John Harris

For 15 months the author walked around London, telling the story of its streets, speaking to living statues, sex workers, drug dealers, security guards, cleaners and those who sleep out every night
On a damp Tuesday lunchtime at the north end of Regent Street, George is working his beat as one of one of London’s Big Issue sellers. I have not come to interview him, but his experience is so relevant to what I will…

Labour problems may be an early sign of inevitable economic readjustments around the world following the pandemic
Jamie Rogers is a former semi-finalist in the BBC’s Masterchef: The Professionals, and the founder of an award-winning restaurant called Twenty Seven, located in the south Devon town of Kingsbridge. As it reopened for business after the recent lockdown, a handful of staff handed in their notice. As he told me last week, he then began to…

Instead of paying musicians properly, the likes of Spotify have set up ‘donation’ buttons – thus passing the buck to fans
Just over a year ago, the music streaming giant Spotify announced a new addition to its services: an innovation called Artist Fundraising Pick, which would allow people to send musicians the online equivalent of a tip. The move came just as controversy began to snowball about the often pitiful returns from streaming, something…

As he has aged and changed, so have his songs, but the essentials remain: honesty, wisdom and hope in the face of despair
When I first properly listened to Bob Dylan, I was 10 years old. Each Saturday, Radio 1 aired a series titled 25 Years of Rock, based on news and music spanning the years 1955 to 1979. And that week, in among archive clips of Lyndon Johnson, Harold Wilson, the Vietnam war…

The pandemic has accelerated the movement of people, creating clusters of like-minded, homogenous communities
London is changing, and so is the south of England. Whether recent predictions of a lasting drop in the capital’s population and emptied-out office districts will come true is still unclear. But something has definitely been happening, for the best part of a year: thanks to Covid and its disruptions, a sizeable number of people are deciding to leave the…