British author Gillian Tindall, "who brought a preservationist's fervor and a novelist's eye to books exploring the layered histories of buildings, neighborhoods and cities," died October 1, the New York Times reported. She was 87. Tindall's worldview was that "cities are palimpsests, each era engraved over the one preceding it, and all still accessible if you knew where to look."
During her career, she published a dozen novels, a story collection, and a biography of the Victorian novelist George Gissing. Her first novel, The Water and the Sound (1959), was set in Paris and focused on a young woman's efforts to track down her bohemian origins. Her sixth novel, Fly Away Home (1971)--also set in Paris--won the Somerset Maugham Award.
Tindall's nonfiction works include The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village (1977), which the Times described as "a wonderfully discursive portrait of a community that Mary Shelley had described as an odious swamp. Ms. Tindall exhumed the vanished cow paths, hedgerows and waterways--the drains and foul effluents!--that had defined what was once a village, a small settlement that 1,600 years after its beginnings along a pre-Roman track had become a bustling inner-city neighborhood.... The book, which has never been out of print, made Ms. Tindall a local hero--with an ale, Tindall on Tap, named in her honor, and a cafe named for the book."
"She has a gift for making vivid unity out of history," novelist Glyn Hughes wrote in his Guardian review. "And in writing about a place with such a staggeringly varied past, she has found an ideal subject."
In 2019, Tindall published The Pulse Glass: And the Beat of Other Hearts, a "memoir, of sorts" in which she explored her family's Anglo-Irish history and her own traumatic childhood, the Times noted.
"I perceived clearly that I wasn't unhappy because of any mysterious hormones but because life in our home was so complicated," she wrote. "I envied school friends with mothers who arranged parties and didn't wreck holidays with fusses about how 'none of this is a holiday for me, you know.' "
For a year in the early '60s, she worked as a researcher for a welfare organization, interviewing the older residents of a neighborhood targeted for urban renewal. "That mostly meant demolition. Many would be relocated, their snug homes and the small businesses they frequented razed, and that experience, along with her realization of how much would be lost--not just the structures, but the memories they held--made Ms. Tindall an ardent preservationist," the Times wrote.
For four decades, she and her family spent part of each year at a cottage in Chassignolles, a village in central France. When she found some letters from the 1860s in an abandoned house nearby, she began working on Celestine: Voices From a French Village (1996), which W.S. Merwin, in a Times review, described as "a narrative of enigmatic beauty, a glimpse of time and mortality and of a quite earthly unearthly light."
Tindall's literary cartographies also included City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay (1982); The House by the Thames and the People Who Lived There (2006); The Tunnel Through Time: A New Route for an Old London Journey (2015); and the recently published Journal of a Man Unknown, "the imaginary diary of the life of one of her Huguenot forebears, an ironworker laboring in Britain during the 17th century," the Times noted.
"We are very ready, today, to concede people's need for 'meaningful relationships,' " she wrote in The Fields Beneath. "Yet we fail almost entirely to realize that other relationships, with places, objects, views--other supporters of the human psyche--may be just as profoundly important."