The first chapter contains a detailed description of a fictional street in the EC postcode area called Angel Pavement, and the employees at Twigg & Dersingham.

The next morning, Dersingham still has not returned to the office, and during lunch Mr Smeeth hears an unpleasant story about the failure of an umbrella firm called Claridge & Molton.

The party is not a success, firstly because of the incompetence of the servants and secondly because of the unexpected arrival of the daughter, Lena Golspie, who quarrels with Miss Verever and Mrs Dersingham.

The fourth chapter depicts one of the miserable weekends of the lonely young clerk, Mr Turgis, who wanders around London taking in any amusements he can afford.

The fifth chapter depicts the narrow world of the typist, Miss Matfield, and her disastrous date with Norman Birtley, which is enlivened only by an accidental meeting with Mr Golspie, who gives her a box of chocolates on a whim.

Mr Smeeth obtains a rise in salary, and after talking to Benenden, he celebrates by going to a concert at Queen's Hall, where he enjoys Brahms's First Symphony.

On returning home he finds out that his daughter Edna has been sacked, but he is not terribly dismayed; he admits to his wife that he has been given a rise, something which he had been planning to keep secret.

On Saturday night his wife's cousin, Fred Mitty, and his family, arrive for a party, and Mr Smeeth quickly comes to loathe them after they wreck the parlour and damage some of his clothes.

Thinking he has strangled her, he wanders at random through London before arriving at Twigg & Dersingham, where Mr Golspie and Miss Matfield are "working late".

The epilogue depicts the unabashed Golspies shipping out from London, on their way to South America: "A string of barges passed them...a gull dropped, wheeled, flashed, was gone...the gleam faded from the face of the river; a chill wind stirred; the distant banks...retreated; and even the smoky haze of London city slipped away from them..." George Orwell reviewed Angel Pavement in The Adelphi in 1930.

"[4] Dismissing comparisons between Priestley and Charles Dickens as absurd, Orwell suggested that rejecting such blandishments would make possible an appreciation of Angel Pavement as "an excellent holiday novel, genuinely gay and pleasant, which supplies a good bulk of reading matter for ten and sixpence.