Patrick Neate in Richmond Park

At 10am on a Thursday morning, save for the odd pensioner and a pair of deer, Richmond Park is eerily quiet. This is exactly how writer Patrick Neate likes it. 'I live in a top-floor flat in Shepherd's Bush and this park is the one place I can come where I don't feel I'm in London,' he says, sitting in the tea room in Pembroke Lodge. 'Hanging with the winos on Shepherd's Bush Green doesn't have quite the same appeal.' He's right: the views from here are amazing. As London's largest open space, a massive eight miles in perimeter, finding solitude is easy.

'I come here quite a lot on my own during the day. There are some strange people here, strange men with plastic bags. I was walking towards one of them recently when I realised I was also carrying a plastic bag. I've become that man.' Actually, Patrick is fast turning into a media star, because, he insists somewhat modestly, 'most writers are socially inept'. After his second novel Twelve Bar Blues - about jazz in turn-of-the-century New Orleans - won the Whitbread award, the 31-year-old former journalist and occasional DJ has been much in demand. He's just taken part in the Clerkenwell Literary Festival and was even on the authors' version of The Weakest Link, beaten only by Jilly Cooper.

Patrick comes to Richmond Park to 'escape the madness' of the two book deadlines he has looming. His love for the park is also nostalgic. 'I grew up in Putney, so Barnes Common was our local. Richmond was more of a treat; it was more of an adventure.' One of his favourite parts is Pen Ponds where he used to play football with his grandad. 'We even played a couple of days before he died,' he says, adding, as an afterthought, 'I hope it wasn't me who finished him off.'

Twelve Bar Blues is out now in paperback (Penguin, £6.99)