The Big Issue

The Big Issue is a UK-based street paper that supports the homeless, the vulnerably housed asnd those seeking to escape poverty. Vendors normally buy the magazine for £1.25 and sell to the public for £2.50. We are using Zinio digital editions to create additonal revenue opportunities to fund our street-based and pastoral care services for our vendors. We are a social enterprise company and all revenues go to support the vulnerable communities we serve. Our goal is to move our vendors away from dependency and towards full time employment

Dee-lightful design

THE DISPATCH • News, views & miscellany

Winners with plenty to smile about

The Big Issue

EDITOR’S LETTER • We need relatable joy, wherever we find it

BIRD’S WORDS • Time to fight the modern scourge of loneliness

LETTERS

‘A TOWN OR A CITY WITHOUT ART AND CULTURE IS LIKE A ROOM WITHOUT WINDOWS. NO LIGHT GETS IN’ • This Town creator Steven Knight, music makers Kae Tempest and Dan Carey and actor Eve Austin introduce BBC One’s ambitious new series about a band coming together against a backdrop of social unrest in the West Midlands in the early 1980s

ARTS FUNDING CUTS MAKE US ALL POORER

Mhairi Black talks to Big Issue • ‘There should be much more urgency about trying to change the direction Britain’s going’

The parliament of change

‘WITH POOR SIGHT YOU CAN FEEL INTENSELY VULNERABLE’ • Life on the streets is dangerous – and much more so for people with poor eyesight. Big Issue vendor Jack Osborne-Richardson tells us how getting proper eye care and glasses through our Specsavers partnership has been transformational

NISH KUMAR • Inspired by The Simpsons and Goodness Gracious Me, his career in comedy beckoned against a backdrop of turbulence

TULIPS

Books

Where are all the rural voices of English fiction?

Film

ROYAL FLUSHED • Gillian Anderson, Rufus Sewell, Billie Piper and Keeley Hawes agreed to a grilling by The Big Issue ahead of their new Netflix film Scoop, a tense dramatisation of Prince Andrew’s disastrous Newsnight interview

Music

Puzzles

MY PITCH INTERNATIONAL • The remarkable revival of a Californian street paper