Celebrating 1,400 Days of My Photo-Journalism Project, ‘The State of London’
Please feel free to support ‘The State of London’, for which I have no financial backing except via your donations. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Today marks 1,400 days since I first began posting a photo a day — and accompanying essays — on my Facebook page ‘The State of London’, and I’m delighted that it has continued to grow in popularity, so that I now have over 4,300 followers, plus many more who follow the daily posts on my own Facebook page.
It now seems like another age since I first set out on my bike to chronicle the changing face of London in photos, in May 2012, exactly five years before I started posting a photo a day on Facebook. As I drew on the archive I’d built up for my daily posts — choosing a photo from each successive day, but from any of the years since the project started — the London of the second decade of the 21st century was a recognisable beast; sometimes charming, sometimes infuriating, a place where the gulf between the rich and the poor continued to grow at an alarming pace, and a place that has been invaded and occupied by predatory developers, building skyscraper office blocks that were not needed, and dense forests of residential tower blocks that were unaffordable for most hard-working Londoners, while selling off existing estates of social housing to be knocked down for further profits.
In terms of my photography and my research, the project has seen huge developments. After using simple point-and-shoot cameras at the beginning, I invested in a superior example, the Canon PowerShot G7X Mk II, two years ago, which transformed my photography, and I also began devoting more and more time to the text accompanying the photos, which, in the early days, had often been quite cursory.
Please Make A Donation to Support My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’
Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation to support my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’.
Dear friends and supporters of ‘The State of London’,
It’s nearly nine years since I first set off on my bike to record London in photos on daily trips through the 241 square miles of the capital’s 120 postcodes — and nearly four years since I began posting a photo a day on Facebook, where I also post an accompanying essay to accompany each photo, and on Twitter.
At the time of writing, I’ve posted 1,350 photos on Facebook, and I’m delighted to note that the Facebook page currently has 4,250 followers, as well as the many other people who keep up with the project on my personal Facebook page.
I’m grateful for all the interest — and the wonderful supportive comments that I receive on a gratifyingly regular basis — but today I’d like to ask you, if you are able, to make a donation to support ‘The State of London’, as I have no financial backing whatsoever, and I’m relying on you to keep me going.
Radio: I Discuss London’s Housing Crisis and Covid’s Impact on Business Rents with Andy Bungay, Plus Three Four Fathers Songs
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Recently I spoke to Andy Bungay of Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, for his show ‘The Chiminea’, which was broadcast on Boxing Day, and is available here on Mixcloud.
Andy and I have been speaking for several years, and it’s always great to talk to him. Our 50-minute segment of the two and a half hour show began just under 21 minutes in, when Andy played ‘Fighting Injustice’, the first of three songs by my band The Four Fathers, which has long been a live favourite, and whose chorus is something of a mantra of mine — “If you ain’t fighting injustice / You’re living on the dark side.”
We then began our discussion by taking about my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, which I began in 2012, and which involves me cycling and taking photos on a daily basis throughout London’s 120 postcodes, and, since 2017, posting a photo a day, with an accompanying story, on Facebook.
Radio: I Discuss Hopes for Guantánamo’s Closure Under Joe Biden, and Julian Assange’s Extradition, with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Chris Cook, in Victoria, British Columbia, hosts a great weekly progressive radio show, Gorilla Radio, and I’m delighted to have been talking to him on a regular basis — mostly about Guantánamo — for many years now.
I spoke to Chris recently for an hour, and you can find the show on his website here, and also here as an MP3. A shorter version of the interview was included in the show that was broadcast on December 17, featuring journalist and author John Helmer in the first half (and the MP3 of that show is here).
I began by providing a brief history of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which will mark the shameful 19th anniversary of its opening in just three weeks’ time, and I stressed how, under Donald Trump, the prison has essentially been sealed shut for the last four years. Bearing that in mind, there is now hope that, at the very least, some of the remaining 40 prisoners will be freed, and there will progress towards the prison’s closure.
Celebrating 1,300 Days of My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’
Please support my work on ‘The State of London’, a labour of love that has no funding except from you. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Sunday marked 1,300 days — over three and a half years — since I first began posting a photo a day (plus an accompanying essay) on my Facebook page ‘The State of London.’
The Facebook project began on May 11, 2017, the fifth anniversary of the day I first consciously began cycling around the 120 postcodes of the London Postal District (the postcodes beginning E, EC, N, NW, SE, SW, W and WC), intending to capture, in photos, the changing face of the city, and its different manifestations based on the weather and the seasons.
My thanks to everyone taking an interest in the project, which has just reached 3,800 followers — plus many more who follow the photos on my own Facebook page, and also those who follow ‘The State of London’ on Twitter.
Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2000) for my Guantánamo Work and Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’
Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo over the next three months, and/or for my London photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’.
Dear friends and supporters,
Every three months I ask you, if you can, to support my ongoing work as a reader-funded journalist, activist and photo-journalist. It’s now 15 years since I first began researching the prison at Guantánamo Bay, writing about it and campaigning relentlessly to get it closed, and eight years since I began a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, consisting of photos and accompanying essays taken on daily bike rides through London’s 120 postcodes.
On Guantánamo, it was, I recall, September 2005 when I became appalled that the administration of George W. Bush had refused to even let the world know the identities of the men held there, and set about trying to find out who was held there.
That quest, as some of you will know, led to me being the only person to review all the documents released through freedom of information legislation in the spring of 2006, when the Pentagon was finally obliged to release the identities of the prisoners, and 8,000 pages of supporting documents — unclassified summaries of what the US alleged to be evidence against them, and transcripts of the lawless tribunals the US had held to, for the most, perfunctorily assess and confirm that they were correctly held as “enemy combatants” who could be imprisoned without charge or trial forever.
COVID-19: Workers and Employers Show No Great Enthusiasm for Returning to the Office to Revive “Business As Usual”
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
In Sunday’s Observer, the paper’s chief political commentator Andrew Rawnsley related how, a few weeks ago, a group of civil servants at the Cabinet Office were “told to find a way of re-opening nightclubs in a coronavirus-safe way.” Although they were, in Rawnsley’s words, a “bright group”, they couldn’t overcome the fundamental — one might say fatal — flaw at the heart of the exercise. “The socially distanced nightclub is a contradiction in terms”, as Rawnsley put it, adding, “Nightclubs, by their very nature, are all about social intimacy.”
Rawnsley proceeded to explain that he was telling this story “to illustrate just how very desperate the government has been to release Britain from every aspect of lockdown and return us to something that resembles the pre-coronavirus world as closely as possible.” Our leaders, as he put it, “dreamed of returning to that prelapsarian age in which you could eat out with your family, go drinking with your mates, commute to work, celebrate a religious festival or jet off to a holiday somewhere reliably sunny without having to worry about catching or spreading a deadly disease. While never quite saying it explicitly, their ambition has essentially been to get everything open again.”
This indeed seems to be the case, and it is typical of a government made up largely of inadequate ministers who are only in place because of their enthusiasm for the insanity of Brexit, and who are led by the laziest example of a Prime Minister in living memory, that the nuances of the challenges facing us — and the unexpected opportunities for a less chaotic and more environmentally sustainable world — are being ignored.
3,000 Days of My Photo-Journalism Project ‘The State of London’
Check out all ‘The State of London’ photos here!
Please feel free to support my work on ‘The State of London’, for which I have no institutional funding. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
My photo-journalism project ’The State of London’ has just reached a noteworthy milestone — 3,000 days since I first consciously went out on my bike, on May 11, 2012, to cycle around London taking photos to chronicle the fabric of London and the many changes wrought upon it, beginning with the upheaval that attended the capital’s role as the host city of the 2012 Olympic Games. I began posting a photo a day on Facebook on the fifth anniversary of that first trip, on May 11, 2017, and have been posting a photo a day for the 1,176 days since.
In the eight years since, I have taken many tens of thousands of photos, covering all 120 of London’s postcodes in the 241 square miles of the London postal district (those beginning EC, WC, W, NW, N, E, SE and SW), with a particular focus on central London — the City (EC1 to EC4) and the West End (WC1, WC2 and W1), and the immediate surrounding postcodes (SE1, SW1, NW1, N1 and E1) — and with other clusters of repeated activity in the whole of south east London, where I live, in east London, most readily accessed via the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, and in parts of south west London — particularly, it seems, Brixton, Vauxhall and Battersea and Chelsea — and west London; especially Paddington, Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove.
These 3,000 days have not only been a way of keeping physically fit; they have also played a major role in ensuring some sort of mental equilibrium amidst the general chaos of the state of the world — even if some aspects of ‘The State of London’ have added to my sense of rage rather than placating it; in particular, the colossal and colossally expensive construction projects that have transformed the city to an alarming degree over the last eight years.
The State of London: Marking 120 Days of My London Lockdown Photos with Some Previously Unpublished Images
Please feel free to support ‘The State of London’ with a donation, as I have no institutional backing for it, and it is, instead, a reader-funded project. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Check out all ‘The State of London’ photos here.
Yesterday marked 120 days straight that I’ve been cycling around London, taking photos of the coronavirus lockdown — and, in recent weeks, its partial easing — and posting a photo a day on ‘The State of London’ Facebook and Twitter pages.
I first began cycling around London on a daily basis, taking photos for a photo-journalism project that I soon named ‘The State of London’, over eight years ago, in May 2012, and on the fifth anniversary I began posting a photo a day on Facebook. Until the coronavirus hit, the photos I posted were drawn from the various years since I began the project — on that particular day, but from any of the years since the project began in 2012.
When the coronavirus hit, however — and particularly after the lockdown officially began on March 23 — the archive suddenly seemed, if not irrelevant, then relating to another, lost time, as the streets of the capital emptied, and economic activity ground almost to a halt.
Lockdown Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support My Guantánamo Work and My Photo-Journalism Project, ‘The State of London’
Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo over the next three months of the Trump administration, and/or for my London photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’.
Dear friends and supporters,
Every three months I ask you, if you can, to support my ongoing journalism and activism — mostly on Guantánamo — and my photo-journalism, via my project ‘The State of London’, for which I have no institutional backing. As a very modern version of a freelance journalist, I’m reliant on you, my supporters, to support my work via donations if you like what I do and are able to help.
This is a long-standing arrangement, and it largely arose because there was no room for someone like me in the mainstream media, which didn’t want an expert on Guantánamo writing relentlessly about the prison, the men held there, and why it needs to be closed, and who, in general, dismiss people who are relentlessly dedicated to important causes as “activists” rather than journalists. This is a distinction that I don’t find valid, which serves to largely sideline writers who burn with indignation at injustices in favour of those who embrace “objectivity” — and sadly it tends only to end up supporting the status quo.
On Guantanamo, I have doggedly sought its closure for 14 years now, and have no intention of giving up while it remains open, because its very existence is such a legal, ethical and moral abomination. Your support for my relentless persistence regarding this hugely important but almost entirely forgotten topic is very greatly appreciated.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
