Ged Pope's literary guide to suburban London is a rich cultural history

Pope, a specialist in London cultural history, argues that such a literary analysis is long overdue in "British cultural geography".

London literary focus has usually been based on the Bloomsbury and Mayfair sets.

Bloomsbury's Virginia Woolf utters the following words in the 1998 film, The Hours, written by David Hare, "If it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death".

PG Wodehouse's Psmith said of Clapham, "One has heard of it, of course, but has its existence ever been proved? I think not".

Pope wonders if this suburban neglect comes because of the names, "Penge and Pinner, Totteridge and Tottenham, Chorley, Cheam and Chiswick, sound like minor ailments or solicitors' firms from the Fifties".

The "everywhere of suburbia" came to the forefront in the 1970s, especially in the writings of J G Ballard, who despite his increasing wealth remained in his three bedroom semi-detached in Shepperton from 1968 to his death in 2009.

Pope notes Ballard's The Unlimited Dream Company "pressurises zones of banal suburban normalcy until they crack and evolve into their opposites".

Pope's 12-chapter armchair tour is not one to be read cover to cover, but rather to be dipped into and savoured.

Each chapter begins with a map of the suburb and then follows writers associated with the suburb from the 17^th century through to the present day.

Authors, represented through analyses and extracts from their books, diaries, autobiographies and poems, include Samuel Johnson, William Blake, Daniel Defoe, Conan Doyle, Angela Carter, Ian McEwan, George Gissing and Alan Bennett.

H.G. Wells, Charles Dickens and London "psychogeographer" Iain Sinclair are the most cited, but most authors are suburban specific. 2019 Booker prize winner Bernardine Evaristo uses Woolwich settings and history, notably in her autobiographical novel, Lara, to explore "race and nation, cultural and national identity".

In Holloway, Pope records Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell defacing library books, while Zadie Smith's White Teeth portrays Willesden as "a multicultural and multiclass zone of confused identities and conflicting stories".

Bromley is claimed as "probably the most significant suburban British pop history", where Hanif Kureishi in The Buddha of Suburbia exposed "suburban pretensions, snobbery and prejudice".

All the Tiny Moments Blazing is a comprehensive literary gazetteer, providing fascinating insights into the social, political and cultural life of London suburbs.