Fictional London – a travel/writing blog

by Julie Tetel Andresen | September 16, 2016 |

Note: My blogs Visiting London, London Architecture, and Factual London are about factual London. This one is about fictional London.

The present blog is about fictional London, that is, the London that figures as the setting for my two latest stories, The Alpha’s Edge and Buy Me Love. I thought it would be fun in this blog to show the real places where the stories unfold.

THE ALPHA’S EDGE

This short story sets up the world of the shapeshifter trilogy I’ve begun. It is available for free at my website when you sign up for my email list (sign up in the top left corner of this page).

The events take place within a 24-hour period, and all the action unfolds in and around Montague Street in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London.

The story takes place in November, and there’s snow on the ground.

A typical street in Bloomsbury

The neighborhood is characterized by 18^th-century Georgian architecture, mostly brick buildings with black wrought iron fencing, all with three stories and a mansard roof below which are tucked apartments for the servant.

A few scenes take place in near-by Bloomsbury Square Gardens.

Bloomsbury Square Gardens

The main characters have lunch at Spaghetti House.

Spaghetti House is on Sicilian Avenue, a short pedestrian street full of restaurants. I took this picture in August, so no snow.

BUY ME LOVE

This is the first book in my shapeshifter trilogy, and I’m in the midst of writing it. I stopped in London at the end of my around-the-world trip and had tons of fun confirming locations I was already familiar with and then scouting out new ones for the story

The hero, Detective Chief Inspector Moses Reilly, works for the Scotland Yard branch of the Metropolitan Police, so naturally there are scenes in his workplace.

New Scotland Yard moved to this building on Broadway in the 1960s and is now in the midst of moving to their original location on Victoria Embankment and reclaiming their original name of Scotland Yard (that is, without the ‘New’). For the purposes of my story, I have them still in the building on Broadway and refer to them as Scotland Yard.

Early on in the story a dead body shows up in Victoria Tower Gardens. It is walking distance from Scotland Yard.

Victoria Tower Gardens

Another dead body shows up in Russell Square, Bloomsbury.

Russell Square, one side of which is defined by Montague Street

Because Buy Me Love is related to The Alpha’s Edge, some of the action takes places on Montague Street and Bloomsbury (see above). Buy Me Love takes place in August, so the snowy scenes above are green and leafy.

The heroine, Zelda Sachsen, is a werewolf (not really a spoiler if you read The Alpha’s Edge first).

Among other activities, she visits her friend Gerta on Cloth Fair, a medieval street in the part of London known as City of London – familiarly called the Square Mile, the major financial center of the city.

Gerta lives on the first floor of The Rising Sun. I renamed this pub – with a great leap of imagination – The Setting Sun.

Cloth Fair. This image of The Rising Sun shows how narrow the street is because you can see the curbs on both sides of the street at the bottom. It really is only a couple of feet wide.

Paula Fields, a secondary character, lives on Brooks Mews in Mayfair.