SMOKE: A London Peculiar.

Wednesday October 9th. 7.00pm at The Big Green Bookshop

 

Tickets £3 (redeemable on any purchase on the night)

BUY TICKETS HERE

 

Smoke: a London Peculiar was a small magazine of words and images inspired by the capital. After sixteen issues, its editors, Jude Rogers (Guardian, Observer, Q, New Statesman, Elle, Red, The Word, the BBC) and Matt Haynes (Sarah Records, NCP car parks), were inspired by the collapse of Borders to relaunch the magazine as a website (www.smokealondonpeculiar.co.uk) and embark on a series of one-off projects.

 

 

The first of these, Soho!, was a board game based on the two things for which that small, historic patch of London is famous around the globe: its pubs and its one-way system.

 

And the second is From the Slopes of Olympus to the Banks of the Lea, a book about the ways in which London changed between the summer of 2005, when it was awarded the Olympic Games, and the summer of 2013, when the 97 was re-routed via Stratford International. It features ghosts in Bow, missiles on Blackheath, and the loss of Tom Cruise’s hands in Leicester Square, but very little running, jumping or splashing: instead, there’s cough syrup made out of rose petals gathered from a sunken Lea barge, the melancholy song of a nocturnal Greenwich dustman, and the unexpected kidnap of Boris Johnson by a flock of seagulls (the birds, not the band, though in retrospect that might have been even better). Oh, and Will Self consoles Iain Sinclair when the latter discovers that some of the ley lines dug up to build the Basketball Arena had been there since the time of King Lud.

Tonight’s event will feature readings and a chat/Q&A with the editors, who’ll be more than happy to discuss such things as how to make and sell your own book/magazine, how to befriend someone who owns a copy of Adobe InDesign, and how to respond to poets while staying within the law.

 

Buy tickets HERE.