I live near the heath and regularly walk and run through it - would have loved it if there had been some pictures of it, or even a diagram/map or where it was or what it looked like!
Based on those pictures, the description in the article, and some local knowledge of the layout around there, I am guessing it was approximately in this area:
“Pipe gun” - what a bunch of bullshit. It’s a discarded length of plastic pipe with a bit of electrical tape on one end. It’s a piece of trash.
The “bullet” they claim that they found nearby (not pictured) could have been discarded years ago. I’m sure they never tried to date how long it was in the soil there.
Basically they needed to arrest someone to save face for all the billable hours racked up investigating a hole in the ground.
TFA is an amazing story and very well written. I hope the author gets some recognition or award for it. I only wish they pursued the false charges harder, because this man needs to be freed and someone should be fired. But in the end that’s not the point of the story—to clear Van Allen—but just another sorry consequence of homeless life.
Wow wow that guy should not be in jail. That is just PVC. Not only that it has 43mm stamped on it way to large to even use any conventional ammunition on it (way to large even for a 12 ga shotgun shell). Unless we are talking about grenades or a cannon, but the material would make it a suicide device.
Honestly, if he was hiding stuff by burying it in the ground it would have made more sense that it was used as a water tight storage container. It would keep the contents safe from moisture in the dirt.
What idiot officer or police force would consider that gun, this just leaves me baffled. Also how does the judge not see the insanity of the claim. Like even if the pipe was his there is no way that is an improvised gun.
I'd love to know the caliber of the bullet that was part of this, as I suspect they're a lot less common in London than in the USA. "Sure the bullet fits in the pipe, why it even fits in sideways!"
Edit: 43mm seems to be a very odd pipe size from a little digging. If it's that and measured based on the diameter, that would put a "bullet" around 1GA - a specialty shell used in mounted "punt guns" for commercial hunting more than 100 years ago.
That's what is stamped/printed on the pipe (in the images). Also punt guns would be mounted to a boat or use a the boat or earth as support for shooting them. A punt gun would also be loaded like muzzle loader. Here's video of someone loading a punt gun, and they are putting 1/4 pound of black powder in it. https://youtu.be/fg85k28b_dM
Putting the amount powder required to shoot the shot for a punt gun would just make the PVC a suicide device. So same result for anything that would fit in 43mm pvc like a grenade, mortar or cannon/artillery shell.
Edit:
Basically, my point is a punt gun never really had shells, they were muzzle loaders.
EDIT: disregard the comment and see btrettel's reply below.
-- Original comment: --
> Who builds a pipe gun out of a plastic pipe? It would just blow up in your hands.
Someone who's aware that when a metal pipe bursts, you get shrapnel.
The potato guns I've seen tend to be made from plastic pipes for that reason. PVC is surprisingly strong for these applications. As a teenager, I've built some solid rocket motors with a friend, and we've been using plastic pipes for the same reason.
> > Who builds a pipe gun out of a plastic pipe? It would just blow up in your hands.
> Someone who's aware that when a metal pipe bursts, you get shrapnel.
> The potato guns I've seen tend to be made from plastic pipes for that reason. PVC is surprisingly strong for these applications. As a teenager, I've built some solid rocket motors with a friend, and we've been using plastic pipes for the same reason.
Mechanical engineer with potato gun experience here. Your statements here are not just wrong, but dangerous. PVC pipe is discouraged for potato guns specifically because of shrapnel:
> One of the main disadvantages of PVC is that it becomes brittle in cold weather, which may lead to chamber failure, especially in pneumatic launchers. When PVC fails under pressure it breaks into sharp shards, which are propelled at high velocity. Because of this danger PVC pipe is not rated for use with pressurized gases, and the use in spudguns is to be regarded as outside of specifications. Shrapnel from failure of PVC can be fatal. The reason PVC does not shatter with water is that water is not compressible, so water stores very little energy. Air is compressible and stores lots of energy. As a result, pressure rated ABS pipe is a better choice for a spudgun, as it is rated for compressed air. You can find it online or at an industrial supply store. There have been reports of serious injury and death from exploding PVC pipe, even at low pressures. Alternative materials, such as ABS, copper, and steel are much better choices.
Potato guns are typically built from PVC pipe because PVC pipe is cheap, PVC pipe is readily available, and most people building potato guns don't know better. The more knowledgeable folks tend to avoid it in my experience. Metal pipe would absolutely be stronger at the typical thicknesses of plumbing pipes.
I didn't realize that, thank you. It seems I've been severely misinformed in the past about the dangers of different pipe materials for spud guns and rocket motors.
Unfortunately common practices in many hobbies are rather dangerous. I cringe when I see dangerous practices in hobbies I'm familiar with, and I freely admit that I've done the wrong thing before out of ignorance.
Another aspect of the problem is that while many people are diligent about using pressure-rated pipe, they accidentally end up using non-pressure-rated fittings. I myself have fallen into this trap before in some projects of mine, and I didn't recognize it until I started learning more about potato guns. When making a project like this I typically go for all metal construction when possible because the components are stronger and the pressure rating is usually easy to find. For plastic fittings you need to familiarize yourself with the various markings that indicate the fitting is pressure rated. And even then that doesn't tell you what the rating is. In my experience, the pressure rating of a fitting is always lower than that of the pipe the fitting attaches to.
When I was a kid we built tennis ball cannons out of soup cans duct taped together. You take off the top and bottom of 4 cans and smooth out the edges. In a fifth can you punch several holes in the top and one matchstick sized hole on the side. Duct tape them together with the hole can on the bottom. Then you push a tennis ball down the barrel, squeeze a few drops of lighter fluid in the hole, swirl it around a bit and hold a lighter up to the hole. Done right it will chuck a tennis ball a couple hundred yards. I guess it might explode and shred everybody nearby with sharp metal can fragments, but the whole thing is pretty low energy so probably not.
FWIW, the fittings I used in my teenage-years rockets were usually gypsum or plastic + lots of duct tape (for the rockets made from vitamin fizzle tablets containers); their pressure rating was "looks like it should survive the launch, but we'd better move back a couple meters and duck behind cover, just to be sure").
The PVC in the picture can't be a potato gun. They need a larger chamber behind the barrel for either hair spray or compressed air. This looks more like storage container to keep stuff dry from moisture in the soil.
Not only that the police claim it was a firearm because they found an old round of ammunition in the dirt. That pipe in the picture has 43 mm stamped on it for diameter. No small arm ammunition could even use that as a barrel. The only thing would fit in 43 mm tube would grenades, mortars, cannon or artillery shells.
This guy should not be in jail for firearm offenses and he really needs a better lawyer. The police are just being stupid here or just trying to save face.
We would spray axe body spray in the chamber, cap it, shove a Spud in the long barrel, and use a BBQ ignition wire to launch the potatoe hundreds of feet. One time the cops detained us but thank God we had a Physics AP book and explained we were learning about forces in motion etc. and got a warning. I imagine you would be facing serious time pulling a stunt like that today as a high schooler armed with a PVC spud canon in the suburbs...
Yes, looks like the spot just north of the East Heath Road car park. I vaguely recall it being cordoned off for a while, but assumed it must have been related to the Hampstead Heath Ponds Project or something like that. It's not unusual to see cordons around there. They even had the top of Parliament Hill fenced off a few weeks back for filming a scene in one of the new Marvel films. Just goes to show that there could be all sorts of things going on that locals don't know about.
That said, its hard not to notice the big increase in homeless there has been in London over the past 5-10 years. I don't think that is all due to rising house prices - there are other factors like the big sell off of social housing.
Anyway, the bunker sounds ingenious, but is nowhere as big as that of the Mole Man of Hackney[0].
That first link has a picture of the "gun", which appears to be a PVC pipe of the type used for a bathroom sink drain. It wouldn't hold water pressure, never mind an exploding bullet. And it's the wrong diameter for a gun barrel. I wonder if there is actually a metal pipe inside that (with the PVC for a nicer grip or something), or if this is another thing the police dramatically mischaracterized.
This seems to be just another story about the UK's dystopian legal system.
Unless some major details are being left out of this story the evidence behind his conviction seems ludicrously flimsy.
Firstly the assertion that the "gun" belonged to him, just because it was found near his shelter and had his DNA on it. That thing looks so unlike a gun that he could have easily brushed against it or picked it up and not even remembered, leaving some skin cells behind in the process. The fact that a person's DNA is found on objects in the vicinity of where they have been living doesn't seem particularly surprising.
Secondly, who gets to decide what a "firearm" is? All kinds of objects could potentially contain an explosion and fire a projectile.
I fail to see how a jury could possibly reach the standard of "beyond all reasonable doubt" in this case (unless, as I mentioned, some very important details have been left out).
Look at pictures the pipe has 43mm for diameter stamped on it. It' way too large even for a shotgun shell. This is the police just being idiots or saving face. This guy really needs a better lawyer. I am honestly amazed a judge would not even question it.
I bet it was just a container to keep stuff dry from the moisture in the dirt since it sounds like this guy hid stuff in the ground in caches.
I agree, it does seem like flimsy evidence against him. Was he dangerous in other ways? If the mayor of a town had something like that found around his farm where his dna was all around the farm, would he be given this sentence? Probably not. I think the us legal system is no better, by the way.
I imagine it'd be fine for a single use even holding the thing if it's a low-power bird-shot shell.
Frankly I'm surprised by all the comments here dismissing the practicality of the plastic pipe gun.
Sure, there's risk of it potentially failing, but the whole scenario is implicitly a pretty desperate situation where someone's constructing a single-use firearm on a budget near zero. Safety and reliability aren't going to be the top priorities.
It wouldn't surprise me if you were able to fire a smaller caliber slug from PVC simply by sizing the barrel larger than the slug so there's not a good seal containing the pressure. Sure you'll lose muzzle velocity and accuracy, but for an up-close weapon it can still be lethal while reducing the explosion risks.
Anyone who's played with class-c fireworks like mortars will know that even a thin cardboard tube can be both safe and reusable in launching loose-fitting projectiles with black powder. The powder I removed from .357 bullets and mortars as a pyromaniac kid was pretty damn similar, almost identical looking in grain size and flame speed when burned in open air.
The police found a piece of trash and called it a firearm to cover their asses after blowing a quarter million dollars (err, 100,000 pounds?) investigating a hole in the ground.
It should be incumbent on the police to prove that a person intended to build a firearm if they find a tubular piece of trash in the ground and want to put you in jail for 5 years.
The picture of the pipe is has 43mm stamped on it. A 12 ga slug is only like 18mm in diameter. That's so large that I would be amazed a 12 ga slug would even leave the the pipe in the manner you describe. Even if it did you could throw the slug farther and faster.
It was probably just a storage container to keep stuff dry from moisture since he seems like buried stuff in caches. It would also explain why both ends have threading.
This is just police being extremely stupid or saving face. This guy needs some better legal help there is no way that was a firearm.
"The picture of the pipe is has 43mm stamped on it."
Ah. Good catch. Yeah, that's really dumb to call it a gun then. Sort of makes you wonder about the other police claim of meth lab chemicals and equipment.
Yet they still jailed this poor guy. I amazed a judge, or jury member did not notice the insanity of the claim. The guy is homeless so not like he could afford a decent lawyer. He really needs legal help in my opinion.
I only saw one photo of the thing which didn't show any of the interior details at all.
I'm assuming the police at least scrutinized it enough to determine it was indeed an improvised gun, i.e. verified some kind of firing pin mechanism.
As for its diameter, I don't know why you're assuming there's not a coaxial arrangement going on here. Did you see photos showing details I didn't see? URL please if so.
Not being hugely familiar with London I recognised the name but I've never been to Hampstead Heath - it does have quite an extensive Wikipedia entry that makes it sound fascinating:
It's one of my favourite parts of London. Paid ridiculous amounts in rent years ago for a small flat just to live close and be able to enjoy it every day. It's not really a park, more like a forest inside the city, peppered with mansions on the edge, swimming ponds, and all sorts of secluded paths.
I'm glad they've kept it away from new development as it's one of the few places to truly escape the city without actually going away.
A homeless man I befriended to some extent once took me to a shelter in East London. It was scary how many people there were. I stuck out like a sore thumb, and felt I drowned in a sea of eyes alternately a million miles blank or like daggers. Perhaps a similarly welcoming feeling to admission to some prisons. My friend introduced a well kempt, multilingual man with an education, an admirable history and sincerity who had simply fallen off the society's radar. The most of them seemed to be just getting by on little more than hope and memory, they were not just the aged, the mentally ill, desperados and addicts. Without an address, it is hard to get back in to society. I learned more in that visit than I cared to about how globalized first world societies treat their poor. Really humbling. It shocked me.
The reference to the Great Escape seems most apt to me; this tiny underground wooden construction, ultimately doomed to discovery. But in his case he encounters the London anti-terrorism command rather than the Gestapo. And it's a form of escape, but from high property prices. Effectively tunneling into a society that doesn't want him. The mirror image of the mansion owners digging out another sub-basement for another swimming pool.
There are lots of weird illegal living situations in London; "beds in sheds", hugely overcrowded slum housing, illegal sublets. Talk of providing social housing, but what's there can sometimes also get illegally sublet: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/jailed-man-who-lived-...
I really admire this guy. His energy, his resilience, his improvisation. Had my life gone a bit differently, this could easily have been me. But I can't help but think: what could have he done with his smarts and his drive if he didn't have to spend every day on securing the very basics?
Not being chained to the day job to pay the mortgage to keep the roof over your head and the children's school fees paid is very liberating.
I have a proper house, yet once quit my job and went on a hike with just a handful of coins and a tshirt. That hike turned into a 3 month trip round Europe. My total earnings and expenses were probably sub-$10 per day, and I rarely had a bed for the night, yet my quality of life was arguably higher than my current 9-5, 6 figure job.
They might choose it for a little while. Eventually, the novelty wears off. As building the bunker shows, even this guy chose more stability. As he said, "I’m getting too old for breaking tents apart and shoving them under bushes."
The parent poster said "Many people choose to live like this." which is very different to claiming "that homeless people want to be homeless".
I'm friends with a homeless Australian Aboriginal lady and she chooses to remain homeless/jobless despite offers of help as it provides her with a level of control over her life (she had a violent past), but not for a second would I say all people in similar situations want the same thing.
The part that's hard to grasp by well-intentioned people is that you can't always help. Two truths, neither cancel out the other: [1] We need to invest in permanent shelters (i.e. homes) for the poor/homeless who want to pull themselves out from their misfortune and live a more normal life. [2] Homelessness is something we need to embrace by providing covered/sheltered well-lit public spaces where someone can set up a 0-day camp to safely rest without someone tapping them on the shoulder to ask if they're OK.
Two more truths: [1] Many homeless have mental health issues which, if treated, could help them live a better life. [2] Many homeless are mentally fine, in control, and your offers of help are somewhat patronising. They'd prefer a nice cold beer or bottle of red than your free pass to a hostel.
Presumably, a lot more. From the story, it seems his health condition was the main cause for the "downfall" and barely getting by. Sad, and not uncommon.
When I saw the title, I wondered how a survivalist story got to front page on HN.
Then I read it and saw it was really a story about high rents, and then of course it made sense.
My sense of where the highest rents are doesn't keep up with the times though. Tokyo became relatively inexpensive long before I figured it out. New York beat London at some point, and when Vancouver had overtaken San Francisco I was floored.
I spend about 70% of my time in Vancouver. My rented house there is half the size of my place in Austin and costs 3x as much. My wife and I joke occassionally that we could leave Van for almost any other place on earth - including Manhattan - and see our COL go down.
They don't even have the building restrictions that san fran does. They're building like crazy in that city and the price per square foot just keeps going up because it's in high demand.
High demand for a place to offshore money != high demand for a place to live. The former is why the price per sqm is high. The latter would communicate that a place is actually nice to live in.
Maybe it should when the very future of that market is decided by those factors. If people aren't going to be living or utilizing those spaces the market value and actual demand will continue to deviate until at some point where it crashes and fucks over the people living there. Meanwhile the foreign investors, who likely won't be hurt by losing a property they didn't even use, won't give two shits.
It doesn't, but the question is about whether or not one wants to live in a location - which is only one of many market forces at play in determining rent prices.
Oh we love it there. It just happens to be very expensive. Thankfully the favorable exchange rate at the moment helps with other COL expenses (groceries).
The bigger issue I see is the low quality police work.
Back "in the day" it wasn't uncommon for US police to frame random black guys for crimes in order to consider the crime solved. Sticking a homeless guy in prison over something that's a natural right in other parts of the world and in the presence of substantial doubt that it was even his (plausible other reasons for his DNA to be on the gun and no motive to have it in the first place) seems to be about the same level of quality.
The lack of proof that the gun was linked to him sounded quite alarming. What I suspect happened was like the #twitterjoketrial: once anti-terrorism police had got involved, it was impossible to de-escalate it and admit it was just a homeless guy and not a secret terrorist bunker.
(The setup is superficially very similar to "stay behind" operations, so I can sort of see how someone might have panicked)
It's basically "We don't know what this, so let's call it terrorism" - which apparently includes any form of social deviance or unsanctioned initiative.
fair point!! but in such detail-laden [long!] expository articles, i expect more than _suggestion_ around the central premise of this man's ultimate imprisonment for 5 years. no?
Anyone know if his appeal succeeded? It seems that most of the comments here are just whining about the writing or lack of photographs but how about a follow up about the man and his current situation?
He was only sentenced in August. I don't think his appeal has happened yet. Advice I found from a UK barristers chamber suggests that a simple appeal against the sentencing only typically takes about 5 months, but that appeals in general should be processed in less than about 10 months. I'm guessing he's appealing against the overall conviction, not just the sentence, and that this is likely to bring him closer to the 10 month mark.
He's eligible for parole early 2022 if his appeal fails.
Reminds me of my life. I live nowhere. At this very moment I'm acctually in a hotel room half a planet away from home and I have (extremely crappy, but still) internet and a roof. I also have money in my pocket but not enough to turn my life around. My credit is bust.
I have a job though, working for people who think I'm trustworthy enough to give me lots or responsibilities but I can't tell anyone about my situation because that would most likely break the bond of trust that we have. I'm abroad to help my company land a deal and to coach a team through the implementation phase. I'm very, very good at what I do. Better than most people I've met. But. I. Just. Can't. Turn. My. Life. Around.
I used to do drugs. I still do. But I used to, too. Not so much anymore, though. A joint now and then.
Not looking forward to going back to my "home" country. Being on a business trip is bliss. Just blissfull.
EDIT: In my mind I got here by following a dream. I followed it too far. Damn you HN. You keep inspiring me to try to do great things.
Thank you - I was thinking about The Machine Gunners when I read this, but couldn't remember the name of the book - some strong childhood memories associated with that story.
Also Mike Carey's "Felix Castor" series (urban fantasy which I highly recommend BTW). One of the characters is a giant spider who lives under Hampstead Heath. Maybe if I ever visit London I'll swing by there to see if I can figure out why it's such a common trope.
Am I the only one who dislikes this style of expository writing where the story line is non-linear and written with an excruciating abundance of adjectives?
No, definitely not, I think it's called narrative journalism [1] and I personally cannot stand it. My favourite is Colette's view on how to write a newspaper story (via Georges Simenon [2]):
> Just one piece of general advice from a writer has been very useful to me. It was from Colette. I was writing short stories for Le Matin, and Colette was literary editor at that time. I remember I gave her two short stories and she returned them and I tried again and tried again. Finally she said, “Look, it is too literary, always too literary.” So I followed her advice. It’s what I do when I write, the main job when I rewrite.
> INTERVIEWER: What do you cut out, certain kinds of words?
> Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.
This is called storytelling. It is one of the great gifts of being alive and human that we are able to create or enjoy a well told story.
While it’s not appropriate for every subject, or every hour of ones day, it is really a lovely thing and we should cherish those who expend the effort to create long and detailed narrative works.
If you’re not in the mood for a story of this kind and just want to know what happened, the headline is a pretty accurate summary.
No, it's not just "storytelling", and your answer is pretentious in the extreme, painting an aesthetic preference as some fundamental appreciation for human life, and the opposite by implication as crass.
Storytelling is about narrative. It's about conveying a sequence of ideas in such a way as to make an impression. One can achieve storytelling without an abundance of irrelevant details ("Sometimes a travelling circus unfolds itself on the hard-packed sand of the heath’s carpark" does nothing to further establish our sense of setting, nor to characterize anything at all) and just being over-dramatic (leading with an inset quote about little at all, but making sure to lead with the title 'Counter-Terrorism Command').
Just because it's storytelling doesn't mean it's /good/ storytelling. The whole thing stays just one shade shy of purple. That is annoying as hell for a lot of people, and not at all "a great gift of being alive" that is "a really lovely thing." On the contrary: that's something a lot of even-literary editors would take a hacksaw to.
Couldn’t agree more. Know someone in the art history field, and all their academic texts are insufferable. People aren’t trying to deliver a point in the simplest way possible, instead they engage in some sort of linguistic masturbation. Obscure words, lengthy sentences, intricate syntactic constructions, etc. I assume this is some sort of a signalling method: “You can barely understand what I am taking about, and you don’t know half of the words, so I must be smart and this text must be important.”
I think the main problem is not that it's told like a story, it's that it's told badly. The non-linear structure is incredibly confusing, you can absolutely tell the story chronologically and keep it interesting, but it's sort of in fashion to meander about the timeline without reason. I've found these types of stories much more engaging by simply skipping whole paragraphs that diverge from the main thread.
> it's sort of in fashion to meander about the timeline without reason
There is a reason. A modern paper wants articles that are long, with the meat of the matter spread out thoroughly throughout, because this maximizes the amount of ads you can fit in between paragraphs, and maximizes the chances a reader will view them.
In general: if you're wondering why some aspect of journalism is rotten, it's most likely because it needs to accommodate advertising.
Has it occurred to you that the reader might like something that is long, because they see reading content of this type as primarily a form of entertainment?
It's not like there's a prize at the end, or some secret promo code hidden within the words. It's created for the purpose of idle consumption.
Of course not. None of us is ever the only one. But it doesn't do much good to gripe about it, either. If you don't like it, don't finish reading it, and don't upvote the submission. That's sufficient. Complaining here, where authors almost never see it and would probably never care, is not a good use of your energy.
I've have never understood this attitude that shuts down all 'complaining', especially about things that are free.
Why not take the opportunity to have a discussion about the purposes of journalism, instead of complaining about the commenters complaining? I think the comment invites valuable discussion about this.
Exactly. I don't have a lot of interest in comments that boil down to, "This thing was not made for me and I'm upset!" People like different things. People like to make different things.
If somebody wants to start a discussion about narrative journalism's place in the world, fine. If they want to ask for a more condensed version of the story, also fine. Better still if they say, "I'm not a fan of narrative journalism, so I dug around and here are the 3 best traditional news stories I could find on the topic." But otherwise, I'm with the "I DON"T LIKE THING" angel: https://thefrogman.me/post/41542126320/by-jo-b-tumblr-for-we...
It would be nice if there was some author metadata in the page that you could hook an extension to in order to rate them. Keep from getting tricked in the future. Bore me once, shame on you, bore me twice, shame on me. haha
I'd say that usually the section of the title (newspaper, website, whatever) that produces a story is a better guide - usually, I'd water, writers write what editors ask for; when a writer can write many different forms of story filtering by writer seems less helpful.
It's honestly inpenetrable to me. I don't know if i have a cognitive issue going on or what but my ability to pay attention is diminishing rapidly and I can't even make it through the first paragraph. There's too many little whiskers in the words that trail my minds eye off in a direction and it doesn't come back.
Put down the phone, step away from the computer. Read some books. Meditate. Take a long walk in a park with your phone off. Your attention span will expand once you start using it.
(Or there could be something going on outside your brain - being sick, hungry, or thirsty can all lower your effective intelligence, so can lacking something important like vitamins or sunlight; I've been stupid in the past due to all of these myself.)
I think lack of sleep is the main contributing factor for me right now. Attention has always been challenging but it’s positively effervescent now...unless i get locked into something, then its time warp.
It's like New Yorker profiles and longforms, there is a well established structure to these kind of articles. I can't find it anymore but one time I think I had followed a link on HN to a page explaining this type of writing, it's much more structured than I would have thought.
You are not the only one. I generally despise it, as it often delays getting to points that could have been made as effectively but more succinctly. I think narrartive storytelling has its place, but it's way overused, and I see it in many articles that simply don't warrant it, like ones about current events. If the first paragraph starts out with some kind of "it was a dark and stormy night" narrative, my eyes just glaze over. I want to be informed, not read a novel. I only have so many hours out of my day to learn something, and I hate to have that time wasted by fluff.
I get that, and I don't necessarily hate it here. I just don't prefer it in general, and particularly hate it when the style ends up in articles that simply don't warrant it. The fact that the long read articles are often distributed as podcasts makes a lot of sense, now that you mention it.
Same here. This "it was a dark and stormy night" style is bad writing. I read a lot, I like reading novels. This is just an empty structure. In this particular case the bad writing almost killed an interesting subject.
This piece is almost a self-parody. Here's a quote:
Get him started on the subject, ale in hand at The Garden Gate, or on those rare occasions he called in to correct a glib host on talk radio, and Van Allen could go. “We’re an island of, what, 96,000 sq miles? Population that’s sky-high, growing, and the same number of houses we had 40 years ago. Too many people! Not enough houses! Me and most of my friends, we’re all in the same boat, long-termers, a community hundreds of thousands strong, not crashed in the gutter, people in paid employment, and all fucked – have been for years. It’s the way the legislation is … We didn’t choose this friggin’ path. This is the Housing Act of 1996 and every bullshit piece of legislation that’s been put in place since. It’s not our path. I fought it for years and then I threw in the towel. Said to myself: ‘Fuck it, I’m going camping.’”
This is like a McMansion hell of words.
I can't even capture it all with HN's markdown syntax. You have to look at the article. To see the real italics. To see the embedded link.
But you can see the wild flips in perspective, tense and syntax. You can see the nested quote marks at the end. You can see "sq miles".
Riddley Walker is easier to parse than this.
By contrast, I'm currently reading a book by Peter Hessler. He also practices non-linear storytelling. But his words are clear and carefully placed (or well edited). The narrative is not random. There is a continual sense that the reader's trust in the author will be rewarded.
I think you were making a joke, but in reality I probably could spend days reading the z80 CPU manual. I once requested the CPU manual for a Pentium from Intel and they sent me about 1200 pages in three volumes.
I like this one because I identify with the guy and happen to be in a mood to read a long thing today.
But in general I tend to agree with you. A lot of things that get posted on here come off as "hey look how many words I wrote", especially when I was just looking for distraction or a quick summary of something that sounded interesting. But that's what the comments are for I guess.
Indeed! I found myself just scanning the first sentence of each paragraph looking for details of a coherent story. 90% of the content of the article is just verbal fluff. Probably an interesting story in there, but too broken up and scattered.
A style we often see online in the form of many presses of the next button to get the next round of adverts.
Then not a single picture of this bunker with it ending with what I can only be described as some form of sadistic joke "Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread"
Overall, it would win a TL;DR award from me, I started reading it but equally found it so painful as yourself that I skimmed it after a couple of pages.
There are no pictures of it available. It was consider a crime scene and investigated by a counter-terrorism unit of the met after they found a gun there.
I don't know of any general provision in UK law preventing pictures of crime scenes from being published? Being designated a crime scene would make it hard from that point to get a picture, however.
Possibly for the counter-terrorism, though for the basic police, they are usually the first to post such pictures or videos - at least when no bodies in them.
Yes, two drunks illegally built a "dwelling" under a park, peed in bottles (which he emptied where?), ducked the police, stole construction materials, I guess I am just failing to see how this can be justified? Is it because he didn't want to spend money to room with someone (I'm assuming he would rather spend it in the bar).
He could have chosen a location where he wouldn't have been bothered, off in the woods, he could have used his travel card to get back and forth, but he didn't. He could have even done this somewhere he could have eventually won squatters rights for his dwelling. But he didn't.
So again, I was disappointed to read that is was just a story of a (somewhat) vagrant, "scaff monkey".
> Yes, two drunks illegally built a "dwelling" under a park, peed in bottles (which he emptied where?), ducked the police, stole construction materials, I guess I am just failing to see how this can be justified? Is it because he didn't want to spend money to room with someone (I'm assuming he would rather spend it in the bar).
Nothing in the article suggests they were drunks. The article suggests he spent time waiting in a pub for the heath to empty out and at one point mentions "his usual beer", not that he was a drunk. Nothing else in the description suggests any substance abuse problem. Given you describe the pub he used to wait in as "the bar" perhaps you're not from the UK and unfamiliar with UK pub culture, but it is not at all unusual for people to use a pub as their social meeting space and not go there to get drunk, or even drink much, if at all.
Nothing in the article suggests he stole construction materials. He was not charged with any thefts either. The other person worked as a labourer at a building site, so maybe he did, but then again they might also just have known where to get the supplies; you'll note at least one mention of spending money on some of the supplies. But again you're jumping to conclusions. It's possible they stole it, but the article does not provide evidence for that.
Nothing suggests he had sufficient income to make not rooming with someone in a proper flat a choice - this one is a particularly insidious "accusation" seeing as he 1) roomed with someone in his shelter, 2) invited others in when he came across someone that looked like they were in a bad place, so he clearly was not adverse to sharing.
You're inferring a whole lot of things that suggests you're intent to judge him from the outset. You might want to think about why you're so quick to jump to conclusions.
As to "how this can be justified", I'd ask another question: How can a society as rich as the UK justify underfunding social services so much that people like this are unable to afford housing or get social housing? Someone who does work, but is facing health issues limiting what he's been able to do. It's disgusting.
Personally to me, his situation would have justified some petty theft and the by accounts very limited vandalism given the care he appears to have taken to make his dwelling largely invisible, and his lack of access to housing.
You'll note this was also not what he was charged with or convicted for. He was convicted over circumstantial evidence he might have handled an improvised firearm. Now, if he did make that, and it was somehow intended for defense, then I would not have any sympathy for that, but the evidence does not appear particularly strong.
> He could have chosen a location where he wouldn't have been bothered, off in the woods, he could have used his travel card to get back and forth
And, where, pray tell, do you imagine would fit this description in London without doubling or tripling his monthly costs to get too and from the locations where he was able to find work? If you're about to suggest outside London, consider that the article sets out plenty of reason why so many homeless people stay in London: Access to other services. Access to work. Ability to fit in among the crowd.
> He could have even done this somewhere he could have eventually won squatters rights for his dwelling. But he didn't.
Did you miss the part where squats have become increasingly competitive and it became increasingly dicier for him? Did you miss the part where he had been squatting for years, but had to give it up when the law was tightened up significantly in 2011, and it became harder for him to keep up and secure his position in the dwindling number of squats?
In any case after squatters rights in the UK were gutted it is exceedingly rare for people to win rights to property this way, as it takes 10-12 years of continuous occupation and the means to prevent you from getting to that point are many.
> So again, I was disappointed to read that is was just a story of a (somewhat) vagrant, "scaff monkey".
I'm disappointed to see someone so lacking in empathy to dismiss a story like this the way you have in this comment.
There are a few pictures here:
- This one shows the entrance hatch http://camdennewjournal.com/article/homeless-man-living-on-h...
- https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/hampstead-heath-breaki...
- https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7265542/real-life-breaking-bad...
Based on those pictures, the description in the article, and some local knowledge of the layout around there, I am guessing it was approximately in this area:
- https://goo.gl/maps/FNxHU6MVZ2B9phkU7 or https://goo.gl/maps/hNwBfC1tcYGpeDzFA