There’s no escaping Christmas now. The Christmas advertisements are out, the shops are full of Xmas products and the Christmas lights are everywhere. Everywhere including Seven Dials, where I was out last night to dance tango and stopped on my way to take this photo.
Cynical old curmudgeon as I am, I still really like the lights here. It’s lovely that they’ve made the Seven Dials sundial the centre of the illuminations. When Seven Dials was originally laid out in the early 1690s the Seven Dials column was put at the centre with all the roads in the development radiating out from it. It was originally seen as a desirable place to live but, as the city moved westward, Seven Dials was left behind. It became a notorious slum and the column was viewed by the authorities as a meeting place for gangs of rogues, so it was demolished. The existing column is an exact reproduction of the original, unveiled in 1989. It is London’s only column sundial.
Seven Dials is the setting for my book, Back Home. It is the end of a trilogy of books following the adventures of the (fictional) John Williamson and his travels to Borneo and India before returning to London in the mid-19th century. The books are very different to the Burke series and look at questions of Empire during a tumultuous time (including an account of the siege of Cawnpore during the Indian Mutiny/War of Independence). Although the stories all feature a lot of excitement and incident, they also ask more serious questions about the relationship between colonisers and colonised and how this reflected power relationships back in London. They’re not as much fun to read as the Burke series but, I like to think, more rewarding. The paperbacks are cheaper too, because I really want people to read them. I’m so fond of them that the first in the series, The White Rajah, is the only one of my books that you can buy in hardback. All three stories are standalone, although you will probably get more out of them if you read them in order. Perhaps, given the Christmas theme, you might consider The Williamson Papers as Xmas gifts. I’d love it if you did.
