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…]
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…]
A Thousand Black Fishes by Jude Rogers
The sky like a kingfisher’s flash.
The new Eastway overlooking the old, solid river.
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“I’ve heard there’s a new park here, where is it?” demanded the man in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park information centre in the middle of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
by Matt Haynes
Hedonism, of course, was the name of the game, and pretty much anything went. One night, Boy George nearly brought Duran Duran’s career to a premature end when, clutching a garish mojito, he hurtled down the slope using Simon le Bon as a toboggan; luckily for the course of popular music, the chubby Brummie took it in his pantalooned stride. [read more…]
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…]
Penny-Farthing, Lee Navigation Canal towpath, November 2012
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by Jude Rogers
Out of Hackney Downs station, the day is spinning into life. The old lollipop man stands on the kerb outside Brook Community School. A flash of yellow neon, bright eyes, white teeth. His head turning left, turning right, both feet forward, across. He holds his lollipop in front of him, high like a mitre. Children hurry past, their shouts circling above him. In the middle of the tornados of decibels, he stands still, as calm as a prophet. [read more…]
photo by Roger Till
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by Alexandra Lister
… through plumes
of cigarette smoke, the boy with the
anchor tattoo got drunk for the first time
and we looked up to see the early swallows come
in over London like tiny bombers…
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