All roads led to the West End in interwar London. The area of roughly one square mile in the metropolitan Borough of Westminster boasted London's brightest street lights, the largest concentration of electric advertising, the most lavish restaurants and cinemas, and the biggest crowds. This nocturnal cityscape could rival Paris or New York, and for any writer set on modern London life as her subject matter, it was the place to be. Above all, this was where one went to look at quintessentially modern Londoners – the office workers and suburban commuters, the women and men who laboured in London's offices and shops by day, and walked the streets of the West End by night.

The West End had not always been associated with egalitarian street culture; its change in reputation, from a wealthy residential district to the centre of mass leisure, began in the early 1900s. Ralph Nevill wrote that as late as the 1880s and 1890s the West End ‘was a sort of separate part of London in which the inhabitants of other districts seldom strayed’: the majority of passers-by one saw in Piccadilly were not workers but people of independent means out for a stroll. But at the beginning of the twentieth century West End streets became ‘Londoners’ premier playground for every class, from artisan and clerk to rentier’. They also became the best spot in London for observing ‘those who are not personages, but merely persons’. This shift in interest made all the difference to the West End as a literary setting: it became a location that could rival, for the first time, the fascination long exercised on writers and photographers by the East End or the nearby Soho. By the mid-1920s the West End was firmly associated with lower-middle-class leisure – with urban workers taking a stroll or, in a fashionable interwar phrase, taking a night ‘out on the town’. Observed en masse, these ‘mere persons’ still tended to provoke a horror of crowds in sensitive observers, a response with a long literary history. George Gissing had been particularly vicious about London crowds, which inevitably exert a corrupting influence on his impressionable, middle-class heroines.