Dan Hancox

London

Freelance Journalist at Freelance

Politics, music, cities, food, Spain, @ The Guardian, Observer, VICE, LRB, NYT. Co-host @CursedObjectsUK. New book: MULTITUDES: How Crowds Made the Modern World

Articles

In Defense of Rowdy Fans

1 week ago | jacobin.com | Dan Hancox

“Football without fans is nothing.” It has become an often repeated truism in soccer’s age of hypercapitalist excess. Originating with Celtic’s Jock Stein decades ago, the slogan was recently misattributed to Manchester United’s 1960s manager Matt Busby, then reappropriated by Keir Starmer in a typically unconvincing lunge for popular appeal. How times have changed.
In the footsteps of Walter Benjamin

2 months ago | danhancox.substack.com | Dan Hancox |Huw Lemmey

On a warm afternoon last September, I met on the beach in Banyuls-sur-Mer, to do something I’d been wanting to do for a while: hike the ‘Camino Walter Benjamin’ from Banyuls to Portbou in Catalunya — the path which follows the perilous, tragically fatal last steps he took through the Pyrenees, trying to escape from the Nazis in 1940.
The last days of Walter Benjamin

Jan 10, 2025 | ft.com | Dan Hancox

“Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins,” wrote Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher, deep in the winter of...
How to live on the edge of a disappearing coastline

Dec 2, 2024 | aeon.co | Dan Hancox

On the promenade at Withernsea, on Britain’s East Yorkshire coast, next to the public toilets, there is a beautiful memorial engraved in stone, framed by waist-high sculptures of two churches. These are the Sister Kirkes, named for a local medieval myth that told of two sisters who could not agree on the style of the church they wished to build – so they each built their own: one with a steeple, the other with a tower. ‘The sea eventually claimed both,’ the plaque reports, matter-of-factly.
How to lose your home - Dan Hancox

Dec 2, 2024 | qoshe.com | Dan Hancox

On the promenade at Withernsea, on Britain’s East Yorkshire coast, next to the public toilets, there is a beautiful memorial engraved in stone, framed by waist-high sculptures of two churches. These are the Sister Kirkes, named for a local medieval myth that told of two sisters who could not agree on the style of the church they wished to build – so they each built their own: one with a steeple, the other with a tower. ‘The sea eventually claimed both,’ the plaque reports, matter-of-factly.
The NTS Breakfast Show, and a multitude of fun

Oct 28, 2024 | danhancox.substack.com | Dan Hancox

Firstly: there are still £5 tickets available for two Multitudes talks in London this week: at Burley Fisher bookshop in Dalston on Weds 30 October, with Hettie O’Brien. And then at Whitechapel Gallery on Thurs 31 October, with Adam Moore. The launch event at Conway Hall was great fun, and we sold out all the tickets and all the books, pleasingly — thanks very much if you joined at Conway Hall, or via the stream.
Read an excerpt from

Oct 24, 2024 | crackmagazine.net | Dan Hancox

Re-thinking long-held beliefs about crowd behaviour, journalist, author and Crack contributor Dan Hancox’s new title analyses the role crowds play in our lives – from parties to politics to policing – and the potential they hold as a force for change. In this excerpt, he explores the roots and evolution of one of the UK’s most beloved music events – Notting Hill Carnival.
Why our ideas about protest and mob psychology are dangerously wrong

Oct 22, 2024 | msn.com | Dan Hancox

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Why our ideas about protest and mob psychology are dangerously wrong | Dan Hancox

Oct 22, 2024 | theguardian.com | Dan Hancox

I don’t expect measured analysis from Suella Braverman, but even so I was taken aback this time last year when I heard that she had described the Palestine solidarity demos as “hate marches”.
The British Establishment Has Always Demonized Protesters

Oct 18, 2024 | jacobin.com | Dan Hancox

It is an experience as exhilarating as it is rare, but sometimes you can actually feel the electric crackle of history being made in the air around you. On June 7, 2020, amid the tumult of the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) uprising, a long-hated statue of the seventeenth-century slave trader Edward Colston was lassoed with ropes and pulled off its pedestal in Bristol by a crowd of hundreds of mostly young protesters.