Uncanny Waters: Life and Death by Coasts and Canals
LOCATION 1: London, The Social, 28th February – tickets here LOCATION 2: Hastings, Electric Palace Cinema, 2nd March 2018 – tickets here This February and March, Unofficial Britain is proud to take part in two evenings of film, stories and
Pier Pressure: Matchbook etiquette and Dizzee Rascal’s Birthday Cake
LOCATION: Hastings, East Sussex WORDS: Ben Thompson Piers are by definition irrational structures – temporary institutions, neither sea, nor land, living on borrowed time until the inevitable conflagration. But then, which of us hasn’t felt that way at one time
Notes from the Moor & Soggy Scribbles
LOCATION: Yorkshire WORDS & PICTURES: Maxim Griffin ABOUT THE ARTIST: Maxim Peter Griffin is a landscape artist, cartographer and walker based in Lincolnshire.
Sounds of City & Country: Two Picks from the Dead Albatross Prize
WORDS: Gareth E Rees I’m honoured to be on the judging panel of the Dead Albatross Prize 2015. Originally set up two years ago as an unofficial alternative to the Mercury Prize, the Dead Albatross takes an inclusive look at cross-genre music
Streatham Common Boundary Ditch
LOCATION: London WORDS: Ben Austwick Streatham Common Boundary Ditch Rivers of the southern Thames basin, the Wandle and the Graveney The Effra and the Ravensbourne, running through the Great North Wood Between the hills of Streatham, Sydenham and Honor Oak
The Dying Lady of Soho
LOCATION: Soho, London WORDS: Will Burns interviewing Robert Rubbish Robert Rubbish is an artist and filmmaker based in London and hailing from Jersey. He was founding member of the Le Gun art collective and studied at the RCA between 2003 and
This Other London Storywalk – Myths and Legends of Finsbury, Pentonville & Barnsbury
LOCATION: London In this video, John Rogers uses the power of Google Street View to take you on a narrated guide through Finsbury and Pentonville, then onto Hounslow Heath, revealing the many layered myths and legends beneath the innocuous streets.
Folklorists and Antiquarians
Landscape artist Maxim Griffin, as featured in this very wobbly Unofficial Britain profile, has made some postcards for The Travin Press, with an accompanying notebook of prose by Charles Swain. The publishers describe it thus: A set of three archival
Rectogeography: A Journey Up My Own Arse
By Gareth E. Rees LOCATION: The Human Body Times past, I’d go to the doctor with a health complaint. Stomach pain. A persistent cough. An incessant urge to wee. That kind of thing. Times past, the doctor would frown, ask
Memories in the Woodchip: The Day I Moved into a Haunted House
On the day we moved into a dilapidated Victorian town house in Hastings, my wife’s grandfather died. But death was already in the house, waiting for us. We bought the house from a woman who bought it from the family
