I grew up, studied and have spent pretty much my entire life in this city. To be honest, I’m apprehensive about covering London; it’s like a jungle sometimes.
After a brief stint as a freelancer, my journalistic career really began at the FT, where I took an internship and ended up, somehow, writing for the magazine. My first piece of any real substance was a dispatch. I was sent up to Durham for a profile of the embattled RMT general secretary, Mick Lynch, during a high point for the British labour movement. I followed him to the Miners Gala and, afterwards, got sidetracked wandering around the former pit towns that encompass the city. I also wrote a column where I fantasised about accidently slipping the head of TfL a dose of mescaline in an effort to convince him that extending the Bakerloo line to Camberwell was preferable to current proposals. He never got back to me.
My breakthrough, if you can call it that, took me about nine months to put together and concerned a ubiquitous criminal who kept putting up tags around the capital that spelled the moniker, 10 Foot. I became obsessed with him and how he and his crew embodied an idea of London that’s sort of dying. Eventually the piece ran as a cover feature and became — I’m pretty certain — the most shoplifted copy of the FT. Some kid in Southampton managed to swipe sixty of them and a trend emerged online of people photographing themselves in the act. It reminded me that people will go to great lengths to read something if it resonates with their lives. My next cover feature was about the corrupted ghosts that whales leave behind after they die and subsequently rot on the beach. Nobody, to my knowledge, shoplifted that one.
Since leaving the FT, my work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Fence, Prospect, British GQ, 1843 Magazine and Air Mail. If there’s anything that ties it all together, it’s that I like to write pieces which seem to be about one thing, but aren’t really, and actually reveal something else. I’m excited to start this new role at The Londoner, mostly because the team is so strong, and we’re all driven by an impetus to tell stories about London in a new way.
If you'd like to chat, please get in touch.
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