Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

Yesterday, August 18, marked one year and 100 days since I began posting a photo a day on ‘The State of London’, a Facebook page I established on May 11 last year, marking five years since I first began cycling around London on my bike, taking photos of whatever interested me. You can see all the photos to date here.

In the six years and three months since I began this photo-journalistic project, I have been out on my bike almost every day, cycling many thousands of miles across all of London’s 120 postcodes, and discovering that what interests me are the changing seasons, the changing weather, the River Thames and the capital’s other rivers, its canals, its parks, and my own idiosyncratic take on the built environment, in which I’m drawn to the old, the odd, the idiosyncratic, the run-down, the derelict and the abandoned, and also to social housing — the great post-war estates, currently facing an unprecedented threat from councils across the political spectrum, who, financially squeezed by central government, are entering into deals with property developers to demolish their estates and to build over-priced new developments from which almost all the existing tenants are priced out, an epidemic of social cleansing that is largely unnoticed by those who are not directly affected by it. 

When these homes are destroyed, social rents (generally set at around a third of market rents) are also conveniently wiped out, replaced by properties for private sale, for market rent, for “affordable” rents that aren’t affordable at all, being set at 80% of market rents, and for shared ownership, an alarming scam designed to fool renters into believing that they are property owners. To add to Londoners’ woes, housing associations, which have increasingly taken over councils’ housing role since the Thatcher years, have also been severely squeezed, and many have, in response, also joined the private property development gravy train. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, photographer, commentator and activist. Check out all the photos to date here.

Back in March 2011, my life changed when I was hospitalised after a blood clot had turned two of my toes black. Doctors at St. Thomas’s Hospital, opposite the Houses of Parliament, saved my toes — a mercy for which I am eternally grateful to the NHS — but after I recovered, my life changed again when I began cycling across London on a daily basis — and taking photos everywhere I went — in May 2012.

When I got ill, I had managed to give up smoking, which would otherwise have killed me, but I then started piling on the pounds instead, on a steady diet of biscuits and cakes, and so getting back on my bike on a daily basis seemed like the perfect way to get fit.

I’d been a cyclist since I was about four years old, but like many useful habits, it had become sidelined as I smoked too much, and also as a result of my obsessive sedentary lifestyle as a writer, researcher and commentator and activist on Guantánamo, which had consumed my life since 2006. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Dear friends and supporters,

Since I started working independently on Guantánamo, over 12 years ago, I have largely been reliant on the support that you, my readers, have given and continue to give to me via donations that enable me to carry on researching and writing about Guantánamo, and calling for the prison to be closed, a vocation — some might say an obsession — that has, to date, led to me writing and publishing over 2,200 articles about Guantánamo.

I never meant to embark on this path as an independent journalist and activist, but it seemed to be the only appropriate response to my compulsion to tell the truth about Guantánamo on an essentially relentless basis — the truth being that it must be closed, because it is a lawless place of brutality and vengeance, full of alleged intelligence that, to a shockingly large degree, does not relate to any kind of truth, but consists of lies made by prisoners about their fellow prisoners, after they were tortured or otherwise abused, or even bribed with better living conditions.

My independence has allowed me to cover Guantánamo more assiduously than most of the mainstream media, which generally doesn’t maintain a relentless focus on issues of chronic injustice, even though it should, and has also enabled me to use my research and journalism to push more into campaigning, as I did in 2014-15 with We Stand With Shaker, the campaign to free Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, and as I continue to do via my website here, and also via the Close Guantánamo campaign that I set up with the US attorney Tom Wilner in 2012 — where, to provide a current example of my campaigning, I am asking people to mark a terrible milestone — 6,000 days of Guantánamo’s existence — on Friday by taking a photo with a poster marking this sad occasion and sending it to us. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, photographer, commentator and activist.

Exactly one year ago, I began posting a photo a day on a Facebook page I had just established — ‘The State of London’ —  from my archive of tens of thousands of photos taken of London, in all 120 of the capital’s postcodes, as well as some of the outlying boroughs, that I had built up over the previous five years.

I haven’t advertised ‘The State of London’ via Facebook, which some people suggest is a good way of getting supporters, but I’ve steadily built up a following over the last year of people who like my photo-journalistic take on the capital — photos, often accompanied by short essays, of the good, the bad and the ugly of London in the second decade of this tumultuous century. Someone more objective than me can probably analyse my taste, but I know that I’m bewitched by the light and the changing seasons, that I love catching photos on those outings when I get caught in storms or showers or torrential rain, that I love the river and its tributaries, and London’s canals, that I love the capital’s hills, its park, its trees, and that I also see almost everything with a political eye.

On my endless, restless journeys, I see everything that is happening with the built environment, but when I started in 2012, in the year of the Olympic hype, in which big money was savagely reshaping the Lea valley, I was appalled by the jingoism and empty patriotism, but I didn’t fully comprehend how, in the years that followed, the broken capitalist model that had almost killed itself through 2008’s self-inflicted global economic crash would end up working out that the only way left to guarantee huge and unjustifiable profits for the lazy rich was for the UK establishment, and those who aspire to it, to cannibalistically feed off its own people, through housing. Read the rest of this entry »

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 of the Trump administration.

Dear friends, supporters, and any stray passers-by,

My most recent article, WORLD EXCLUSIVE: Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Salem Gherebi’s Letter Explaining Why He Voluntarily Returned to Libya from Senegal Despite the Danger in Doing So, was something of a milestone for me — my 3,000th article published here on my website since I first began publishing articles here, on an almost daily basis, nearly eleven years ago. 

Almost 2,200 of those articles have been about the prison at Guantánamo Bay and the men held there, the main focus of my work as a writer and a campaigner since the spring of 2006, when I began working on the manuscript for my book The Guantánamo Files, which I completed in May 2007, and which was published that September.

If you’ve been with me all that time — as some of you, perhaps, have been — you’ll know that I started publishing articles here after the fourth prisoner at Guantánamo died, a man named Abdul Rahman al-Amri, allegedly by committing suicide. After spending 14 months researching and writing about the prisoners, based on a forensic analysis of the many thousands of pages of information about them that the Pentagon had been obliged to release after they lost a Freedom of Information lawsuit, I think it’s fair to say that I knew more than anyone in the world about the prisoners at that point, but although I pitched a proposal to the Guardian, I was told that they’d pick up on the Associated Press’s wire, and so I published it myself, as I already had a website up and running (technically, a WordPress blog), and hoped people would notice. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist.

Seven years ago yesterday, I was admitted to hospital after suffering for two months with severe pain in two toes on my right foot. As a human rights campaigner, it was, I thought, somewhat ironic that I was in such pain that I was suffering from sleep deprivation, unable to sleep for more than a few minutes before being jolted awake in excruciating pain, a situation that lasted for at least a month, if I recall correctly after all this time.

Eventually, doctors worked out that I had a blood clot, which was what was turning my toes black, but it wasn’t until I was admitted to hospital — and, specifically, St. Thomas’s, where I was taken on March 20, that specialists worked out what to do for me — or, rather, what they would try, to see if it worked — which involved me, for five days, having what felt like liquid cement pumped into me, in an effort to widen the artery that fed my toes and, ultimately, to save them. (I wrote about my experience at the time, in an article entitled, Intimations of Mortality — And Why This Is the View From My Bedroom).

Their endeavours, I’m very glad to say, were successful. After 12 days in hospital, thoroughly marinaded in morphine (a miraculous pain-killer that doctors work hard to prevent mere mortals from having access to on a regular basis, presumably to prevent the world from being overrun with morphine addicts), I returned home, to resume my life, to allow my toes to fully heal, and, eventually, to start a new life. Read the rest of this entry »

Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $2000 (£1500) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo for the next three months!

Dear friends and supporters,

It’s Day 4 of my quarterly fundraiser, and I’m grateful to the friends and supporters who have helped me reach 20% of my target of $2500 (£1800) to continue my work on Guantánamo over the next three months. However, I’d like to ask you, if you can, to join in helping me, as, for the most part, a reader-funded journalist and activist, to raise the funds I’m seeking to enable me to keep working — writing the 50 or so articles I publish every quarter, plus all my social media work, and, when they happen, media and personal appearances.

I have no institutional backing for my work, and no revenue stream that comes through the mainstream media and its advertisers’ support, so almost everything I do is dependent on your financial support for me to continue — not just my writing and campaigning to close Guantánamo, but also my work in defence of social housing in the UK (including ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, the new documentary film that I narrate and am preparing to tour around the UK), my protest music, with my band The Four Fathers, and my London photography project, ‘The State of London.’

If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $500, $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency. The donation page is set to dollars, because the majority of my readers are based in the US, but PayPal will convert any amount you wish to pay from any other currency — and you don’t have to have a PayPal account to make a donation.

You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated. Read the rest of this entry »

Please click the ‘Donate’ button to make a donation towards the $2500 (£1850) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo for the next three months!

Dear friends and supporters – and anyone happening to pass by,

It’s that time of year again, when I ask you, if you can, to support my work as an independent journalist, activist and commentator, working primarily to educate people about the prison at Guantánamo Bay and to get it closed down — and, if you wish, my campaigning work to try and prevent the destruction of housing estates in London and across the UK, my London photography, and my music, with my band The Four Fathers.

I am, it seems, a very modern creation — a writer and campaigner funded almost entirely by my supporters, so if you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $500, $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency.

You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated.

The donation page is set to dollars, because the majority of my readers are based in the US, but PayPal will convert any amount you wish to pay from any other currency — and you don’t have to have a PayPal account to make a donation. Read the rest of this entry »

Please feel free to support ‘The State of London’ and my photo-journalism with a donation, if you wish. I receive no institutional funding for it whatsoever.

300 days ago, on May 11, 2017, I began publishing a photo a day on Facebook as part of a photo project called ‘The State of London.’ I’d actually begun the project five years before, on May 11, 2012, when I’d first started cycling around London taking photos of whatever interested me, the intention being to create a photographic record of the capital at this particular time in its history — under Tory rule, with the Olympics about to begin as the project started, and with hideous towers rising up everywhere, as the latest phase of the primary focus of capitalism in London over the last 20 years — an endless, artificially-sustained housing bubble that is a disaster for almost everyone except the very rich, and, of course, the developers.

As I began cycling around London and taking photos, I decided that I would visit all 120 of inner London’s postcodes — the ones beginning WC, EC, SE, SW, W, NW, N and E — as well as trying to visit as much of outer London as possible. In the first rush of my enthusiasm, I hadn’t genuinely taken on board quite how big London is, and how long it takes to cycle across it, while being regularly distracted by photo opportunities. It took me until September 2014, if I recall correctly, to visit all 120 postcodes, and, to date, I’ve only visited a handful of the outer postcodes — in particular, those nearest to me, for example, designated BR (for Bromley) and CR (for Croydon).

As the project has developed, I suspect that some of my enthusiasms have become apparent. To some extent, I have come to regard myself as a barometer of the weather, because I cycle almost every day, whatever the conditions (which, along the way, has also helped to keep me healthy, and has made me realise that we are meant to be outdoors much more than we generally are), and the photos inevitably reflect that, with some photos capturing torrential rain, for example, which is generally quite rare, and others capturing the dullness of the typical overcast weather that defines so much of the British weather (and, by extension, the British psyche — once a heavy dose of Puritanism has also been added). Other photos capture the beauty and clarity of the many different types of sunlight — at different times of the day, and at different times of the year, and I freely admit that I’m always in search of the strong, low light and long shadows that can be found towards the end of the day, and that I particularly love. Read the rest of this entry »

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 of the Trump administration.

This article is the 23rd in an ongoing series of articles listing all my work in chronological order. It’s a project I began in January 2010, when I put together the first chronological lists of all my articles, in the hope that doing so would make it as easy as possible for readers and researchers to navigate my work — the nearly 3,000 articles I have published since I first began publishing articles here in May 2007, which, otherwise, are not available in chronological order in any readily accessible form.

I receive no institutional funding for my work, and so, if you appreciate what I do as a reader-funded journalist and activist, please consider making a donation via the Paypal ‘Donate’ button above. Any amount, however large or small, will be very gratefully received — and if you are able to become a regular monthly sustainer, that would be particularly appreciated. To do so, please tick the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and fill in the amount you wish to donate every month.

As I note every time I put together a chronological list of my articles, my mission, as it has been since my research in 2006-07, for my book The Guantánamo Files, first revealed the scale of the injustice at Guantánamo, continues to revolve around four main aims — to humanize the prisoners by telling their stories; to expose the many lies told about them to supposedly justify their detention; to push for the prison’s closure and the absolute repudiation of indefinite detention without charge or trial as US policy; and to call for those who initiated, implemented and supported indefinite detention and torture to be held accountable for their actions. Read the rest of this entry »