Behind the scenes: Where & When

Last autumn, Les Jones, founder of Elsie magazine, announced a new concept: a magazine driven entirely by invitations from strangers.

In October last year he spent a week in London responding to invitations from anyone, anywhere in the city, and the first issue of the unconventional travel magazine Where & When is out now. We caught up with Les to learn about his experience creating the magazine, and what made him want to surrender so much control to strangers.

You say in your editor’s letter that you hate planning. How does that combine with making magazine?
Yes, I’m not very good at visualising an end product – I prefer to start a ball rolling and see where it leads. Like Where & When, the way Elsie comes together is also a bit random. For example, the last issue took me all over Europe meeting the people behind stickers. I like working that way – not knowing where I’ll end up, who I’m going to meet, and what the final magazine will look like.

The idea for Where & When came partly from wanting to shorten the time period of gathering the content. The concept is that for each issue, I’ll go to a big city and spend one week responding to invitations from strangers. It’s all about getting under the surface of a city by meeting people who are just going about their daily lives, and hearing their stories.

Did you see any unexpected themes emerge as the issue came together?
I used my own networks to get the word out, so the majority of the invitations came from people more or less creatively based – artists, craftsmen and performers. I was surprised to learn that there’s a big folk community in London.

But I also got invitations from further off the beaten track. Like the first person I met, Chris Warrell. He’s the founder of the South East London Meccano Club and invited me to their Annual Meccano Show. It was in a room in the back of a church and filled with older guys building Meccano models. I loved it!

If you could pick one, which was your favourite encounter?
I absolutely loved meeting Phil Blackman, who’s a third generation shoe shop owner just off Brick Lane in East London. Phil was a real character, and a real Londoner as well. It’s an absolute throwback to the past, with shoes stacked from floor to ceiling and a continuous stream of cockney banter – Phil would abuse anyone and everyone who came in.

Hearing you talk about Where & When, more than anything it sounds like a personal journey. What’s your most important reason for making magazines?
For the whole of my career I’ve done creative work, but it has always been for clients. I always have so many ideas, and it got to a point where I thought that if I’m ever going to make any of it happen, I’ve got to get started!

So I deliberately set out to explore the ideas without any commercial driver. Elsie and Where & When are purely an expression of what I want to do – and to me, that’s the real satisfaction. I produce them, but I don’t print thousands of them. The very fact that just a few people buy them… I can’t tell you how big a rush that is!

I’ve got lots and lots of ideas for different magazines, so I’ve told myself that it doesn’t matter if I only produce one issue of Where & When. As long as I have a good time making it, that’s the most important thing. That said, I do plan on making more issues – I’d love to make one from New York. But it’s hard work!

Yes, I’m sure. It’s one thing to go out meeting people, but then you’ve got to put it all together. How do you find that part of the job?
The first thing I did after gathering the content was to start playing with the graphics and layouts, which I enjoy. And then you have the really mundane bits, like transcribing interviews. But this is a one-man magazine, so there’s no other way around it than to sit down and do it.

One of the things I find challenging is reaching a point where I’m content. You have to be your own harshest critic, and I’d go through periods of questioning whether what I’m doing is interesting, or if it’s just self-indulgent. There were times when I thought I’d never get to the end of it, but bit by bit it came together. And it was a lovely project. I really enjoyed spending a whole week with strangers who were all such nice people.

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