Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking £1,000 to Support ‘The State of London’, My Unique Photo-Journalism Project

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,

Ten and a half years ago, at the comparatively youthful age of 48, I set out on my bike, armed with a small point-and-shoot Canon camera, on an ambitious mission to photograph the whole of London — or, more specifically, the 120 geographic postcodes that make up the 241 square miles of the London postal district.

3,839 days later, I’m now close to my 60th birthday, I’ve cycled tens of thousands of miles and taken tens of thousands of photos, as well as getting through two bikes and four cameras — with the most recent of these, a Canon PowerShot G7 X Mk. II, having transformed my photography since I first bought it nearly four years ago.

For the last five and a half years, my ambitious mission to record the changing face of the capital has manifested itself as ‘The State of London’, a unique photo-journalism project on Facebook (and Twitter), which involves me posting a photo from these journeys every two days, along with a detailed accompanying essay (I used to post a photo and essay every day until July this year, when I finally realised that the daily schedule had become too arduous).

I’m delighted that over 5,800 people follow ‘The State of London’ on Facebook (and many more people who don’t officially ‘follow’ it), and I’d like to ask you, if you like it, and if you’re able, to make a donation to support it, as it’s an entirely reader-supported endeavour, and it takes a considerable amount of time taking the photos, and researching and writing the essays to accompany the posts.

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 £10, £20, £50 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.

Ten and a half years since I started this project, London fascinates and confounds me as much as it always has — a place of extraordinary history, some of which I’ve been delighted to uncover, but also a place where parts of that history have been destroyed over the last decade, as the forces of predatory trans-national capital have gained an ever stronger presence, and council estates — long demonised by cynical politicians — have been torn down in ‘regeneration’ projects, and where the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow at an alarming rate.

What the future holds is unclear, but it seems pretty obvious that it will involve unrest, in response to the catastrophic climate change that the Tory government isn’t taking seriously, and also in response to the failing policies of the Tories in general, who have been in government ever since ‘The State of London’ began, and have clearly long outworn their welcome. I also suspect, in the year that saw the hottest temperatures ever in the capital, that the future will bring more extreme weather, both in terms of heat, but also via another aspect of catastrophic climate change — increased rainfall, and flash floods — and I’ll also be keeping a close eye on the River Thames at high tide …

Thanks to everyone who’s been on this journey with me, and I hope you’ll stay with me as my adventures continue.

Andy Worthington
London
November 13, 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.