizzard (played by Joyce Carey), who is a widow and a believer in spiritualism; Mr and Mrs Josser ( Wylie Watson and Fay Compton), and their teenage daughter Doris ( Susan Shaw); the eccentric spiritualist medium Mr Squales (Sim); the colourful Connie Coke ( Ivy St. Mild wear and bumping to spine, board edges and corners, with scuffing, staining and marking to boards. But, as soon as you’ve read the first chapter and are immersed in the colourful, lively, hilarious and often touching world of the inhabitants of 10 Dulcimer Street, any trepidation falls away, and you become lost within the streets of prewar London. I’ve never had time to listen but now I’m unemployed and will have to go back and start listening to all of them from the beginning (which will undoubtedly add even more books to the TBR list.