Smoke: a London Peculiar magazine

 

Smoke was…

… a love-letter to London, to the wet neon flicker of late-night pavements, electric with endless possibility, and the soft dishevelled beauty of the city’s dawn… to the overheard stories and unexplored histories, the facts and the fictions, the accidental poetry and fugitive art of graffiti-slashed suburban stations and rain-splashed shopfronts… the out-of-shot lives half-glimpsed from a train window, or from a phone number scrawled on the back of a Travelcard, dropped on the night-bus stairs…

Founded in April 2003 by Jude Rogers and Matt Haynes, Smoke – an A5 magazine of words and images inspired by London – published its 16th issue in the summer of 2010, and then decided to take a short sabbatical to consider its options and work on other projects. The first of these – the board game, Soho! – appeared in December 2010, and the website you’re now reading, which is essentially an online version of the old magazine, was launched in May 2012, and continued to publish new pieces of work until August 2014. The first Smoke book, From the Slopes of Olympus to the Banks of the Lea, was published in August 2013.

More about the ideas behind Smoke, the reason for stopping the magazine in 2010, and the launch of the website in May 2012, can be found here:

June 2010 statement

May 2012 relaunch

More information about the suspension of the website in August 2014 can be found under the home tab.