I acquired a handsome copy of Geoffrey Fletcher’s City Sights at the weekend, which has made me curious about exactly who he was and his life. The answer is that he studied at the Slade just after the war and was then a Rome Scholar in 1948. The UCL Art Museum has a painting by him dated 1945 entitled The Paying Guest, which already shows his taste for low life. In the 1950s, he contributed drawings to the Manchester Guardian and, in 1958, drawings of London to the Daily Telegraph in a column called ‘London Day by Day’. His reputation as a writer and illustrator was made by the publication of The London Nobody Knows in 1962. I’ve discovered that I’ve got two copies of the paperback, the first, published in 1965 for 6/-. It is an exploration of what he describes as ‘the crummier areas’ of London. ‘This, then, is the obscure, hardly-to-be-thought-of city; the London, very largely, of the hot August pavement and the pleasures of the mean, interminable streets’. I owe him a debt of gratitude because he first introduced me to Limehouse and Stepney Green. The book was made into a film starring James Mason in 1967. What happened to him later in his life is not clear except that there were exhibitions of his work in northern cities, including, Manchester, Oldham and Blackpool and his work is extremely well represented in British public collections. He died in 2004 and his archive is held by Islington Public Library.