Growing up in a city that was never there

Where hauntology may see the progressive mind mourning a future state that hasn’t come to pass and hiraeth feels loss for a place or time once known, sehnsucht and anemoia, represent something more tricksy, even dangerous, more like a desire for a version of the past that has slipped away, or never really existed at all.

(I don’t want to go to) #Midtown

Not far from where I work in Clerkenwell, a series of large orange and white flags fixed to lampposts line the major thoroughfares running through Holborn, Chancery Lane, Bloomsbury and St Giles. They state blithely that you are InMidtown, before in tiny print, grudgingly acknowledging the actual names of the places they are attempting to reinvent.