The Missing Postman’s Park Memorials
by Mark Sadler
“Mary Popplewell perished while attempting to save her older sister who had become helplessly entangled in the strings of a harp. March 27 1899.”
[read more…]
Aug 112014
MNO
Jul 302014
by MW Bewick
Hattie also remembered that when my father was a child he had described the river as a yawning snake, which to me seems precocious. To him, snakes meant danger, and the space below the bridges was filled with slithering horror. They found things in rivers too. It said so on the news. Whatever people secreted in the unfathomable water eventually washed up. [read more…]
Jul 212014
Iain And Will Have A Cup Of Tea
by Matt Haynes
Iain stared glumly at the stained formica. “It’s like I said, when I told you how Hackney’s pre-Games decontamination and realignment into a fugitive cartography of designer lock-ups and guerrilla sofa bars had created a hallucinatory Ballardian nexus of dystopian interzones – some of the ley lines they dug up to build the Basketball Arena had been there since the days of King Lud.” [read more…]
Jul 152014
Threnody on the Death of a Street Lamp on Lollard Street, SE11
by Matt Haynes
O noble lantern ’neath whose kindly fire
my love and I did oft together lark,
our bodies, lust-engorged, ’twined in desire –
why hast thou gone and left us in the dark?
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Jun 232014
“He’s asked me to sing in a proto-punk band,” said the man in the suit on the phone in the sun on Piccadilly. “I don’t even know what that means.”
Jun 192014
Please Do Not Touch The Walrus No. 9
A fantastic new series in which we attempt to catalogue some of the amazing things you can’t do in our fabulous capital city. Today: pointing at the sun in Greenwich. [see more…]
Jun 132014
The whiteboard at Southgate station says services are normal on all lines except the Central; on the Central, it says, they are good.
May 272014
For The Greater Good by Matt Haynes
Mother, by the time you read this I will be in Tegucigalpa.
Don’t worry, I’ll be fine; I just wanted to let you know
That I have buried the body of Nigel Farage
At the back of Uncle Terry’s garage
In Bow.
[read more…]
May 222014
Leyton Lights by Matt Haynes
Once, on a night flight to Los Angeles, our pilot told us over the intercom that if we looked out the right-hand window we’d see Las Vegas. So I pressed my face to the Plexiglas and saw a strip of pure light blazing out from the Nevada desert like someone had just skimmed sodium pebbles across a vast black lake. [read more…]
May 122014
A Short Journey Downriver by Mark Sadler
Twice a day, when the tide is high, the Thames floods the broad, low-ceilinged underground channel from which the Granville emerges. During the autumn and winter, as the temperature drops, these back surges create localised fogs that linger along Upper and Lower Thames Street. The river that London buried alive rises like a ghost through the porous layers of paving to reassert its claim upon its former overground course. [read more…]