Daniel Trilling

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...

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...

The word​ ‘Caucasian’ was first used as a term for white people in the late 18th century, by men who believed they were making objective scientific judgments about the world. In 1795, the naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a professor at Göttingen University who owned a prodigious collection of human skulls, proposed the existence of five ‘varieties’ of...

All of the pressures that result from international migration are also generated by migration within a country’s borders. Linguistic and cultural differences, scarce public resources, unequal distribution of wealth: all of these exist within as well as between nation-states. So why limit controls to international borders? Why not prevent people from Solihull moving to London and putting pressure on the rental market?

On a sound file​ sent to me via WhatsApp, a teenage girl sobs, and an older woman says: ‘Don’t worry, the white people will help you.’ The girl is 17, from a village in Edo state in Nigeria. A family friend came to her house, she says, and asked her parents if they’d like to send their daughter to work in Europe. The friend didn’t say what kind of work she...