Squatting in Mayfair

A deleted chapter from What Goes Around

Hello - and Happy Christmas!

Photo by Selim Korycki, circa 2011

As promised, this week’s post is something a bit different - an entire chapter of What Goes Around that had to be cut before publication. I spent weeks working on it, and was proud of how it turned out, but ended up sacrificing it to the tyranny of the word count. It concerns a visit to a squatted mansion in Mayfair, in January 2009, where I listened to a lecture on the confluences between squatting and couriering, and met a few people who later became friends.

For those who haven’t read the book, Ash was my girlfriend at the time I started couriering. Jon, one of the people I meet in the squat, is Jon Day, whose book Cyclogeography came out in the same year mine did.

The chapter has been edited lightly, mostly to remove paragraphs that did make it into the book.