I wrote a section of ‘Burying Bad News’ in the summer which was a flashback to 1995 when Frances was a young GP in Feltham, in south-west London (famous for its Young Offenders’ Institution which takes the worst young criminals from the whole of London and visitors to which can often be seen on the local trains and buses).<\/p>\n
I used to work there in the\u00c2\u00a0late 80s\/early 90s and often travelled through there for the rest of the 90s. The whole\u00c2\u00a0town centre was a 60s planning disaster and\u00c2\u00a0over the last five or ten years it’s been completely redeveloped. My old\u00c2\u00a0office has been turned\u00c2\u00a0into Yuppie flats and the\u00c2\u00a0local boozer (whose beer garden was the only bit of green in the\u00c2\u00a0whole centre) has been flattened.<\/p>\n
I went back there last night\u00c2\u00a0and\u00c2\u00a0spent two or three hours in the Moon on the Square — a Wetherspoons pub which replaced the infamous\u00c2\u00a0Cricketers, which was a place where 70-year-old Irishmen offered each other out for fights, customers let their\u00c2\u00a0rottweilers roam around and pushed\u00c2\u00a0trolleys full of shopping into the pub from\u00c2\u00a0Tesco’s next door (Tesco has relocated down the road and has been joined in Feltham by Lidl, Aldi and Asda).<\/p>\n
The whole area is a vast improvement on what it was\u00c2\u00a0like\u00c2\u00a0at the point I set my chapter.\u00c2\u00a0The beer was very good in the Wetherspoons too. It’s good to revisit the places that I’ve used for settings. I drove on the bridge over the Stokenchurch Gap cutting last week and I’ll try and get to the Tate Modern again\u00c2\u00a0tomorrow\u00c2\u00a0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I wrote a section of ‘Burying Bad News’ in the summer which was a flashback to 1995 when Frances was a young GP in Feltham, in south-west London (famous for its Young Offenders’ Institution which takes the worst young criminals from the whole of London and visitors to which can often be seen on the … <\/p>\n