Independent magazine show at St Brides

On Thursday 5 February we hosted an independent magazine show at the St Bride Foundation. You can see videos of individual readings on YouTube, but I wanted to have the whole thing in one place, so now you can listen to the entire show in its original order via the podcast episode above.

It was the second of our independent magazine nights, where we invite a group of publishers to each have two of their writers read stories from recent issues. The first show took place last summer in the basement of a pub in Shoreditch, and it was brilliant. I wanted to do it again straight away, but I also wanted the next show to be a step up. (I loved doing the first one in the pub, but lots of people in the audience had to sit on the floor, and there was a noisy fridge behind the bar that kept clicking on and off.)

So I was delighted when the St Bride Foundation agreed to include us in their public programme, which meant we could hold the event in their big, beautiful hall. (And everyone had seats.) But while the setting changed, the idea remained the same – we wanted to create a sort of live performance version of the magazines, giving people a taste of what the publications are all about, and in the episode above you’ll hear readers from The Fence, Die Quieter Please, Dispatch and Piscine.

I’m really pleased that we were able to film the event, which means the stories can live on beyond the night itself. I’d like to say a big thanks to Simon from Crowdfinder Video for supporting us with his video skills. And of course thanks very much to everyone at St Brides, who agreed to step slightly outside their normal programming to include our selection of magazines. But the biggest thanks go to all the publishers and writers who came along and made it such a great night. The stories were superb, and after we’d packed everything up at the end of the event we went around the corner to The Crown and Sugarloaf and took over the little pub just off Fleet Street.

I hope you’ll enjoy this recording of the independent magazine show itself. It’s a little different from our normal podcast episodes, which usually include interviews with independent magazine makers speaking about what they do. So if you’d like to hear that sort of thing, please follow us on Spotify or YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and we’ll be able to deliver all our new episodes to you as soon as they’re ready.