Siddhesh Joshi (Editor)

Gillian Tindall

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Name
  
Gillian Tindall

Role
  
Writer

Awards
  
Somerset Maugham Award


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Books
  
The Fields Beneath, The House By the Thames, City of gold : the biograph, Celestine, The man who drew London

Gillian Tindall FRSL (born 4 May 1938) is a British writer and historian. Among her best-known works are the books City of Gold: Biography of Bombay and Celestine: Voices from a French Village. Her novel Fly Away Home won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1972. From the 1960s to the early 1990s, Tindall also worked as a journalist, writing stories for The Guardian, The Evening Standard, The Times, and The Independent – and for many years she was a regular guest on the BBC Radio 3 arts discussion programme, Critics' Forum. Since 1963 she has lived in Kentish Town, North London.

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Beginning as a writer of fiction, she made her initial move into non-fiction with a biography of the fin de siècle novelist George Gissing. Tindall went on to specialise in a niche she has made particularly her own: the genre of miniaturist history. Her book The Fields Beneath (1977) explores the history of the London neighbourhood of Kentish Town and the spread of great cities in general, and is regarded as a seminal work of urban historical geography.

Tindall's book The House by the Thames (2006) is about the house built at 49 Bankside in London in 1710 and the buildings that preceded it on the site. The house has served as a home for prosperous coal merchants, an office, a lodging house, and once again as a private residence in the later 20th century. It has been erroneously assumed to be where Sir Christopher Wren lived during the construction of St Paul's Cathedral; other fantasy residents of older buildings on the site include Catherine of Aragon and William Shakespeare.

Another of Tindall's works, The Journey of Martin Nadaud: A Life And Turbulent Times, (1999) reconstructs the life and voyage of a 19th-century Frenchman from the Limousin region – a master stonemason-builder, who became a French political figure, revolutionary, republican Member of Parliament, and then an exile in England for eighteen years. Following this book's publication, Tindall was awarded in France the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

More recent books of Tindall's include Footprints in Paris: a Few Streets, a Few Lives (2009), which deals with the author's ancestors and their various connections to Paris over the generations; Three Houses, Many Lives (2012), which is another historical study centred on three ancient, contrasting habitations in southern England; and The Tunnel Through Time: A New Route For An Old London Journey (2016), which explores the layers of history that lie beneath the route of London's newest underground line.

Tindall's mother, Ursula Orange, was a novelist in the 1930s and 1940s.

References

Gillian Tindall Wikipedia