Today we're pleased to welcome Luke Honey to the Dabbler. You can find Luke writing about food, drink and the finer things in life over at his blog The Greasy Spoon. We start by revisiting a west london institution redolent of the swinging sixties... Hands up who remembers The Gasworks?  Twenty ... Read More...

When he saw the title of a Dabbler post earlier this week, Frank Key found himself whisked back into the past... They were just three words, but when I read them on Monday, a childhood memory came flooding back in vivid detail. Sandcastle And Robot, wrote Daniel Kalder... sandcastle and robot... ... Read More...

Mr Slang searches for love, and finds only sex and drugs... I tried to write a musical once. No, you shouldn’t laugh, really. I had lunched well,  couldn’t face the database and it served to counterfeit work. It was called – goodness, how did you guess – Slang! I forget the plot ... Read More...

Congratulations to our two lucky winners of this excellent prize... Picador reaches its 40th anniversary this year, and to mark it they’re reissuing 12 of their most celebrated novels in a very cool new black-and-white cover design. We had two full sets to give away, each worth just shy of £100, and winners ... Read More...

Nige debunks the English myth of the wild wood... I am, as readers of my blog will have noticed, a lover of woodland - but I really couldn't see what last year's fuss about the proposed sale of Forestry Commission land was all about [Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, called it "an unforgivable act of ... Read More...

Do innards, entrails and other wobbly bits still have a place in the kitchen? Jassy Davis thinks so and starts our series of offal recipes with a dish of baked livers and mash... Offal isn’t everybody’s bucket of entrails. Some people’s eyes light up at the prospect of piling their plate ... Read More...

In this week's bulletin from Norbiton, Toby Ferris considers the remarkable Linear City of town planning visionary Arturo Soria y Mata... Town planning is predominantly a literary form. The boiling visions of the great city planners remain for the most part locked on the page, quaint and harmless. Writing, insofar as it ... Read More...

Bryan ponders a 'troubling dream' of a photograph... This is William Henry Fox Talbot’s Nelson’s Column under Construction, Trafalgar Square, April 1844.  It is a photograph that has haunted me for some time. The Met’s commentary says it ‘marks the beginning of a new, photographic way of seeing’ which, I think, is ... Read More...

To mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth, we're serialising The Pickwick Papers... Thanks to our friends at Naxos Audiobooks, we're exclusively serialising their abridged version of what is perhaps Dickens’ funniest work, The Pickwick Papers, read by Anton Lesser. Chapters 7 and 8 can be heard below. You can catch ... Read More...

Here's the first of a pair of posts on what is now an established and popular format: comics for grown-ups. The other day I was watching a Channel 4 news segment about the now ubiquitous “occupy” facemasks, in which they dragged around the aged hippy & magician Alan Moore, introducing him ... Read More...