This little 52-page gem is essential reading for anyone in love with London.
For starters, the description on the website is enough to make one swoon: “… a love-letter to London, to the wet neon flicker of late-night pavements, electric with endless possibility and the soft dishevelled beauty of the city’s dawn… to the overheard stories and unexplored histories, the facts and the fictions, the accidental poetry and fugitive art of graffiti-slashed suburban stations and rain-splashed shopfronts… the out-of-shot lives half-glimpsed from a train window, or from a phone number scrawled on the back of a Travelcard, dropped on the night-bus stairs…”
(I wasn’t going to paste all of that, but I couldn’t bare to chop any out because it’s lovely.)
Editor Matt Haynes and his contributors dip into the pockets of London that are often forgotten and empty them out for us through creative writing and photographs that expose London’s lint as well as its little known treasures. “A London Peculiar” is accurate indeed because this is one of the most unique publications I’ve seen that explore the city so thoroughly in print. It was one of my first London discoveries when I moved here and still one of my favourites.
Issue 15 is on shelves now.
Little London Observationist 