STAT16/17


Design & editorial work. Book-binding. For STAT - ISSUE 16/17. January 2026.


Includes: The Man Who Built an Aeroplane; Lem; Blood, Sweat & Black Pudding; The Life and Times of a Bickershaw Park Ranger; Blow Jobs, Bust-ups & Berghain; Who Were The Economic League?; The Scouse Stone Skimmers of Sefton Park; The Indigent; An Assessment of the Arts Fair; A Stopfordian Sing-Song; The Foul-Mouthed Clickbait of Clitheroe Fucking Market. PLUS reviews of music, film, literature and video games.

Featuring work by: Edie Barnabas, Olivia Bernstein, Tom Branfoot, Davey Brett, Becky Brookfield, Joseph Conway, Mark Cunliffe, Rhys Delany, Sue Denim, Sam Fairbrother, Hayley Flynn, Cath Garvey, Dex Chait Grodner, Ted Richards, Hayley Scott, Connor Seed, Georgina Tyson, Phoebe Verity, Kayla Victoria.

One of 200 limited, numbered copies.

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Editorial

The issue you’re currently holding was printed in a five-storey former cotton mill in Leigh, Lancashire. A short walk from the mill, in the Liverpool direction of the Leeds–Liverpool canal, is Pennington Flash.

Flashes, unlike their naturally occurring watery relatives, are man-made accidents. They’re created suddenly and unintentionally, the result of flash floods in collapsed coal mines. Pennington Flash is just one of eight across Wigan and Leigh. Lakes that weren’t meant to be; ghosts of Lancashire’s industrial past.

Much of my life has been spent on walks around the flash, returning to its winding paths and hordes of geese. I’d trace bridleways that were once trainlines, meander through the adjacent new build estates that were once coal board headquarters. All evidence of the region’s industrial and social fabric has been slowly chipped away, and yet the flash remains.

Born not of a reactionary reversion to mythologised pastures, the flash has cemented itself as an immovable feature of the landscape. No testament to extractive practices or fetishised labour, but as something new and distinct, chaotic even. Something new made out of the old, something beautiful made in spite of history, and with thanks to it. We need more flashes.

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