West London, 1936. Looking forward to a more prosperous future after the Depression, 15-year-old May Stubbs and her family take on a derelict cricket pavilion, convert it into a cafe and general store, and find it quickly becomes the hub of the community. Then May contracts tuberculosis. Leaving her best friend Betty Lane and lifelong soul mate George Bailey behind, she is sent away to fight off the illness. But on her return to London, she finds...

Step into the world of Victorian London, where the wealth and poverty exist side by side. This is the story of two long-lost sisters, whose lives take different paths, and the young woman who will be transformed by their experiences.

As the Great Smog falls over London in 1952, Florrie Palmer has a choice to make. Will she stay with the Cutters, a gang of female criminals who have terrorised London for years and are led by her own mother? Or leave it all behind to make a safer, duller life with the man she loves? And what will she do if she's too crooked to go straight, and too good to go bad? Over the next five days, Florrie will have to find her own path and the courage to stumble...

If a wedding marks the first day of the rest of your life, then the story starts with the dress. It's 1936 and the streets of London's East End are grimy and brutal, but in one corner of Bethnal Green it is forever Hollywood. Herbie Taylor's photography studio is nestled in the heart of bustling Green Street. Tomboy Stella and troubled Winnie work in Herbie's studio; their best friend and hopeless romantic Kitty works next door as an apprentice dressmaker....

Whitechapel in the 1930s was not an easy place to be brought up, and when the war came those with nothing were hit the hardest. Queenie watched her family struggle and learned her lessons the hard way. When she was a little girl there was one thing Queenie knew - she was going to get out of this. And then handsome Alfie Butler walks into her life and gives Queenie her ticket out. One rushed wedding later, the real trouble begins. As the Krays make...

London, 1912. It is two years before WWI and the conflict which will change the role of women forever. But for now, young Mabel Oakley is caught between her own dreams of becoming a teacher and what is conventionally expected of a girl from her class and background. If only there were some way out.

Marian Sutro has survived Ravensbruck and is back in dreary 1950s London trying to pick up the pieces of her pre-war life. Returned to an England she barely knows and a post-war world she doesn't understand Marian searches for something on which to ground the rest of her life. Family and friends surround her and a young RAF officer attempts to bring her the normalities of love and affection but she is haunted by her experiences and by the guilt of...

Julia Longfield has a comfortable life. She lives on the fringes of the East End, in a prosperous and middle-class neighbourhood with her family, and is looking forward to the announcement of her engagement to Chester Morrison. But when Julia's father dies suddenly, the family are left in poverty and Julia is jilted by her fiance. It falls to Julia to look after her mother and younger siblings and find them new lodgings. Ambitious and determined to...

Vicky Tress is a young policewoman on the rise who becomes involved in a corruption imbroglio with CID. Hannah Strode is an ambitious young reporter with a speciality for skewering the rich and powerful. Callum Conlan is a struggling Irish academic and writer who falls in with the wrong people. While Freddie Selves is a successful theatre impresario stuck deep in a personal and political mire of his own making. These four characters, strangers at...

Can she have a second chance at happiness? Mary Lett has been struggling since the death of her baby daughter. Her husband Geoffrey cannot understand why she finds it so difficult to let go of the memory of their child and seeks solace elsewhere. In an effort to forget his own feelings for Mary, Geoffrey's brother, Henry, marries another woman. Meanwhile, Will considers marriage to be out of the question. When it becomes clear that Mary and Geoffrey...