The first issue of Smoke: a London Peculiar was published in April 2003, full of buses, lost rivers, blue plaques and stories about the city. Seven years later, with bookshops closing and phones getting smarter, we decided that printing a small A5 magazine onto thin slices of tree no longer made much sense, and turned Smoke into a website instead, promising that in future we’d chop down trees only when we had enough new words and images for a book. By August 2014, however, it seemed best to hang up the Closed sign on the back of the screen, and move on. We still thought Smoke was a lovely idea, and were proud of everything we’d done, but…
And where have we moved on to?
Well, JUDE‘s been writing for various papers and magazines – the Guardian, Observer, New Statesmen etc. – while also turning her hand to books and programmes for the BBC. You can find out more at JUDE ROGERS, her own personal website.
And MATT now has a new London project, UNCHARTERED STREETS – a series of books about some of the city’s more unsung districts, kicking off with Leyton and with Deptford, Vauxhall and Brentford in the pipeline. There’s also DANGER; VOID BEHIND DOOR, which collects some of his writing into one convenient website.
If anyone’s interested, we still have back issues of the magazine available from issue#5 onwards, and also copies of our Olympic book and board game, Soho! You can buy them from the Unchartered Streets shop. And all the old Smoke stories and photos will remain on this website (under the WORDS & IMAGES tab) until we stop renewing the domain, or the various coding issues have made the site unusable…