Innholdsfortegnelse for 21-08-2017 i The Big Issue

Celebrated artist and friend of The Big Issue Charming Baker has created a series of unique and thought-provoking illustrations for a new collection of Roald Dahl’s short stories. Brought together for the first time since they were originally written, Fear, Innocence, Trickery and War reveal one of Britain’s best-loved children’s authors’ fascination with the darker traits of human nature. From the spine-chilling stories of Fear, to the semi-autobiographical War, the sinister collection of revealing tales is sure to shake even the most steadfast of adult readers. Check out next week’s edition for your chance to win one of five collections signed by Charming Baker…

AUNT JEAN BY DAVID TOVEY David is an ex-homeless artist and founder of the ONE Festival of Homeless Arts. “Being a social artist means I like to raise awareness of issues that are close to my heart,” he says. “This is a portrait I’ve just finished of my beautiful aunt who is living with dementia. Dementia is cruel and not only does it take the life of the person living with it but also all of those around them. This picture is for the strength of my cousins.” UFO BY URSULA Ursula, originally from Portugal, submits her artwork via London homeless charity the 240 Project. She is studying to become a personal trainer in North Kensington. BUY STREET ART! You can buy prints of some artworks featured in Street Art…

The review, conducted by Lord Farmer, looked at the importance of strengthening prisoners’ family ties in reducing reoffending rates, which currently cost society an estimated £13-£15bn per year. Inside Stories , a project by the charity Create, attempts to solve these issues by enabling prisoners to create storybooks for their kids – who often appear as characters. “It unlocks a whole new way of communicating with their children, both in prison and on the outside,” says Nicky Goulder, the chief executive of Create. “I sat in a prison with a guy who spent one hour cutting out a white fluffy owl for his story – a whole hour because this was a key character and the stories are usually written about their children, for their children.” The programme works with…

A love story, set against the backdrop of World War One, is at the heart of this sweeping East meets West drama. Lillie (Hera Hilmar; Anna Karenina, Davinci’s Demons) and Jude (Josh Hartnett; Black Hawk Down, Penny Dreadful) are an American couple who leave the US to work in the Ottoman Empire for a medical mission run by Woodruff (Ben Kingsley; Gandhi, Schindler’s List). However, Lillie finds her loyalty tested when she meets an Ottoman lieutentant, Ismail (Michiel Huisman; Game of Thrones, The Age of Adaline), and falls in love with him. Lillie (main image with Ismail) must decide if she wants to be what other people want her to be, or to be herself. Love, war, a clash of civilisations… it doesn’t get much more dramatic than The Ottoman…

Fill ’Em Up Approach any British town and you will drive through acres of retail parks consisting of pre-fabricated, low-rise warehouses and supermarkets, surrounded by sterile car parks. All of this is empty and unused at night. With determination it could be made a planning condition that such warehouses should have three storeys of accommodation built above them. This would make more efficient use of land, bring life to areas that are dead for much of the day and, with imagination, improve the approaches to our towns. David Bowman, Romsey The housing crisis is easy to solve. It just means building more social housing, with a blueprint so that each house can be built to a high spec with renewable energy. It would mean getting a team together, helped by…

The first-ever exhibition of international street paper cover art arrives in Manchester this week. Launched as part of #VendorWeek 2017, UNCOVERED: Still Homeless, Still an Issue showcases the story behind the global street paper movement and their outstanding designs. The exhibition, created in partnership with creative agency Equator, will be on display at Manchester Town Hall from August 22-24 as part of the Global Street Paper Summit after a run in Glasgow that saw more than 13,000 visitors. The gathering, hosted by the International Network of Street Papers, is held in a different city every year, and gives a chance for street paper staff across the globe to share knowledge and develop innovations.…

I’ve been helping to run one of the Grenfell relief centres for the last few weeks, at Notting Hill Methodist Church. I’m now co-ordinating a number of projects aimed at helping survivors and the wider community rebuild their lives. I’ve written a short piece about the contribution of one of your Big Issue sellers to the relief effort. I’d like to be able to say thank you, and doing it through the pages of your newspaper seems the best way. In the days after the fire we were inundated with clothing, bedding, toiletries and all manner of useful items. The overwhelminggenerosity of the local – and national–population was extraordinary. Volunteers worked tirelessly to sort through clothes and shoes but we had to turn donations away in the end, and it…

The back wall of my junior school class was decorated with world maps. They were torn at the edges and grubby with generations of little fingers tracing imaginary journeys but they felt solid; the bold lines that separated the countries looked like they had been chiselled deep. That was always a delusion. Today it is even harder to pretend that the world’s borders are locked in place. For many years I’ve been writing about ‘off-the-map’ and unruly places – places that escape the confines of ordinary cartography. It can be a frustrating business: every week the kaleidoscope shifts again. How does one draw a map of the borders that squirm around inside Syria, Libya or Ukraine? Often we just have to guess. There are all sorts of less well-known places…

The Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] was established in Montgomery, Alabama in 1971, and since then has traced and tracked Klan chapters, neo-Nazis, anti-government militias, white nationalists, black separatists, neo-Confederates, the list, sadly, goes on. In January 2016, The Big Issue reported on their work making information available to the public and law enforcement. Their aim is to fight hate, teach tolerance and seek justice – effectively trying to “sue hate groups out of existence”. At that time there were 784 groups on their books but today there are 917. When Trump was running for president, his divisive rhetoric legitimised extreme views. Now from the country’s highest office he is condoning – by failing to condemn – extremist groups and beliefs, as became clear from his remarks following recent events…

1. CARRIE Stephen King Proof that you needn’t sacrifice plot or pace for depth and humanity. No book since Lord of the Flies has examined child-on-child cruelty so devastatingly as King did with his debut. 2. ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE Benjamin Alire Sáenz  Truth, beauty and swimming lessons with two of the most endearing leads I can recall. Sweet but not saccharine; angry but not dull; a queer masterpiece addressing race, class, sexuality and gender. 3. THE SECRET DIARY OF ADRIAN MOLE AGED 13 AND 3/4 Sue Townsend The world is a lesser place without Townsend. Fortunately her brilliance will be devoured for centuries to come in the form of Mole, her gloriously idiotic savant. 4. THE GREAT GATSBY F Scott Fitzgerald What is adolescence…

“I love the magazine. I feel it is mine. The magazine embraces human souls” I was born and raised in Athens. My parents divorced when I was nine months old and I never saw my father. Our first meeting was at my 16th birthday, and our relationship lasted for only one year. He moved to Canada and since then I have no news of him. I graduated from high school and intended to study philology. I prepared all summer but then breast cancer hit me for the first time. I was only 21 years old. My universe was overthrown. I didn’t have courage to go on but I had to do something. I got a job in an advertising company, and over seven years got a very high salary but…

I’d like to big up and say a big ‘THANKS’ to Eddie who sells The Big Issue outside Liverpool Street Station. He’s there rain or shine, in his wheelchair and always ready for a friendly chat. This despite poor health, including a nasty leg ulcer, a recent stay in hospital after a collapse (reason undiagnosed) and being badly shaken up by vile verbal abuse and getting beaten by thugs on a bus while on his way home. I trust you (Big Issue staff and readers) appreciate the dedication shown by Eddie, and other vendors, in extremely trying circumstances. Please fellow readers who pass by Eddie’s patch, stop and give Eddie a hug, a kind word, a chat or just a smile, and let him know that he’s appreciated and far…

Show what you stand for without compromising style or comfort in these Stand4 Socks. ‘Not just another pair of socks’, their sale supports the UN Global Goal of Decent Work & Economic Growth by providing £1 micro-loans to small-scale farmers struggling in South America. Made from bamboo, the socks aren't only super soft but also ethically sourced and environmentally sound. Each design features a cause-related logo so that you can wear your issue on your ankle without having to stand out for the wrong reasons. Buy Stand 4 Socks at bigissueshop.com bigissueshop.com priced £11.99 (plus shipping) and spread the Social Echo with every purchase.…

“Perhaps we should see that some of the most important tasks on Earth are mundane and essential” On November 7 last year, I asked an oral question in the House of Lords about Japanese knotweed, a pernicious plant that upsets gardeners – and peers – big time. You have to ask a question in that part of the proceedings but most make a statement dressed up as a question. I asked Lord Gardiner, the minister, whether it was possible for Her Majesty’s Government to imitate the late Anita Roddick, who took a novel attitude towards cyclamen. The plant was blocking the water courses and streams of Nepal. And no one seemed energised to do anything about it. Anita wanted to turn a minus into a plus. So she got someone…

The prison system is in ‘meltdown’, with unrest and riots this summer the ugly face of a creaking system. Frances Crook of the Howard League for Penal Reform, who made the meltdown claim last week, added that signs of improvement are hard to find. It’s not just on the inside that the system is failing, recent figures show the majority of female offenders – a staggering 60 per cent – become homeless when they’re released. The same percentage of reoffenders said they wouldn’t have felt forced to commit other crimes had they found a suitable home of their own. “It’s just as one woman said to us, ‘without a roof over your head you haven’t got a hope’,” explains Jenny Earle, director of reducing women’s imprisonment at the Prison Reform…

PHOTOGRAPHY RINGING THE CHANGES The news that Big Ben’s bongs could be silenced for four years created peals of outrage but the sound of silence is one we should get more used to. This picture is of Whitechapel Bell Foundry in the Whitechapel Road premises it moved to after the Great Fire of London. Whitechapel Bell Foundry claims to be the oldest manufacturing company in the country, casting Big Ben and Liberty Bell. However, they closed their doors in May this year. This picture comes from Unseen London, which captures the hidden side of the capital.…

We take sound for granted in cities. There is so much you can explore if you walk around and listen. Composers and artists have long responded to the architecture of a city but, perhaps, in recent years, most music to be heard in a new building tends to be muzak. Musicity is definitely not about lift music! A piece of music can reshape the way you feel about a place and we’re inviting people to seek out all sorts of buildings, celebrated and obscure, in order to discover music attached to it. Musicity is a platform for the discovery of new music and architectural spaces. Alongside talks, walks and film screenings, I commissioned original pieces of music inspired by different locations, then once you go to that location, by using…