I popped into a charity shop in London a few days ago and stumbled upon an old book. At £10 it was a little more expensive than the second-hand books I usually buy, but I told myself that it was for research purposes and worth the price.

If I’m honest, it wasn’t for research at all. I just bought an old book because it caught my eye and then decided it may even be a valid business expense.

The book is called “London Stories: Old and New” by John O’London, published in 1926. (I wonder if that was really his name?) It’s full of stories, histories, and little odd bits about the city I’ve grown to love. The kind of thing I can never resist.

The wonderful part came later.

I was outside flicking through it, and I found an inscription that I’d missed in the shop, written in faded ink inside the cover.

“To Frances, from Alice. With love and Birthday Greetings. 24 July 1926.”

Someone named Alice bought this book for someone named Frances exactly a century ago. And through a hundred years of moving house, decluttering, and whatever else happens to books over the course of a century, it survived. 

Now it’s sitting on my desk, next to my laptop and a mug of tea.

That feels kind of amazing to me.

We often think of history as something neatly boxed away in museums and archives, or marked with a plaque on a wall. But London has so much of its history in less obvious places. Names etched into buildings no one even glances at anymore. Old unused doorways. Streets that have been renamed many times but often follow routes laid down by the Romans. 

Things that have hung around just because nobody got around to throwing them out, like this book.

It’s one of the many things I absolutely love about this city, and it’s why I ended up setting stories here.

The city I walk today is built right on top of much older versions. Sometimes literally. I could be standing outside an office building, checking the train times and trying not to swear at yet another delay, while beneath my feet there might be a sealed tunnel, a hidden river, or the foundations of a building that disappeared long before I was born.

But what about Alice?

I don’t know anything about her, other than that she apparently gave rather good birthday presents. I know even less about Frances. I have no clue about where they lived, whether they remained friends, or if Frances even liked the book or just left it unread on a shelf for decades. 

But for a moment, when I opened that cover, it connected two very ordinary moments in London. Someone gave a friend a birthday gift back in 1926, and someone else found it in a second-hand shop a hundred years later, in 2026.

The book itself is packed with tales of old London, unusual events, and forgotten parts of the city, the kind of things that make me start wondering what else is still hiding beneath the surface of the city.

So that gives me a perfectly good reason to spend a few evenings reading it.

For research, obviously.

And if a little of it eventually finds its way into a future Code & Stone book, well…

Alice started it.