The seemingly unresolvable difficulty of pinpointing the imaginary London parish of Morwellyn, on a fictional map of the Capital

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Cross-posted from /r/ImaginaryLondon


The commonplace description of the ancient and fictional London parish of Morwellyn as “pint-sized” is an apt one. The tiny community made its first appearance as the setting for George Tatters' 1964 novel The Catboat – a book containing neither cats nor boats. Tatters later admitted that it was a working title that he kept at the behest of his publisher, who thought that it implied to the reader hidden depths that were, in fact, not present in the narrative.

Morwellyn is initially framed by Tatters as “a few rows of houses that had lain unclaimed by the parishes on either side.” Our first glimpse of it comes courtesy of the novel's protagonist, David Breddy, who regards the neighbourhood out of the corner of one eye, through the sudsy lens of an empty beer glass, that he holds carelessly up to his face like an inverted telescope. The following morning, Breddy, who appears to be a resident of Morwellyn (although this is not stated implicitly – he could very well reside in one of the adjacent parishes) is awakened at a quarter to seven by “mechanical birdsong” emanating from the squeaky cogs of a carillon, located in the tower of a nearby meeting house, “as they warm themselves up in expectation of chiming the hour.”

Tatters was evasive when it came to establishing the precise location of Morwellyn. His perverse reluctance to pin down the parish on a map has regrettably been echoed by other writers who have referenced the area in their own works. In his novel The Octet, Toby Notte describes the parish as being “just down the road from Chivers,” though he does not deign to furnish his readers with any details regarding the nature of this 'Chivers'. Does the name refer to another London parish, a road, a department store, a restaurant, or even a private household? We are not told and presumably will never know, since Notte passed away in 2019, and provided no deathbed revelation or notations to be issued posthumously.

Katherine Rolfe, in her short story The Seal Painter, claims that the radio tower at Rontree lies to the distant north of Morwellyn and can be viewed from the upper storeys of the houses on clear days. As to the whereabouts of Rontree, Rolfe has remained enigmatically silent.

The Trinidadian writer, Sapphire Welton, claimed that she would like to visit Morwellyn, if only she knew what bus to take.

Our efforts to narrow down the location of Morwellyn in even the most simplified geographical terms, as occupying ground either to the north or the south of the River Thames, have met with abject failure. It is hard to say, exactly, whether this lack of success on the part of myself and others, can be put down to the literary skill of Tatters and his collaborators in concealing it, or if it is a manifestation of a national decline in reading comprehension, the blame for which must be laid at the front steps of our secondary schools and universities. It should be noted that, when Colin Brickley stated his intention to cement the foundations of Morwellyn, somewhere in the vicinity of Kensington and Notting Hill, he was denied fictional planning permission.

When one searches for a lost city, attention might be turned to desolate or overgrown backwaters. Alternatively one might simply peel back the footprint of an existing city and peer underneath in search of evidence of a previous settlement. When it comes to rooting out Morwellyn, matters become more complex. We are on the hunt for a fictional parish hidden among a collage of other parishes, both real and fictitious in nature; we are looking for a particular needle buried within a pile of needles.

Duncan Marley has observed that David Breddy never explicitly enters Morwellyn and is only seen to observe the parish indirectly, usually at oblique angles, or through mediating devices (for example the aforementioned beer glass). He speculates that the parish may well be a mirage – an aspirational London that has manifested in the consciousness of the protagonist as a more desirable alternative to his actual circumstances.

While I cannot discount this idea outright, I find the prospect that I have wasted the past five years of my life scouring imaginary London for a parish that has no existence, even in the fictional context that it is said to inhabit, to be particularly galling.

~ Sam Redlark.

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