My name is Jeff Cotton and I'm the creator, photographer and writer of this site. I live in south west London, in an area amusingly called Tooting. It's near Wimbledon, if that helps. I was born in north London, in Shoreditch, and spent my formative years living in Hoxton, when it was still real. From 1976 until October 2011 I worked as a librarian for Hackney Council, initially in Shoreditch but later in Stoke Newington.

North and south London - that's the halves each side of the Thames - are like separate cities and you generally stay living on the side where you were born, and mistrust and avoid people from the other half.  But I can now confirm that south London does not, as is sometimes said, smell funny.

I've done various bits of freelance music reviewing down the years, from a start with Prestel (an early primitive internet-like thing) through a few years on a magazine called Which CD? in the early days of the compact disc, to Comes With a Smile, an indie music magazine which folded in 2006. I started Fictional Cities in 1998. I also spent a couple of years writing weekly video-game reviews for The Observer, a UK Sunday newspaper, but gave that up in December 2006 to devote more time to making websites for writers, which seemed appropriate in a way that, say, working with heavy metal bands did not.

In 2007 I began making a website devoted to The Churches of Venice and in 2011 The Churches of Florence. Later in 2011 I took early retirement from my day job, giving me more time to devote to the websites, travel and art-history courses. Extra cities now get regularly added to both church sites, and trip reports are now more of a thing on this site.

If you want to buy any of the books I self-published or contributed to please click HERE.
 

Click here to send me an e-mail
 

What books are on your nightstand?
Funnily enough the books on my bedside cabinet are unusually interesting at the moment. Aside from the 520 books in my Kindle there are The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death and The Anglo-Saxon Way of Death, both growing out of a current thing for archaeology and the gruesome mysteries of early burial practices, and related to an earlier thing for cemeteries. Also I Am C-3PO - The Inside Story, signed To Jeff... by the robot himself.

My earliest reading memory
In my parent's bed on a Sunday morning reading Treasure Island with my dad. It had a red leather cover with lots of gold and stirring colour illustrations.

The book that changed my life
During the power cuts of the Three Day Week of 1974 I read Lord of the Rings, often by candlelight. It wasn't the first - Alan Garner had been a notable forerunner - but from then on I've never not had a novel on the go.

Are there any classic novels that you only recently read for the first time?
Giorgio Bassani's stories set in Ferrara, collected together as The Novel of Ferrara have been a highlight of my year, together with a trip there.

How have your reading tastes changed over time?
Up until very recently I would religiously have one (and only one) work of fiction on the go at any time, but in the past few years I have started reading non-fiction almost continuously too. Art history initially, which lead naturally to the history of the Bible, and then the plague and other events and figures who keep cropping up in art history.

What’s your favourite book no one else has heard of?
Flicker by Theodore Roszak is not without a cult following (it only has 18 reviews on Amazon UK). But I loved it so much when I read it back in 1994 that I've not dared risk re-reading it and finding it disappointing. It's all about film, film-noir, a Fritz Lang-like director's disappearance and emulates Umberto Eco in its digressions and spread.

The book I am currently having read to me
George Saunders is reading me his stories from Tenth of December. This year I've discovered how flipping good he is, and the joy of listening to audiobooks whilst doing the ironing. Short stories are ideal, so I've also been revisiting O. Henry and Saki, whose stories I remember being smitten by on cassettes from the library in the 1980s.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
That you replace every atom in your body once every 7 years. So not one bit of me has worked for a living. Although in spirit I remain a librarian.

The book I wish I’d written
Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists, because it would have been an interesting time to have lived, with all the frescoes still so fresh, and I could have resisted the temptation to invent stuff, and just stuck to the facts!

The last book that made me laugh
It's one of my personal confusions that, although I like a laugh, I rarely read humourous fiction. Tom Sharpe was a notable fixture of my youth, and I've been a rabid reader (and multi-media consumer) of the works of Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams. And then there's Thorne Smith and P.G. Wodehouse.

The book I couldn’t finish
The Name of the Rose and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell are both books that took three goes, and then suddenly struck me, and have stuck with me.

The book I give as a gift
Depends on the recipient


We know of your occasional obsession with numbers and odd coincidences - who are the authors that you have read the most books by, and do they oddly sometimes share the first three letters of their surnames.
In the 1980s I felt very connected to Iris Murdoch (22 books) and then in the 1990s, and ever since, have felt that Haruki Murakami understands me (29 readings - a rare author whose books I've reread). More light-heartedly: Terry Pratchett (31) and P.G. Wodehouse (49).

My comfort read
P.G. Wodehouse

The book that is most underrated
Stephen King's Dark Tower series is one I've loved and remembered out of all proportion to his reputation as a bit of a hack. I've been a reader of Rupert Thomson since his first novel, Dreams of Leaving (see right) attracted my attention with a blurb mentioning that the central character's story begins when he disguises himself as a ploughed field.