When I started Phantom Signals, I had no idea it would take roughly 1,380 train journeys to finish it.

That sounds like an odd way to measure a book.

Those 1,380 journeys add up to around 690 days of commuting, spread across more than two and a half years. Same route. Same platforms. Same daily negotiation over a seat that doesn’t involve fifty minutes of small talk with a stranger who has clearly never read the unwritten rules of commuting.

I decided I was going to write a book.

It was one of those ideas that had probably been sitting in the background for a while. At some point I stopped thinking about writing a book and decided I should try it.

The idea itself came fairly easily.

I’ve always been fascinated by history, architecture, myth, legends and technology, and London has all of them layered on top of each other. So the idea became a modern London where the things you walk past every day might be hiding something older. A city built on forgotten systems and secrets most people never bother to notice seemed like a good premise.

Then came the fairly obvious problem.

When exactly was I going to write it?

Like many people, I had a full-time job, an extended family, and all the usual things that compete for your attention.

I’d also spent the best part of a decade commuting into London, filling that time the way most people do: staring out of the window, reading or half-watching something on my phone. Anything to make it pass faster.

Eventually it occurred to me that fifty minutes each way was a fairly substantial chunk of time.

I already had the time. I just hadn’t been using it.

So I started taking my laptop or iPad with me and writing on the train. Delays became extra writing time, and lunch breaks turned into short writing sessions wherever I could find somewhere to park myself. Of course I still managed to write at home when time allowed, but mostly, somewhere between Hampshire and Waterloo, Phantom Signals slowly took shape.

A chapter drafted on the way in. A plot problem worked out on the way home. The odd idea turning up unannounced while I watched the same stretch of countryside go past for the thousandth time. I always imagined writing a novel would be more romantic. A quiet room. Long, uninterrupted hours. Maybe a favourite coffee shop or country retreat. Inspiration arriving politely on schedule.

The reality, for me, was a crowded commuter train. Coffee balanced on a tray table barely big enough for the cup, never mind the laptop. A stranger three seats away conducting a work call for the benefit of the whole carriage.

Oddly enough, that suited the book rather well.

Phantom Signals is about the extraordinary hiding inside the ordinary: a London that looks familiar on the surface and has rather more going on underneath. Writing it on the way into that same city felt just right.

So my commute had become the place where an entire hidden world was built. A story about a hidden London, written during one of the most ordinary parts of London life: the commute to London.

Phantom Signals launches on 24 August 2026.