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Designed by Marc Brunel, the Thames Tunnel was one of the greatest engineering feats of the 19th century. Running between Rotherhithe and Wapping it was the world’s first tunnel under a navigable river. ‘The Great Bore’ finally opened after 18 years to the public in 1843, and featured the first underwater shopping arcade – with a parade of 60 shops selling souvenirs. Every year a Fancy Fair was held in the Thames Tunnel and included panoramas, side shows and scientific demonstrations.
In November 1827 Marc’s son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, organised a lavish underwater banquet in the tunnel to help convince people that it was safe. Victorians called the tunnel the eighth wonder of the world, but it became notorious for prostitutes and “tunnel thieves” who lurked in the arches and mugged passers-by. In 1865 it was bought by the East London Railway Company. Currently closed for engineering work, the grand entrance hall to the tunnel is now accessible to the public this weekend for the first time in over 140 years. There will be rat wee about, so you have to wear gloves. Fun for all the family!
Oh come on, a round of applause – the translator was doing great until the second half!
The entries are pouring in now, and the quality is high. We’ll announce the ten entries to be published after the closing date – this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the only ones to be published; that depends on whether other publishers pick up the flag and agree to come on board.
You join the Campaign by submitting your entry and receiving your acknowledgement.
Go to:
http://campaignforrealfear.wordpress.com
Your subject line must have Submission: [title of story].
Put your 500 word story in the body of the email as text. (If you want to format, italics can be expressed as _this_ and bold as *this* – be careful about cut-and-pasting other formats from Word, which tend to turn up as question marks.)
Leave your name, contact address, and a one-line bio. Your submission will be automatically acknowledged.
Anything that’s over the word count or doesn’t conform to the specified format will be discarded. Entrants must agree to grant copyright to the Campaign for publication.
Got a question? Go to our FAQ, or email:
realfearcampaign@gmail.com
The deadline for entries is 5pm GMT, Friday the 16th of April, 2010.
Remember, it’s your chance to prove that fear is for everyone.
Get passionate. Get personal. Get published.
Given that there are over fifty museums in London, it’s hardly surprising that this gem gets overlooked. Linley Sambourne House, 18 Stafford Terrace, is a unique example of a late Victorian townhouse. It was the home of the cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne and his family from 1874, and survives with almost all of its furniture and fittings intact. Like the houses of Sir John Soane, Handel, Leighton, Dickens and Dennis Severs, it can be visited – by daylight or candlelight, and is worth a trip, although it may make you want to buy a top hat or a bustle skirt afterwards. It will also have the peculiar effect of making you feel that your own home isn’t as cluttered as you thought it was.
Author threads have now been set up on the The British Fantasy Society board. The idea is to give authors a proper home/hub, and hopefully the BFS will prove to be the ideal place. You’ll find it here at;
It’s under the Promote your Project section and called Ask the Author. It’s for members and non-members so if you want to, you can establish a thread by simply putting your name and posting your news of projects, stories and where they can be seen, covers and when they are coming out. You can post reviews, interviews, blogs, etc. Lucius Shepherd, Stephen Volk, Tim Lebbon, Sarah Pinbrough and over 50 authors/artists have a thread there so far.
 A Young Book Contemplates Its Future
Today I received a rather formal letter from my lovely publisher. ‘The Water Room’ didn’t sell out its hardback run – but only by 194 copies. The publisher would like to offer them to me at a knockdown price. I can call the ‘Author Care Line’, where my call will ‘be treated with total confidentiality’. At least I think they’re offering me cheap books – from the tone of the missive, it sounds like they’re expecting me to commit suicide.
Would they be shocked to know that I don’t believe in hardbacks? That the idea of sitting in an armchair with a huge hardbound novel on my knees is absurdly Victorian? That I much prefer paperbacks because they’re more portable and suit my lifestyle? The argument is that the press prefer reviewing hardbacks, but the truth, of course, is economic. Hardbacks make much bigger profits.
But surely there will come a point when the numbers simply don’t add up. When was the last time you bought a hardback?
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I’m always amazed that people don’t write more about the class system in England. Jonathan Coe wrote the wonderful ‘What A Carve Up!’ and of course Evelyn Waugh’s books are saturated with it, but we still seem to exhibit a creeping admiration for toffs (I’ve always found Alan Hollinghurst’s literary satires suspect from this point of view).
It comes as no surprise, then, to discover this week that the UK has the worst social mobility record of any developed country. Even today, the chances of a young person from a less well-off family enjoying higher wages or getting a higher level of education than their parents is low. In a time when MPs are charging the state for their duck-houses, why can’t we enable the young to escape poverty?
(The clip is from TWTWTW, the first and most beloved of the 60’s satire shows)
Andy Cox at Britain’s finest horror magazine Black Static and Simon Taylor at Action Audio have both pledged support for our campaign. If you’re joining us late, here’s the story so far.
Horror has some great champions in the UK, but some of them seem to have forgotten that it doesn’t exclusively belong to a small group of white males. Recently, anthologies and magazines have been running state-of-the-art articles on horror and have managed to avoid including any women or minorities, not because they aren’t there (they are, in healthy numbers) but because their selection process has been entirely run by the boys’ club. The story has been picked up by the national press, and questions are being asked.
It must be pointed out that the problem lies mostly with the New School journos and writers, and not the older players like Steve Jones, editor, or Jo Fletcher, publisher, who have scrupulously included the best women and men in their anthologies. Selection of material should always be about what constitutes great writing, and not who is represented – but it’s easy to unthinkingly narrow the field by trawling through your own contact book and not bothering to look for new talent.
That’s what the Campaign For Real Fear is all about.
It’s not a club; you don’t get a membership badge. It simply shows a level of awareness on your part and allows us to gauge how much work needs to be done. But we hope it will lead to new writing and a fresh perspective. Britain has led the world in great horror and fantasy in the past, and should be able to adapt to the rising challenges of the future.
Maura McHugh and I are looking for ten members who can write just 500 terrifying words. That’s the length of the kind of column most journalists can manage in an hour. We want horror that’s relevant to the modern world. The old vampires and werewolves scenarios have been worn to death – where are the new fears that reflect our world – fear of alienation and losing your identity, fear of manipulation, cruelty, xenophobia, class divides, fear of difference, fear of simply going unnoticed and unmourned. Anything and everything is fair game.
With Andy and Simon on board, the idea is to publish the first ten in Black Static magazine, and to publish an Action Audio book version of the ten stories, with the writers sharing any profits. It’s important to stress that all of this may not work – Maura and I may be proven horribly wrong. We may only get stories from middle-aged white blokes about sexy vampires. In which case I’m going to give up writing and become a greengrocer.
But it’s worth a try, surely? Reflect what you feel and frighten us in just 500 words, whether you’re an old lag or have never written before. Treat it as a mental exercise and have fun. Details about how and where to post your entry will be published here.
This is the Shambles in York. A lot of towns have them but most have been pedestrianised and packed with Starbucks. This one appears more intact than most and probably has shops that sell greetings cards and craft bits ‘n’ bobs like pointlessly small vases, by order of the council. The point is that it has been voted Britain’s prettiest street, proof – if such were needed – that we all want to live in the kind of Harry Potter land that existed in the 1950s and Ladybird books.
I suppose it’s cute and a bit like a film set, but as AS Byatt once pointed out, Britain is a country held back by its past. We see instability and as creatures of habit we want a bedrock of common sense. We don’t want Berlin’s Alexanderplatz with bits of steel and windswept concrete all over the place, we want old blokes selling magic potions to toddlers. We want yo-yo’s and mangles and old-fashioned prams where the baby faced you so it could read your expressions, and postmen who knew your name (I’m still getting Christmas post, by the way. It’s March. Thanks guys.)
Well maybe that’s not so bad, but I for one would miss the city’s cosmopolitan energy. I like the modern world, and don’t want to live in a museum. Then again, I don’t have kids, and I guess it would be easier to raise them in the former, although they’d be more likely to be frightened by difference and grow up to be bigots.
With an election approaching, it seems to me that whoever can guarantee more cute little Olde Worlde streets would win by a landslide.
Something that might go a long way toward explaining the strange English psyche of the postwar baby-boomer generation is Ladybird Books – these surrounded kids as they were growing up, and depicted a safe, secure and comfortably middle class world where you went shopping with mummy on Saturdays and nobody tried to stab you. Although I think that grocer looks a bit smarmy, and probably had his finger on the weighing machine as he slipped you a few duff oranges.
I’ve seen a couple of the old Ladybird books ironically rewritten to make them darkly funny, but was surprised to discover dozens of collector sites for these serene slices of the past. The pages of Ladybird books feature lollipop ladies, milkmen, coalmen, jolly policemen, sailors and lots of ladies in sensible coats and woolly hats. The children have been dressed for display and warmth. Nobody wears a shell suit and a scrapie, or is morbidly obese. Clearly no riff-raff ever entered the lives of these people or disturbed the status quo with their filthy rap music and parkour and ecstasy.
The artwork seems similar to those paintings of seaside towns that used to feature in railway carriages when people could still be trusted to behave in single compartments without cutting lines of cocaine and having sexual relations with strangers. There’s a great book of these pictures written by Michael Palin. His caption for a crowded Weston-Super-Mare beach remarks that everyone seems very happy in the days before awareness of untreated sewage.
   
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