On his website, Jon McGregor explains that the book began partly as a book about the reaction to the death of Princess Diana, set in 'a street where life was going on regardless'. His aim was 'to take a day in the life of one street in a city, and try to show the vast multiplicity of stories which were happening there, and to look at how those stories interacted with each other in an environment where people were constantly moving in and out and rarely knew each other’s names'. He goes on to state that the setting is Bradford, where McGregor lived in the late 1990s.