Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	79/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
The A.V. Club	A−
Entertainment Weekly	B+
The Guardian
Los Angeles Times
Pitchfork Media	7.8/10
Q
Rolling Stone
Slant Magazine
Spin	B

Tales from Turnpike House is the seventh studio album by English alternative dance band Saint Etienne. It is a concept album in which the songs depict characters who all live in the eponymous block of flats in London.

The exact setting of the stories told by the album's setting is somewhat amorphous. The real Turnpike House is a high-rise block of flats in Goswell Road, EC1, an area of ex-council blocks between Clerkenwell and Upper Street. The band had spent a lot of time in Turnpike House, as filmmaker Paul Kelly lived there during the period in which they were collaborating on What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day?. However, Sarah Cracknell has said that the building imagined in the album is "not nearly as smart" as the real Turnpike House. Bob Stanley has said that he imagined the album's setting to be more suburban, "probably somewhere like Croydon or possibly Ponders End". Pete Wiggs has said that his experience of living in Croydon was the inspiration for "Side Streets" and "Slow Down at the Castle" (the Castle is a water tower in Park Hill Recreation Ground). However, the title of "The Birdman of EC1" refers to the postal district in which the real Turnpike House is located.

The album features two tracks co-written and produced by Xenomania ("Lightning Strikes Twice" and "Stars Above Us") as well as a guest vocal from 1970s pop star David Essex on "Relocate" (Essex had earlier appeared on the Saint Etienne album So Tough via sampled dialogue from the 1973 film That'll Be the Day).

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Wikipedia