Radio 4 is roughly midway through it's month long George Orwell season - this year is the 110th anniversary of his birth - and last week's Book at Bedtime was 'Down and out in Paris and London'. I remember reading it along with most of Orwell's other works virtually in one clean sweep when I was somewhere in my teens. Maybe I was fifteen, sixteen, I really don't remember. What I do, though, is the utter vividness of his writing, it's simplicity and clarity, and the fact that for me at that time it represented a world I knew little of and had no experience of whatsoever - the sprawling, brawling, anonymous, never still metropolis.

Six or seven years after that clean sweep, I made that transition from a quiet South Yorkshire ex-mining village to London, the uber-city. Not a backward look over my shoulder since.

I love London  It is my home: by spirit; by association; by implicit memory, every stone, every pavement holds a story, even if it is just a fragment its there. It's been and continues to be the palimpsest that I've written the bulk of my life's story on.

And its to people like Orwell - as it to others such as J.B. Priestley, whose novel 'Angel Pavement' galvanised my sense of London as a vast social panorama, where individuals lived intertwined hugger mugger lives, which could be every permutation of circumstance and emotion, exuberant, degrading, humorous, gritty, tenacious, defiant, introspective, but what mattered was that they were alive - that I owe so much.

It's novels that helped me begin to tease out the nooks and crannies of 'the Smoke' in the early days of living here when I only had one day off and had to pack so much into those scarce twenty four hours. How else would I have uncovered Mayfair for instance, if not for reading of Dorian Gray pacing along Audley Street; or Notting Hill through the eyes of Colin Macinnes.

Even Dickens, who I don't particularly enjoy has a place in my fictional London, with his opening paragraph to Bleak House, where the November weather was so elemental that it would n't have been unimaginable to "...meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill...

Without them the road to adventure could have been so much different.