Andrew O’Hagan stepped off a night bus at King’s Cross when he was 21 years old. Ever since, the Scottish author has been fascinated by Caledonian Road, which runs North from the station. He wanted to go on a moral exploration of this road, where big tech now hosts offices and houses worth 7 million pounds stand right across from social housing complexes. In his “book of a lifetime”, he tackles the money-laundering at the centre of London’s financial activities and its accompanying consequential social inequalities. In conversation with Peter Florence to celebrate the book, O’Hagan explores the connections between the people who carry its story.

With more than sixty characters, the book has a central protagonist in Campbell Flynn, but features people across a vast social spectrum in masterful ways. Flynn is a writer in his mid-fifties who is more concerned with maintaining appearances, and the belief that correct sociocultural values are worth more than money. With Flynn, O’Hagan has created a character to represent the powerful elites who seem to have nothing left to sell but their “entitlement and privilege.”

In a painful irony, O’Hagan characterises the often-second-generation immigrants who are born and who grew up on Caledonian Road as more ‘Londoner’ than the elites who dominate the city’s riches, such as Campbell Flynn. The research that O’Hagan has conducted for the book spans more than ten years and involved much time spent with members of drill gangs, on the streets of London and in the courts, where they often found themselves trying to survive as free men, which none of them did, as O’Hagan recounts.

The book holds together many more of the subjects that O’Hagan has investigated in his work as a journalist for years, all with a comic realism that runs throughout the novel. He manages to demonstrate a profound interest in people in all their facets, together with the fundamental belief that “human beings move gently, stumble perhaps, towards progress.”