The phrase **“on the fringes of South Hackney”** appears in *So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish*, describing the modest little flat where Arthur Dent settles after returning to a mysteriously restored Earth.
SEARCH 51.5363026, -0.0896013 Fringes of South Hackney
It’s a perfectly Douglas Adams location — precise yet vague, both somewhere and nowhere. The “fringes of South Hackney” evoke a quiet, slightly scruffy corner of East London, close to the canal, where reality feels thin around the edges. It’s here that Arthur tries to live an ordinary life after everything that’s happened: buying groceries, making tea, and wondering whether the universe has simply forgotten him. This stretch of Hackney — near Victoria Park and the Regent’s Canal — has long been home to artists, writers, and improbable people. Adams captures it with affection and irony: the idea that even after surviving the end of the world, one might end up in a flat with unreliable plumbing and a faint smell of curry from downstairs.
Adams was not directly connected to the Berkeley, but its presence in his London — a place of champagne receptions and cosmic-scale pretensions — makes it emblematic of the kind of Earthly excess that *The Hitchhiker’s Guide* gently mocks. In the universe of improbability, it could easily be the sort of hotel where Zaphod Beeblebrox might park his stolen spaceship.
# See
- the-berkeley.co.uk 
- The Berkeley on Wikipedia