Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation to support my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’.
Dear friends and supporters,
Every three months, I ask you, if you can, to make a donation to support my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, an entirely reader-funded endeavour, in which, for the last five years and three months, I’ve been posting a photo a day, plus an accompanying essay, drawn from the photos I’ve been taking on daily bike rides throughout the capital for the last ten years.
If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s £5, £10, £20 or more!
You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make this a monthly donation,” and filling in the amount you wish to donate every month. If you are able to do so, a regular, monthly donation would be very much appreciated.
The donation page is set to dollars, because my PayPal page also covers donations to support my ongoing work to secure the closure of US prison at Guantánamo Bay, and many of those supporters are based in the US, but PayPal will convert any amount you wish to pay from any other currency — and you don’t have to have a PayPal account to make a donation.
Readers can pay via PayPal from anywhere in the world, but if you’re in the UK and want to help without using PayPal, you can send a cheque, or cash (to 164A Tressillian Road, London SE4 1XY), or you can make a donation directly into my bank account. Please contact me if this option is of interest.
Some of the nearly 2,000 photos and essays I’ve posted since 2017 celebrate London’s history, its surviving historic fabric, its parks, commons, rivers and canals, and — a particular love of mine — its surviving social housing, from the 1860s until the tumultuous 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher began fatally undermining the provision of genuinely affordable rented housing by selling off council housing at significant discounts.
Other photos and essays, more critically, chronicle the capital’s more recent neo-liberal takeover, and its consumption by cannibalistic greed, which has been particularly pronounced since I began taking photos ten years ago, as council estates have been cynically destroyed to be replaced by private housing for sale, and by new rented properties that are described as “affordable”, when they’re not, as new and largely unregulated private developments have risen up on former industrial land, often in clusters of absurd high-rise towers, and as ever higher and more ostentatiously expensive office buildings have also been constructed in the City and at Canary Wharf, that bastion of private capital that was first established during the ‘regeneration’ of London’s docklands, also under the baleful leadership of Margaret Thatcher.
My thanks to the many thousands of you who follow ‘The State of London’ on Facebook and on Twitter, and who have, over the years, provided wonderful feedback and support for the project.
Thanks also for bearing with me as I reduced the frequency of my posts from daily to every two days, an easing of my self-imposed workload that has given me some much-needed head space, as I was starting to become overwhelmed by the demands of cycling and taking photos, selecting a photo, researching it, and writing an essay every day.
As for what the future holds, I’m not entirely sure, although I intend to keep posting a photo and essay every two days. Uniquely, over the last six weeks, it has — for the first time since I began this project in 2012 — been too hot for me to undertake any long-distance journeys across the capital, a sign, I suspect, that the climate crisis — unfolding faster than even the most pessimistic climate scientists expected — is going to increasingly dominate my reporting from now on, along with the “cost of living crisis” that is likely to see a combination of chronic poverty and social unrest emerge in the coming months.
I hope you’ll stay with me for the journey, and thanks for your interest in’The State of London.’
Andy Worthington
London
August 18, 2022
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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).
In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.
To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.
Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.
