Marking 11 Years of ‘The State of London’, An Appeal for £1000 to Support My Unique Photo-Journalism Project For the Next Three Months

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’,

Every three months I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my unique, reader-funded photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, which has just reached 6,200 followers on Facebook, and has over 1,550 followers on Twitter. As I have no institutional backing whatsoever, I’m entirely dependent on your generosity to enable me to continue this project, which takes up a considerable amount of otherwise entirely unpaid time.

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. Currently the exchange rate is £1 to $1.25.

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’: a history

Eleven years ago yesterday, when I was still — just — in my 40s, I embarked on what, with hindsight, was an absurdly ambitious project: cycling and taking photos throughout the 241 square miles of the London postal district, defined by its 120 geographic postcodes (those beginning WC, EC, E, SE, SE, W, NW and N). The postal district is based on a circular plan of the capital, with a six-mile radius from the City, that was produced by the Post Office, under its founder, Rowland Hill, in 1856, and, with admirable eccentricity, the Post Office has resolutely refused alter its basic model (except for some reorganising in the 1860s) to reflect the formalisation of London’s boundaries in the intervening years,  so that it is much larger than the County of London created by the LCC (the London Council Council) in 1889, which covered 117 square miles, but smaller than Greater London, created by the GLC (Greater London Council) in 1965, which covers 607 square miles.

Six years ago yesterday, I began posting a photo a day, with an accompanying essay, on ’The State of London’ Facebook page, with daily photos on Twitter following soon after. Over the years, the essays have become more detailed, to such an extent that, last summer, overwhelmed by all the effort it was taking, I began posting a photo and essay every two days, and I’m grateful to all of you who take an interest in it —and particularly those who follow it regularly, and who let know how much it means to you. Without you, I wouldn’t have made it this far.

So absurdly ambitious was my project that it took me two and a half years to visit every postcode at least once, and there are some that I have not yet managed to visit again. Often I only cycle in my immediate neighbourhood (frequently from Brockley, where I live, through Deptford to Greenwich, and back again), but in the 4,000+ days since I started this project, I have got to know, on many hundreds of journeys, not only the whole of south east London (28 SE postcodes), but also the whole of the City and the West End (the 4 EC and 2 WC postcodes), significant parts of the SW postcodes (which cover both sides of the River Thames), significant parts of the east London postcodes (often accessed via the Greenwich Foot Tunnel), as well as all of the other central postcodes that ring the City and the West End (SE1, SW1, W1, NW1, N1, E1), as well as a handful of other interesting areas further afield.

I don’t regret for a moment finding the time to cycle everyday, alongside all my other independent journalism and activism. It has been transformational to spend so much time outdoors, as we always used to do until capitalists invented ways to imprison us in buildings, and it has been fascinating to get to know London as a vast interconnected landscape, defined by its geography and geology (the Thames and its tributaries, the hills to the north and south), and by its history.

Over 2,000 years, London has been increasingly shaped by its rulers and its merchants, and its teeming and ever-increasing population, expanding from the Roman City and medieval Westminster and Southwark into the West End and beyond, and eventually swallowing up villages via roads and railways so that almost every inch of these 241 square miles bears the imprint of humanity — even in its many parks, often fought for to prevent their enclosure and development, where humans have continued to seek to impose order on what would otherwise be nature’s wild proliferation.

My only regrets are that, firstly, I didn’t embark on this project many years before. I’ve been cycling since I was four years old, and had times in London, during my 27 years here before I started ’The State of London’, when I used to cycle a lot, but I had let slip my interest in photography (which was particularly pronounced in the 1980s), and in the years before 2012 I had also neglected my cycling, particularly after 2006, when I worked obsessively on Guantánamo almost every day for five years, until I developed a rare blood disease and almost lost two of my toes.

My only other regret is that took me until 2019 to get a camera worthy of the project — a Canon PowerShot G7X Mk. II, which I really can’t recommend highly enough — and that, although I have some great photos from 2012 to 2018, much of my archive from that time would have seriously benefitted from a better camera than the cheaper Canon point-and-shoot cameras that I was using at the time.

How London has changed

As for how London has changed over the last eleven years, it has, for the most part, been miserably failed by its elected leaders — in its 32 largely Labour-run councils, in the GLA (the Greater London Authority), established in 2000 after 14 years in which London had no central elected body because Margaret Thatcher had spitefully dissolved the GLC in 1986, and in the fundamentally unaccountable City of London — as well as by MPs and ministers in the Houses of Parliament, where the Tories have been in government since ‘The State of London’ began.

Since I started my project amidst the jingoistic hype of the 2012 Olympics, the chasm between London’s rich and poor has continued to expand, as the global super-rich continue to be wooed and welcomed by politicians (almost entirely without any concerns about whether they are criminals, money launderers or human rights abusers), and politicians have overseen a still-rising housing bubble that first began around 25 years ago, based on absurdly overvalued land and property prices. This has led to an ever-increasing number of ordinary hard-working Londoners being unable to buy a home, and being, instead, at the mercy of private landlords, whose primary characteristic seems to be one of arrogant entitlement — their invented ‘right’ to make as much money as they can from exploiting their tenants.

Allied with this has been the rise of corporate landlords, via a shamefully unregulated property development market, largely involving two initiatives that were introduced by Labour politicians.The first of these is a cynical council estate demolition programme, whereby estates, often neglected over many decades by the councils who should have been responsible for their maintenance, approve, with GLA support, their ‘regeneration’, which generally involves the complete demolition of the estates and the social cleansing of existing tenants.

The estates are replaced with new, denser developments led by private developers, often working with housing associations (who have now become an arm of the private development industry), in which a minimum of 50% of the new homes are for private sale, while the rest are a mix of shared ownership (a Frankenstein mix of part-mortgage and part-rent, usually with colossal service charges), and a variety of rental options, including as many market rent properties as is feasible, and in which those described as ‘social’ rents are markedly more expensive than the flats they replace. The most notorious estate ‘regeneration’ programmes are of the Heygate Estate and the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark, but they are found across the capital, and I’ve spent a great deal of time chronicling their demise and their almost always disappointing rebirths.

The second initiative introduced by Labour politicians involves ‘Opportunity Areas’ on former industrial land, where developers have, since the policy was introduced by London’s then-Mayor, Ken Livingstone, in the GLA’s first ‘London Plan’ in 2004, been allowed largely free rein to build dense developments of mainly private properties that deliver even less for hard-working Londoners than the estate ‘regeneration’ programme, despite Livingstone’s initial hope that allowing private developers access to these sites would deliver much-needed funding to cash-strapped councils. The most notorious of the ‘Opportunity Areas’ are the VNEB (Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea), a dystopia of mismatched towers which includes the much-criticised ‘regeneration’ of Battersea Power Station, and, I would say, the Olympics-based ‘regeneration’ of Stratford, but there are many dozens of others across the capitals, many of which I have also chronicled in detail over the years.

London’s beauty — and its challenging future

If this was all ‘The State of London’ consisted of, it would be a pretty bleak experience, but I’ve always tried to balance the darkness with the light — its historic buildings, from its Roman remains to its churches and cathedrals, and its more recent memorable architecture (its Tube stations, for example), as well as its wealth of still-surviving social housing, some of which is architecturally impressive, and reflects socialist values that have, sadly, become shamefully unfashionable since the 1980s.

The weather and the changing seasons also permeate the project, as does nature, via the capital’s parks with their often astonishing trees, and the geography and geology noted above, via its rivers, the canals that are their man-made counterparts, and its many hills, with their often astonishing views, and some with traces of the vast forests that once covered them.

‘The State of London’ primarily focuses on the fabric of the capital, but London, of course, is also home to eight million people, some of whom populate my ongoing chronicle of this ever-changing city. Given my particular concerns, when I particularly focus on individuals, and on crowds, it is generally in connection with protests, most notably involving environmental protestors, who are trying to raise the alarm about the already unfolding climate catastrophe that we all face, but that is still largely ignored by our leaders. I find it both sad and ironic that, during the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, which now seem like a dream (and when I relentlessly photographed the empty West End and the City), a cleaner, simpler and more sustainable future was glimpsed, but was largely forgotten about when the crisis passed, and ‘business as usual’ resumed.

Right now, I’m also concerned that, instead of recognising that peaceful protest must be allowed, and that it is sometimes disruptive, our home secretary, Suella Braverman, has driven through new laws that prohibit any disruption whatsoever, aimed particularly at those seeking to highlight the need for urgent government action on climate change — just as she is also establishing the UK as the sole nation in the world to criminalise being a refugee, even though that is morally abhorrent, and even though the number of climate refugees will certainly increase significantly in the near future.

As climate change will undoubtedly impact on the UK more severely this summer than ever before, it will be interesting to see how our brave protestors and our derelict and disgraceful politicians respond to the latest manifestations of our dangerously damaged climate. With your help, I’ll continue to chronicle the capital’s story in all its glory and its challenges, although I feel secure in predicting that many more challenges than we can even anticipate right now lie ahead.

Andy Worthington
London
May 12, 2023

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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 (see the ongoing 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, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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.