Marcia Hutchinson, Kate Griffin and actor Paterson Joseph

THE size of two football pitches, it is a piece of hotly contested prime real estate just north of Covent Garden where Tottenham Court Road meets Oxford Street.

As far as developers are concerned, the only way is up. But in the 18th century, St Giles was the notorious slum depicted in Hogarth’s Gin Lane, where competition for space led to people digging beneath the warren of squalid alleyways to create a subterranean world they could call home.

This is the setting of the thrilling new novel, The Blackbirds of St Giles, which transports us from Jamaica to St Giles, where Daniel, having escaped a sugar plantation and fought for the British in the American War of Independence, finds himself up against mob rule.

A gripping page-turner, full of meaty characters and intriguing twists and turns, the title refers to so-called black loyalists like Daniel who settled there after being given freedom in return for supporting the war effort.

“The fact that they ended up in a place like St Giles shows that they did not receive the promised welcome they had hoped for – they weren’t even given pensions,” says Kate Griffin, who co-authored the book with Marcia Hutchinson under the pseudonym Lila Cain.

“St Giles was home to people who had nowhere else to go and nowhere further to fall, not just black people but Irish and Scots and countless others in desperate search of a refuge.”

For Daniel, his fall is all the harder as he has been cheated out of an inheritance left to him by his commanding officer and then robbed of all his money after venturing onto London’s mean streets like an innocent abroad. He swiftly finds himself in the grip of Elias, the cut-throat don of St Giles, and must summon both brains and brawn to break free as well as protect his teenage sister, Pearl, from sexual predators. Despite the menace and violence that pervade the passageways as much as the stench of human waste, humanity and hope flourish.

Kate, author of a series of London-based Victorian crime novels, and Marcia, a one-time educational publisher specialising in black history, had never met before being brought together by canny literary agent Eugenie Furniss, who circuitously learned about the blackbirds story via a talkative hackney cab driver taking a colleague past St Giles’ Church one day. She was looking for a way to give it wings and the two proved to be a perfect match.

“My expertise is black history and Kate’s is London and we melded the two together,” says Marcia, a former lawyer and local councillor who was brought up in West Yorkshire by Jamaican parents.

Hogarth’s Gin Lane

“After developing the plot and characters together, Kate wrote the chapters and I would look through the cultural detail to ensure it chimed. It is 50-50 imagination and fact. We started off with a relatively small amount of historical fact and left the rest to our imagination.”

Among a lively list of villains, outcasts and gems of all colours, some real-life characters appear in the book to give it historical context, among them the abolitionist Ottobah Cuagono, who was a member of the Sons of Africa, here called the Brotherhood, which comes to Daniel’s assistance.

Also referred to are the African American war veteran and musician Billy Waters, who lived in Dyott Street in the heart of St Giles, and the notorious Zong incident, in which 130 African captives being transported to the Americas were cast overboard in an insurance scam.

As for “The Maze”, the underground, candle-lit labyrinth where much of the plot takes place, only the name is fictional. Unlike adjoining Covent Garden, which always had aristocratic aspirations despite being rough round the edges, St Giles was miserably neglected by its owners, who turned a blind eye as unscrupulous leaseholders tunnelled down to create more space for the expanding population of destitutes alongside abandoned wine cellars and sunken remains of earlier buildings.

In 1814, several people were drowned when such basement dwellings were flooded after large vats of beer exploded at a brewery on the site of what is now the Dominion Theatre.

Much of historic St Giles has been obliterated by waves of development, the most recent Renzo Piano’s garish Central St Giles, but St Giles’ Church, which inevitably looms large in the book, still stands. Built on the site of a medieval leper colony, it has always been a beacon for the poor and needy, today providing food to the homeless just a stone’s throw away from the West End and Theatreland.

Written in rich descriptive language, Blackbirds is a far cry from the TV costume drama Bridgerton, which was also set in the Georgian era.

“Marcia and I are both fans of Bridgerton, which is so beautiful and fluffy,” says Kate, based in St Albans but ever drawn back to London, where she was born within the sound of Bow Bells, and gazing up at its old buildings.

“Blackbirds is a sort of anti-Bridgerton in which we seek to show the real side of Georgian London, much closer to the truth and to the actual experience of the poor. It is like Dickens but with black people in it.”

Having seen Blackbirds top the Sunday Times best historical novel list in February as well as become an audiobook narrated by Paterson Joseph, the writing partnership – Lila is the name of one of Marcia’s daughters and Cain is Kate’s maiden name – has powered on to write its sequel, The Nightingale of Covent Garden, due out early next year.

Meanwhile, Marcia, who was awarded an MBE for services to cultural diversity in 2010, has been named as one of the Observer’s best new novelists for 2025 on the back of her forthcoming solo debut, The Mercy Step, based loosely on her childhood in Bradford.

• The Blackbirds of St Giles. By Lila Cain, Simon & Schuster, £18.99