Free talk at 3pm
Writer and broadcaster Robert Elms discusses Tom Hunter’s film A Palace For Us with the artist.
For more than fifteen years Robert Elms has been known as ‘the voice of London’ because of his daily radio show on BBC London, covering all aspects of life in the metropolis, including his passion for great music. This multi-award winning show highlights his love of urban culture and is the culmination of 30 years in the media.
Born in the city in the sunny summer of 1959, educated at Orange Hill Grammar school and Queens Park Rangers football club, Elms progressed to the LSE where he studied ‘modern history and political thought’ and numerous night-clubs where he studied dressing up and falling over. A combination of these two led inexorably to a career as a writer.
The start of the 1980's also saw the start of The Face, the pioneering style magazine, where Elms instantly found a niche for his diatribes on the intricacies of young urban living and created a reputation as a controversial chronicler and style arbiter. Becoming an editor of The Face and the most recognisable of its writers in his early 20’s, he also contributed regularly to such magazines as Elle, US Vogue and Arena, as well as most of the prestigious British newspapers. He began broadcasting for the BBC, most notably as part of the team of Loose Ends, the award winning satirical radio show on Radio 4.
In 1986 he combined two ambitions by going to live in Spain, a land he has long been enamoured with, to write his first novel. After a year in Barcelona, In Search Of The Crack emerged to be published by Penguin books in both hard and paperback. He also began travel writing for the Sunday Times, who regularly print his portraits of places as diverse as Venice and Buenos Aires, Istanbul and New Orleans. He is now one of the Sunday Times' most valued travellers and regular contributors. Elms continued his obsession with Iberia by writing his second book Spain - A Portrait After The General which was nominated as travel book of the year in 1992.
Image from the archive of Kit Keatley used by Tom Hunter in the making of A Palace for Us 2010
