Kester Brewin

The media coverage in the UK has been limited, but I think the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest is interesting, and I hope it turns out to be significant. There was comment on BBC radio the other morning suggesting variously that it was the Democratic equivalent of the Republican ‘Tea Party’ movement  - though I’m not [...]

I ended up on the 7th floor of a multi-story car park in Peckham this evening, at an event hosted by Bold Tendencies, which looked at the car parks from an architectural and anthropological point of view. One contributor made the point that the problem of car parking only became such as Henry Ford developed [...]

I’ve been away for a couple of days, so haven’t posted again on the aftermath of the night of looting that gripped various locations in London, and then spread to other cities in the UK. But in the mean time I’ve faced some criticism for my previous post for a) appearing to back away from [...]

  It’s perhaps too soon to work out what the hell really happened in London last night, or why. I stayed up til 2am following the news and the Twitter feeds, and I have to say it was one of the saddest nights I’ve ever spent in the capital. There has already been some debate [...]

Fuckers Are you the same, that yank dogs with choke leashes, and smash shops? Tight necks, chain nooses and restricted passage-ways: the dispossessed will tonight by force, take possession of dogs and televisions women and matches and, for a moment, burn brightly before waking, smouldering with no cause to kick the ashes of what time [...]

Interesting piece in The Independent yesterday, asking why people bother going to festivals when the sound quality is crap, there’s mud everywhere, you can’t sleep, and people push and spill beer all over you. I visited Glastonbury once, many years ago now, and left utterly mystified. Why, I wondered at the time, did so many [...]

Interesting piece yesterday looking at why kids might play their crappy, tinny music through their stupid phones when on buses on trains. And why good, responsible adults might find their blood boiling when it happens. With mobile phones in many a teenager’s pocket, the rise of sodcasting – best described as playing music through a [...]

…hopefully up again soon.

Undoubtedly a moving story – a guy fallen on hard times begs by the side of the road and is ‘rediscovered’ as having the perfect voice for radio and voice-overs. Just begs the question… are the homeless who aren’t so blessed with some great talent not worth helping?

Although the official records will say that bookmakers paid out on a ‘white Christmas’ in London in 1999 and 1996 (the technical definition being a snowflake falling on the London Weather Centre on that day) the last proper blanketing of snow on Christmas Day was apparently in 1895, which is right back in the picture-postcard [...]