Smoke: a London Peculiar

… a love letter to London, to the wet neon flicker of late‑night pavements, electric with endless possibility, and the soft dishevelled beauty of the city’s dawn… to the overheard stories and unexplored histories, the facts and the fictions, the accidental poetry and fugitive art of graffiti‑slashed suburban stations and rain‑splashed shopfronts… the out‑of‑shot lives half glimpsed from a train window, or from a phone number scrawled on the back of a Travelcard, dropped on the night-bus stairs…

Founded in April 2003 by myself and Jude Rogers after Jude had had the idea of creating a fanzine for London, Smoke was an A5 magazine of words and images inspired by my home city and her adopted one. We published our sixteenth and last issue in the summer of 2010, and then took a short sabbatical to work on other projects. The first of these was a board game, Soho!, and the second a book, From the Slopes of Olympus to the Banks of the Lea. In May 2012, the magazine relaunched in online form and continued to publish new pieces of work until August 2014.

Although Smoke no longer exists, some of the back issues are still available, as are copies of the book and board game. You can find them all in our shop.