James Campbell interviews James Campbell

While on JG Ballard, James Campbell interviews the writer about his life, writing and urbanism in last month’s Guardian. “I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn’t in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs, near the film studios. This was the England I wanted to write about, because this was the new world that was emerging. No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of their car.” The proximity of Shepperton film studios was important. “They were why I picked this place. The entertainment medium of film is particularly tuned to the present imaginations of people at large. A lot of fiction is intensely nostalgic.”