Daniel Trilling is the author of Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain’s Far Right.
In the summer of 2018, Lucy Knell-Taylor, a youth worker at King’s College Hospital in Camberwell, noticed that teenagers were talking more often about guns and knives. One girl said she had seen someone pistol-whipped at a party; other stories suggested that weapons were becoming more easily available. Knell-Taylor’s workload began to rise. She told Ciaran Thapar that she felt...
Coastal towns in south-east England tend to be portrayed both as bolt-holes for metropolitan creatives priced out of London, and as repositories of a ‘left-behind’ Englishness.
Museum of Austerity is an immersive exhibition ‘that preserves memories of public and private events from the austerity era’. You could visit Room 1 at this year’s London Film Festival. It told the stories of disabled benefit claimants who died in the UK between 2010 and 2020. On my way in I was given an augmented reality headset and told to raise my hand if at any point I felt uncomfortable.
In 2016, staff working on the refurbishment of the Rio Cinema in Dalston, East London, discovered a filing cabinet in the basement containing more than ten thousand photographic slides. The images were the remnants of an adult education project from the 1980s, in which a dozen or so locals – all of them young, most of them unemployed – were trained in photography and sound...
On the last weekend before England entered its second lockdown, two slabs of the Berlin Wall were standing on the concourse at Lewisham Shopping Centre. They marked the entrance to the Migration Museum, a roving exhibition space that has made a temporary home in south-east London, near a branch of Footasylum and a stall selling phone cases. Inside, the museum’s main space was laid out like an airport terminal, for Departures, an exhibition about emigration from the Britain, which has shaped the country’s history (not to mention the world’s) at least as much as immigration to it has. A short film took visitors on a brisk tour of the last 400 years, from early efforts at colonial ‘plantation’ in Virginia and Ulster, through to the 19th and early 20th centuries – when more than 17 million people left Britain and Ireland, mainly for North America – and the more recent period of free movement within the EU.
Julia Ebner discusses her experiences going undercover in various extremist groups, including White Supremacists, German Neo-Nazis and ‘Trad Wives’, as described in her new book, Going Dark.
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