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Underground
London below street level: trains, tunnels, hidden routes, public movement and the lives carried beneath the city.
Enter the issue
World Series 2026 · London
London
Future Archives
A reading route through London as it appears in fiction, poetry, performance and memory: underground lines, church halls, small rooms, public records, private grief, music, migration, libraries, inheritance and speech.
London is not one story. It is a pressure of voices, rooms, routes, losses and returns.
Voice · Performance · Recording
Where the page becomes voice.
Some pieces in the archive are not only read. They are heard, watched, performed, remembered in cadence. These recordings keep the live pressure of the work intact.
GP
Video
George the Poet on LitroTV
Poetry, music, public speech and the London spoken-word circuit at the point where literature moves into performance.
Open video Read interviewFM
Video
LitroTV meets Femi Martin
Flash fiction with the rhythm and force of performance poetry: energetic, honest storytelling from the live London circuit.
Open videoLL
Audio
For Dad, If You Could See the State I’m In
A son addressing a father who can no longer hear him. Grief becomes a city of familiar routes that can no longer be followed.
Listen now
Stillness · Solitude · Attention
>Stillness and attention.
Short recordings from the Covid years: writers on stillness, solitude and paying attention while the world had slowed down.
Pico Iyer — Solitude, Stillness, Attention
Pico Iyer on solitude, stillness and attention, recorded for Litro during the Covid years.
A bridge from London into Japan, global memory and post-Covid reflection.
LA Marks — Contributor Trace
A short recording with LA Marks from Litro’s video archive.
Brief, direct and part of the wider record of writers Litro filmed during this period.
Reading trails
Follow one thread, then another.
Start with a thread — sound, faith, belonging, libraries, print, performance — and follow it through the archive.
01
Beneath the City
Tunnels, trains, hidden movement and the lives carried below the surface.
Zephaniah · Litro #74 · underground London
02
London Sound
Garage, spoken word, pirate radio, performance and memory carried by voice.
Chingonyi · Caleb Femi · George the Poet · Femi Martin
03
Faith, Youth, Diaspora
Church, Peckham, Nigerian-British speech, humour, desire and inheritance.
Caleb Femi · Literary Highlife
04
Belonging Under Pressure
Citizenship, migration, state language, legal process and the performance of Britishness.
“The Knock” · “Make Me British” · Rankine
05
Libraries and Loss
Bookshops, public memory, civic space and the cost of cultural disappearance.
Jamie Ogden · print archive
06
Writers in the Archive
Writers caught in the archive before the wider literary world fully claimed them.
Doerr · Alderman · Wigfall · Chingonyi
07
Stillness and Attention
Pandemic-era thought, solitude, place and the work of looking closely.
Pico Iyer · LA Marks · Litro video
Poetry · London Sound
Self-Portrait as a Garage Emcee
Kayo Chingonyi
A poem that listens to London as much as it describes it. UK garage becomes a way of remembering place, class, youth, movement and selfhood.
The poem belongs here because it understands that a city is also made from sound: stations, slang, basslines, rooms, loops and voices.
Read the poem
Reading note
London is not only built. It is mixed, sampled, repeated, misheard, shouted over and carried home.
London Sound
Peckham · Faith · Diaspora
Whilst the pastor preached about hell, his son was texting girls
Caleb Femi · Litro #162: Literary Highlife
A poem alive to the comedy and pressure of inheritance: church, youth, desire, Nigerian-British speech and South London rendered without flattening.
This is London as voice, not postcard. The poem holds faith and mischief in the same breath.
Read the poem
Reading note
The city enters through speech: what is said, what is hidden, what is overheard, what survives inside a joke.
Peckham · Future Archives
New writing · Witness
The Knock
Anonymous · 7 min read
A woman at her rowing machine. Half past seven. A measured knock at the door. Plain-clothes officers enter the house with the calm of people who know the procedure.
The story belongs in this edition because it understands the terror of record-making: the moment a private life is translated into process.
Read “The Knock”Content note: domestic abuse and legal process. Published anonymously at the author’s request.
From the piece
“Just a knock — measured, certain — a sound that seemed to pause the morning.”
“The Knock” · AnonymousWho gets to belong?
Citizenship · migration · languageFiction · Britishness
Make Me British
Rhys Timson
Aylan can juggle. For the third stage of the process, a story alone will not do. Britishness becomes audition, spectacle and test.
First published in Litro #150: Britishness.
Read the storyInterview · Citizenhood
The Public Life of Private Encounters
Claudia Rankine
A conversation on racism, language, attention and the ordinary encounters through which a culture reveals itself.
A necessary companion to the issue’s questions of speech, power and belonging.
Read interview
Libraries · Loss · Public memory
The Last Man in England
Jamie Ogden · 2022
A near-future London has defunded its arts colleges, galleries, music venues, theatres, record stores, bookshops and libraries. Joseph Hellman, a Black bookseller on Rupert Street, takes the bus to work on the coldest day of the year.
The story asks what remains of a city when the places that hold its memory are allowed to disappear.
Read the story
Reading note
A library is never only a room of books. It is shelter, access, memory, proof that public life once mattered.
Libraries · Future ArchivesWriters in the archive
Fiction · Reputation · Early tracesFiction
Trees
Anthony Doerr
A marker of the archive’s long memory: the presence of a writer whose later work would travel far beyond the magazine page.
Part of Litro’s wider record of fiction before and beyond reputation.
Open archiveFiction · Litro #98
I Love You Crazy
Naomi Alderman
A story of money, desire and instability, held in the archive before wider acclaim made the name familiar.
A reminder that the archive is also a record of early attention.
Open archiveEast London · Fiction
The Party’s Just Getting Started
Clare Wigfall
East London, fiction and the short-story form meeting in a writer whose work understands atmosphere without wasting a sentence.
A bridge between the London print archive and the wider literary shelf.
Read related interviewConversations on writing and memory
Process · form · world literatureInterview · The creative process
Geoff Dyer, Lydia Davis, Jonathan Safran Foer
Litro conversation
Three writers thinking through making, digression, fiction, value and the strange routes by which a mind finds form.
A conversation for readers interested in the work behind the work.
Read conversationWorld archive · Diaspora
India, Nation, Memory
Shashi Tharoor · Aatish Taseer · Abraham Verghese · Shehan Karunatilaka
A wider shelf of nation, memory, migration, inheritance and empire — the world archive that London cannot be separated from.
The London edition opens outward: to diaspora, history, return and aftermath.
Enter issue
Print archive
London, in print
Between 2008 and 2011, Litro published four print issues devoted to London. They remain part of the magazine’s physical memory: commissioned artwork, city writing, neighbourhood attention and writers looking closely at the city before the next decade remade it again.
2008#74
Print issue · Collectors’ edition
Underground
Tom Lynham, Benjamin Zephaniah, Robert Finn · 2008
Benjamin Zephaniah leads an issue on the Tube, tunnels and the subterranean cultures that carry London below the street.
£20 print edition
Own this issue
Limited stock
2010#95
Print issue · Collectors’ edition
North London
Carl-Henrik Björck, Ben Fergusson, Jonathan Pinnock, Paul Lyalls, Laura Solomon, Vanessa Woolf-Hoyle
North London as mood, geography and argument — Muswell Hill, Stoke Newington, Archway and the city’s edge.
£20 print edition
Own this issue
Limited stock
2010#97
Print issue · Collectors’ edition
East London
Louise Stern, Sammy Wright, Siân Melangell Dafydd, Jackson Martin, Clare Wigfall · Photography: Jon Cartwright
East London before the next wave of change hardened into myth: streets, photography, fiction and disappearance.
£20 print edition
Own this issue
Limited stock
2011#100
Print issue · Milestone
South London
Ralph Williams, Rob Ganley, Miriam Burke, Malcolm Gluck, Neil Baker · Artwork: Stephen Farling
Litro’s hundredth issue: South London as subject, not backdrop — Peckham, Brixton, New Cross, Plumstead.
£20 print edition
Own this issue
#100 milestone edition
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Digital edition
London: Future Archives
A curated reading edition bringing together fiction, poetry, interviews, video, audio and print memory from Litro’s London archive.
£7.99 digital edition
Includes the London edition and access to future World Series releases.