Quarterly Fundraiser for 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’.

 

Nine years ago, in the spring of 2012, I set out on my bike, with a small point-and-shoot Canon camera, on a mission to take photos in all 120 postcodes of the London postal district, an area of 241 square miles featuring the City and the West End (EC and WC), and the compass points that radiate out from them (E, SE, SW, W, NW and N). 

I embarked on the project after five largely sedentary years spent researching and writing about the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and an illness in 2011, in part because I wanted to get fit, but, in particular, because I wanted to get to know better the city that has been my home since I left university in 1985, and to record its multi-layered history and the significant changes that it was undergoing as it played host to the 2012 Olympic Games, and, more generally, as development money poured in to remake huge swathes of the capital for the 21st century, via an array of “regeneration” projects that largely seem to involve sidelining the genuine needs of Londoners in pursuit of profits for investors, both foreign and domestic.  

Five years in, I began posting a daily photo on Facebook from the archive I’d built up since 2012, accompanying the photos with essays intended to establish it as a photo-journalistic appraisal of the capital in all of its complexity, and I hope that, as the project has gone on, it has also improved, as I embraced better technology (upgrading to a Canon PowerShot G7X Mk. II in February 2019), became a better photographer, and increasingly devoted more time to the essays that give the photos what I regard as a necessary context.

I’m delighted that ‘The State of London’ has just reached 4,400 likes on Facebook, where the project also has nearly 4,700 followers, and, in order to keep it going, I’d like to ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support it. I have no institutional backing for the project, and, even if we disregard the amount of time I spend out and about taking photos, the process of researching the daily photos, posting them and responding to comments, takes around three hours a day, meaning that I devote at least 20 hours a week to what, is essentially, a labour of love.

That’s my choice, of course, but as I explained when I last posted a fundraiser for the project back in May, “If I could get £1,000 for the three months to come it would take it from the realms of an absurd hobby into something resembling a valid enterprise in a capitalist society” — although still one that pays me way less than the minimum wage (although it is, I suspect, considerably more enjoyable than most minimum wage jobs!)

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 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.

In the months to come, I will continue to record the changing faces of the capital, now that I have recovered from a debilitating leg sprain that prevented me from cycling for three months, and as the capital begins, in some measure, to recover from, and to adapt to the huge changes it underwent as a result of successive Covid-19 lockdowns from March 2020 onwards, when the City and the West End, in particular became ghost towns (as I captured in my photos at the time). 

I hope you’ll continue to travel with me as I carry on recording ‘The State of London’ in these unprecedentedly challenging times, as the capital and its people continue to try to cope with the effects of Brexit, Covid and the grave indicators of profound climate change, and as the big money predators (and their pimps in central and local government) resume their efforts to pretend that we can return to “business as usual”, that profits come before the needs of the people, and that the city should continue to be remade by people who, in general, have set an absurdly high price on almost every square inch of this extraordinary city of ours, but who know nothing of its value.

Andy Worthington
London
August 20, 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. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.