This week’s NS: The London issue

Summer double edition: essays, fiction, art and photography inspired by the capital.

Special double edition with contributions from Vivienne Westwood, Matthew Hollis, Maurice Glasman, Will Hutton, Ruth Padel and Evgeny Lebedev, an essay by Will Self, a new short story by Joe Dunthorne, an interview with David Bailey and a specially commissioned 12-page photo essay on the world’s greatest city

This week’s New Statesman is a 92-page special issue on London. The double issue of the magazine features a series of capsule essays, “Tales of a city”, in which artists, authors and public figures reflect on their relationship with the capital. The pieces include:

Vivienne Westwood on a life spent in art galleries
Bim Adewunmi on Hackney’s inevitable gentrification
Alex Preston urges bankers to look up at the buildings they built
Ruth Padel argues the case for London Zoo
David Lammy questions whether London can be a place for everyone

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Matthew Hollis travels on a boat down the Thames
Stuart Maconie offers a northerner’s take on the capital
Dorian Lynskey celebrates the Rough Trade record shop
Sarah Sands insists that no other city can compete with London
Maurice Glasman recalls gloomy childhood Sundays in Palmers Green
Evgeny Lebedev is grateful to a city that welcomed him

Will Self: Streets of love and anarchy

For a special essay, Will Self takes a stroll through south London with his son. They encounter pirate DVD sellers, 1970s tower blocks and Battersea Power Station – and Self remembers how much he loves, and hates, the protean city. Ralph Steadman has created an original illustration for the New Statesman to accompany this London essay.

Reporter at Large: Edward Platt

Last summer, Edward Platt set out in the footsteps of J B Priestley, tracking Britain’s post-industrial decline and revival. In the last of his “English journeys”, he visits the Isle of Dogs and Southwark, and discovers that urban poverty coexists uneasily with high finance. With photographs of Canary Wharf and the Shard by Stephen McLaren and Mimi Mollica.

Also in the London issue

An extensive photo essay, specially commissioned by the New Statesman, opens with a reflection on foreign depictions of the city by Sukhdev Sandhu, the author of London Calling and Night Haunts: a Journey Through the London Night. Across six spreads of the magazine, vintage photographs from Tate Britain’s exhibition “Another London” (opens on 27 July) sit next to reinterpretations in images by the contemporary photographers Daido Moriyama, Alex Webb, Aaron Schuman, Jan Stradtmann, Noemie Goudal, Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Mishka Henner and Richard Mosse.
David Bailey, whose iconic fashion and celebrity photos of the Sixties captured the essence of Swinging London, talks to Rebecca McClelland in the NS Interview.
We run a new short story by Joe Dunthorne, “The Cold War”, set in an east London park and with an illustration by Barry Falls.

Elsewhere in this week’s NS

Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, reflects on what can be done about Britain’s gloomy outlook in the Economics Column.
In the Politics Column, Rafael Behr reports that Boris Johnson “has told aides he intends to perform his mayoral duties on an unofficial part-time basis after the Olympics”. With seven deputy mayors left to run the capital, Johnson will be afforded “three years of idleness” – which for Downing Street “means endless scope for political devilry”.
In the Critics section, Richard Mabey writes the third in his series of “seasonal diaries” for the NS on the “floral phantasmagoriahe” we have our unusually wet summer to thank for.
Leo Hollis examines attempts to transform London from a Victorian capital to a futuristic metropolis using the latest digital technology.
The former editor of the Observer, Will Hutton, writes examines three books by leading economists who dissent from the “austerian” consensus on the best solution to the economic crisis, both domestically and globally.
Also in The Critics, the NS’s pick of the top ten London novels, films and songs.