i saw this question asked before but never answered. is there a comprehensive list anywhere of real places listed in gaiman works?

i found this one: http://www.frowl.org/gods/geography.html

but it is limited to "american gods" and i am visiting london next week and wanted to know what i could check out. any help appreciated!

There's this, with a little bit of Neverwhere at the end.

The Frowl page was done by our very own poster, HeyJupiter, who has fallen off the face of the earth.

edit : Someone was just here saying they lived on a portal to London Below. Not sure if that helps any. But it's really wacky.

edit again: I don't think it's listed anywhere, but Neil does talk a lot about various locations in the commentary for the Neverwhere dvd.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: aitapata,

And how to distinguish which places are 'real' and which aren't? I live in Ireland, so I know there's an occasional, (disappearing and reappearing), lake, but a field, like that mentioned by GK Chesterton in Soft Places (Fables & Reflections)? I'm not so sure. May as well try to list all the 'real' characters!

Let's see, though, to be more helpful - Cardboard City, where the homeless live and where the girls bring Mad Hettie the sacrificial dove in - damn, I lost all the graphic novels, so I'm doing this from memory - I think it's Fables & Reflections - that's real - I think it's under Waterloo Bridge, beside the Thames. I live just outside Belfast and haven't been to London since childhood, so I'm working from memory there too. THere are definitely some scenes at Picadilly Circus/Nelson's Column - worth a visit anyway. Come to think of it, Neil could almost work part-time for the London Torist Board. I haven't read Neverwhere, just watched the tv series on BBC2, about a decade ago, but I'm pretty sure that most of the locations are genuine ones, or close proximities thereof. The circus in The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch (Smoke & Mirrors), "a small back street in the neighbourhood of Southwark Cathedral." I'd say that's genuine, though whether the circus still runs is another matter - the performers enjoyed some success and were on Channel 4 television a few times, again, quite a few years ago - late 90s. All the streets and roads in Looking for the Girl - same book - are real ones.

Scarily - having just read Fragile Things, and How to Talk To Girls At Parties... I think I lived 6 doors down from the house described there... Addiscombe near East Croydon (I would not recommend Addiscombe - or even Croydon - during the day they are very sensible, business places, where you used to be able to talk to ex African princes in their terraced afterlives or just watch people scurrying into their high rise offices but at night they have every shred of the horror you can picture, the alley ways come alive with the monsters, never pretty!) I know they sometimes do tours of the sewers of London though. Very Neverwhere.

quote:

Originally posted by sammael:
Let's see, though, to be more helpful - Cardboard City, where the homeless live and where the girls bring Mad Hettie the sacrificial dove in - damn, I lost all the graphic novels, so I'm doing this from memory - I think it's Fables & Reflections - that's real - I think it's under Waterloo Bridge, beside the Thames.

It's not F&R - I've just bought it. However, that sounds just like the opening to Death: The High Cost of Living. Haven't got that yet, but I did have a flip through it in Forbidden Planet the other day, and I'm fairly sure that's it.

On real places in Neil's work, doesn't the conversation between Dream and Death in Sound of Her Wings take place in Washington Square, in New York (yeah, I thought it was the Arc de Triomphe, too, but I don't think that has the words "Built by the people of the City of New York" inscribed on it anywhere!)