Angel Pavement
By J.B. Priestley, 1930
Cover by Agnes Pinder Davis

One of the very finest, and darkest, London novels, Angel Pavement is a devastating portrait of the city. Its blend of drudgery and wasted passion represents a muted English response to Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, published five years earlier. Priestley’s book may be less epic and more seedy, yet it is recognisably a product of the same era.

The Angel Pavement of the title is a fictional street in the City of London. This non-place becomes a cipher for the turgid office life that its central character, the luckless drudge Turgis, both endures and represents.

Nothing of this, however, is immediately apparent from the dust-jacket, designed by Agnes Pinder Davis, who is better known for her decorative designs for china between the 1930s and 1950s. Instead, we get a picture-postcard view of the city, a panorama at odds with the novel’s bleak portrait of urban misery and swindling.

But Pinder Davis’s design is more sophisticated than it first appears. The crowds on the street are reduced to anonymous smudges, just as Turgis is reduced to an existence of boredom at work and lonely weekend excursions. The buildings are as faceless as the people, their façades stripped bare.

In the background, the dome of St Paul’s looms like a zeppelin, its shape out of all proportion. It is as if it represents the weight of the City bearing down on its inhabitants. The only life is provided by the red buses, symbols of escape to home or beyond.

The spine features another vignette. The centre of the roadway is occupied by a bus which, seen from the front, resembles a mini skyscraper. The same sooty, faceless crowds that populate the cover, queue to mount it. But, on the opposite side of the road, a horse and cart trudges by, a symbol of the old city.

Angel Pavement is a novel that depicts a changing metropolis being slowly strangled by greed, foreigners and fraud. It is, it seems, a timeless concern.