Read my article for New Start magazine on the failure of regeneration in Kensington, Liverpool “The Liverpool Echo’s recent reports into the state of the city’s ‘Kenny’ neighbourhood paint an alarming picture. Yet the most shocking fact is that the same neighbourhood was the recipient of £62m through the New Deal for Communities programme.” Photo […]

Read my review of ‘Berlin Bodies’ for 3AM Magazine  “I found myself carried along by his descriptions of how the city’s rich and conflicted history has given rise to these diverse tribes of urban identity.” Image taken by me.    

Read my second instalment for 3AM Magazine’s ‘Cities in Cinema’ series “Napoli is more than a neutral stage. The people we encounter are the essential products of the city’s toxic soil, corrupt institutions, dysfunctional housing estates and decaying public spaces. They all issued from the cankered kennel of the city’s womb.” Image credit: Federica Zappalà

Read my article for New Start on Everton’s new stadium. “Everton styles itself as the ‘people’s club’ on Merseyside; more community-minded club and supported by the locals, as opposed to the commercial outfit followed by tourists and day-trippers on the other side of Stanley Park.”

Read my article for New Start on twelve takeaways from the Regen2017 conference ‘Regeneration may be back on the agenda – but have we learned from the failures of the past?’ Image taken by me near Broadway Market, London.

Read my short essay on Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 masterpiece.  Despite the ‘great beauty’ of the title, Rome has become a place of criminality, sexual exploitation and superficiality. Just as its son Jep, an ageing art critic of once great taste and eloquence, has become a jaded old cynic.

Read my post for New Start magazine on the implications of Brexit for poor neighbourhoods  “Despite the sneering and mockery, the Brexit voters in the poorest neighbourhoods might get themselves a better deal after all.” Photo by –Sam– 

Read my review of ‘The Mediated City’ for 3:AM Magazine “It is easy to dismiss local news as irrelevant and outdated into today’s world of instant online, global communication; the preserve of headlines like ‘Old Mrs Miggins has a funny turn on the No. 30 bus’ and ‘Newsagent runs out of five pence pieces’.” Photo taken by me in Bromley by Bow.       […]

Read my review of Deyan Sudjic’s ‘The Language of Cities’ for 3AM Magazine. “It’s a shame, then, that in contrast to the sharp focus and tightly woven narrative fabric of that chapter, much of rest of The Language of Cities is a loosely-hung clothing line of brief observations and historical vignettes from across the ages and the […]