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Oct 3, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | John Banville |Miles Ellingham |Cormac Kehoe |Charlie Baker
Lunch in an Umbrian tavern. We were on holiday in the hills outside Spoleto. It was the early 1980s, so Italy was not as dense with the locust clouds of tourists as it is now. We were not tourists, of course, oh, no – we were visitors, and we could prove it, too, because we were staying at the house of a friend.
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Sep 17, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | Grace Linden |Miles Ellingham |Cormac Kehoe |Charlie Baker
Marvelling at gymnastic displays in Hackney. Beginning in the 1930s, as the cult of healthy living continued to spread across the United States, a handful of gymnasts and athletes began to gather on the beaches of Santa Monica to practise human pyramids, and throngs flocked to watch bronzed babes perform tricks. Inspired by the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games, the city installed a wooden platform, parallel bars and a set of rings. Muscle Beach was born.
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Sep 3, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | |Miles Ellingham |Cormac Kehoe |Charlie Baker
George Martin was the man who made The Beatles. Here's an interview with his daughter. When the legendary music producer George Martin, known as the ‘Fifth Beatle’, died in 2016, Paul McCartney offered his condolences to George’s ‘wife Judy and their kids Giles and Lucy[sic], and the grandkids.’But Giles and Lucie aren’t George Martin’s only children. Before he married Judy Lockhart-Smith, Martin had another wife, Sheena Chisholm, and with her, two children: Alexis and Greg.
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Aug 29, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | Stephen Smith |Miles Ellingham |Cormac Kehoe |Charlie Baker
Living your childhood dreams. There aren’t too many places in the world where you’d think Xanadu might be found, certainly not the London suburb where I found it for myself. Yet there it was, Coleridge’s stately pleasure-dome, climbing into the cloudless skies over Beckenham. Admittedly, it was well disguised. Strictly speaking, this was the indoor training ground of Crystal Palace Football Club’s academy: the dome was basically a big top for kicking a ball about in.
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Aug 9, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | John Phipps |Miles Ellingham |Cormac Kehoe |Charlie Baker
What drives a man to local history? On the morning of 20 May 2000, perhaps a dozen men and women holding printed placards walked into St Mary’s churchyard in the Irish town of Drogheda. They had come to protest an exhibition taking place at the deconsecrated church, which featured a provocative historical relic: the death mask of the English soldier-statesman, Oliver Cromwell. In Ireland, the name Oliver Cromwell is remembered with unanimous horror.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | Miles Ellingham |Cormac Kehoe |Charlie Baker |Grace Linden
An anonymous probation officer tells us about their working life. The hotel, perched on a London ring road, was sky blue. Everything else was grey: the flyover, car showrooms, a dirty river that ran alongside the building. Sometimes swans would glide down there, looking like they had taken a wrong turn.
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Jun 13, 2024 | 
the-fence.com | Thomas Gorton |Miles Ellingham |Cormac Kehoe |Charlie Baker
Can you still hear the sound of the Blair era? In 2005, on the quiet suburban streets of Merthyr Tydfil, a jarringly uncomfortable noise begun outside a shop. It was pulsing four times a second at a frequency intended only to be detected by young people – roughly those aged between 13 and 25. This was the ‘Mosquito’, a soon-to-be controversial sonic weapon and security device invented by Howard Stapleton, created with the intention of preventing young people from loitering.
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Nov 10, 2023 | 
airmail.news | Charlie Baker
Camberwell AuthentocratsWhat a storm to prominence this imperious tribe has had! These men—yes, it’s always men—are sticking two fingers up to the corporate crap in pursuit of revelation at the bottom of a bowl of genuinely gristly Vietnamese pho. The authentocrats are on the march from their southeast habitat, through the world-food aisles at the supermarket and the Hinge dating profiles of every woman under 30. Where they go, others follow.
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Sep 29, 2023 | 
airmail.news | Charlie Baker
After a cloud-spoiled summer, September was stifling in London. It was hot—almost too hot. Even Harry Styles left his aerie next to the Spaniards Inn to take a dip in Highgate Men’s Ponds on Hampstead Heath. As ringing an endorsement as Styles’s appearance was, it’s not for me, I’m afraid. I like the balmy waters of the Mediterranean, as opposed to the brisk murk of the Pond, but here you will find London at its most relaxed and leisurely, enjoying the lulling change of the seasons.
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Sep 8, 2023 | 
airmail.news | Charlie Baker
There is nowhere in London like Notting Hill, the stuccoed district that only 50 years ago was a byword for squats and squalor—now more readily associated with Hugh Grant’s foppish charm and pastel-colored, Instagram-friendly, multi-million-dollar houses. And there’s nothing like Notting Hill Carnival either, when more than two million people jam themselves into the narrow streets and squares of W10 and W11 in the biggest celebration of Caribbean culture outside of the actual Caribbean.
