This website

 

PLEASE NOTE THAT, AS OF AUGUST 2014, ALL PROJECTS ARE ON HOLD AND NO NEW PIECES ARE BEING PUBLISHED: STAY TUNED FOR FURTHER NEWS.

The Smoke website, like the old Smoke: a London Peculiar magazine it replaced, is composed of words and images sent in by readers. There are roughly two new pieces each week, generally posted on Mondays and Thursdays. Each new piece appears in full on the home page, with older pieces in excerpted form beneath. Every piece of writing is also filed under the WORDS & IMAGES tab; you can search on author, subject matter or place. Meanwhile, for those who love serendipity, random tales and photos from our archive appear in the right-hand column, as do excerpts from forthcoming books.

Speaking of books… many of the pieces appearing on the site will, at intervals, be collected into printed publications on various retrospectively selected themes; once a new them has been chosen, though, we’ll also also put out a “call for papers”, inviting further contributions on the same topic, so the eventual book will be a mix of old and new. The first of these books, an anthology of pieces about the effect of the Olympics on London (From the Slopes of Olympus to the Banks of the Lea) was published in August 2013; the second, with a working title of Smoke on the Water, was announced in January 2014 and is about London’s rivers, canals, ponds and puddles, so if you have anything you’d like to send us… please do! Two other more long-term projects are Night Bus To Camden, tales from London’s music venues over the years, and Please Do Not Touch The Walrus, a celebration of just a few of the brilliant things you can’t do in our amazing capital. Successful pieces for these books will appear on the home page as regular contributions and will also be filed under the appropriate project heading (below the WORDS & IMAGES tab).

Finally, this site also features occasional pieces from back issues of Smoke: a London Peculiar, the little magazine that started all this. If you want to know more about Smoke, there’s some historical info under the About… tab. Details about Soho!, the board game we produced for Christmas 2010, are there too. And obviously back issues of the remaining magazines are still available from our SHOP.

Matt & Jude