Celebrating 2,000 Days of ‘The State of London’, My Unique Photo-Journalism Project

Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation to support my reader-funded photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, as it reaches its 2,000th day.

 

I’m delighted to report that today marks 2,000 days since I first began posting a photo a day taken on bike rides through the 241 square miles the capital’s 120 geographical postcodes — plus an accompanying essay — on my Facebook page ‘The State of London.’ I launched the Facebook page on the 5th anniversary of when I first set out consciously on my bike to capture my perceptions of London with a small point-and-shoot camera, on May 11, 2012 — and for anyone interested in that longer timescale, today actually marks 3,826 days since the project began, which has involved me getting through two bikes and four cameras (ending up with the wonderful Canon PowerShot G7 X Mk. II, which I’ve had for nearly the last four years, and going from looking at my 50th birthday approaching to reflecting on my imminent 60th.

I’m grateful to my 5,800 followers — and 1,350 followers on Twitter — plus the many more people who take an interest in the project without officially ‘following’ it.

There are, of course, many pages and websites out there that feature photos of London, but to the best of my knowledge there’s nothing like ‘The State of London’, which is very specifically a photo-journalism project. I endeavour to make the photos memorable in their own right, but they are rarely the kind of images you’d find wooing tourists, or emblazoned on a canvas print in a populist art shop — and, moreover, the photos are always accompanied by detailed essays providing a wealth of context, historical background and commentary.

The London that particularly attracts me is the one that works for the people rather than the elites — social housing built from the 1890s to the 1980s (and preceded by the earliest examples of philanthropic housing), the city’s commons and parks, the great River Thames, without which there would be no city, and its many tributaries and canals, and the hills and valleys that have also contributed significantly to the city’s development over two millennia. I also love the changing weather and the changing seasons, and am rarely put off by inclement weather, and, as the project has intensified over the years, I’ve also become increasingly fascinated by the layers of the city’s history, as it has been torn down and rebuilt, and, on occasion, been devoured by flames.

Very consciously, I also celebrate London’s vibrant and ongoing history of protest, and, as my project began in 2012, in the run-up to the Olympics and a building boom that has not really ceased since, I frequently cast a profoundly critical eye on the most noticeable injustices of contemporary London: the cynical destruction of council estates to facilitate the creation of new ‘mixed-use’ developments in which the majority of the new homes built are for private sale, and former tenants are largely removed via a process of social cleansing, and the ‘Opportunity Areas’ that have sprung up on former industrial land, where, largely without any effective supervision, developers have been encouraged to build fantasy ‘mixed-use’ environments in which any notion of anything resembling social housing is almost entirely done away with, replaced, instead, with an orgy of overpriced housing, endless shopping opportunities and expensive office developments.

I’m hoping soon to find the time to write a book, copiously illustrated with my photos, telling the story of London’s proud tradition of social housing, and contrasting that with its takeover by predatory capital in recent decades, but in the meantime I’m enormously grateful for your support of this project — and for bearing with me as I have reduced the frequency of my posts from one a day to one every two days, as that particular self-imposed workload was starting to become rather too difficult to sustain.

If you can make a donation to support ‘The State of London’, that will be very welcome, as it is an entirely reader- and viewer-supported project, and if you like the project and have ideas about mechanising, please do get in touch. I’d love to be making calendars, postcards and limited edition prints, but there are only so many hours in the day, and I can’t ever quite seem to get round to it.

Thanks, as ever, for your support.

Andy Worthington
London
October 31, 2022

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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 £2.50).

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.