• Orwell lived all over London, including at Notting Hill (22 Portobello Road), Islington (27b Canonbury Square) and Hampstead (77 Parliament Hill). His only English Heritage blue plaque is at 50 Lawford Road,›Kentish Town, where he lived for six months from August 1935, writing much of his third novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. www.english-heritage.org.uk
• A small advance from his publisher, Victor Gollancz, in 1936, sent Orwell on a northern English adventure to Liverpool, Sheffield, Barnsley and Wigan. The poverty he saw there formed the basis of The Road to Wigan Pier, yet the irony was that Wigan Pier did not exist; it was nothing more than a railway gantry leading to a jetty. Today the Museum of Wigan Life is housed in the former library where Orwell researched the…