CEN Magazine Launch

Although this is the fifth issue, we are treating this special little riffle of joy you are holding in your hands as our launch issue. Hey, the Queen has two birthdays and no one complains (well, we complain but nobody listens) so we don’t care.

Before this point we have been making baby steps, but now we are making our first full stride into the cutthroat world of East London arts. We intend to take in the sights and settle in at a few places along the way, recording and bringing attention to the local semiotics – mindful, at all times, that we are just tourists and shouldn’t disrupt the anthropological balance of the natives. Either way the journey has begun.

There is an old fable in Indian folklore that concerns a merchant who resides in a coastal town. Now, this merchant had been cursed for a lack of devotion to a particularly warlike and greedy God, so that his trading ships would submerge within the waves each time they embarked. All his ships sank apart from one, the most humble of the fleet, which was left on the shore. The villagers, whose livelihoods were effected, rallied round the merchant and adorned the final vessel with their handiwork to make it look quite spiffy and, maybe, better than all that had gone before. The ship sailed, didn’t sink, end of story. We haven’t made this story up, despite the fact that the metaphor fits so completely (the ship is CEN magazine, the villagers are the East London arts folk – no clue about the merchant but you can’t have everything), and if you’re thinking we have made the story up – shame on you.

What we hope to offer you is unrivalled coverage of the East London creative scene (unrivalled in the sense of being the best but also in the sense that no one else is covering it), to import complementary articles from the arts world outside the East End, and to bring the artist closer to you. If we have any joy in this endeavour, it is because we speak directly with those who toil at the cultural coalface.

We welcome your thoughts on the magazine and we can be contacted at editor@cenuk.com but failing that, and bearing in mind that this is a launch issue, you might want to break a bottle of Champagne over it in celebration – but if that’s too rich for your taste and you can spill a pint over it, that’s okay too.