Rough Sleeping

Isn't that an amazing map? And it turns out, that strip through Limehouse and Ratcliff is still there on modern maps, except now it includes more of the Isle of Dogs.

But, alas, I really can't follow this up the way I want to. I know there are options beyond hotels and hostels and Air BnB. There are worlds, intersecting worlds of shared rentals and sleeping rough and shelters and St. Mungos and crashing at a friend's.

I'd love to write that book. I'd love to write the book in which the diary of the shopgirl (who is sleeping rough on a railway platform herself) is presented in full-page excerpts.

But that's too much work. Plus I think it might be the wrong kind of book. When you get right down to it, being hungry and having uncomfortable living spaces isn't the story of my heroine, it is a temporary obstacle. She doesn't do without because archaeology really doesn't pay that well and life is hard for everyone. She'll do without because she's lost in the desert while searching for the Golden Orb of Somebody.

The intersect with the past in this one is entirely filtered. It is through study and discovery and exhibits, not through direct experience. As much as in some other book I might have my protagonist re-live the experience of someone in the past (or just set the damn book in that period in the first place), the closest Penny is coming is with a little dress-up and some museum displays.

Besides, her poverty problem is artificial and temporary. She has her plane tickets. She has friends she can borrow from. She most certainly has people she could crash with. The only reason I've got her, in the chapter I'm working on now, taking the tube down to Brixton to look at a poor neighborhood with council estates and all that is to ramp up the pressure on her while I work around to the climax of the book.

Plus I need the page count.

So don't look for a deep look into the realities of being poor in London. This is just going to be enough surface impressions to sell emotional arcs of the story. Nothing on the practicalities of the hostel circuit. Just a bit of dirt and grime and the experience of riding the tube.