by Jess Sully
“Nah – they’re docile,” he replied, and proved this by bending and twisting the ferret into strange shapes. It was as if he was trying to create a balloon animal. The sight of a ferret being manipulated would, in itself, have been enough excitement for me, but then the owner’s young daughter insisted on showing me her party piece. She opened her mouth and the ferret put its head in, a modest variation of the head-in-lion’s-mouth circus trick. [read more…]
Remembering Sea Alley by Mark Sadler
I grew up in a dockers’ terrace on Sea Alley, in East London. Our house was one from the end of the row, near to where the street split into three tributaries, like an old piece of frayed rope. A stone staircase ran along the front of the houses. When the water was at its highest point, it would come up over the third step, leaving the fourth step clear for you to walk on. [read more…]
Waiting: Dartmouth Park Hill, Spring 2009 [see more…]
On the delayed 22:34 to Dartford, a boy with an earring and pair of Hoxton glasses pores over a musical score, humming intermittently. The carriage look on with benevolent confusion.
Anatomy of London
by Alex Farebrother-Naylor
Number 9: East Dulwich
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by Matt Haynes
The caffs round King’s Cross are full of downcast Scotsmen eating breakfast. Outside O’Neill’s, others stand in kilts and saltires, pints in hand. Soon, it will be time to cross the Euston Road and catch the train back home. [read more…]
by Matt Haynes
Out here, the river’s still allowed to undo its buttons twice a day and slob out across the mud with primordial glee. For one of the Thames’s more discombobulating quirks is that it’s wider upstream than down, where it’s been artificially banked and trammelled – no one paddles on the beach outside Lambeth Palace any more, not since Mr Bazalgette’s embankments went up in the 1860s and the Archbishop lost his deckchair concession. [read more…]
On the Pentonville Road by Howard Colyer
After three years of trying, my colleague, Malcolm Taylor, managed to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a bin five yards from his desk. [read more…]
“Is this London?” she pouts, pressing a chocolatey face to the tagged and leaking window as their train waits at Worcester Park. “Daddy, when is it going to be London?”
by Henry Wilson
We set out after lunch, hurrying along the quiet dusty back streets of West Hampstead to the Overground station on West End Lane, just in time to squeeze onto a Stratford train. Body heat radiates through summer dresses, T-shirts, skirts and shorts in the sun-drenched carriage. A sense of expectancy and excitement rises out of the chatter and laughter; a hundred disparate journeys blend into one. [read more…]