About the author
A darker London
Thomas Ludlow creates thrillers set in a darker London. He walks the city at hours when most of it is asleep — the towpaths, the cuttings, the estates with one lit window — and the books come out of what is left standing when the traffic stops.
His first book, Mind the Dark: Twelve London Thrillers, ranges from Whitechapel to Wimbledon to the Isle of Dogs. His first novel, Nothing Stops at Crouch End Now, stays in one place: the Parkland Walk, the disused railway cutting under Crouch End, which closed to passengers in 1954.
He lives in north London and answers his own email.
Why this footpath
The Parkland Walk is four miles of Victorian railway with the trains taken out. They ran from Finsbury Park to Alexandra Palace, calling at Stroud Green, Crouch End, Highgate, Cranley Gardens and Muswell Hill on the way. By day it is busy — runners, dog walkers, the school run — and it is still a cutting: sunk below the streets, screened by half a century of growth, out of sight of the roads that cross it. The platforms at Crouch End are still there in the trees, and people pass them every morning without looking up beyond them to notice the Spriggan, a 1993 sculpture by Marilyn Collins set in a high arch of the retaining wall.
