The novel was also adapted for Thames Television as a series, broadcast in seven one-hour episodes from 6 September to 18 October 1977. 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. 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. Mrs Vizzard lives in the basement’s ‘nether depths’, next to the soon-to-beoccupied back basement room.

Although a (happy) resident of the north of England for over 20 years now, I was born in London and raised in the south, and first read this book about 15 years ago. The blackouts are vividly presented (“it had a sinister, almost solid, quality of its own, this blackout, so that you felt you had to carve your way through it, scraping and scooping out a passage as you went along”) and when Collins emphasises the carry-on attitude of Londoners during the war, it seems not so much heroic as dutiful (“[Mr Josser] had something else to think about.The other residents include flashy young mechanic Percy Boon, whose foray into stolen cars descends into something much, much worse. I was attracted by its newness, its title – I love London-based writing – and its cover photograph, a street scene by the Austrian photographer Wolf Suschitzky. The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "Norman Collins' story, which is Dickensian in the richness of its pathos and kindly humour, has been triumphantly captured on the screen. The author is not as brilliant as George Orwell (my personal hero) but the writing style has some similarities. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

It, and it’s characters, have always stayed with me and I was delighted to read it again when I found a second hand copy a couple of years ago. I’ve always enjoyed completely inappropriate, florid covers (although obviously I feel for the authors who must have recoiled in horror when they first set eyes on them. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. 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.London Belongs to Me (also known as Dulcimer Street) is a British film released in 1948, directed by Sidney Gilliat, and starring Richard Attenborough and Alastair Sim. So much happens – often of a banal but diverting nature – that to reveal some of it would be not so much spoiling as inadequate. Not a period piece at that time, but very familiar territory to people who had been young in the 30s, that is, people of my parents\’ generation. It also shows us something of Norman Collins’s courage in writing and publishing this novel when he did. London Belongs to Me is an enormous doorstopper of a book that looks rather overwhelming when you first pick it up, with its almost transparently thin pages, tiny text and a vast array of characters who you initially feel you might need a family tree to keep track of.