A story of Thailand both past and present – THAILAND
Talking Location With … Ben Shepherd: SOUTH LONDON
24th September 2026
#TalkingLocationWith …. Ben Shepherd, author of Blood Drunk: SOUTH LONDON
There are lots of different Londons. My novel, BLOOD DRUNK, starts in a bit of London that most visitors don’t see, out somewhere in the tidal zone of South London where the sprawl of suburban post-war housing meets the edges of the old city. South London has always been the poor relative, cut off from Westminster’s power and the gilded halls of the City of London by the Thames – for centuries London Bridge was the only way across
Things changed after the Victorians slapped up half-a-dozen new bridges and outlying villages were crusted over by brick-built housing like an invasive fungus in stop-motion, but South London’s reputation as the scrappy, dirty outsider never quite went away. The protagonist of Blood Drunk, Freddie Burns, embodies that spirit.
Frenzied Victorian industry also saw most of London’s other rivers vanish from view as the tributaries running into the Thames were covered over and forgotten. They’re now only really remembered by pubs – the Effra Tavern in Brixton, the Falcon at Clapham Junction, both named for rivers now flowing deep below them in the dark. But there is one at least that is still there, mostly out in the open – the river Wandle, which cuts through South London via Merton and Wandsworth, all the way to the Thames, a little tendril of the wild reaching into the heart of the city. You can walk along most of it. It is an encounter with a vampire next to one of London’s urban rivers that begins Freddie’s journey from the edge-lands where he grew up into an older, stranger and darker city than he knew; rivers have always marked boundaries.
His first step takes him to St James’, an enclave of Georgian grandeur nestled between royal palaces and parks and once London’s most fashionable address. It is now home to multinationals and gentlemen’s clubs; walk it and you might get a glimpse of wood panelling and brass reading-lights through a crack in the curtains before a hard-faced man with brass buttons on his coat politely moves you on. You can’t help but wonder what kind of deals are being done behind the anonymous front doors, where the big beasts of global capital meet amid centuries of ingrained snobbery. Freddie gets to open one of those doors, though the predators he finds tend to prefer fresh blood over portfolio acquisition. Albeit not by much.
It doesn’t end there. Freddie goes deeper, to Wapping, an even older riverfront district where sailors swarmed and river pirates were hanged and left to rot in the tides, that in my version hides something even wilder than vampires. To a card game in the old liberty of the Temple, where London’s lawyers carved out a semi-autonomous enclave on a site first owned by the Knights Templar. And to Vauxhall, where the debauchery of long-forgotten pleasure gardens finds an echo in twenty-first-century sex clubs. London has picked up a habit of memory; nothing is gone in the city, not completely, and the ghosts of the past are all around if you take the time to look.
There is no one London, and no one novel can hope to reflect more than a fraction of its long history, still less one that is more concerned with drinking, fighting and magic than nuanced social history. But still, I have tried to reflect something of the city I know and where I grew up – its contradictions and contrasts, rich and poor, old and new all bundled up together. And underneath that an abiding tolerance: bruised, world-weary and sometimes cold, but mostly happy enough to welcome anyone as long as they buy a round and stand on the right side of the escalators down to the Tube. It’s not so much that Londoners are broad-minded, Freddie muses at one point, more that we just genuinely don’t care – he uses slightly stronger language than that, but you get the point. Works out much the same in the end.
BEN SHEPHERD
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