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George Orwell moved to Paris in the spring of 1928, taking up a room in a small hostel in the Latin Quarter, at 6 Rue du Pot de Fer. Aged 24, The young Eric Blair (Orwell’s real name) had moved across the channel to concentrate fully on his fledgling writing career: rents in Paris were relatively cheap, and the space and anonymity such a move afforded seemed ideal encouragement to write - and to write well.

Today Rue du Pot De Fer is a narrow residential street, lined with restaurants, just off Rue Mouffetard in the 5th arrondissement. These days it’s a very pleasant address, but it’s still recognisable in Orwell’s description, in Down and Out in Paris and London of a rough and tumbledown slum. Known in the book as the Rue du Coq d’Or:

It was a very narrow street - a ravine of tall leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. At the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male population was drunk… It was a fairly rackety place. And yet amid the noise and the dirt lived the usual respectable French shopkeepers, bakers and laundresses and the like, keeping themselves to themselves and quietly piling up small fortunes. It was quite a representative Paris slum.

Orwell spent some eighteen months in the city, and in that time completed two early novels, though after rejections from publishers these were subsequently destroyed. While he could certainly call on some financial help from home, Orwell taught English to support his writing, and lived a modest but relatively comfortable life in Paris - until the autumn of 1929, when the theft of his money, and most of his possessions, left the young writer perilously close to poverty.

Rather than return home to the relative wealth of his parents house in England, Orwell threw himself into the world of Paris’ poor - taking a job as a plongeur (dish washer) in the Rue de Rivoli’s Hotel Lotti. Quite why the young Eton-educated writer took so willingly to the life of grime remains unclear (and it may be that he realised immediately the literary value of his experiences), but his true account of life on the breadline came to form the first part of Down and Out in Paris and London, his first published book.

While his short time in the city laid the foundations for Orwell’s immensely successful career, his french adventures were also at least part way responsible for his famous name. Shocked by tales of his loose life in Paris - and even more concerned by their imminent publication - the author’s parents were pleased to hear that Down and Out was to be published under a pen name. Eric Blair became George Orwell - and stayed that way for good.