Gentrification. Are you pro or anti? Perhaps, if you’re reading this article in a small town with a dilapidated high street, this question may be far from your mind. But if you’re inside the M25, it will loom larger, and …
Is this the end of Chinatown?
Beneath the fluttering red and gold lanterns on Gerrard Street, drivers unload vats of rapeseed oil fresh from China, for cooking up batches of deep-fried pork balls and the like. In the windowless Lo’s Noodle Factory in a passageway off …
The Haçienda saved Manchester
The artist Jeremy Deller once gifted me a brick wrapped in newspaper. It was from a demolished factory building in Salford that had been co-founded in 1837 by the father of Friedrich Engels. Concerned that his son was mixing with …
Why the Left eat junk
Back in the Nineties, reading food packets for junk ingredients was a typical Left-wing hobby. It was a fairly safe bet that if you had opinions on pesticides in farming, preferred “unrefined” or “unprocessed” foodstuffs, or questioned the benefits of …
