Behind the scenes: Where & When

by Stine Fantoft Berg in June 2016
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Last autumn, Les Jones, founder of Elsie magazine, announced a new concept: a magazine driven entirely by invitations from strangers.

In October last year he spent a week in London responding to invitations from anyone, anywhere in the city, and the first issue of the unconventional travel magazine Where & When is out now. We caught up with Les to learn about his experience creating the magazine, and what made him want to surrender so much control to strangers.

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You say in your editor’s letter that you hate planning. How does that combine with making magazine?
Yes, I’m not very good at visualising an end product – I prefer to start a ball rolling and see where it leads. Like Where & When, the way Elsie comes together is also a bit random. For example, the last issue took me all over Europe meeting the people behind stickers. I like working that way – not knowing where I’ll end up, who I’m going to meet, and what the final magazine will look like.

The idea for Where & When came partly from wanting to shorten the time period of gathering the content. The concept is that for each issue, I’ll go to a big city and spend one week responding to invitations from strangers. It’s all about getting under the surface of a city by meeting people who are just going about their daily lives, and hearing their stories.

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Did you see any unexpected themes emerge as the issue came together?
I used my own networks to get the word out, so the majority of the invitations came from people more or less creatively based – artists, craftsmen and performers. I was surprised to learn that there’s a big folk community in London.

But I also got invitations from further off the beaten track. Like the first person I met, Chris Warrell. He’s the founder of the South East London Meccano Club and invited me to their Annual Meccano Show. It was in a room in the back of a church and filled with older guys building Meccano models. I loved it!

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If you could pick one, which was your favourite encounter?
I absolutely loved meeting Phil Blackman, who’s a third generation shoe shop owner just off Brick Lane in East London. Phil was a real character, and a real Londoner as well. It’s an absolute throwback to the past, with shoes stacked from floor to ceiling and a continuous stream of cockney banter – Phil would abuse anyone and everyone who came in.

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Hearing you talk about Where & When, more than anything it sounds like a personal journey. What’s your most important reason for making magazines?
For the whole of my career I’ve done creative work, but it has always been for clients. I always have so many ideas, and it got to a point where I thought that if I’m ever going to make any of it happen, I’ve got to get started!

So I deliberately set out to explore the ideas without any commercial driver. Elsie and Where & When are purely an expression of what I want to do – and to me, that’s the real satisfaction. I produce them, but I don’t print thousands of them. The very fact that just a few people buy them… I can’t tell you how big a rush that is!

I’ve got lots and lots of ideas for different magazines, so I’ve told myself that it doesn’t matter if I only produce one issue of Where & When. As long as I have a good time making it, that’s the most important thing. That said, I do plan on making more issues – I’d love to make one from New York. But it’s hard work!

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Yes, I’m sure. It’s one thing to go out meeting people, but then you’ve got to put it all together. How do you find that part of the job?
The first thing I did after gathering the content was to start playing with the graphics and layouts, which I enjoy. And then you have the really mundane bits, like transcribing interviews. But this is a one-man magazine, so there’s no other way around it than to sit down and do it.

One of the things I find challenging is reaching a point where I’m content. You have to be your own harshest critic, and I’d go through periods of questioning whether what I’m doing is interesting, or if it’s just self-indulgent. There were times when I thought I’d never get to the end of it, but bit by bit it came together. And it was a lovely project. I really enjoyed spending a whole week with strangers who were all such nice people.

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