Hammersmith is a west London district where Cormoran Strike’s inquiry into Lula Landry’s death leads him to St. Elmo’s Hostel for the Homeless, and where the bustle of a commercial centre lies close to the Thames and to sharply different forms of urban life. The location also prompts Strike to remember Sundays in Cornwall, giving the district’s ordinary streets a personal resonance.

Setting and contrast

After showering at the University of London Union, Strike takes the Tube to Hammersmith Broadway. Tentative sunshine glints through the precinct’s glass roof as he emerges onto the street; King Street’s shops are crowded enough to suggest a Saturday. He knows, however, that this busy and essentially soulless commercial centre is only a ten-minute walk from a quiet, countrified stretch of the Thames embankment. Hammersmith is thus presented through proximity and contrast: commercial activity and riverside quiet share the same urban geography.

Strike’s memories of Sunday

Walking through traffic, Strike recalls Sundays in Cornwall during his childhood, when almost everything closed except the church and the beach. The remembered day is defined by stillness and domestic routine: china clinking, gravy, a dull television, and the echoing quiet of the high street. He also remembers running with Lucy onto the shingle, where the waves forced them back on their own resources. His mother’s remark that hell would be “eternal Sunday in bloody St. Mawes” gives the recollection a wry edge. The present-day journey through Hammersmith becomes a passage between his adult investigation and a childhood landscape shaped by Sunday’s peculiar quiet.

St. Elmo’s Hostel and the investigation

Strike seeks a woman Lula met in therapy, whose first name he remembers as beginning with R and who lived at the hostel when Lula died. When he asks John Bristow for help identifying her, Bristow responds with disappointment and questions why Strike wants to speak to her, pointing instead to Tansy Bestigui’s insistence that the voice she heard upstairs was male. The exchange places the hostel within a contested investigation: finding Lula’s acquaintance may complicate an account that Bristow would prefer Strike to follow.

The hostel stands behind a noisy concrete flyover, about five minutes’ walk from the commercial centre. Its red-brick exterior and grubby white facings are described as a humbler, worn counterpart to Lula’s Mayfair house: it has no stone steps, garden, or elegant neighbours, only a chipped street-level door and peeling window ledges. The flyover’s concrete barriers and passing traffic loom outside its upper windows. A large buzzer and speaker, together with a caged black camera whose wires dangle from the lintel, make the building’s institutional character unmistakable.

Outside, Strike sees an emaciated young woman with a sore at the corner of her mouth, smoking in a dirty man’s jumper that overwhelms her frame. She watches him as he presses the buzzer, apparently assessing him. Inside, a grimy lobby leads to locked glass-panelled doors; glimpses of a bare hall and a dispirited side room reveal leaflets, an old dartboard, and a wall peppered with holes. The kiosk-like front desk is protected by another metal grille. These details locate the hostel not merely as an address in Strike’s search, but as a guarded, materially worn environment sharply set against Hammersmith’s crowded shops and Lula’s affluent home.