Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that revels in the possibilities of the format.
Issue 25 has been seen in a variety of locales: the magazine is now stocked in the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park and has just hit Casa Magazines in the West Village. Daniel Pemberton has done a Soho pick-up and the ‘Goodbye Horses Index’ is at the table. Please keep sending through your best snaps of the mag ‘in the wild’ to editorial@the-fence.com or tagging us on social media – we want to see more.
One relatively exciting piece of news: we will now be printing the magazine in the UK, which means that subscribers will be receiving the magazine before it arrives in the shops, which is the way it should be. The Fence will no longer be wending its way from the snow-tinged islets of Estonia, but will instead be printed at an industrial park in Bermondsey. Just as you’ll be getting the magazine sooner, we’ll also have more time to work on each issue, though we will have to increase prices slightly as the costs at our end are going up quite significantly.
What this all means is that there really is no better time to subscribe than right now, as you’ll get the issue immediately, and also save yourself some money both now, and forevermore.
Today, there’s some Oxonian intrigue on the menu, but first up, we’ve got a dispatch from Fonie Mitsopoulou, who went to the opening night of a secretive new venture right in the centre of town.
Slap and Tickle
London’s nightlife is in a parlous place, but those with means are keeping their party going. On Saturday, the man who sold the Secret Cinema for $100 million, Fabien Riggall, opened the doors of his new venture, which is a club night called ‘lost’ (note, please, the choice of capitalisation). It can be found in the Saville Theatre in Covent Garden, which was repurposed into an Odeon Cinema 40 years later, before being taken over by the team behind lost, who spent six to eight months painting it jet black.
I attended the club’s trial run, which had a strict guest list consisting of ‘friends’ and ‘family’ – but it was not difficult to infiltrate.
Upon arrival, a staff member provides you with a password at the door, (‘Milton’, a heavy-handed reference if there ever was one), which is then immediately demanded of you by another staff member at the same door. It’s a brief but exhausting process.
Going further inside, you are ambushed by another posse of employees, who drawl ‘hello, dreamers’ at you. They are all sporting feathers and foulards and other baroque attire. For the evening, they have all been assigned fake names, which I discovered after a staff member accidentally revealed their real name. They whisper at you – not unmenacingly – to follow the light, which seems like wise counsel, because travelling up and down endless flights of stairs in pitch darkness feels like an accident waiting to happen. The light takes you through curtains, hallways, a bar, and more stairs.
The point is for you to get lost. If a staff member catches on to the fact that you’ve been estranged from your party, they will approach you to unhelpfully say: ‘You’re lost? Good!’ You also can’t text your friends, as your phone has been sequestered inside an impenetrable wearable pouch that stays on your person.
One of the first things you see inside is a woman, Bambi, a well-known London club kid, straddling a rusty bathtub, holding herself aloft from the edges, acting out an orgasm. She is wearing nothing but stilettos and some strategically placed covers, her contorted body covered in fake blood. It’s a reference to the Immoral Tales, a 70s cult art-house porno, which used 30 gallons of pigs’ blood in this particular scene. The film was projected on the only screen in the cinema that has survived the renovations. I was seated next to Dom Hicks, who runs the Nickel Cinema. They specialise in this sort of thing: gonzo movies, sexploitation films, video nasties. Hicks provided a helpful running commentary to the scene where the woman engages with an alarmingly endowed humanoid bear until it quite literally dies.
As an entrepreneur, Riggall is known for his vaunting imagination. He once screened La Haine at the Broadwater Farm estate the year after the 2011 riots , and is currently working in Saudia Arabia, where, in conjunction with the country’s regime, he is putting on a show entitled Azira: the Immersive Experience.
‘not every room is for the faint of heart,’ the invitation promised, entirely in lowercase, though one might have expected more spectacle, more immersion, more Berlin sex club from proceedings.
In the main room, a live band played horror movie music, backgrounded by clips from David Lynch movies. Riggall took to the stage to address the crowd, where he embarked on a homily about how ‘As a society we have become lost by technologists’. Following this, he projected a montage of the late singer, D’Angelo, to the bemusement of many. The video began to buffer, at which point Riggall urged us to ‘applaud’ the tech dysfunction.
The venue opens to the rest of the general public on Halloween weekend, but lost has the space for three months, after which the building is scheduled for redevelopment, with plans to become a nine-storey hotel. You can follow them on Instagram here.
Casa No More
As the days get shorter, and the nights grow colder, it’s easy to long for hot summer nights sprawled out in front of Love Island. Snake Denton taps into that seasonal nostalgia while gently lifting the rose-tinted glasses. He recalls coming within reach of the villa, before being cut at the final stage and reflects on how that rejection, rather than defeat, became a moment of self-realisation. A brilliant piece.
The Naughty Rhombus
More proposals are afoot to pedestrianise parts of Soho, and turn it into a boring restaurant district much like you can find in any city in the world. We do invite you to read (or re-read) Francisco Garcia’s outstanding feature from Issue 22, in which he interviews the dwindling band of residents who call the neighbourhood home.
It’s a cracking piece of journalism, and we would like to publish more pieces of similar ambition and heft in 2026. If you’ve got a great story, and you’d like to chat with us further, do digest the pitch guide here and then drop us an email at editorial@the-fence.com. November is a great time for making plans (at least for us).
A Little Birdie
Last week we suggested that The Yellow Bittern might be taking charge of the kitchens at McGlynn’s, the King’s Cross pub now owned by the artist, Peter Doig. However the chef of The Yellow Bittern, Hugh Corcoran, has contacted us to assure us that he has no intention of doing so, but is looking forward to patronising his neighbouring establishment.
At The Old Parsonage
Astonishing news last week, as hotelier Jeremy Mogford was charged with the murder of his 100-year-old mother. If you’ve spent any stretches of time in Oxford during the last 40 years – on either a voluntary or an involuntary basis – you’ll be familiar with his group of restaurants and hotels, which were, for decades, the only passable places to eat in town. Mogford made a fortune selling the Browns brasserie chain in the 1990s. He also is, as far as we know, the first member of 5 Hertford Street to be charged with murder.
The Magazine for People Who Love Books
‘Slightly Foxed is a very civilized way to appreciate books and writers. No shouting, no hype, just beautifully presented enthusiasms, most of which are irresistible.’ – Michael Palin
For the past 20 odd years Slightly Foxed been introducing its readers to brilliant books that they may have otherwise missed.
Each issue offers 96 pages of lively personal recommendations for books – fiction and non-fiction – that have stood the test of time. Companionable and unstuffy, it is more like a well-read friend than a literary magazine.
We are delighted to offer The Fence newsletter subscribers the opportunity to receive a half-price trial issue of Slightly Foxed Issue 87 (Autumn 2025) (£14.50 £7.25 inc. p&p for UK customers).
Just add a copy to your basket and use the code FENCE50 at the checkout to unlock the discount.
If you’d like to advertise with us, either in the newsletter (28,500 subscribers) or in the print magazine, please contact the editor, Charlie Baker, at cb@the-fence.com. Full media pack is available on request.
In Case You Missed It
The Paddington producers are suing Spitting Image for depicting him as a cocaine-using podcast host.
Trudeau, you’re a firework. Sparks fly between a truly unexpected pair.
Daniel Kolitz’s ‘The Goon Squad’ explores extreme onanism. Humanity, it seems, is very much changing.
Yvonne Singh celebrates the life of Claude McKay, a radical Jamaican journalist in 1920s London.
Sophie Heawood has written the definitive piece on the new Lily Allen album.
Something in the LRB about serial killers, for those of you so inclined.
And Finally
Over in the US of A, Saturday Night Live may misfire occasionally but the show still reliably rolls out funny sketches from young and youngish thrusters; while in the UK, we seem to only be treated to dirge-like travelogues from middle-aged comedians who haven’t said anything even halfway amusing since the Cameron government.
But let’s tread back into Lorne Michaels’ vaunted archive, to the year 2015, when Tina Fey and Amy Poehler returned to co-host, and delivered this absolutely brutal short:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJEAGd1bQuc
That’s not it for this week, as we will be back with Capital Letter on Thursday – we’ve got a spy’s guide to clandestine London – secret bases and the like – on the hopper. You can sign up for that here. Also remember we are raising prices very soon so do make sure you score a subscription at the current rate now. If you’d like to get in touch with us about an order, please email support@the-fence.com. The oldest person in the world is Ethel Caterham, who was born in 1909, and is resident in a care home in Lightwater, Surrey. She is the last surviving subject of Edward VII.
All the best,
TF