Let’s look at some of the books which explore your passion for London. Your first choice was written during the reign of Elizabeth I – A Survey of London. It is the first survey of its kind ever published. How has it helped you with your work?

Well, it has helped enormously. When I was preparing myself for the book I wrote about London – London: The Biography – I read it carefully from page to page. The first edition of A Survey of London was published in 1598 when John Stow himself was then past 70. It is a monumental and magnificent work. He had always lived in London and he was interested in every particular thing connected with his native city. Nothing escaped him. He remarks on the sports and pastimes of Londoners, the towers and castles, the gates in the wall and the fresh water supply. And he goes ward by ward through all the streets of London describing their characteristics and their history. He was a great antiquarian of London, too, so we get a picture of not only Tudor London but also medieval London because it still survived in his lifetime.

So he was very good at peeling back the layers and revealing different parts of the city.

Yes, that’s right. He was able to see beneath the crevices and was able to judge and describe the underlying structures of the city.

What was one of the most interesting wards that he described?

I liked the Cheap ward, which I suppose now would be part of Cheapside. He writes things like, “Then near to the standard in Cheap is Honey Lane, so called not of sweetness there of being very narrow and somewhat dark, but rather of often washing and sweeping to keep it clean.” That is the sort of detail at which he excels, where the daily life of the people also comes to life.

Another favourite author of yours is Charles Dickens. You have written a biography of Charles Dickens as well as other books exploring his work – so what made you choose Bleak House?

Well, Bleak House is the work which most powerfully suggests the darkness of London, the close-packedness of London, if you like, where everything is connected to everything else. It is a London world where people are tightly bound together with ties of duty and ties of love and charity. And yet at the same time this London world is so perilous, so cruel and so close to death and disaster all the time, that you fear for the characters in the novel. The rich and the poor, the sick and the well all mingle together, which is one of the themes of the book. It is a serious London, full of mysteries of the past and mysteries of origin. In all respects it conveys a haunted city, half pantomime-half graveyard, and full of ghosts and unseen presences.