Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and we join you in the amber glow of an England victory (a victory that a minority of our editorial team celebrates). We digress. Issue 20 is here, and it looks beautiful.
A reminder that we’re celebrating a half-decade in the print media maelstrom, and we’re offering all readers 20% off any subscription (print, digital or both) using promo code ‘5YOFENCE’. Click the button beneath it to get after it there.
For this issue, we thought we’d peel back the patina of the capital’s seedy underbelly: this is the London Noir special, in which we have six features probing the vicious glamour of the city we call home.
Margaret Mitchell heads to Ciro’s Pomodoro, a Knightsbridge pizzeria run by a 75-year-old restaurateur who claims to have been best friends with Patrick Swayze – and to have discovered the secret of eternal life. Jimmy McIntosh retraces Frank Lampard and John Terry’s infamous post-9/11 Heathrow binge. Orlando Whitfield recounts his meeting with ‘The White Whale’, the most vulgar art collector to have crossed the threshold of a blue-chip gallery.
It is claimed that The Ace Hotel is haunted by the ghost of its founder, Alex Calderwood, who died of a drug overdose there in 2013 – Jordan Michelman searches for Gen-X spectres in Shoreditch. Róisín Lanigan, our contributing editor, visits Princess Diana’s favourite caff and Clive Martin circuits around Hatton Garden on the trail of Terry Adams, the godfather of London.
Elsewhere, we’ve got a fantastic short story from Eva Wiseman, a Belgrade dispatch from Camilla Bell-Davies, a visit to an Odinist temple in Nottinghamshire and a superlative long-read from John Phipps, who travelled to Drogheda, to meet the only Irish member of the Friends of Oliver Cromwell Society.
If this all sounds heavy-going, rest assured that the issue is loaded with gags – it’s probably the silliest issue yet. We’re particularly pleased to welcome Andrew Hunter Murray to our back pages, and longstanding readers will be delighted to learn that we have another 146 Questions, this time with Jordan Stephens of Rizzle Kicks.
The cover is by Orfeo Taiguri, and there are illustrations from Miki Lowe, John Broadley and Nishant Choksi. It really does look very good indeed and you’re making a mistake if you’re not reading The Fence in print.
If you’d like to buy a single issue, you can do so here, and if you’d like to subscribe, remember there’s a deal on, with the code 5YOFENCE. TV and film’s Chris Addison says we’re ‘a great magazine’, which is generous of him.
Subscriber copies should be landing in letterboxes tomorrow morning – please do remember to send through snaps. We’ll join you again on Tuesday, with a conventional newsletter. Until then.
All the best,
TF