The journey with no destination.

"We board in northwest London on a regular bus, with the intention of heading into the heart of the capital, where there is a much greater choice of night buses when it gets later and colder. By now the group seem to have fully accepted my presence and are keen to tell me about their lives. The most pressing question I have is: why? Why would you eschew safety and warmth and comfort for this? It turns out that while a couple of kids might be along for the ride, for most this is their only option.

A boy with huge brown eyes, who is so small he barely looks older than 12, tells me: “I’m allowed home in early mornings to have some food and change my clothes, but I have to be gone by the time my mum wakes up.” When I ask him why, he shrugs, as if the answer is forgotten or irrelevant."

posted by fight or flight on Jan 17, 2013 - 34 comments

Not content with displacing the poor, menacing photographers and blocking ambulances the london olympics now wants ground-to-air missiles, presumably to shoot down rogue skywriters who might misuse it's brand.
posted by Artw on Apr 28, 2012 - 68 comments

In the frantic pace of modern life, it is often easy to forget what life was once like for those who built the world we now live in. More from Bishopsgate library here and the Institute itself is worth a poke around
posted by mattoxic on Apr 3, 2012 - 34 comments

Inner City Youth, London "In 2002, Simon Wheatley began photographing London's publich housing developments...and was able to obtain a level of intimacy with his subjects that provides a true picture of the daunting project of growing up in the intimate confines of drug use, societal neglect, and poverty." This (Flash-based) narrated slideshow features Wheatley's work, and is a look at the culture...and also the music (grime) "as an artistic response to the place and circumstance, an expression of the violence, bleakness, and neglect..." (via Future Feeder)
posted by tpl1212 on Jul 20, 2006 - 38 comments

Charles Booth Online Archive. Charles Booth's survey of life and labour in London at the end of the Victorian era, with the famous poverty maps.
posted by plep on Jun 22, 2004 - 2 comments

The Bolles Collection on the History of London at the Tufts University Perseus Digital Library contains, among other transcripts, the searchable text of all four volumes of the Henry Mayhew's classic 19th century account London Labour and the London Poor: Volume 1 (costermongers and street-sellers); Volume 2 (more street-sellers, cleansing, and sewer work); Volume 3 (vermin destroyers, street entertainers, labourers, cabbies, vagrants); and the Extra Volume (vice and beggars). Read of the sellers of fake pornography; snail-sellers; death and fire-hunters; a depressed street clown; "pure" (i.e. dog dung) finders; and more. The past really is another country.
posted by raygirvan on Sep 29, 2003 - 11 comments