Celebrating 2,400 Days of ‘The State of London’: Please Donate to Support This 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,

Today marks 2,400 days — or a little over six and a half years — since I first set up ‘The State of London’ Facebook page, and began posting a photo a day, with an accompanying essay, drawn from the photos I had been taking since I first began cycling around London and taking photos throughout the capital’s 120 geographic postcodes five years before — on May 11, 2012, to be precise. I also post the photos on X (formerly Twitter).

From the beginning, this has been something of a deranged hobby. I have no financial backing for the project and, as a result, am reliant on you, my readers and followers, to provide me with any kind of monetary recompense for the ridiculous amount of time that I’ve spent cycling around London with a camera over the last eleven and a half years — and, in particular, the many hours I spend researching and writing about the photos that I post to entertain and inform you about London’s history, its social housing, its takeover, in recent decades, by predatory capitalism, the changing seasons, forgotten corners, rivers, hills and canals, parks and graveyards, seats of power, poverty and protests.

In the last six months, for example, I’ve celebrated pubs and cafes, inter-war council estates, Art Deco and Brutalist triumphs, delved through the archive for coverage of lost or soon to be lost reminders of London’s history — Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross, prior to redevelopment, slipper baths in South Bermondsey, council flats in Homerton, a lodge in Archway and a prefab in Stepney Green, and have also posted about horrible new developments in Pimlico, Canary Wharf, the City, Vauxhall and Lewisham, as well as covering the massive and frequent protests against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

If you can make a donation, however large or small, it will be very gratefully received. If 100 of you gave me £10 to cover the next three months, it would at least enable me to think that, in a resolutely capitalist world, a labour of love can also have value.

If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal, or go directly to my PayPal page here. 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 calling for 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 future of ‘The State of London’

Last summer, after five years of posting a photo every day, I realised that I was beginning to burn out — in large part because I had been devoting more and more time to researching and writing the essays accompanying the photos — and as a result I reduced the frequency of my posts to every two days. This has been a life-saver, although I can’t guarantee that I won’t have to drop the frequency of posting to every four days, simply because it’s so hard to sustain this kind of workload when it’s fundamentally unpaid.

One unfortunate side-effect of this is that I don’t have the time to develop the project further — though writing a book, for example, setting up a website, putting on exhibitions, or even getting any kind of merchandise organized. If you can help out all with any of the above, please get in touch, but in the meantime I’ll keep posting my photos and essays and hoping that, in 2024, I’ll find a way to finally fulfil some of these unrealized dreams — as well as hoping for some improvement in the many challenges facing us collectively.

Thanks, as always, for your interest in this project.

Andy Worthington
London
December 5, 2023

* * * * *

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.