More about the event here:

In a season of ghosts I’ll be joined by professor Greg Leadbetter, who has published widely on the Romantics, to discus ‘Body 115’ after live-streaming the poem on 18 November…

Keats would spend his 25th birthday (31 October 1820) in quarantine, due to a cholera outbreak, aboard the Maria Crowther in the Bay of Naples having sailed from London a month earlier. He would die in Rome just four months later.

And from the rain-washed, subterranean underworld of King’s Cross, ‘Body 115’ emerges in this modern day homage to the ‘Divine Comedy’.

‘One hour of literary and poetic brilliance.’ ★★★★★

‘Body 115’ live-streamed over the usual channels. 18-11-25 →

bodyoneonefive.com/livestream/

King’s Cross (formerly Battle Bridge) was the also the site where Boudicca’s rebel army confronted the Roman garrison, setting Londinium ablaze and reducing it to ashes. Today, a rejuvenated gateway to Europe, its cafes, piazzas and boulevards mask a seedy and often squalid history.

On the 18th November 1987 a fire broke out in the Underground station at London’s King’s Cross claiming the lives of 31 people. One unidentified victim, burned beyond all recognition, was known, for over 20 years, as ‘Body 115’, the mortuary tag they were assigned.

Read more on Substack →

“From ‘Twist and Shout’ all the way through to ‘I’m Losing You’ you’ll hear that primitive yell. I have it in me today. I need to let it out. I need Lennon to show me how it’s done.”

From a consideration of John Lennon at 85

“It's the primal scream at the beginning of ‘Revolution’ that became Lennon’s corresponding signature… “

Tune in to hear my city lament 18 November at 19:30hrs. Signals sent out on all appropriate channels…

bodyoneonefive.com/18-november-...

It has since become a city of mirrors, of glass, of vacuity and self obsession…

The London I grew up in adjacency to was a grey and grubby, crumbling concrete monument to a post war optimism…

Sometimes, London, sometimes…

31 is a number of significance. My poem ‘Body 115’ is composed of 31 cantos, each of 31 lines, in commemoration of the 31 victims of the King’s Cross Fire, the backdrop to the work and on the anniversary we’ll be streaming the entire poem live. Skinhead Danny’s tuning in. Are you?