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Short samplers of A London Year will be distributed at Liverpool St, Waterloo and King’s Cross stations on 19th and 26th September. As well as containing some choice extracts from the anthology itself, there’s also a £7 off voucher if you pre-order the book from Waterstones.com

How We Used to Live

‘Documentarian Paul Kelly returns to the festival with his latest collaboration with the band Saint Etienne, following the loose trilogy of London films Finisterre, What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day and This Is Tomorrow, all recently published on BFI DVD. In the decade since Finisterre Kelly has built a reputation as a distinctive voice in British cinema, developing a lyrical style that draws on the psychogeography and people of the city and its culture. How We Used To Live is effectively a prequel to Finisterre, a meditation on London life today and a glance back at a receding Britain. Using colour footage from the 1950s to the 1980s, taken from the BFI National Archive, the film covers the ‘New Elizabethan’ age from the optimism of the post-war era to the dawn of Thatcherism. Soundtracked by Saint Etienne’s Pete Wiggs and scripted by the band’s Bob Stanley with Travis Elborough, the film is for anyone who has ever tried to understand their city. Alluringly impressionistic, poetic and political, this is the most joyful and entertaining offering yet from a unique filmmaking collective.’

Full details here:

http://goo.gl/OF5mPF

For any publicity enquiries regarding A London Year please contact:

Jessica Axe, Campaigns Director, T: 0207 284 9364,

E: jessica.axe@aurumpublishinggroup.com

 A London Year is an anthology of diaries I have compiled with Nick Rennison that Frances Lincoln will be publishing in October.

Here’s the blurb:  ‘A London Year is an anthology of short diary entries, one or more for each day of the year, which, taken together, provides an impressionistic portrait of life in the city from Tudor times to the twenty-first century. There are more than two hundred featured writers, with a short biography for each. The most famous diarist of all – Samuel Pepys – is there, as well as some of today’s finest diarists like Alan Bennett and Chris Mullin. There are coronations and executions, election riots and zeppelin raids, duels, dust-ups and drunken sprees, among everyday moments like Brian Eno cycling in Kilburn or George Eliot walking on Wimbledon Common. Vividly evoking moments in the lives of Londoners in the past, providing snapshots of the city’s inhabitants at work, at play, in pursuit of money, sex, entertainment, pleasure and power, A London Year is a beautifully packaged gift hardback with foil detailing on the jacket, a ribbon marker and black and white illustrations throughout. The perfect book for all who live in or love this eternal, ever-changing city.’

I will be chatting to Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne and the director Paul Kelly about London films at 6.30 pm on Wednesday 24th at Westminster Arts Library. Do book early as spaces are limited and there is free gin from Hendricks! –

The full details here:

http://salonforthecity.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/salon-no-7-lights-camera-london.html