How Alan Wheat's Character Placement Wheel started a South London property boom

photo credit: Pafcool2 (Wikimedia Commons)
Cross-posted from r/ImaginaryLondon

Mention the 2011 Croydon property boom to any estate agent based within the Capital. The likely response will be awestruck nostalgia, dating to a six-month period when it seemed as though all roads to home ownership converged upon the South London borough.

“It was the speed of it,” recalls Mark Barton of Barton Sales & Letting. “I returned from a fortnight in the Seychelles to find that, during my absence, we had sold all eleven of our mainstays – rundown properties in Croydon that had been on our books for ages. I almost fell off my chair when I was given the news. It was the same for the other estate agents in the area. People were coming in off the street looking for homes that they could renovate almost from the ground up. A lot of them were first time buyers. Nobody knew why it was happening at first. It was Gary Rockley who eventually put two and two together.”

The unlikely catalyst for Croydon's sudden rise in popularity, as a place to put down roots, was a writer named Alan Wheat.

Wheat, a lifelong resident of Lewisham, is a prolific author who self-publishes, on average, four novels a year, as part of his Lanes of London series – a tapestry of unconnected stories, that he commenced writing in 1974, documenting the day to day trials of fictional inhabitants of the Capital.

“I ride around on buses, or on the Underground,” he told an interviewer for ITV, in 2007, during one of his intermittent spikes of popularity. “Occasionally I see someone who catches my imagination. They become the unwitting subject of my next book.”

Despite a common metropolitan setting, there is no overlap between Wheat's novels. The lives of the characters in one story do not cross paths with the lives of those in another.

“That was a deliberate choice on my part,” says Wheat. “I hate that pandering, pseudo-intellectual spin on the soap opera trope, where a character suddenly turns out to be the father, or the long lost brother of one of the other characters. London is an enormous city. Most of the people who you meet there, you will meet only once in your life. My books are intended to shine a light onto lives that have meaning within a very small social circle, set against a wider, largely indifferent backdrop of human background chatter and activity.”

In 1987, Wheat noticed that the settings for his books had become too narrow and predictable in scope:

“It was always either somewhere just south of the river, or in the East End, or up in Hampstead or Highgate. I was missing out on huge chunks of London because I never went to those other places. I was staying within my comfort zone and writing about what I knew,” he says.

To counter his prejudices, Wheat created what he describes as a 'character placement wheel': A dial, with a spinning arrow at the centre, that is divided into London boroughs on its innermost section, then subdivided into smaller areas, within these boroughs, in a band that forms the wheel's outer circumference.

“I started using it to randomly select the locations where my novels were set,” he says. “It really opened up London to me and I think my books improved too as a result. I made a prototype out of those plastic overlays that they use on overhead projectors. Then I knocked up a larger version out of wood that I used for a few months until it warped. The final incarnation is made entirely out of scrap metal. That's the one currently on display in my front garden. The cobbled circular area that it occupies originally housed a sundial.

“The wheel got mentioned in a few interviews I did. Probably in response to that, I started to get a steady trickle of London writers and artists making pilgrimages to my front garden to spin the pointer for their own projects. In the beginning they were very polite. They would ring the doorbell first and ask permission. They would post samples of their writing through the letterbox for my approval. The shine wore off that pretty fast. It became a bit annoying. I put a sign up, giving people permission to make use of the wheel within sociable hours.

“Things really got out of hand after I did the interview for ITV and the wheel began to attract a lot of attention. People would loiter on the grass around it, like it was a public space. I had to literally step over bodies to leave my front garden. In the end I had to redirect my mail to a PO Box and lock my garden gate, though that didn't stop people from climbing over the low wall.

“Then the thank you letters started to arrive from people who had moved to London from elsewhere in the UK; some even from other countries. They would visit my home and spin the wheel as a random method of divining where exactly they should put down roots. The letters I got were all positive. They talked about their lives and how happy they were, or how they wouldn't have met this person, or got this job, if they hadn't paid a visit to my garden. I suppose I should have been flattered but I was horrified to be honest with you. I hope nobody ended up in a rotten situation as a result of a bad turn of the pointer.

“The Croydon business was a perfect storm of coincidence. At the end of 2009, I gave a film production company permission to shoot a scene around the dial. One of the characters in their screenplay (Headerley), is fleeing an abusive relationship. She uses the wheel to select a new part of London where she can restart her life. The film did rather well. It won a few Baftas, which obviously increased curiosity about the wheel.

“In November, 2010, my mother died. I went into a depression, which didn't lift until the end of the following year. I didn't write anything during that time, or go out very much. It was a very black period in my life. At some point the mechanism in the dial broke. You could spin the arrow as hard as you liked, but it would always end up pointing towards Croydon. By this time, people who had been inspired by the film, were descending on my garden en masse to spin the pointer and begin their own personal journeys. The first I knew about it was when a Croydon estate agent named Gary Rockley, who is now a close a friend, sent me a bottle of champagne and a hollowed-out granite slab containing hand-made chocolates.

“Obviously, I must take some responsibility for what many regard as the gentrification of Croydon. That type of thing should occur organically as opposed to mechanically, and never as a result of mechanical error.”

Despite Wheat's misgivings, many remain amazed by the impression that he has been able to make upon the social geography of London.

“It all calmed down after a few months, though the momentum carries forward to this day,” says Barton. “Small fortunes were amassed. A year later practically everyone I knew in the local trade had upgraded to a bigger house and was driving a better car. Some people throw around pejoratives like gentrification. The truth is, when you look at the city from the perspective of someone in my position, there's always an ebb and flow. You always have an eye on the comings and goings. Areas are always either on the up, or stagnating and deteriorating. Alan unintentionally made life imitate art and, for a while, no-one realised what was going on.”

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