Daniel Trilling recently contributed a chapter to Broke: Fixing Britain’s Poverty Crisis. He was shortlisted for the 2023 Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness.
In August 2015, two treasure hunters announced that they had discovered a train buried deep underground in the countryside outside Wałbrzych, in the Polish region of Lower Silesia. The legend of the Golden Train – filled with looted valuables that were supposedly hidden by the Nazis in a complex of tunnels dug using slave labour – had long circulated in the region. Here, it...
At first sight, as you walk uphill along New Street, it looks as if a UFO has landed in Birmingham’s Victoria Square. As you get closer, it turns out to be a boat, stranded in mid air – on top of what used to be a statue of Queen Victoria, outside the city’s council buildings. Victoria stands in the middle of the boat, surrounded by four smaller replicas. The cloned queens are all looking outwards, their bodies pointing in the direction of travel. But the boat isn’t going anywhere, fixed as it is to the top of a plinth.
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.
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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