Mystery authors like to choose the locations of their stories carefully. I know authors who choose certain cities and towns intentionally so they can build in a readymade readership. Readers like recognizing the café they frequent or the hair dresser or the main street the protagonist finds the body. Other authors will choose a place and change it subtly to work with the landscape they need in their stories. Santa Teresa is a stand-in for Santa Barbara in Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series, for instance. But I chose London. And not just any London, but a fourteenth century one. Now although London is a real place, the fourteenth century London is long gone. I know that we think of England as eternal and unchanging, but a city like London, even with its few remaining Dickensian streets, has changed a lot. Two great fires saw to that along with just the regular amount of tearing down and building up. I have a few copies of maps from about the early fourteenth century and a stunning one from the sixteenth century. What enthralls me about these two maps is how much London grew in two hundred years and how much it also remained the same. London began as a Roman settlement—Londinium—but even before the Romans arrived, the prehistoric natives had sporadically settled in the area. William the Conqueror, the last successful invader to England, secured the Anglo-Saxon walls around the city and built his keep within it. We know this keep today as the Tower of London. The walls of Anglo-Saxon London stretch from Ludgate and Newgate to the west, to Cripplegate and Bishopsgate in the north, Aldgate in the east, and Dowgate in the south. Over the centuries, farmland began to be gobbled up for more and more city dwellers, well outside the city’s original walls. And the Thames, once its own sort of border, became merely one more thoroughfare, cutting the city in two. The north side was where all the main attractions were and the Bankside in Southwark, was traditionally the place where the brothels and low-life’s lived. Since actors were also considered low-lifes, the southbank is also where they put the theatres in Shakespeare’s day.
Mystery authors like to choose the locations of their stories carefully. I know authors who choose certain cities and towns intentionally so they can build in a readymade readership. Readers like recognizing the café they frequent or the hair dresser or the main street the protagonist finds the body. Other authors will choose a place and change it subtly to work with the landscape they need in their stories. Santa Teresa is a stand-in for Santa Barbara in Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series, for instance. But I chose London. And not just any London, but a fourteenth century one. Now although London is a real place, the fourteenth century London is long gone. I know that we think of England as eternal and unchanging, but a city like London, even with its few remaining Dickensian streets, has changed a lot. Two great fires saw to that along with just the regular amount of tearing down and building up. I have a few copies of maps from about the early fourteenth century and a stunning one from the sixteenth century. What enthralls me about these two maps is how much London grew in two hundred years and how much it also remained the same. London began as a Roman settlement—Londinium—but even before the Romans arrived, the prehistoric natives had sporadically settled in the area. William the Conqueror, the last successful invader to England, secured the Anglo-Saxon walls around the city and built his keep within it. We know this keep today as the Tower of London. The walls of Anglo-Saxon London stretch from Ludgate and Newgate to the west, to Cripplegate and Bishopsgate in the north, Aldgate in the east, and Dowgate in the south. Over the centuries, farmland began to be gobbled up for more and more city dwellers, well outside the city’s original walls. And the Thames, once its own sort of border, became merely one more thoroughfare, cutting the city in two. The north side was where all the main attractions were and the Bankside in Southwark, was traditionally the place where the brothels and low-life’s lived. Since actors were also considered low-lifes, the southbank is also where they put the theatres in Shakespeare’s day.