Author Interview: A Debut Novelist on Researching Post-War London

Nell Ravenscroft's debut novel The Lamp Room opens in Bermondsey in February 1947, in a city still dark by habit, short of coal, and scattered with bomb sites that local children treated as playgrounds. Her protagonist, Ruth Aylward, takes a clerk's job in the borough housing office and spends her days allocating prefabs to families on the waiting list. Ravenscroft built that world over four years of reading, walking and listening — and then spent two more writing it.

We talked about how the research actually works, what she threw away, and which London bookshops she keeps going back to.

A novel that began with one photograph

The book started with an image rather than a plot. Ravenscroft was in a local studies library in south London, working through photographs of the borough after the war, when she found a picture of a woman in a headscarf standing in the doorway of a prefab with a mop in one hand.

"She looked as if she'd stopped mid-sentence. I wanted to know what she'd been saying, and who she was saying it to. That was the whole idea."

That single photograph set the limits of the research. She decided the novel would run from 1947 to 1951 and stay within a few streets of the river. Anything outside that frame had to earn its place, which meant saying no to a great deal of good material.

Where the detail lives: five sources to start with

Ravenscroft is not an archivist and she is quick to say a first novel does not need one. What it needs is a handful of sources you know properly. These were her starting five.

1. Mass Observation diaries and questionnaires. Held at The Keep in Brighton, these wartime and post-war records answer the question fiction actually needs: what did an ordinary afternoon feel like?
2. Borough and local studies libraries. Housing committee minutes, rate books and school log books give you the paperwork your characters would have handled themselves.
3. The National Archives at Kew. Government files are useful less for plot than for knowing what people were told, and when they were told it.
4. Maps and street directories. Ordnance Survey sheets and old directories let you rebuild a walk, shop by shop, and work out how long it took.
5. Oral history collections. Recorded interviews are the best source for the rhythm of speech. Listen with a notebook and steal the pauses, not the stories.

Getting period detail right without showing off

Her working rule was two facts to a page, and only if a character would plausibly notice them.

"A woman in a queue notices the weather and the woman ahead of her. She does not notice the architecture of austerity. If I needed a reader to feel rationing, I put them in a queue for something small."

She checked three things before anything else: money, transport and food. Wages, fares and the price of a loaf anchor a scene faster than any description of a street. She also kept a running list of words that felt too modern for the period and crossed them out in later drafts, rather than trusting her ear on the day.

One more habit worth copying: she gave herself permission to get a character's beliefs wrong, and none at all to get the world wrong. Ruth might misremember a date or misunderstand a policy. The buses, the ration books and the weather had to be consistent.

Routines that survive a day job

Ravenscroft wrote before work, four mornings a week, from six until half past seven, with coffee and no internet connection. Saturday mornings went to structural work: moving scenes, cutting chapters, checking the chronology. Research happened in blocks, never during a drafting stretch — otherwise, she says, the reading becomes a very respectable way of not writing.

Two tools did most of the heavy lifting. A chronology wall of index cards, one line per day of the novel, so she could see at a glance what her characters were doing while the history kept happening around them. And a questions file, where anything unverified went, to be checked on the next archive trip or quietly cut.

London bookshops worth the walk

Asked where she sends people who want to understand mid-century London, she named shops rather than reading lists.

• Persephone Books, Lamb's Conduit Street. Mid-century novels by women, mostly, with the grey covers. Read three of these and you will hear the period's voice.
• London Review Bookshop, Bury Place. The history and essay shelves are where you find out what historians are still arguing about.
• Daunt Books, Marylebone Road. Shelved by country and city, which is exactly how a novelist thinks about place.
• Any Amount of Books, Charing Cross Road. Second-hand stock that turns up odd local histories you would never find online.
• Skoob Books, Bloomsbury. Good for cheap paperbacks of the period, which is often more useful than a scholarly edition.

If you want to research your own corner of London

Start small. One street, one family, one week. A single Tuesday in February will teach you more than a decade of reading, because it forces you to answer practical questions: who was at home, what was cooking, what did the walk to the bus stop look like in the dark.

Before you go anywhere, check opening hours and whether you need a reader's ticket or an appointment. Many London archives are appointment-only and close one day a week, usually Monday. Photograph the reference slip of every document before you leave the reading room — you will want it three months later and you will not remember the box number.

Keep a research diary with dates, names and where each fact came from. Talk to people early, ask before you record anything, and if someone would rather a story stayed in the family, let it. Most of what you collect will never appear in the book. That is not wasted time; it is the ground the book stands on.

The Lamp Room is out now.

Photo: Mikhail Nilov / Pexels