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https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/jan/23/nicholas-saunders-forgotten-genius-changed-british-food>
"If you were a young person living in London in the early 1970s and you were
looking for a bargain, the word of Nicholas Saunders was something close to
holy scripture. Whatever you sought, Saunders had the answer. If you wanted to
start an anarchist squat or self-publish a Trotskyist pamphlet, you consulted
Nicholas Saunders. If you wanted to know how much a gram of cocaine should
cost, or where to get free legal advice if you were arrested, you consulted
Nicholas Saunders. If you just wanted to find out how to unblock a drain
without calling a plumber, which supermarkets were cheaper for which goods, or
how to fly all the way to India on a ticket to Frankfurt, you consulted
Nicholas Saunders.
A tall young man with a wild beard that gave him the look of a shaman, Saunders
was obsessed with documenting how the new global counterculture was changing
the ancient city around him. In 1970, at the age of 32, he self-published his
findings in a slim but dense guidebook called
Alternative London. The book
was testament to Saunders’ belief that information should be made available to
all, and that this information should be rigorously tested. For the section on
abortions, Saunders had a friend phone up each provider in the city, in the
process uncovering a London-wide scam of clinics that marketed themselves as
“cheap” but in reality were charging over double the non-profit rate. By 1974,
Alternative London and its subsequent revised editions had sold close to
200,000 copies and become an underground bible."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
