Table of contents for 3/17/2025 in The Big Issue

TOX is the most prolific London vandal ever. Banksy is the most well-known street artist ever. This is the first interview TOX has ever given. This is the first time Banksy has ever interviewed anyone. Banksy: Hello TOX. Are you allowed to carry pens on a bus yet? [It was rumoured in graffiti circles that TOX had done so much damage and been caught so many times that he was banned from carrying any mark-making tool on public transport, under penalty of an immediate 30-day jail term] TOX: It wasn’t 30 days, it was five years maximum cos it was breach of ASBO, I think that’s what you’re on about init? ASBO means Anti Social Behaviour Order where they could lock you up for stuff that wasn’t actually a criminal…

Laura Mythen is a 27-year-old market gardener based in Norwich. She has worked in productive horticulture using organic principles since she left higher education. Laura is pragmatic and motivated to bring better food and land management to her local area. Big Issue: What do you do? Laura Mythen: I co-run a market garden in East Anglia where we grow vegetables to sell as part of a veg box scheme. We harvest from our site every week. People sign up to receive veg from us, and they get a weekly delivery. And then, alongside the veg growing, we run volunteering opportunities, horticultural education and community events, BI: You must need a mad set of skills? LM: We have to wear a lot of different hats. We get a lot out of…

Reading the city sounds like something a psychogeographer might do, but in a sense we all do it whenever we move around, on foot or on wheels: route, encounter, diversion, disruption. That shop’s re-opened … oh joy, a new nail bar. (Clearly I’m an urban pedestrian. Cyclists and drivers notice other things, but we all register something about a journey, consciously or not.) Words, too, are there to be read en route: adverts, road signs, street names, all legitimated by commerce and custom. And then the other, illegitimate words, not printed but handwritten: PUZ, FLASH, WEZE, HOOK$. It could locate me quite precisely in one bit of North London, that those are the names I think of first. I’m talking tags, the graffiti IDs on shutters, hoardings, walls and particularly…

Here be dragons… This was a phrase written onto maps in the old times, back before satellites and vloggers had stared into every abyss the world has to offer. It served as a warning: unknown danger lurks in this area. This part of the globe was a mystery. In our world – one plugged in and switched on 24/7 – there are few dragons left. Zeroes and ones turn myth and legend into live action. Everything is uploaded and shared. Liked and remixed. There is no privacy. There is no wonder. Whether you’re getting stabbed in the street or railed by strangers, it’s getting broadcast somewhere. This has never been so true as it is at war. The proliferation of trench warfare footage set to a high-speed phonk soundtrack has…

In Enfield I tune in to Turkish pirates. In Hackney, KoolFM. In Uxbridge, house. In Southall, Punjabi radio. In South, Citylockradio’s dancehall. But at home, Resonance FM has been the background noise of my adult life. From the age of 14 I’d turn it on and Traditional Music Hour would have a man singing about turnips in Norwich, Little Atoms would be hosting Jonathan Meades on a rant, someone unnamed would be playing an ambulance siren backwards for an hour. Resonance became most important to me when I was in prison though; everything about prison is designed to blinker the liberty of your mind, body and soul, to close down your horizons – everything about Resonance is designed to open them up. On 104.4FM you never know what lies over…

AS a Grammar School castoff with no education beyond the age of 17, I’m sometimes asked where I acquired the abilities needed in my various fields of endeavour. If they don’t believe my radioactive spider story, then I’ll tell the truth, which is that nearly everything I learned, I learned from Arts Lab. Arts Lab was a creation of the 1960s, when we were still suffering from the hallucination that there might be entertaining and productive possibilities in life and in the world. A brainwave of the counterculture figurehead Jim Haynes, ridiculously easy to establish and immense fun to participate in, Arts Lab spread across the country during those colourful years, from Drury Lane to Beckenham, Birmingham to Northampton. The Northampton version sprang from an announcement by the DJ at…

We give thank to Almighty Lord God. You give bundance to men in dew of heaven. To ladies too. You give food out of richness of soil. We give thank to Your most gracious for fruits of field we have gathered. We beg of You, in Your mercy, to bless our harvest, to bless our deep abinding love for each other mutually amen. We bow our heads to give thanks to earth for bundance of veg inc queer gear premium fresh hand picked no plastic packaging. We give humble thank that we have picked more than daily quota. So won’t get telling off from Stan Poucher or real furnace roasting from Poucher’s mail-order Mrs. Not real Mrs but real mail-order. She’s so worse! Siren of the potato fields she is called. Jezebel style…

Got no money to travel the London Underground? Sick of being crowded on trains and overcharged for the privilege? Think public transport should be free for all, all the time? Feel like not paying? You’re not alone – join the Fare Dodgers’ Liberation Front! Let’s peer into history: London, 1990s. A massive city where travel was expensive; for people on benefits or low pay, paying your way was out of reach. Lots of people thought public transport should be cheaper – or even free. But campaigning for free travel is one thing. Some of us were determined to just take it for ourselves. Until the early 1990s, fare-dodging was widespread and culturally normal: thousands would ‘jump’ the tube or bus. And it was easy – few stations had barriers and…

A famous 1966 guide described Piccadilly Circus as the real centre of London and the focus of everyone’s night out. The entry describes how the buildings are “covered with illuminated signs which are one of the best, least self-conscious displays of popular art anywhere in London”. In 1998 a digital projector was used at Piccadilly Circus for the Coke advert, providing its first digital billboard, and through the 2000s there was a gradual move to LEDs. By 2011, no neon lamps remained. Wikipedia points out that “the number of signs has reduced over the years as the rental costs have increased”, showing that even advertising is a victim of the city’s landlords. Although, over the same period of digitisation, the difference between advertising and the city’s inhabitants is also something…

Crossword CRYPTIC CLUES Across 2. Spare piece of pork? (3)5. The accent is on footwear (6)7. Having spokes diverging from the centre of a tyre (6)9. Curse the way men talk (11)10. Persist about loss of point for serviceman (6)11. Official Tory, an eccentric (6)13. Forced spider out (6)16. Sounds correct for the repairer (6)18. Taking exception to the questioning (11)19. Round field of activity? (6)20. Feel sorry for redstart, a wading bird (6)21. Thirsty when teetotal (3) Down 1. Child’s book used at start of painting (6)2. Rush item to prepare again (2-4)3. Some macabre conflict in a Welsh town (6)4. Biblical food said to be in fashion (6)6. A drudge in the ship’s cookhouse? (6,5)8. Digging for gold under the snow? (5-6)10. Father has a fizzy drink (3)12.…

Uncertain times call for media or methods of communication, transmission and relay that feel as constant and true as the oxygen in the air we breathe. So, when Resonance lost its studio at the very start of the pandemic, we refused to sit still and instead embarked on a new project in an enormous and sprawling derelict chapel on Borough Road in South London. There, using every microphone we had – placed and hung and hidden in every room and doorway and staircase of the building – I set about turning the whole structure into a live-broadcast space, with each microphone feeding back to a central mixing desk on the upper floor, where one could sit and mix live on-air the studio’s entire architecture as people came and went, playing,…

I’d never considered broadcasting until, through (the now defunct) Migrants’ Resource Centre’s collaboration with Resonance FM, I enrolled in a radio training course for migrants, at the end of which I was invited to pitch a programme and so The Workplace was born. My programme fulfils on various levels: me, personally, listeners, information-wise, as they obtain insights from our work-related discussions and my guests, professionally, as we explore the themes of health and wellbeing at work, women’s advancement in the workplace, leadership and ethics – including the environment, art and artists and the future of work. Having featured all seven female presidents of The Law Society of England and Wales, contributors to the Science Gallery London’s AI exhibition and this year’s MOBO Awards winner for Album of the Year, as…

Fume’s name has been etched into my consciousness since riding the Hammersmith & City Line in the mid-’90s, en route to Ladbroke Grove’s Subterania Club. Four stark letters, aggressively scratched into the tube doors, boldly outlined on the walls of track visible as the train ascended above ground, emblazoned on every street. Back then, West London was a dangerous place. Fume I supposed must be a very sketchy character, not helped by the many rumours that circulated – ‘Fume robbed some boys in the skatepark with a machete last week, watch out!’ The only reference to him in print, a Big Issue article from 1997 named Battle of the Art Outlaws, painted him as an enigmatical delinquent. Until the advent of social media and podcasts, the graffiti writer was of…

When I was little, my dad used to tell me a story from the early ’60s. He and his friends were sleeping rough on Villiers Street, just off the Strand in Central London. The authorities at the time were taking it upon themselves to hose people down, getting their bedding wet and trying to move them on. Anyone who has been homeless will know this is a well-worn form of harassment. This particular time, Dad and his friends had enough. They hatched a plan to fight back, which involved staying up all night, jumping on the back of the fire engines that were doing the hosing and opening the water tanks. By the time the engines reached Villiers Street there was no water left to hose down his community. They…

WITH the highest per-second costs of any TV advertising in the world, the commercials aired during the US Super Bowl are – weirdly – a cultural event in their own right. Among the ads this year was a clear focus on AI: next to ads for ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Meta spy-glasses, were a pair of commercials featuring Matthew McConaughey of Interstellar fame, in which he sits outside a restaurant in the soaking rain, complaining that his AI agent didn’t check the weather and book him a table inside or order a meal to his liking. If only he’d used Salesforce AI, he’d have been undercover with his buddies and eating the right food. Once you’ve got over the absurdity of the premise that McConaughey couldn’t have just checked the…