Welcome to the Shelter Sleuths Investigations page. Here you can find more background about the book’s characters, the sources of the stories, and the London locations featured in the novels.

If you have found any mistakes, inconsistencies or have any theories, pop them in the comments box below, I won’t hold it against you.

Colin Chaucer

A London cabbie for decades: middle-aged, slim, tall, with dishevelled greying hair. Of all the characters created, I’m proud of this one with his obsession with data and statistics in his pursuit of knowledge. A compulsive diarist who lives on his own. He is loosely based on a famous London blogger, and if truth be told, he’s a little bit like me.

Frank Belzoni

The cabbie of Italian extraction is a composite of the proprietor whom I rented a cab from in my early days. Mediterranean good looks, which are slightly fading, gregarious, knowledgeable and an all-round nice guy. I was apprenticed in Little Italy, so the experience of six years with Clerkenwell’s residents has probably percolated into the manuscript.

Donna Constable

Detective constable/sergeant, lives with her parents in a house overlooking Ealing Common. I’ve made an error here for unless her father was a corrupt senior police officer (he’s not portrayed as such), they couldn’t afford to live in the multi-million pound house. She has the classic beauty of young women of Indian descent – fairly short stature, flawless olive complexion, and long straight raven-black shiny hair.

Tom Farquharson

As a young journalist, I’ve struggled with this character. Not knowing any newspaper hacks and being over half a century older than him. I visualised a tallish, slim guy, wearing a jacket, but no tie, with shortish hair and with a naive countenance disguising a forensic brain.

Nigel

I’ve deliberately refrained from giving the lecturer a surname as his students would never refer to him as such. Wearing clothing firmly stuck in the 80s with printed t-shirts, Levi 501s and sporting a thinning ponytail, he epitomises so many of his academic generation.  His Jack Russell cross terrier, Spencer, is named predictably after Herbert Spencer, the Victorian philosopher and polymath, who originated the expression ‘survival of the fittest, ‘ which rather sums up much of the arc of my novels.

The Green Shelter

The ‘meeting place’, aka ‘incident room’, is based on a green shelter, close to Acacia Road in St. John’s Wood, where in February 1875 the first shelter was opened. Near Lord’s Cricket Ground in Wellington Place, it is nicknamed ‘The Chapel’ or ‘Nursery End’, and recently, a new proprietor has taken over the Shelter. Incidentally, The Chapel was the finishing line for ten cabbies calling themselves The Green Hut Run Club, who on Wednesday, 24th September, 2025, raising money for the charity maintaining the shelters, ran 16 miles across the capital, visiting all 13 of the city’s historic green taxi shelters in one go. The description of the internal layout is accurately described in the Shelter Sleuths Investigations, as is the adjacent toilet and small park. Herbert Spencer, the proprietor’s dog is fiction, as the shelter’s kitchen is adjacent to the dining area, less than 10ft away, strictly speaking, having a dog in the vicinity would contravene the Food Hygiene Regulations 2013, that rules that restaurant owners mustn’t allow dogs into places where food is prepared, handled or stored.

Taxi meters

Currently, no plans exist to incorporate cameras into taxi meters (if there were, On The Meter would be a work of non-fiction). Although many cabs today have CCTV installed in the vehicle’s interior, the cabbie has no access to the images.

Canal Walk Apartments

A new fictional development near Paddington Station. The adjacent canal exists; in the 1800s, Paddington became the gateway to London, connecting the city to the growing industrial world beyond. When the waterways opened in 1801, Paddington stood at the junction of two major canals – the Grand Union Canal and the Regent’s Canal – which terminated at the Paddington Basin. There is a huge number of apartments being built here, the flat visited by Tom and Colin, the sales office and Peter the salesman are all fictional.

Pinner Park Farm (derelict)

The isolated 18th century building of Pinner Park Farm certainly exists, and is situated in the middle of a large area of farmland, once the exclusive hunting preserve from the time of the Norman Conquest of the Archbishops of Canterbury.

Nellie Clifden

In August 1861, Bertie was finishing up a summer at the military camp at Curragh in Ireland, and his parents were visiting him there to see what he had accomplished. Days later, passages appear in Bertie’s diary that mark three distinct engagements at Curragh, dated on September 6, 9 and 10 – “N.C. 1st time, N.C. 2nd time, N.C. 3rd time.” This, my friends, is how the future Edward VII lost his virginity. I have used artistic license with young Nellie Clifden, as, rather than living in obscurity, contemporary accounts claim she regularly appeared on the musical stage in Dublin and London.

Angels Fancy Dress

When German tailor Daniel Angel arrived in 1813 with barely a word of English, he set up a barrow selling second-hand clothes to London’s poorest in Seven Dials. Little did he realise a request from an actor to rent a suit, rather than buy it, would lead to a shop in nearby Shaftesbury Avenue by the late 1880’s. Angels Fancy Dress is still renting out costumes to the public from those same premises.

The Regency Cafe

The Regency Cafe is an art deco style British cafe in Regency Street. It first opened in 1946, and much of the interior is original. In 2013, it was voted the fifth best restaurant in London by users of Yelp. The cafe has been featured as a filming location in several BBC series, such as Judge John Deed, Rescue Me, and London Spy. It has also appeared in the films Layer Cake, Brighton Rock, Pride, and Rocketman. In print, it has appeared in the Japanese version of the magazine Vogue and in a Volkswagen advertisement.

The most beautiful road in London

Exhibition Road was once actually described by a politician as ‘The most beautiful road in London’, when it was transformed by paving it in Chinese granite at £22,000 per yard. Once known as Albertopolis, it is lined with museums, a university, colleges and music venues.

The National Archives

With its stark white concrete, the building containing the National Archives looks more like an oversized Odeon cinema, a nod to its architect, who designed many of the 1930s picture palaces. The lake and its three fountains at the entrance mutes the brutalist frontage. Anyone can apply to conduct research at this haven of tranquillity.

Brantridge Park

The Grade II-listed Brantridge Park does exist. The 19th-century country house, sitting on a small hill overlooking Brantridge Forest, was formerly a low-grade royal residence built around 1874 by Sir Robert Loder, replacing a farmhouse that stood on the site. It is now primarily a spa and location for photo shoots.