B. Priestley, and study of his novels has been revived because of their distinctive style, deploying a Dickensian narrative voice to convey aspects of inter-war London street culture.

[3][4] His parents were pretentious and snobbish; Bernard Hamilton thought himself to be "a great writer although the few books he penned — soppy romances and some hotchpotch of religion and spirituality — were mediocre at best", "frequently boasted about his genealogical table", and "pretended to be the rightful heir to the throne of Scotland", and Ellen "treated her domestics with haughtiness" and "attempted to breed her children as members of the high society".

[5] Due to his father's alcoholism and financial ineptitude, the family spent much of Hamilton's childhood living in boarding houses in Chiswick and Hove.

The Midnight Bell (1929) is based upon Hamilton's falling in love with a prostitute and was later published along with The Siege of Pleasure (1932) and The Plains of Cement (1934) as the semi-autobiographical trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935).

Hangover Square (1941) is often judged his most accomplished work and still sells well in paperback, and is regarded by contemporary authors such as Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd as an important part of the tradition of London novels.

Set in Earls Court where Hamilton himself lived, it deals with both alcohol-drinking practices of the time and the underlying political context, such as the rise of fascism and responses to it.

[8] Hamilton was the subject of a special season of films in March 2005 at the National Film Theatre in London, and continuing the strong revival of interest in his work the British TV channel BBC Two screened an adaptation of 20,000 Streets Under the Sky in September 2005, reshown on BBC Four in January 2006, alongside a documentary account of his life.