Table of contents for 02/23/2026 in The Big Issue

IN DEEP WATER ‘It feels like we live in the middle of a lake’ → After her sixth flood in three decades, Heather Shepherd has stopped trying to keep the River Severn out of her Shropshire home. “I just say, come on in,” she tells Big Issue. “Sit down, and let me know when you’re going to go!” If Shepherd – a campaigner who has spent nearly 30 years working to help those affected by flooding – sounds blasé, it’s only because she’s tried everything: spending more than £70,000 trying to floodproof her home, installing removable wall panels and raising all of her furniture and fittings by six inches. But there’s only so much you can do – “still, the water comes”. Soon, many more people will live with the…

→ Now that it is possible not to go to work, because social security will support you, and it is remarkably easy to get, there are people who have decided not to work. Obviously, there are people who can’t work due to some affliction but there are also hundreds of thousands who have chosen not to work. They have dropped out of society in many ways and are prepared to live off the limited support given by state aid. How ever mean that existence is, it seems it is preferred to getting up in the morning and trundling off to a job. Many of the jobs on offer are tiring and unrewarding and low paid. So if a state offers an easily accessible alternative, why not take it? Hence the…

The Rastafarian singer had played football in the Kennington street back in the 1970s, one of thousands of visitors who passed through the squat before its demolition in 2005 through 2007. “It was very known; it had thousands of people going through it over the years,” said Wiedel, a photojournalist who documented the squat’s final years. “They [the squatters] formed a really extraordinary community, and a refuge in many ways.” Squatting – occupying empty properties without the owner’s consent – was huge in the 1970s. By the end of the decade, an estimated 50,000 squatters lived in England and Wales, with 30,000 in the capital alone. It has been incrementally criminalised ever since. In 2012, it was banned entirely. Wiedel’s photographs, which will be published in a new book in…

1 The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth by Lillian Nayder Looking at Dickens through his wife’s eyes provides a new perspective on him as a family man and shatters the illusion that being able to write so convincingly about loving relationships made him a good husband and father in real life. 2 Charles Dickens and Georgina Hogarth by Christine Skelton Dickens forced Catherine out of the family home and away from her children but her sister chose to stay with him. This highlights not only his ability to inspire loyalty but the limited choices available to women at that time. 3 The Invisible Woman by Claire Tomalin Dickens never recovered from the childhood trauma of seeing his father locked up in debtors’ prison, so when he fell in…

↓ GET IN TOUCH The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK thebigissue ISSUE 1705 Congratulations to all 100@BigIssue 2026 Changemakers. I was on the list in 2019. Anna Kennedy OBE MY WORLD AS I FIND IT ↑ 12 down – any ideas?! Rick Pott Send us your image, or photo you’ve captured, of Britain today with a brief description. On socials or email letters@bigissue.com Outside the box Television is changing, and so is the way it’s delivered into our homes [Issue 1703, 02-08 February]. With broadcast licences due to expire in 2034, the government is reviewing how free-to-air is provided in the future. This creates a natural point to reflect on how best to secure universal access for the long term.…

Oh boy, at age 16 I can almost divvy my interests up as a 70/30 focus on the world. Seventy per cent was music. I was playing in a punk rock band, while also playing in a Joy Division-inspired new wave band. And I was obsessed with every single aspect of the world of music. I was obsessed with record stores. I was obsessed with college radio stations, with fanzines, with music magazines. Anything involving music was just so unbelievably exciting and fascinating to me. So that was 70% of my obsession, and the other 30% was having unrequited crushes on women in my high school. I didn’t get my heart broken. See, in order to get your heart broken, you have to be in a relationship. I would just…

HOMELESSNESS Susan Carol won a Grammy. A year later, she was homeless. ‘Everything can crumble in a minute’ → Many singers have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives. Shania Twain stayed in a shelter as a child. Lizzo couch-surfed or slept in studios while trying to break through. Ed Sheeran slept under bridges during his busking years. For those artists, homelessness came before their big break. For Susan Carol, it felt like it came afterwards. A year or so after winning a Grammy, the American singer was living in her car. “Everything can be so secure and so built up, and then it can just crumble in a minute,” she tells Big Issue. “And you can have a Grammy, you can be signed to a label, all the…

Despite not previously having one single ice chip of interest in winter sports, I have to admit I got a bit emotionally attached to the Winter Olympics. They became a friend to me – a cold, weird friend called Klaus who doesn’t say much and sits in the corner wearing a helmet and neon salopettes. After a week or so of watching people throw themselves off things and fly through the air with the greatest of ease, l became an expert critic. I loved the ski jumping and Big Air snowboarding events where gravity is just a state of mind and every jump is a fine balance of graceful and suicidal – one wrong move and you’re squished like a mosquito on a windscreen. Despite the fact that I wouldn’t…

Two citizens shot dead. A five-year-old child abducted. An entire city placed under siege. Controversy and calls for boycotts have surrounded recent World Cup tournaments. But this isn’t Qatar 2022. It’s Minnesota, United States of America, 2026. Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City is preparing to host its first of six World Cup matches, including a quarter-final. The opening night will be headlined by Argentina and history’s greatest player, Lionel Messi. Fireworks, fan zones, and a carefully curated image of US hospitality broadcast to billions. The spectacle will be sold as a celebration of unity and diversity. But seven hours north of that stadium, the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Fort Snelling, Minnesota, stands as a stark counter-image. Its doors do not welcome fans. Instead they hold migrants and protesters,…

→ As so often, there is always an opposite reaction. Last week, employment figures were published for the UK showing the unemployment rate was at its highest for five years. The rate was 5.2% – amounting to 1.88 million people. Within this, the figures for younger people are staggering. Over 16% of 16- to 24-year-olds are unemployed. That’s much higher than the EU average. This is not an epidemic of laziness, rather of opportunity. It doesn’t take much digging to find young people who have been through demoralising searches for months, receiving rejection after rejection. It’s across the board. Last year nearly 1m people graduated from university in the UK. Applications for jobs from them is up 15%. The issues are macro and micro. Entry level jobs are being squeezed,…

SOCIAL MEDIA My band has been on the fringes long enough. This will be our year I quit my job and gave myself 365 days to get my band signed. This might sound crazy if you don’t know me, but if you’ve been following my socials, you might understand why giving myself this challenge is so important. Music has been a constant in my life since I was six years old and wrote my first song. By the time I was a teenager, I was performing in bars and taking music industry meetings. By 17, I’d started releasing my own music and I haven’t stopped since. I’ve never allowed myself to have a Plan B. The dream I had when I was six years old is still what drives me:…

A strong sense of place is one of the many reasons we read fiction. A good novel can help us find out how a city ticks; expose the real place behind the tourist brochures. This week we have two novels with a terrific sense of place, integral to the action that unfolds. First up is Louise Welsh’s The Cut Up. Welsh’s debut novel, The Cutting Room, launched her on Scotland’s literary scene 24 years ago, becoming a modern classic. It featured Rilke, an acerbic, gay auctioneer navigating Glasgow’s seedy underbelly to solve mysteries close to his dark heart. Welsh only returned to Rilke’s world with The Second Cut after a gap of 20 years, but now she has delivered a third slice of slippery and morally dubious adventures, as Rilke…

Raving can be religious. To hear diehards describe it, a packed dancefloor at its exuberant zenith represents a transcendent mix of escapism and ego death. It’s a place where time ceases to exist. The world could be ending outside the club and you would never know. Such hedonistic epiphanies might sound a bit “I went to Glastonbury but missed Rod Stewart because I ended up dancing for nine hours straight in the Mystic Pendragon grotto” but they still retain a ring of truth. There is something exhilarating, and even a little scary, about how loud, repetitive music can rewire your brain. This is the starting point for Sirāt, the Cannes-winning and Oscar-nominated rave odyssey from Galician director Oliver Laxe that manages to be hypnotic, apocalyptic and genuinely shocking. It begins…