Published: 25 March 2010

If London was a book, it would be in constant need of a rewrite, to be edited through fresh eyes. One of the most exciting aspects about living in the city is its astonishing dynamism. London’s always in a state of flux: new arrivals, reluctant departures, changing politics and fashions, the shifting cityscape, all conspire to keep the city fresh, self-regenerating; a perennially updating story. 

Everyone has their own narrative; in a city this big that makes for a lot of fresh and uncommon angles. 

The official population of London is roughly seven million, but anyone who’s ever flown over the capital and seen the way it spreads out like a grey, congealing fried egg from Hounslow to Havering, Colindale to Croydon, knows there are so many more people here, many of them incognito, unofficial, invisible: each in their own world, yet with intertwined lives, conflicting interests and mutual needs.

My London – that patch I have considered home for 25 years, and which I tend to write about in my fiction – is considerably smaller; the so-called “bemused triangle” comprising Camden, Islington, Hackney and Soho, possibly the most metropolitan corner of the world, with hundreds of races, religions, smells and sounds. Sometimes I walk the streets, sit in pubs and parks, people-watching, eavesdropping, attempting to absorb as much as I can; to beg, borrow and steal a little, and make up the rest. 

In my new novel, Out of Office, I wanted to write about multiculturalism and whether it works; here, on my manor, overall I’d say it does, but there is some electricity and occasional conflict too, which the parent in me fears and perhaps the writer in me needs.

My book is partly about the fears and paranoia familiar to most city-dwellers; although fictional it is a London that hopefully many people will recognise. Many of the locations are real: Camden High Street, the East and West End. The novel has some controversial themes, including terrorism, religion and immigration, but also explores what it is to be a parent in this contradictory place.

Becoming a father has given me the opportunity to see my city afresh, and bathed in this new light London transforms itself yet again: we visit ball-parks, museums and city farms, my kids mix with the sons and daughters of Germans and Bangladeshis, Muslims and Jews, drawn from the local estates and the imposing terraces, the progeny of film-producers and builders. 

A part of me wishes I lived in a less artistic community; a bigger fish in a smaller (less exotic) pond. I’m not even the only novelist parent in my daughter’s class. But it was this vibrancy and diversity that drew me here all those years ago and have kept me here, with London- (as opposed to Stockholm-) syndrome; a willing hostage to fortune in this page-turner of a city.

• Out of Office. By Mark Piggott. Legend Press £7.99