James Meek
speaker
486 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 15 Jun
James Meek’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
London Review Bookshop Podcast · James Meek & Lara Pawson: Your Life Without Me · 15 Jun 2026
podcast
If it was that, Wadley Road had taken a hammering.
This was a bomb that shattered and warped and dissolved solid structures and stripped small things of superfluous charm, leaving each object cheaper and meaner and more disposable than before.
Nobody could say when this bomb had begun to go off, or if it would ever stop exploding.
It had been exploding for years.
And because there was no sudden thunderclap and flash of light that tore everything down in an instant, and nobody could claim it made their ears ring or had given them concussion, they felt only a sinking of the heart and a sense of war being waged against them by a force that was just out of sight, of having their commonwealth taken apart piece by piece while their backs were turned.
As the bomb ignited and expanded, the local department store went dark.
Everyone who worked there disappeared, and everything inside it vanished.
It filled with dust, chipboard spread over its windows, and eventually the entire building disappeared, with a B&M retail shed stopping the gap, colours already fading.
The facades of a butcher's, a jeweller's, and a shoe shop were ripped away, and a cash converter's, a cash generator, and a branch of a pawnbroker's chain poked out.
A furniture showroom disintegrated, and all that was left was a Poundland.
A clothes shop crumbled in the incremental blast, leaving nothing behind but a branch of Sports Direct.
Crash!
A solicitor's office is blown away, and what lies on the site is not rubble, but XFC chicken and pizza.
Boom!
Gambling chains and charity shops peep out from the husk of the neo-Georgian post office.
And where the neo-Palladian branch of a bank stood, a different novelty bar selling sweets and fizzy booze to school leavers opens and closes every year.
No one screams when the bomb goes off.
No one sits stunned in the fresh debris with blood trickling down their dust-covered crown.
No one curses or cries, look out, because it's going off all the time, silently.
And if you dial 999 and tell them the high street is being destroyed, they ask what service you require, and you hang up.
Showing 101–120 of 486 · page 6 of 25
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