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.

Until Covid arrived last year, I had regularly drawn on photos from the archive I’ve built up over the years, and the accompanying text was sometimes quite brief, but over the last year I’ve been out almost every day photographing London under Covid lockdown — I was, for example, out for 120 days straight from when the first lockdown was declared on March 23 last year — and I’ve also invested much more time and effort in providing detailed commentary to accompany the photos, increasingly delving more and more into the many layers of London’s rich history, as well as continuing to provide my own opinions.

Typically, these days, as well as spending many hours out on my bike taking photos, I also spend one or two hours researching the photo of the day and writing the text to accompany it, posting the photos and responding to comments. Obviously, this is my choice — and I’ve always been aware that ‘The State of London’ is fundamentally a labour of love — but if you can make a donation to support it, I will be very grateful. £1,000 a quarter would take it from the realms of an absurd hobby into something resembling a valid enterprise in a capitalist society.

If you can make a donation to support ‘The State of London’, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s £5, £10, £20 or more!

You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and filling in the amount you wish to donate every month. If you are able to do so, a regular, monthly donation would be very much appreciated.

The donation page is set to dollars, because my PayPal page also covers donations to support my ongoing work to secure the closure of US prison at Guantánamo Bay, and many of those supporters are based in the US, but PayPal will convert any amount you wish to pay from pounds, or any other currency — and you don’t have to have a PayPal account to make a donation.

Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send a cheque, or cash (to 164A Tressillian Road, London SE4 1XY), or you can make a donation directly into my bank account. Please contact me if this option is of interest.

With thanks, as ever, for your support.

Andy Worthington
London
February 18, 2021

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.