In this issue we celebrate London’s Underbelly, drawing your attention to the unseen, marginal places and people that exist alongside the wealth and prosperity.

This alternative, seedier world behind the glossy facia of the city has been brought to life by countless great authors – from Chaucer and Dickens to contemporary urban chroniclers such as Iain Sinclair, whose magnum opus Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire has just been published after many years’ gestation.

The real and the fantastical merge in Jonathan Pinnock’s story ‘The Birdman of Farringdon Road’ and Siddhartha Bose’s gruesome poem ‘Song’, whilst Guy Mankowski captures the pretention of the city’s indie elite in ‘The Insiders Party’.

Vanessa Woolf-Hoyle gets her archaeologist’s trowel (or is that scalpel) out to uncover the hidden history of Cross Bones Yard; and Salena Godden lifts us out of the underbelly – but only just – with her perfectly-pitched tale of love and loss in the city, ‘Oh, you should have been there’.