Angel Pavement

London is first seen from the Thames, where a Baltic steamship docks and delivers the novel's most elusive force: James Golspie. Big, theatrical, and impossible to place, he charms customs men, drinks with the captain, and treats borders and regulations as jokes, all while concealing a sharp commercial purpose. He has come to exploit a timber trade scheme, using cheap continental veneers and inlays to undercut London prices, and his confident arrival suggests both opportunity and danger in the city's vast anonymity. Against this bustling opening, Angel Pavement turns to the shabby side-street that gives the novel its name: a cramped, overlooked corner of the City where offices, shops, and hidden lives crowd into a once-grand building. At No. 8, Twigg & Dersingham becomes the stage for quiet struggles, from Mrs. Cross's proud resentment over thankless labor to Mr. Smeeth's inward life of music, money worries, and domestic tension. Priestley's London is a place of commerce, class pressure, and private longing, where ordinary rooms contain the possibility of larger, unsettling change. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.