The idea became a guide to London. But not the London on the tourist maps, the other one. The seedy, conspiratorial, slang-ridden city that existed after dark and off the record. A handbook of attractions the tour buses would never show you.
To write it, I needed to know it. So I found a friend of a friend. A man with an intimate knowledge of London’s less visible economies, someone who’d spent years putting cards up for working girls in phone boxes across the city. He took me out. A few nights, a few drinking dens, introductions to people who had no reason to be careful with their words. I took notes.
That research is what gave the copy its voice. It didn’t sound like advertising because it wasn’t written like advertising. It was written like someone was telling you something they probably shouldn’t.
Designed in stark black and white by Frost Design, the guide covered everything from where to buy counterfeit goods to the going rates for various other London services. Conspiratorial. Frank. Deliberately shocking.
250,000 copies were given away with Base products. The campaign ran across the Tube, 48 sheets and bus-sides. Sales rose 111% in the following year.
Then it was banned under the Censorship of Publications Act. Which, in hindsight, was the best thing that could have happened to it.
It also made the D&AD Annual. But the ban? We were prouder of that.
