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Mick Farren: dead good Deviant
‘Sure the underground was elitist: we were an elite. We were the cutting edge of ongoing bohemianism at that point.’ Mick Farren in Days In The Life by Jonathon Green The last time I spoke to Mick...
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Pubs
I’ve only ever really had one local, that is a pub I visited at least once a week for a couple of years. But what a local. Crocker’s Folly was one of London’s best pubs, a beautiful old gin palace,...
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Secret London: eight London shrines
I wrote this for the wonderful Curiocity, London’s finest pocket-sized trivia-and-map-packing magazine. Issue E, with a pilgrimage theme, is available at all good London bookshops. Tyburn martyrs On...
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Farewell to Soho’s Stockpot
It feels these days as if every time I venture into the West End I will pass a raft of unfamiliar shiny expensive shops and restaurants and then stumble upon one last holdout from the London that I...
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It’s all glass here now – the taming of St Giles and death of the West End
I have a piece in today’s Guardian about the disappearing London district of St Giles, for centuries a hive of villainy and low entertainment but which is now, finally, being aggressively domesticated...
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RIP Martin Stone – guitarist, bookseller, hustler
I first met Martin Stone, who died this week of cancer in France, at at exhibition in a Mayfair bookstore. It was a display of countercultural ephemera and included a flyer advertising a gig by Mick...
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Inside the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Spitalfields Life reports that the Whitechapel Bell Foundry is to close. This is one of London’s oldest companies, founded in 1570 and based at its present site for 250 years. I met the owner of the...
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Graham Taylor: City slicker, ballet lover
Graham Taylor, who has died aged 72, is the single nicest famous person I have ever interviewed. I met him in a City boardroom, where he was doing risk analysis for somebody who was about to buy a...
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There was only one Tony Elliott
When I started freelancing at Time Out in 1998, originally on sport and then with the TV section, I often sat on the “Channel 5/cabsat desk” – the desk for the journalist appointed to review the best...
View ArticleRIP Luca Vialli
A short and sad post to start 2023, following the death of former Chelsea player Gianluca Vialli. Some of my happiest memories were spent at Stamford Bridge watching Vialli play for and then manage a...
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Andy Rourke RIP
Like many people, I have a difficult relationship with The Smiths. They were my favourite band for the most formative years of my life, but they also have the most problematic frontman, one in whom I...
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