Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a joyous newsletter. If you missed out on last week’s edition, where we ranked the best men in publishing, then you can read that here.
Issue 24 is now sold out on our webstore, but can be found in stockists all around the world for a short while longer, as Issue 25 is landing in the first week of October. You’ll hear a lot more about it next week, but for a sneak preview of the content and the cover, tune into our appearance on Monocle Radio last Saturday. The first ten of you who subscribe today to the print magazine will receive a beautiful ‘Phone Wallet Keys Fence’ tote bag, which like everything we do, is outstanding value at £12, but this time you’ll be receiving it for free.
To business, today we’ve got our usual buffet of treats, but we’re starting with an exclusive.
Blessed Be His Name
It’s conference season, and political intrigue whistles through Liverpool, but the juiciest story we’ve heard comes from London.
Prince William, who has already made ‘strongly worded’ interventions on the Gaza conflict, was all set to make a statement welcoming the UK government’s recognition of a Palestinian state – but was talked out of it by anxious courtiers. Now there’s an interesting story…
Long and Strong
We are incredibly happy to say that Natalie Berry’s cover story for Issue 22, ‘In The Shadow of The Mountain’, has just been announced as a finalist for this year’s Banff Mountain Book Competition after being featured on Longreads. Natalie’s piece charted the story of two climbers: Alison Hargreaves and her son Tom, both of whom would end up perishing on some of the most dangerous mountains in the world, K2 and Nanga Parbat.
The story details the complicated world of pressures and attractions that drove them; a desire for independence, control, financial success, status, escape. She also examined the slew of highly critical coverage that followed Alison’s death with a strange cast of writers – Polly Toynbee, Nigella Lawson – taking the moment to suggest that ‘K2 is not for mothers’. They did so with little knowledge of the domestic turmoil Alison was escaping from, having suffered at the hands of her husband Jim.
It is a phenomenal piece of writing and a very deserving finalist, joining a fine handful of pieces that have made their way from our pages to those of Longreads. The very first of these was a piece on Poundbury by our very own pints correspondent Jimmy McIntosh. For those unaware, Poundbury is a kind of town planning extension on the western outskirts of Dorchester, and the pubs really aren’t that great. More recently, Patrick Galbraith’s ethereal report of chasing down the free party scene to a hilltop in south Wales was featured. It really is a magnificent piece, leading you through the rabbit warren of contacts and voicemails it takes to make it to the hallowed ground selected by the secretive ravers.
Georgia Brown’s article on a century of incarcerated children in the UK also made the Longreads cut. It is both a revealing look at the history of the institution that was the borstals as well as a personal account of her half-brother’s experiences in the vestiges of the same institution: the Young Offenders Institute.
Gary Grimes was also hand-picked by the folks at Longreads for his hilarious account of his teenage activities on the online forum ThisIsBigBrother.com, a place where Gary found an odd form of community and a chance to do a good bit of youthful lying: pretending to be a 17-year-old New Yorker and not a pre-teen from Sligo.
Finally, one that was close to our hearts and our offices was Francisco Garcia’s, ‘Last Days of Soho’, which focused on the ever-dwindling number of full-time residents in Soho.
Grooooooooove Park
It’s official: Camberwell is the 4th coolest neighborhood in the world, according to the omniscient bods at Time Out, who, for whatever reasons, omitted the crucial detail that SE5 is the postcode with the highest number of subscribers to The Fence magazine in the world, which is even cooler. (SE15 is in second place)
Some might say that Camberwell is considerably less ‘cool’ than it was two decades ago, when you had Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jenny Agutter, Erin O’Connor and Nicholas Serota leading private lives on the Grove, a banging nightclub with the Redstar on the Green and the last gasps of a squat movement that had incubated some worthwhile art and artists.
For all the earnest talk about gentrification, Camberwell is one of the least changed parts of London, as this outstanding walking tour underlines. Did you know about the secret MI5 listening post with the hidden entrance? Now you do.
So What’s a Cri-de-Coeur, C**t?
Tony Harrison, who died last week at the age of 88, was our greatest living poet, and it was fitting that he passed having seen the form enjoy a flowering at the end of his life.
There is no better time to watch, or rewatch in some cases, Harrison’s astonishing reading of the work he was best known for, V.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA3AL14d05k
It Will Be a Hoot
After his American debut, our pints correspondent, Jimmy McIntosh, is doing a talk at the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town on 22 October. There will be a trip to one of the excellent pubs in the area afterwards. Jimmy is yet to put the event on his TikTok, but when he does, it will assuredly sell out, so do buy a ticket here for the princely sum of £6.
Ads Value
This week, cybersecurity reporters have documented that online ads are increasingly enabling financial crime via native tools within both Google and Meta. It falls on us to tell all our readers to stay safe out there, while also reminding you that such technology has always proven a minefield.
As anyone who has ever bought a hat and then been followed around the internet with ads for that exact same hat can tell you, Google Ads are almost entirely tailored to your own search history. Thus, complaining about which ones are presented to you has long been one of the more charming vehicles of self-owning on the internet. Who can forget balloon-headed former Conservative MP for Croydon, Gavin Barwell who, in 2012, decried the presence of ads blaring ‘Date Arab Girls’ at the top of LabourList’s web page? Or MAGA freak Benny Johnson fulminating over ads for gay cruises on the Military Times? We might even give an honourable sideways ‘Menschn’ to former Tory MP and social media gadfly Louise Mensch, whose ignorance spread to the autocomplete function in Twitter search results.
None of those come close to our own personal favourite, however, which is the, ahem, seminal moment in which Guido’s Paul Staines attacked the Guardian for advertising videos depicting bestial congress on its front page.
We can only hope Mr Staines guards his financial information closely.
Where’s The Beef
A great bit of local reporting dropped from an Irish food blog at the weekend, namely AllTheFood.ie’s investigation of new Dublin restaurant Entrecôte, trumpeted by the Irish Times, Irish Independent, and a host of radio stations as a branch of the ‘world famous French bistro’ finally arriving in Ireland’s capital. Which makes it all the stranger that a small indie food blog were the only news source who thought to ask: ‘is it?’
What follows is an immensely readable potted history of the Entrecôte brand; their complex and multi-limbed presence across four separate and variably related locations in France, and similarly tenuous boltholes overseas, London included. None of which, it turns out, have any connection to the Dublin location at all, who appear to have simply invented their association with the famous eatery from whole cloth, presumably with the expectation that nobody in the media would think to check.
They were, of course, very nearly right. As such, this small story of food PR bluster also serves as a sharp indictment of media context collapse. At a time when news desks have never been more sparse, nor PR bluff more powerful, you’d be forgiven for wondering what else slips through the net.
As ever, if you know of some similar chicanery going unreported closer to home, please remember that our ears, and inbox, are always open.
Crossing the Line
It’s not often we do retractions. In fact, this may not be a retraction; merely a troubling update on a former newsletter subject. GeoWizard (aka Tom Davies), the affable Black Country YouTuber who has electrified us with his lo-fi straight line missions through Wales, Norway and beyond, is, regrettably, a Milkshake Duck.
His latest mini-series, where he crossed London north-to-south without using any roads, brought Davies a whole new wave of fandom. With fandom comes obsessives. With obsessives comes amateur sleuthing. And with sleuthing came the knowledge he’d followed Nigel Farage and Reform on Instagram. Some fans were keen to frame it as an example of Davies’ general news feed or an admirable open-mindedness toward all sides of the political spectrum. The problems really began when Davies tried to clarify his position.
‘I really didn’t want politics to rear its ugly head here,’ he wrote on his Patreon page, ‘but I suppose it’s my fault for publicly liking those pages, so I’d better clear it up.’ What followed was the familiar argument against mass immigration; intonations over creaking infrastructure, civil war and the loss of British culture.
But the sleuths did not stop sleuthing, and later uncovered a track on his self-released album called ‘Outnumbered’. Sadly not a paean to the long-running and gently humorous BBC sitcom, but the mildly less gut-busting world of the Great Replacement Theory. ‘What do we do when we’re outnumbered? / What do we say when it’s all over? / Where are we supposed to go when people take our homes and it’s all gone?’
And with that, we must caution you all: never google a YouTuber.
In Case You Missed It
A fascinating AI Trump generated and posted by the Chechan leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
An obituary for the pioneering typographer and art director, John Morgan, who passed away at a devastatingly young age at the beginning of this month. There would be no The Fence were it not for John.
‘AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations’, writes Cory Doctorow.
Series three of Time Out’s Love Thy Neighbourhood has landed in style with comedian Kiell Smith-Bynoe as its first guest.
While we’re blasting audio, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff’s new podcast series, The Missing Sister, is scintillating stuff.
Simran Hans is a brilliantly acute restaurant critic. Read her latest, on Lupa and Carmela’s.
And Finally
We’ve checked our database and it’s over a month since we posted something from the BBC Archives. Please rest assured that measures have been taken, people have been sacked, some light violence has been administered, and this will never happen again.
And we’re happy to report that our return to the enfolding warmth of Auntie’s skirts is a real humdinger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ykXnTlUOO0
In 1972, Nationwide paid a visit to Mrs Mary Anderson, an 84-year-old widow who so greatly missed the caravan holidays she’d taken with her late husband, that she installed a caravan inside her home. It is, we are lovingly told, a ‘1936 Birmingham Tourer… 14 feet long and painted a pleasant shade of battleship grey’.
We won’t spoil the reveal that comes from around one minute in, except to ask you this: what could possibly be better than having ONE 14-foot caravan within a small living space in your suburban home?
Happy camping!
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That’s all for this week. The bell has rung, the sheep have fled, and we must tarry no longer. Remember to send pitches to editorial@the-fence.com; all other questions to support@the-fence.com. Buy a mag or a bag or a subscription here. The first vending machines date from the first century AD, dispensing holy water in exchange for coins in the temples of Alexandria.
All the best,
TF