The June 2021 issue of The Richmond Magazine gets readers ready for summer with a massive feature on Kew Music Festival.
Editor's Letter
IF A WEEK is a long time in politics, then a year is a veritable eternity.
Strange to recall that it was little more than 12 months ago that the Coalition burst upon the early summer scene, its architects wandering happily in the Downing Street rose garden, nostrils filled with the sweet scent of hope.
As Wordsworth might have put it: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be a Lib Dem minister – plucked from obscurity and given a darned good job with a car – was very heaven.”
How different it all seems now.
The weeks of squabbling over voting reform – AV or not AV – have created a sea of troubles for the Coalition.
And while no participants in the project talk openly of bringing it to an end – opposition, after all, is a country from whose bourn few Liberals return – there is no doubt that the hue of resolution so prominent in the early days has been sicklied o’er with a paler cast of thought.
I mention all this because, in a curious sense, The Richmond Magazine is a coalition too. As with Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, writers, designers and advertising executives come from different traditions and engage with different concerns: the demands of revenue, narrative and aesthetic appeal don’t always neatly coincide.
Yet for all that, the overall aim is shared: to create as good a product as the inevitable limitations of talent, time and circumstance will allow.
Again, we are much like the Coalition Government: different groups brought together by the need to wipe out the deficit in quality local publishing that existed here before we arrived, created by those magazines that now form our disreputable opposition.
To which end, we’ve been taking a serious look at our design.
Observant readers – like the ones who spotted an erroneous apostrophe in an advert last month, and who relished the irony of the fact that false apostrophes were the subject of my blog – will notice certain adjustments in typeface, print ranging, point size and other similarly sexy minutiae of production.
Let us know what you think. I can’t promise a referendum on the changes – such are the compromises of coalition that not even my Editor’s writ runs unchallenged – but when it comes to local publishing, you can bet your life that The Richmond Magazine will always be first past the post.
