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In 2024, author Keiran Goddard appeared on a radio interview to promote his new novel, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning — a belated coming-of-age story about a group of thirty-something friends who all grew up on the same housing estate. “And one of the first questions the guy put to me was about [the neighbourhood I grew up in,] Shard End.”
Goddard hadn’t lived in Birmingham for 20 years, so the question made him uneasy. Was he, someone who’d been based in south east London for so long, really the right person to answer this? “Fuck it,” he thought. “It's not like I'm taking the place of someone else who’d otherwise be on the radio talking about Shard End.” Contemporary English literature is not exactly drowning in depictions of working-class people outside of London. “It’s important that lives like this are represented in culture because they're the lives that are most frequently lived in this country.”
It’s early afternoon at The Crown in Shard End and we’re on a tour of places in Goddard’s home city that shaped him as a writer. Even on a Monday daytime, many of the tables are busy with people chatting at outdoor-voice-volume over the pop music blasting in the background. The barmaid clocks Keiran: “Can I get youse a drink? They’re on me.” There’s a reason we’re welcomed like long lost friends, Goddard explains. The Crown functioned as an unofficial HQ during the 2025 shoot of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning, the film adaptation of his second novel, which stars Antony Boyle and Joe Coyle. Directed by Clio Barnard, it picked up the Audience Award when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and is due for a UK release in December.
“We couldn’t have made the film without this place or at least it would have been a different kind of film,” says Goddard, gesturing at the pub around him. Not only were scenes shot there, but “it became a real base”: those at the pub introduced the team to people and helped with casting. Besides this, casting calls went out via neighbourhood Facebook groups with hundreds of locals showing up – many donning their flat caps mistakenly guessing the audition was for the Peaky Blinders movie.
More than a year on, Jackie, the barmaid, is still taking it in. “It's amazing, just unreal,” she tells me, while showing us a wall plastered with framed photos of the pub staff with the film’s cast and crew grinning for the camera. “And how about you Keiran,” she turns to Goddard, “how are you feeling?” He says that at Cannes, he snuck into an early morning screening. “I thought, I’ll get my crying out of the way, so I don’t cry on stage.” This is how much it meant to him. Everyone lives in places like this, he says, but you never ever see places like this in the cinema. “That alone is special.”
To be clear, Shard End is never named in I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning (and while the film was mostly shot in Shard End, it’s not explicitly set there). The story follows a group of five friends – Rhian, Patrick, Shiv, Oli and Conor – who grew up together in an unnamed city before Rhian, after some wily financial investments, moves to a bigger, flashier, unnamed city. For any reader in the UK, it’s clear the city could only be London, but Goddard’s decision to dispense with city names is deliberate.
“It’s anywhere that’s the place and not the place,” says Goddard. He wanted to give the book a mythic quality to reflect the sense that: “There are Shard Ends literally everywhere. That has been my experience over the last two years of going on book tours. People come up to me and say, I grew up there. But it happened to be in Liverpool. Or it happened to be in Greece. They recognise it instantly.”
Earlier I met Goddard at Lea Hall Station. He arrived, coffee in hand, and we swapped battle stories from the parenting trenches (he has a son and daughter, both under five) as we headed to his teenage family home in the corner of a cul-de-sac. This house as he remembers it was small but busy, full of life and laughter, people coming and going. “An Irish household,” he says, “very social, funny and emotional in its own way.” As a 14-year-old, he’d once opened the door to his room here only to discover a random girl from his year asleep in his bed. It turned out she had a Saturday job on the checkout at Aldi where she’d got to know his mom, who’d invited her to stay after she’d had a falling out with her parents. “I was like, what the fuck is she doing there?” Goddard laughs.
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