Joe Bishop

Aug 7, 2024 | the-fence.com | Andrew Murray |Richard Smyth |George Lee |Joe Bishop

A whistle-stop tour of London’s disappointing barons and the peers we could’ve had. Barons: we imagine them as rural land magnates, shagging the wives of their miserable villein tenantry or bullying King John into signing Magna Carta. Newsflash, House of Lords-heads. There are modern, urban barons too. Barons, indeed, who stalk the very streets of our capital. Plenty of opportunity there, you’d think, for maverick aristos with amusing names. Alas no: meet the real (and imagined) Barons of London.

Aug 5, 2024 | the-fence.com | Richard Smyth |George Lee |Joe Bishop |Jordan Michelman

Meeting some charming men in Nottinghamshire There was a brief window, back there in the twenty-teens, where, if you wanted, you could buy something on Amazon and – thanks to Amazon’s now-defunct Smile programme – have 0.5 percent of the purchase price donated to the Odinist Fellowship of Newark-on-Trent. This is the kind of quaint anachronism that comes up fairly often in the Odinist game.

Jul 31, 2024 | the-fence.com | Orlando Whitfield |Joe Bishop |Jordan Michelman |Eva Wiseman

The memoirs of a bad dealer. I first met The White Whale in early 2017 in the company of Drew, a project-space-impresario-slash-art-­advisor. Drew had somehow managed to secure a short-term lease on an enormous and crumbling hotel in west London, using it to stage a number of exhibitions over the period of a year or so; he included several of the artists we represented in these shows.

Jul 30, 2024 | the-fence.com | Camilla Bell-Davies |Alex Christian |Joe Bishop |Jordan Michelman

A dive into the contested political energies of contemporary Belgrade. There’s a guy who comes to my gym sauna every week whose behaviour baffles me. He wears a felt cone hat in the blazing heat, and jumps around a lot while the rest of us sit sedate. Sometimes he whorls his towel above his head to get the steam going, or tears his fingernails scratching the dead skin off his back. When he’s done in the sauna, he pelts towards the cold pool, holds his breath and plunges in.

Jul 29, 2024 | the-fence.com | Joe Bishop |Jordan Michelman |Eva Wiseman |Fiona Mozley

In the gutter, looking up at the stars. I think we can all agree that the Michelin Guide isn’t particularly cool. Especially in our fair London, where, depending on your vibe and your set, ‘cool’ can be small plates at a Peckham brasserie named after a DJ, laksa obscura in a Zone 6 banlieue or some TikTok cheese-pull carbslop nightmare served out of a carnival truck in Camden Lock. It’s all a bit unserious in the city these days. That’s why I’m drawn to Michelin’s profound self-seriousness.