White Teeth

Smith's North West London is a working, multicultural map: the terraced streets of Willesden and Cricklewood where the Iqbal and Jones families make their tangled lives from 1975 to the millennium, the high roads and cafés where the men gather, the local school, and a final swerve to a genetics institute in the centre of town. The map runs from Willesden Green east across Cricklewood and Kilburn to the West End.

Irie Jones

The Iqbal and Jones homes, Willesden Green

1975

The whole book radiates out from a handful of terraced streets in Willesden Green, where the Joneses and the Iqbals settle within walking distance of each other and their children grow up entangled. It is the neighbourhood Smith herself grew up in, and the ordinary domestic ground the novel keeps returning to.

Willesden Green, throughout

inferred Smith sets the two families a few streets apart in Willesden Green but gives no exact address; this marks the centre of Willesden Green as a representative point.

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Irie Jones

Cricklewood Broadway

1975

The book opens on the Broadway on New Year's morning 1975, where Archie Jones sits in his car above a halal butcher's, having decided to end his life, and is interrupted back into living. The real high road running north from Cricklewood sets the tone: shopfronts, traffic and the everyday multicultural street.

Chapter 1

explicit Cricklewood Broadway is named in the novel; this marks the high road itself.

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