He also appeared in Humphrey Jennings's famous film about the Blitz, Fires Were Started, as the fireman who plays the piano.

[citation needed] Sansom was involved in fighting the Second Great Fire of London in 1940, during which a wall collapsed and buried him and another firefighter, killing the latter; his friend and fellow firefighter Leonard Rosoman, who was replaced by Sansom's colleague on the assignment, painted A House Collapsing on Two Firemen, Shoe Lane, London, EC4 to commemorate the incident.

[2] As well as exploring war-torn London, Sansom's writing deals with romance (The Face of Innocence), murder ("Various Temptations"), comedy ("A Last Word") and supernatural horror ("A Woman Seldom Found").

The latter, perhaps his most anthologized story, combines detailed description with narrative tension to unravel a young man's encounter with a bizarre creature in Rome.

[6][7][8] In his classical work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman used an extended paragraph of Sansom's A Contest of Ladies to develop his model of the social role and the dramaturgical approach to sociology.