Nine years. The number sits heavy on the chest when you walk the streets of our borough today. Living around this part of West London, you feel the absolute shift in the air every time mid-June rolls around. The shadow of Grenfell remains a stark reminder of what we lost and the fierce fight for justice that still beats through the heart of the community. Today is the 14th of June 2026, and we are gathering to...
Danny rested his forearms on the wrought iron railings of C Wing. H.M. Prison Pentonville still held the cold of the Victorian era. The bricks carried the same grime, and the wooden signs on the walls still ordered discipline and silence. But the silence was gone. It drowned under the noise of daytime television, the vibration of smuggled smartphones, and the shouting of young men smoking synthetic weed. The screws no longer wore stiff caps from the history...
Remembering David Hockney: The Boy from Bradford Who Painted the Truth.
David Hockney packed his brushes away yesterday. He made it to eighty-eight, a good stretch for a working-class lad born among the damp cobbles and grey skies of Bradford.
He swapped the Yorkshire rain for the chlorine-sharp light of California, but he kept his Northern grit intact. He spent seven decades grafting at the easel. There was never any pretension with David. He was just a...
One of my good friends, Barry, has passed away. It is incredibly sad news, but he fought the good fight against cancer with a smile on his face right until the very end.
I actually wrote about Barry in my book about Ossie Clark, "The Highs and Lows of a Legendary Fashion Designer", because he was simply unforgettable.
A former costume designer, he loved Pink Cigar, the band I was...
After a stint out in Mexico writing his next record, Steve Dior is back on home turf. He’s stepping out of the studio for one night only to play a raw, intimate set at one of Notting Hill’s finest traditional boltholes, the Stewart Arms.
If you need a refresher, Steve is true punk royalty. He was right there at the birth of the 1976 London scene, teaching a young Steve Jones how to play guitar before heading to New York to form The Idols with Jerry...
Birkbeck, University of London Two Centuries of Radical Education For more than 200 years, Birkbeck has stood apart.
Founded in 1823 by Dr George Birkbeck as the London Mechanics’ Institute, the college was built on a revolutionary belief: that world-class education should belong not only to the elite, but to working people with ambition, discipline, and intellect. While traditional universities closed their doors to ordinary Londoners, Birkbeck opened them at night.
"We weren't parochial, we weren't narrow-minded, we weren't 'little Englanders'. We were looking at the world, and we were looking at it from a point of view of being interested in everything. We had the suss to embrace what we were presented with. Which was the world and all its varieties."
Also, I think People ought to know that we're Anti Fascist, we're Anti Racist, and we're pro-creative - we're against ignorance.'
You don't plan to become a prize fighter when you are wearing a cheap suit and selling office supplies. You plan for the weekend. Fabio Wardley grew up in Ipswich with a single mother who grafted to keep the lights on and the fridge stocked. The plan was football. It is always football in working-class towns. You kick a ball against a brick wall until the leather peels and hope a scout walks past. Wardley had the feet for it. He played...
Howard Marks, Prisoners Abroad, and I Finsbury Park isn’t exactly where you’d go looking for a miracle, but that’s where Prisoners Abroad has been holding the line for years. For me, they were the bridge back to reality. When I finally got out of the General Penitentiary in Jamaica and landed back in London, the air felt thin and the streets felt too fast. When you’ve been locked up overseas, you don't just walk back into your old life; you’re like a ghost...
in5nfd8qix4mkwfyj5spp0el0pg02.79 MBA good day was enjoyed by all yesterday at the Soho Bastards' monthly meeting in the Duke of York. Organised by David Palfreyman and film director Alan G Parker, which also happened to be Alan's birthday celebration. Nice to see all the familiar faces and the new ones, too. 129l2im17iq1j44uyz7lga5p7zm227.5 KB
Happy Easter to you. I wanted to say a quick thanks for the support lately; it means a lot. We’ve seen a surge in sales for the Ossie Clark book over the last few months, and that is down to you lot spreading the word. I’ve always put more stock in a personal recommendation than any flashy advert. Word-of-mouth is everything in this game. I’ve been buried in books myself lately. If you’re looking for a deal, there are some proper bargains on Kindle Unlimited at the moment. I’ve been using it...
I met Stephen through friends at the Stewart Arms in Notting Hill. Theresa and her husband, Simon, were having a leaving party for Theresa's daughter, Ruby, who was taking a 3-month trip around Southeast Asia. And Stephen told me about his round-the-world bike trip.
Thirty thousand miles. It sounds like a made-up number when you say it out loud, the kind of distance you fly over while watching crap films and eating stale plane food. But Stephen Aslin is doing it on a pushbike—every single...
Concrete, Rope, and the Tamarind Switch I stood outside the General Penitentiary on Tower Street and let the heavy reality of the place sink into my bones. You smell the salt from Kingston Harbour mixed with the sour tang of old, sunbaked concrete. The British built this fortress back in the colonial days to warehouse people with low incomes, and they did a proper job of it. They wanted to cut the costs of their empire, so they threw thousands of working men into a stone box and locked the...
Reading Emily Brook: How a Welsh Mother Survived a Dubai Nightmare
I just finished reading a book that demands your absolute attention and refuses to let you look away. It is called Fu...d Up in Dubai! One determined Welsh mother's real-life nightmare: a memoir about love, sex, drugs and life in a Dubai jail. Yes, the title is a proper mouthful. Emily Brook earns every single word of it, though, across 432 raw and unfiltered pages.
Email not displaying correctly? View the web version Your Party Dear readers . The US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran has set the entire region ablaze. Innocent people, like the girls whose primary school in the Iranian town of Minab was obliterated, are paying the price.We want no part in this illegal war. Your Party’s initial statement, published hours after the bombing began, zeroed in on the issue of British military facilities and resources being...
Pints, Pianos, and Welsh Consonants: Joining the Gwalia Male Choir
Back up North in Warrington, the only time you catch a mob of blokes roaring a chant in unison is freezing on the terraces watching The Wire. I never pictured myself spending a Wednesday night standing in a room full of Welshmen in London. I am not exactly from the Valleys. My only real connections to Wales are my friendships with two absolute legends. The first was the late, great drug smuggler Howard Marks. The second is Rob...
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