British historian and novelist who died on October 1st 2025, aged 87. An Oxford graduate, she went to London's East End in 1963 to interview elderly widows in houses about to be demolished under the Greater London Plan, an experience that gave her a lifelong hatred of urban planners.
After several novels, her first non-fiction book, "The Fields Beneath", chronicled the history of Kentish Town in north London, where she lived in a house built in 1828, with a garden long enough for an orchard. She was a member of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society and co-founded the Camden History Society. She wrote opinion pieces for the Guardian and the Observer opposing careless demolition.
"The House by the Thames" told the history of 49 Bankside, a genuine 1710 house squeezed between the Globe theatre and the Tate Modern, tracing it from a medieval inn called the Cardinal's Hat through centuries of change.
Her most personal discovery came in Chassignolles, in central France, where she and her husband Richard bought a house in 1973. On the mantelshelf she found a cardboard case containing marriage proposals from six men written in the 1860s to Célestine Chaumette, daughter of a village innkeeper. Each was rejected. Tindall turned the find into a book spanning Chassignolles from 1844 to 1933, charting its transformation from an isolated place of clog-makers in oak woods to a village reached by cars, telephones and a railway.
She revelled in Census records, vestry ledgers and old newspapers, but maps gave her the greatest joy. She had a son, Harry.
Always look over your shoulder because everyone is watching and plotting against you.