21.11.21
Dear friends and supporters,
It’s now over four and a half years since I first began to post photos — and accompanying essays — on Facebook, as ‘The State of London’, from the archive of photos that I’d been building up since I first began cycling with a camera and a curious eye throughout London’s 120 postcodes five years before, in May 2012.
This has, from the beginning, been a labour of love. No one asked me to do it, and no one was paying me to do it either, but as time has gone on and the project has become more popular (with nearly 5,000 followers now on Facebook), I have also devoted more and more time to it — particularly through the research I undertake into the subjects of my photos, and the essays I write to accompany my daily posts, which I know many of you appreciate.
As a result, earlier this year I began posting quarterly fundraisers asking you to make a donation, if you can, to support ‘The State of London.’ If you can help out, 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.
‘The State of London’ takes up about half my working week, and in my fundraiser back in May I explained that, “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 I should point out that, even with your support, it would still be a job that pays considerably less than the minimum wage (despite being considerably more enjoyable than most minimum wage jobs).
Since my last fundraiser in August, I’ve continued to monitor the capital as it begins to reawaken after the worst of the Covid lockdowns, which I chronicled assiduously at the time, and which transformed the West End and the City into largely empty and apocalyptic environments in which almost everyone had disappeared.
People are now out and about in noticeable numbers, but the capital’s economic recovery is falteringly slow, as, around the world, Britain is seen as having badly mismanaged the Covid crisis, and as not being a safe destination. As a result, foreign tourists, who tend to spend much more than the homegrown variety, are still largely absent, a situation made worse, as a recent CNN article entitled, ‘How the UK became the sick man of European tourism’, explained, because of the government’s failure to invest in publicity aimed at reassuring tourists that it is both safe and worthwhile to visit.
In the last three months I spent some time focusing on the environmental crisis that ought to be our number one priority, as Extinction Rebellion activists spent two weeks highlighting the role played, in particular, by the City of London in funding fossil fuels, in the run-up to the underwhelming COP26 climate talks in Glasgow earlier this month. However, much of what I’ve been posting — in part because the weather hasn’t generally been very enticing (which makes me reflect that we are already seeing a disturbing change in weather patterns) — has been drawn from my various trips throughout the capital over the last nine and a half years, as I continue to build up a portrait of the city’s past and present that now runs to over 1,600 photos and essays.
I’m grateful that so many of you are accompanying me on these journeys, and if you can help out financially in any way — a £10 donation is basically just 10p a day — your support will be very greatly appreciated.
Andy Worthington
London
November 21, 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 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 struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — 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.
Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.
Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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2 Responses
Andy Worthington says...
When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:
Here’s my latest article, a fundraiser for my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, in which I post a photo a day, with detailed accompanying essays, taken on bike rides throughout London’s 120 postcodes over the last nine years. https://www.facebook.com/thestateoflondon
‘The State of London’ is a labour of love, which takes up at least half my working life, although I have no financial backing for it whatsoever, and am dependent on your support to enable me to keep it going. I’m hoping to raise £1,000 to support my work over the next three months, and if you can make a donation of £10, that’s basically 10p a day.
Please note that the PayPal page is set to dollars, because I set it up for my Guantanamo work, and many of my supporters are in the US, but PayPal will accept payments in any currency. All UK readers need to know is the exchange rate, and currently £10, as an example, is about $13.50.
Thanks for your support!
...on November 21st, 2021 at 7:56 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks to the two supporters who have made donations. If anyone else can help it will be very greatly appreciated!
...on November 23rd, 2021 at 1:26 am