Wembley Speaks is a criss between oral history and grassroots sociology: an authentic picture of a London suburb built on what its residents have said to each other in spontaneous comments about the issues that concern them. Wembley Speaks is a new type of grassroots sociology. Based entirely on postings on Nextdoor, the hyper-local community app, over the course of one calendar year, the book offers a twenty-first-century equivalent of Henry Mathew's groundbreaking study, London Labour and the London Poor (1851). For the first time in print, the reader is able to gain a fascinating insight into what matters to people, what triggers their attitudes and emotions, how they engage with each other, how they support and challenge each other, how they use language, what they find funny and even how they think. The community under observation - Wembley, in north-west London - happens to house England's national football stadium, but is also a very typical suburb, ethnically diverse, with stresses and strengths that this book fully reveals. AUTHOR: Stephen Games is the founder and publisher of EnvelopeBooks. His interest in how people and places work goes back to his earlier career as a writer and lecturer on architecture when he was the architecture critic of The Guardian, a documentary maker for the BBC, and the first architectural specialist to be recognised in the British Press Awards. He has published four books on the German architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the subject of his doctorate, and on John Betjeman, and has written about the need for a new British capital city to be sited in the North of England.
