At the height of its popularity, quicksand was a sexually charged danger that appeared in dozens, if not hundreds, of Hollywood films. It has since disappeared from the mainstream consciousness, but there remains aging community of quicksand enthusiasts who recreate versions of their favorite quicksand scenes with an erotic twist.

[body_image width='2000' height='1338' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='double-dutch-is-hip-hop-456-body-image-1427747784.jpg' id='41270']
All art by Chris Kindred

In November of 1982, the New York City Rap Tour came to Paris, bringing with it a culture that had never been seen in Europe— hip-hop. The group of young and black New Yorkers wore a variety of leathers, sneakers, jumpsuits, puffer coats, caps, and hoodies. And, according to a write-up by David Hershkovits for Sunday News Magazine, they "blindsided the Europeans [in the audience] with their burst of personality and freedom of creation."

Afrika Bambaataa DJed. The Infinity Rappers rhymed next to him. Futura 2000 and Fab 5 Freddy sprayed canvases and walls surrounding the performance space. And in the middle of the dance floor, right before theRock Steady Crew came out to breakdance, the Fantastic Four jumped rope, or more specifically double dutched.

The names of those DJs, rappers, and graffiti writers who performed that fateful day have become fixtures in hip-hop lore. The Fantastic Four are less well known, but at the time, the double dutch girls who defined the earliest incarnation of hip-hop.

"In France they were like, 'The American's are coming to town!' At this point, rap was coming into its own. We had Afrika Bambataa, the Rock Steady Crew, and us." says Delores Finlayson of the Fantastic Four. "We were a part of that trend."

"The tour in France was New York City rap, and [double dutch] was part of the street culture," Fab 5 Freddy says. Freddy was the original hip-hop impresario who organized that very first rap tour not long before he solidified the concept of hip-hop with his 1983 movie Wild Style. "[Double dutch] fit perfectly with the tour and it was a great element. That was the big bright moment regarding putting it all under the umbrella of hip-hop."

But today double dutch has disappeared from hip-hop consciousness. It pops up sporadically in creepy Angel Haze videos, during a Pharrell–Missy Elliott performances at the BET awards, or as a minor motif in movies dedicated to New York City like Top Five. But beyond those increasingly negligible roles, double dutch is no longer considered part of hip-hop. The oft-quoted four elements—MCing, DJing, graffiti, and breakdancing—that make hip-hop what it is, leave it out.

So what happened to double dutch?

Like no other hip-hop story ever, this one begins with the New York Police Department. Eleven years before the first New York rap tour, in 1971, NYPD detective Ulysses "Mike the Cop" Williams watched a police-organized one-mile cycling race in Harlem's Marcus Garvey Park. There were races for boys and races for girls, but afterward, Mike says, there was one unanimous assessment: "'My God the girls did terrible!"

So Mike set out to make an event where the females could shine. He'd seen girls playing double dutch in parks and on street corners and figured he could take the street game to the next level. He called his friend and fellow cop David Walker and "from that point on David and I began to contrive the sport of double dutch."

David and Mike took rules from other sports and applied them to the game. Like track, they used speed testing: how many times players could jump over the rope in two minutes. Like gymnastics, they included compulsory tricks: two turns on the right foot, two turns on the left foot, two criss-crosses right over left, two criss-crosses left over right, ten high steps with knees to waist parallel to the floor. Finally, like ice-skating, the competition ended with a three-minute freestyle.

[body_image width='720' height='482' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='double-dutchs-forgotten-hip-hop-origins-456-body-image-1427820021.jpg' id='41641']

To systemize the sport they organized a police department–run league and reached out to public schools asking gym teachers to start spreading the sport. "This was an opportunity for young girls to be involved, and yes, an urban traditional sport to go onto a competitive level," says Lauren Walker, David's daughter and the current president of the National Double Dutch League.

Their initial dream was to make double dutch an Olympic sport and at the start it looked like an achievable goal. The first ever official double dutch tournament took place at Intermediate School 10 on West 149th Street in 1974. There was a sponsor, Royal Crown Cola, and the New Yorker even wrote an article about it.

From there, with David and Mike's commitment, the sport grew. They toured the country teaching double dutch in public schools. "It grew to the point where USA Jump tried to get on board," says Mike. "But it belonged to the streets of Harlem."

In 1974 David and Mike organized the first ever American Double Dutch League championship in Lincoln Center. (The league's name was later changed to the National Double Dutch League). Mayor Ed Koch was in attendance, and Mobile Oil, 7 Up and McDonalds eventually sponsored the event. By 1981, the tournament was a big enough deal that a documentary was made about it, called Pick Up Your Feet. It features the Fantastic Four's Delores Finlayson, Robin Watterson, Adrienne "Nicki" Howell, and De'Shone Goodson, who had joined as a team in seventh grade when they all tried out for the American Double Dutch League. In 1980, in their early teens, the Fantastic Four won the Lincoln Center tournament with never-before-seen tricks, including one where all four girls were jumping inside the rope at the same damn time. Soon after, they became famous around America for double dutching in two different McDonald's commercials.

"At the time, it was really just us," says Robin. "It was known that watching the Fantastic Four, if you blink your eye, you're gonna miss something."

Fab 5 Freddy agrees: "Every time you'd watch them it was astonishing."

Ruza Blue didn't want to risk missing them. She had just started organizing a hip-hop night at a Chelsea nightclub called the Roxy and, with Fab 5 Freddy's help, she transformed it from a roller rink to a hip-hop breeding ground. Kool Lady Blue, as she's also known, brought rappers, DJs, MCs, and breakers from way up in the Bronx and introduced them to downtown New York's punks and artists. (Later, as their manager, Blue introduced the Rock Steady Crew to the queen of England.)

"The word hip-hop was not even in the lexicon," Freddie says. "It was the first time when you had this whole example of New York street culture that we now know of as hip-hop." Much of the city heard rap for the very first time at the Roxy, and double dutch was part of the same milieu.

Blue remembers the exact day in September 1981 when she saw the Fantastic Four in that first McDonald's commercial. Almost immediately she "went on a mission to find the girls."

"The hip-hop scene was so male-dominated and I wanted to infuse some female energy," she says. Blue worked hard to make it happen, sifting through David and Mike's bureaucratic, police-approved maze to find the girls and get permission for them to perform.

"There was a lot of ownership involved," Blue says, but once they made it in, the double dutch girls performed speed and freestyle routines like the breakers, right in the middle of the dancing crowd,

"We started to get to know the Rock Steady Crew and familiarize ourselves with everyone," Nicki says of their entrance into the scene. Double dutch's rhyming chants fit with those of the MCs, and the sport demanded a physical dexterity not too far removed from breakdancing. Soon, Blue was showing double dutch to British impresario and musician Malcolm McLaren—he immediately fell in love and wrote a song about the Ebonettes, another New York double dutch team, for his 1983 Duck Rock album. It quickly became McLaren's most popular song, reaching third place on UK singles charts.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/sDcg7poOZhc' width='640' height='480']

By then Freddy had already traveled to France and recorded a partly French track called "Change the Beat" with Celluloid Records. Following the success of that song (it has since been sampled in over 700 other songs), he partnered with Blue, the radio stations Europe 1 and FNAC, and French journalist Bernard Zekrit, to bring his entire presentation of hip-hop culture abroad in what became known as the New York City Rap Tour. Blue suggested they bring along the double dutch girls, and Freddy agreed. Together with the MCs, DJs, breakers, and graffiti artists they traveled across the Atlantic to demonstrate exactly what New York hip-hop was.

"The double dutch girls got a great look at the right time," Freddy says. "It came together for that one moment when we toured France and it was a great addition."

But it was at its peak that double dutch began disappearing from hip-hop. In March of 1983 Freddy and his partner Charlie Ahearn released Wild Style, the definitive hip-hop movie about a lovelorn graffiti artist in the Bronx, to worldwide acclaim. This was the official introduction of hip-hop for all the world to see not just as an idea, but an active and thriving culture. In the movie's world of DJs, MCs, breakers, and graffiti artists, the double dutch girls were nowhere to be found. Blue had "dipped out of the scene" and Freddy forgot about the girls. "Unfortunately, it was not an idea that I had to further develop," he says.

From there, the separation was swift and complete. The Fantastic Four went off to college the same year Freddy released Wild Style and no one took their place in the scene. "Arguably, if the idea to incorporate these girls doing double dutch had hit me when we were making Wild Style, it might've been further put in the context of hip-hop. Who knows?" Freddy says.

Instead, as hip-hop grew more commercialized, double dutch turned into an oddball sport, removed from its former roots. David and Mike continued to pursue their dream of getting double dutch into the Olympics by creating a strict and structured competition circuit that took it off the streets, even as music officially entered double dutch competitions in the form of "fusion," an evolution of the original freestyle component, in 1991.

In an even broader sense, as crime in New York reached its highest rates in the late 1980s and video games entered the picture, fewer children were interested in playing together on the street. "Kids don't even want to play outside anymore," Nicki laments.

"A lot of hip-hop's core brownie elements dissipated and transmuted," says Freddy. Breakdancing became huge in Asia. Similarly, Japan has a massive, thriving double dutch community.

"If the idea to incorporate these girls doing double dutch had hit me when we were making Wild Style, it might've been further put in the context of hip-hop. Who knows?" –Fab 5 Freddy

In the US, Red Bull has taken on a revival mission with its Red Bull Rope Masters, but the sport remains absent from the hip-hop radar. If double dutch's early hip-hop presence had been well documented, America's Best Dance Crew could have easily been a Mario Lopez–hosted MTV show about double dutch. In 2010, Saltare, a team on that show, featured double dutch in their dance routine, harking back to the long-forgotten time when double dutch and breakdancing were intertwined, but that was just one brief moment.

Every member of the Fantastic Four is still involved with double dutch, with many judging competitions for the National Double Dutch League. They've watched the sport's evolution firsthand and have tried to maintain its status as the primarily female urban street game that hit it big. But when Robin, who has since moved to Virginia, tried to expand her town's double dutch league she ran into opposition. "They kept mentioning that movie Jump In! with Corbin Bleu," she says. "No one knows what it is here."

"It's kind of a drag hearing about this," says Freddy, "because we could've incorporated double dutch more and put it further in the context of hip-hop or just New York street culture. It could've been developed more. But then again, I never thought that this stuff was going to have the effect it did around the world."

[body_image width='2560' height='1440' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='metal-gear-solid-2-sons-of-liberty-was-the-game-that-stopped-me-being-a-fanboy-220-body-image-1427801724.jpg' id='41480']

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

If it's fair to say that Metal Gear Solid arrived on UK shores on a wave of hype back in early 1999—and it is—then it's also fair to say that Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, released three years later, arrived on a tsunami of the stuff. The original had come somewhat out of nowhere: a surprise that became a media darling that became a sales phenomenon, despite the stupid name. The second had no such luxury.

Instead, Metal Gear Solid 2 was an event. It didn't have a release window, it had a fucking D-Day: a global countdown of breathless excitement and sophisticated marketing, backed by a games press ready to lap it all up and spew it back out. The recently-launched PlayStation 2 was (once again) being heralded as a new dawn for gaming, described not as a machine of primitive bleeps and bloops anymore but of "emotions" and "jacking in" to the fabled living, breathing worlds. MGS2 was the game that was going to show how far the medium had come. In terms of hype, expectation, and cultural awareness, it was to games as The Phantom Menace was to cinema.

It was also nearly as shitty.

On the morning of March 9, 2002, I sat dumbfounded as the credits rolled on MGS2, having played it for 14 straight hours after getting it on launch day. To say I was a fan of the series is an understatement. I was a fanboy. I loved MGS, with its grand mixture of stealth mechanics and Hollywood production values (the voice acting especially), its coherent and clever approach to making players feel like they were the driving force in an imaginative, intelligent big-budget thriller that felt like a movie and played like a dream. I'd never seen anything like it. Nobody had.

I had the expensive Premium Package version: it came with dog tags and a T-shirt, which in keeping with games industry logic (and average player BMI) was a thousand times too large for any mammalian body. It also arrived a day later than my friends' normal copies, and I nearly cried. I completed all 300 stages in the spin-off (stop-gap, cash in, take your pick) MGS: VR Missions to play as the Cyborg Ninja for about a minute. I bought anything with the Metal Gear Solid brand on it. At a time when I should have perhaps been worrying more about exams, whether Adidas poppers were really still acceptable, and girls, I was theorizing about Solid Snake's next step.

So imagine my thoughts when I found out exactly what Hideo Kojima, the game's creator and the hottest, smartest designer in the world, had been up to. Rather than elation, there came the various stages of grief, each crashing in sharper and faster than an HD Hindenburg documentary on 30x fast forward. What... the fuck... was that? Kojima had badly fallen out with his usual English translator between games, but why did it seem like David Icke had been drafted in to rewrite MGS, while obviously drunk and reading Orwell for Beginners? (Potential upside: would Kojima, now having obviously gone over the high side, soon appear on Wogan? And could I get tickets?)

[body_image width='600' height='339' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='metal-gear-solid-2-sons-of-liberty-was-the-game-that-stopped-me-being-a-fanboy-220-body-image-1427801762.jpg' id='41481']

Definitely not Solid Snake

Where was the bit where Solid Snake fought a Harrier jet on the George Washington Bridge, like I'd seen in one of those gorgeous trailers? In fact, where was Solid Snake in general? After spending two hours playing as him he was gone, relegated to a secondary role, so that players would foster a deeper affinity for his character while they controlled a rookie named Raiden. It was a bold move for a high-profile sequel with a huge established audience (and their expectations), but then The Empire Strikes Back would have been too if it were about a talking door handle that fell in love with C-3PO, and no one wanted that either.

Raiden—and his section of the game—was so bland and forgettable that it was impossible not to wonder what had gone wrong. The hyper-detailed tanker that opened MGS2 featured magazines you could shred with gunfire, ice buckets you could knock over and watch the contents melt, and plasma screens you could fire at and watch bleed out. It was replaced with a boxy, beige oil rig dubbed Big Shell which was generally so forgettable that Konami had to include a map for you to get around it.

It was a long way from Shadow Moses's cold intensity, an Alaskan backdrop that seemed as unique and threatening as its inhabitants. Both games follow near-identical structures (which is the point, it turns out), but whereas in MGS you were snaffling key cards and throttling guards to progress deeper into the bowels of an otherworldly nuclear storage base with a world-threatening mechanical minotaur in the middle, here you were constantly circling a featureless warehouse merely to get into another one, like a particularly grueling work experience shift at Amazon.

The Big Shell's anodyne nature was made worse by a story that went from intriguing to baffling to The Matrix Reloaded in about six hours. Magical realism is Kojima's thing: the original game featured a character called Decoy Octopus. Decoy Octopus. But that made sense in context. None of MGS2 makes sense in any context beyond "hubris." Particularly galling is Raiden's girlfriend calling you up all the time to bemoan your relationship and demand a 20-minute chat about fuck all, squared, while you attempt to avert world-ending catastrophe. Oh, and she's called Rose, to your Jack, because Titanic must have been on at some point.

[body_image width='1892' height='933' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='metal-gear-solid-2-sons-of-liberty-was-the-game-that-stopped-me-being-a-fanboy-220-body-image-1427801789.jpg' id='41482']

A few hours of blindly browsing this is likely to reward you with a more coherent story than 'MGS2'

It gets more nonsensical at an almost geometric rate. There are so many plot threads, in-jokes, call backs, double-crosses, and needless interruptions that it feels like the video game equivalent of pressing the "random article" feature on Wikipedia for 14 hours.

In attempting to tell a postmodernist tale encompassing societal control, AIs, the role of the player and the currency of information, among a trillion other things, Kojima dropped the ball, the baby, and the fucking bomb. Sons of Liberty deliberately echoes the original for both narrative and tonal reasons, in every area apart from the rather crucial one of being interesting. By repeating the previous game's beats, Koj had to match or better its narrative and characters. Something to go alongside the intensity of this Sniper Wolf battle, or the invention of Psycho Mantis reading your memory card. We got a fat man on roller skates. Boss battles, staging, pacing: everything is a faded copy, a reflected glory. MGS's FOXHOUND appealed because they were unique, as were the places you fought them. Dead Cell is a covers band, and MGS2 is a tribute album filled with empty yet painfully over-earnest renditions of the original material.

MGS2's final hours are the worst: a barely-interactive mess of Codec calls and cutscenes filled with nothing but mindless exposition, a descent into madness as Kojima, desperate to tie everything from Raiden's relationship with Rose to him being the adopted amnesiac son of the President of the United States (Snake's brother) who's now Dr. Octopus and is planning to bomb New York, to set it free, to Snake's other brother who is dead but is really still living in an arm grafted onto someone else but isn't really, goes totally fucking mental.

[body_image width='640' height='480' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='metal-gear-solid-2-sons-of-liberty-was-the-game-that-stopped-me-being-a-fanboy-220-body-image-1427801810.jpg' id='41483']

It was, quite simply, a phenomenal let down, burying its incredible aesthetic and mechanical advances—holding up guards, multi-layered alert and escape phases, non-lethal play—under a load of drunk gibberish.

The reviews weren't much better. Like me, members of the games press were obviously fans of Kojima. He was a genius, but he also made "adult" games: that is to say they weren't overtly childlike, as opposed to actually being mature. And in an industry yearning for acceptance as being something other than glorified toys, Kojima's sermons on nuclear proliferation, asymmetry theory, genes, memes, and so on seemed like a turning point. If Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto was the Steven Spielberg of games, then Kojima was both Wachowskis: a high concept king with a faux-intellectual edge pushing (some of) the boundaries of a medium.

We wanted to love MGS2, and the coverage was rabid. One mag had a regular "MGS2 Watch" segment. Usually, there was nothing in it. But the reportage of nothing was something. MGS2 was a business, and it sold magazines. Back before the mass uptake of the internet, games mags were still king. To get the latest information, you had to pay. And I paid. I followed MGS around from cover to cover, place to place, like some demented early 2000s equivalent of a Bay City Rollers fan, there the second doors opened no matter the venue, believing all the hype.

So when I read the reviews, I was elated. To see them now is like reading the babblings of children. When I finished the game then I wondered what they had been playing. One of the lone dissenting voices, Play (who I wrote for years later) gave it 78 percent, presumably killing whoever wrote it immediately after.

[body_image width='960' height='544' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='metal-gear-solid-2-sons-of-liberty-was-the-game-that-stopped-me-being-a-fanboy-220-body-image-1427801823.jpg' id='41484']

Still: did the others really love it? Later, another thought: had the mags, like me in the hours after I'd finished it, tried to convince themselves it was actually brilliant? The pressure from fans and PRs—and, in some cases, editors—to score big games highly is real: it persists to this day. Was this a factor? Was I just an outlier? Or had we all been suckered by ingenious, sophisticated marketing and our own expectations? I was in denial. I tried to convince myself I'd missed something. It had to be good. When friends asked about it, I said it was great. Parts of it were amazing. Had I missed something?

In reality, there was nothing to miss, but MGS2 was important. It was a personal watershed: the first time I'd really been let down by a series I loved, and also the first time I realized the terrifying ease on which hype warps both expectations and creative freedoms. Kojima, always keen to be seen as an auteur, joined fellow millennium-era zeitgeist busts such as George Lucas and the Wachowskis in a grand mistake: presuming we cared about the minutiae of universes expanding, bloating, at a geometric rate. We didn't. Our mistakes lay elsewhere.

Kojima recovered with MGS3: Snake Eater, one of video gaming's finest hours. Its predecessor, however persists in my mind now as not a great game, or even a good one, but instead as an important reminder of the danger—and perniciousness—of the good ship hype, and all those who sail in it, whether they're fans, creators, or journalists.

Follow Steve on Twitter.

[body_image width='1556' height='1037' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='we-spoke-with-mindy-pollack-about-being-montreals-first-female-hasidic-city-councillor-781-body-image-1427817461.jpg' id='41630']

Mindy Pollak, far right, with the Equipe de Montréal Outremont borough association. Photo via Flickr user Etienne Coutu

Outside of Israel, Montreal holds one of the biggest Orthodox Jewish communities in the world. If you take a stroll through the city's Mile End or Outremont neighbourhoods, you'll see the curious duality of hipsters living alongside Orthodox Jews; man-buns bobbing alongside traditional shtreimels; and fixies weaving in and out of sidewalks dominated by strollers.

But while the ultra-Orthodox community has been visible on the streets, the unprecedented election of Hasidic city councillor Mindy Pollak still came as a big shock to Montreal.

Pollak first came to attention in 2013 when she was elected to city council representing the Outremont region—an area where Hasidic Jews comprise about one quarter of the population. Her campaign generated lots of buzz not just because of her age (she was only 24 when she ran), but because she became the first Hasidic Jewish woman ever elected to Montreal's city council. This is an impressive feat for any young woman, but particularly one coming from an ultra-conservative religion where women typically don't work in co-ed environments.

She decided to run for office after sitting on an intercultural council in Montreal and realizing that if she wanted to make a difference, it would have to be on the city council itself.

"The only reason I decided not to run was because it had never been done before," she said. "But what is fear itself going to do? Is it going to make the situation better off?"

Her platform focused mostly on a simple idea: reestablishing trust and communication between Outremont's Hasidic residents and city council—a fairly daunting task given the long list of strained relations between the two groups.

Those tensions include a bathing suit ban for parks (which was shot down in court), forcing a gym to frost its windows because of revealing clothing, neighbourhood resistance to a small expansion of a synagogue, and accusations of a powerful so-called "Hasidic lobby."

Pollak's unlikely role as the political voice of the Hasidic community pushes back against Quebec's strict secular ethos. Despite the epic defeat of Pauline Marois' attempt in 2013 to ban religious clothing in the public sector, secular Quebec generally abides by the belief that religion inherently oppresses women. Among many Montrealers, the idea of valuing traditional female "modesty" is about as welcome as saying you find Toronto more charming than Montreal.

Montreal's Hasidic community was also recently thrust into the spotlight outside the city limits with the film Felix and Meira, which won the Best Canadian Feature prize at last year's TIFF. With a storyline set in the Mile End, director Maxime Giroux paints a compelling narrative about the relationship between the atheist Quebecois Felix and Hasidic Meira—the married but slightly rebellious protagonist who eventually leaves the faith in attempt to be free from its restraints.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/obC5MAJkm-w' width='500' height='281']

Giroux told VICE that the best feedback the film received came from ex-members of the Hasidic faith who thanked him for the accuracy with which he told Meira's story. He started researching Orthodox Judaism two-and-a-half years before filming even began and primarily cast actors who had voluntarily ex-communicated.

Meira, played by Israeli actress Hadas Yaron, paints a character who stays true to the perceptions most people have about Hasidic women. She is shy with strangers, seemingly fearful of the outside world and rarely makes eye contact with men. Her submissiveness is a dramatic theme throughout the film and is one the most poignant social critiques Giroux makes about the Orthodox Jewish faith.

Giroux confirmed that the film had not been particularly well-received by members of New York's Hasidic community, although he wasn't sure if anyone from Montreal had chosen to attend a screening. When I asked Pollak if she saw the film, she gave a friendly but firm "no," although that doesn't stop her from passing judgment on it.

Felix and Meira is a highly sensitive portrayal of the complexities that accompany the protagonist's eventual exit from the Hasidic faith. Pollak seemed to take most offence to this. She sighed and told me that she wished, for once, a film would portray Hasidic women as fulfilled and happy in their lives. "We aren't all oppressed," she emphasized.

"Do I seem meek to you?" Pollak countered to me when I asked her about Meira's portrayal. It was admittedly difficult to imagine the bright and animated city councillor as anything but determined and expressive.

There are things about the Hasidic faith that undoubtedly make many Canadians uncomfortable. Number one at that list would be the acceptance of distinct roles for men and women.

"We feel the roles are different. Women are in charge of the children's spiritual education," Pollak told me.

But according to her, it's this division of responsibility that empowers women in the Hasidic faith. "Men spend most of their time in spiritual study, so women are often the breadwinners," she said. "We're entrepreneurs, comedians, singers, and doctors."

Almost halfway through her four-year term, Pollak laughs about her initial naiveté and emphasizes the importance of continuing to push for inter-cultural and inter-faith acceptance in Outremont and the Mile End.

In 2011, she co-founded the Facebook group "Friends of Hutchison" which aims is to foster an open dialogue between all of the area's residents—Hasidic, francophone, and anglophone alike. But the most unlikely part of the group is its origin. Pollak co-founded the group with a Palestinian woman, Leila Marshy, who would go on to become her best friend and ally.

The group's membership is still relatively low at just over 1,000, but it signals the early stages of a cultural shift away from the Hasidic faith's insular past.

That's not to say the conservative religion is somehow sliding towards becoming a more watered-down version of itself. Despite her revolutionary role, Pollak still adheres to the orthodox rules of her religion. She dresses modestly keeping her elbows, knees and collarbones covered and, like most Hasidic women, made the decision not to shake the hands of men.

Pollak is hesitant to talk about any negativity she faced from her own Hasidic community. "The majority of the feedback I got was overwhelmingly positive. But there were a few people who were unhappy," she admitted. The Satmar sect—arguably one of the most orthodox movements within Hasidism—disagreed with Pollak's political bid and challenged her by running their own candidate.

Perhaps somewhat naively, I asked if a young Hasidic woman could leave home and chase a career in the big city—the kind of clichéd capitalist dream sold to girls through generations of New York sitcoms.

"That might be difficult to do," Pollak agreed. "In New York, there are all-women seminaries where you can even get college credits, but because Montreal is smaller, nothing like that exists here yet. But that doesn't mean it won't."

And while Pollak's role as a politician is the exception and not the rule amongst Hasidic women, she's proof women from orthodox faiths can balance religion and personal identity. That even within the most seemingly conservative religions, there are progressive voices. And that perhaps the best person to bring god-fearing Quebeckers out of Pauline Marois' era of religious intolerance is a 26-year-old Hasidic woman with a plan.

Follow Neha Chandrachud on Twitter.

[body_image width='1052' height='744' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='life-between-lives-therapy-840-body-image-1427809228.jpg' id='41550']

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Illustrations by James Burgess.

I'm standing in a car park in Cheshire, waiting to have my first metaphysical experience. Clare, a certified hypnotherapist, is on her way to pick me up and drive me back to hers, where I'll supposedly witness some of the bodies my soul used to inhabit and ultimately understand what my purpose is here on Earth.

While this is all very exciting, I'm a little skeptical; if past-life tourism was actually legit, I'm pretty certain Derek Acorah would already be presenting a show in which Ben Fogle finds out he was once Emily Pankhurst, or Kirstie Allsop jets back 400 years to discover she used to regularly kill and eat dogs.

That said, Clare does have all the necessary credentials: she has completed training that makes her a member of the Newton Institute, an organization of hypnotherapists who practice Past Life Regression (PLR) and Life Between Lives therapy (LBL). The former allows patients to re-experience key moments from previous lives, while the latter transports you to wherever it is souls hang out before being reincarnated.

The Newton Institute takes its name from Dr. Michael Newton, a hypnotherapist who popularized these therapies with his two best-sellers Destiny of Souls and Journey of Souls. Newton's work—based on the hypnotherapies of over 7,000 patients—states that hypnosis puts you in a stage of meta-consciousness that allows the soul, and all the memories stored within it, to manifest itself.

Familiarizing myself with Newton's writings, I found it hard not to look at the whole thing as a bit of a scam—a series of sessions where you actively part with money to be told something that sounds a lot like bullshit. Mind you, there was no way of knowing for sure without giving it go, which is why I figured it made sense to go through PLR and LBL with a professional practitioner.

When I meet her, Clare seems measured and instantly gives off an impression of warmth; unlike in normal shrink therapy, the patient-therapist relationship in the world of PLR and LBL is remarkably open.

It doesn't take long for me to share my doubts about Dr. Newton's legitimacy. I describe his theories as dogmatic, but Clare is quick to explain she thinks of them more in terms of faith or belief, adding that she's not really into religion, but rather spirituality. It's the case studies she's personally taken part in, she tells me, that convinced her there really is an afterlife.

"There is no dogma; it is merely what you experience that matters," she says.

After a short drive we arrive at Clare's house and walk into a room decked out with a couple of sofas, some chairs, two teddy bears, and a piano. To get the process rolling we start out by identifying the issues to work on, because, according to Clare, "the main goal of LBL therapy and PLR is not to experience the afterlife, but to understand our purpose in this life and resolve issues buried deep beneath, often linked to traumatic events that occurred during past lives."

Clare insists that psychosomatic ailments can often be cured this way.

I single-out a few of my emotional and physiological problems: unexplained dermatitis on my scalp, my general pessimistic attitude towards life, and my tendency to panic when I lose control.

[body_image width='772' height='515' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='life-between-lives-therapy-840-body-image-1427808951.jpg' id='41547']

The author lying down in Clare's house, under hypnosis

Clare then invites me to lie on a chair and tells me to remain motionless, before covering my body with a blanket so we can start. Aided by the kind of ambient music that wouldn't sound out of place during a Twin Peaks montage, I let myself go. I hear Clare's voice gently urging me to find inner peace, and a sensation of tranquility fills me up to the brim, a warmth rushing through my limbs: I am relaxed.

Most people associate hypnosis with a loss of control. Those people are wrong. Rather, senses are enhanced, consciousness and memory sharpened. Once I've reached something resembling this state, Clare's voice leads me—or, if you listen to LBL therapists, my soul—into a corridor. I am to picture doors in this corridor, one of which I'm supposed to enter. I can't help but think of The Matrix, which is quite off-putting.

Opening a door, I see a boundless white nothingness. This does not represent anything. Let's try another one, says Clare.

Through the next door I see a swarthy man standing in a pretty sparse landscape. Problem is, I'm acutely aware that he's just the product of my imagination. Clare decides to take me through another round of relaxation and start again.

After Clare once again lulls me into hypnosis, I picture a man wearing clogs, green pants, a white shirt, and a brown apron. His hair is shaggy, his beard rough. I don't know his name, but decide to call him Alfred. He's a thief and has to steal to survive. I know this because he's just stolen a loaf of bread and some silk clothes, which seem a bit redundant in the grand scheme of things, but there you go.

This is why, when I'm asked to imagine Alfred's last day, he's about to be executed by guillotine. Clare asks me, "What is Alfred thinking at that moment?"

"How do I know?" I reply. "I'm not him."

[body_image width='1052' height='744' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='life-between-lives-therapy-840-body-image-1427809211.jpg' id='41549']

He seems scared, but there's no way to know what he really feels like, and I don't want to misrepresent this imaginary man's emotional state to Clare. Playing it safe, I go ahead and assume he's resentful of the situation because he's always had to steal to physically stay alive, so doesn't feel the punishment is fair.

When the blade falls I don't really know what happens—he just dies. I am not him; my brain created him. Clare tries to make me see the similarity in Alfred's lack of control over his destiny and my lust for it.

We then move on to another "life."

Clare tells me it's worth investigating what could have caused the dermatitis on my scalp. I focus, picturing myself being chased through a forest as a Native American. I imagine this has something to do with the word scalp, because I'm soon shot and scalped by whoever was chasing me.

So that's presumably my dermatitis cured.

Finally, I'm given the choice between exploring "the place we go when we die" or life on another planet. Despite feeling very much like I might now be on a hidden camera show, I choose the second option. However, it seems my mind has given up; even my subconscious can't be bothered to come up with descriptive answers to Clare's questions.

What do my feet look like? Small.

What do my legs look like? Small.

What do my arms look like? I haven't got any.

Maybe it's time to stop.

[body_image width='772' height='515' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='life-between-lives-therapy-840-body-image-1427808985.jpg' id='41548']

My soul, Clare tells me when we finish, was too reluctant to fully hand itself over to any one of my past lives—although I apparently did catch a glimpse of them. To me, it felt more like I was taking part in a very stationary improv class. Mind you, there was an element of digging into my subconscious and memory; when I was at my most relaxed it felt like I was almost lucid dreaming, in a semi-dormant state where pockets of information compartmentalized in my mind were able to reveal themselves.

It's vaguely close to what scientists call cryptomnesia, where a subject recalls a forgotten memory and believes it to be new and original—a lot of what I saw seemed to be influenced by things I'd previously learnt or watched.

I agree with some of what forms the core of Clare's work, in particular the importance of resolving personal issues in both the conscious and subconscious mind. I also genuinely believe that her form of therapy can help some people get better—that it could be a way to get at feelings that are otherwise suppressed. However, I don't believe in the afterlife in the way she'd like me to; the whole thing just seems too much like a way of coping with the inevitability of death by maintaining an illusion of control.

I almost forget that the therapy can purportedly enlighten you to the meaning of life until Clare suggests that the life I'm currently living is meant to put me to the test. I found out I had cancer at the age of 20, so the prospect of facing death so early on apparently represented a challenge. However, I can't get on board with this, either; in my opinion you can crowbar any meaning into a specific set of circumstances, and it's impossible to know whether or not that explanation is accurate.

I understand that some people are terrified of the unknown—the unknown is an inherently terrifying thing. I also understand that filling that existential void with religion or spirituality is a solution for many people, that faith is a bit like putting the bowling alley bumpers up on life, the idea—on a subconscious level, at least—surely being that it will shield you from the gutter of the strange and unexplained.

But I'm OK with living with that void. I'm OK with the idea that the world is absurd, that plenty of its mechanisms elude human reasoning. I'm OK with the idea that death could be the end of everything.

Follow Robin on Twitter. Visit James' website for more illustration work.

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

In the run-up to Election '15, Britain's political leaders need to sell voters a vision. They need to show voters what life would be like under their rule. But what about political leaders at the margins? What about Islamic fundamentalists?

Last week, the Islamist preacher and tabloid hate figure Anjem Choudary called a press conference outside the Houses of Parliament to explain why Muslims should not vote in the forthcoming election and all of the parties running for office are heretics. He had spelled out his own vision for the country to us previously, as we drove around London in a people carrier.

In the picture of a Sharia UK that Anjem vividly painted, there would be no pubs, no clubs, thieves would have their hands chopped off in Trafalgar Square, and Prince Harry would stand trial for treason.

On the ride, we also ran into London Mayor Boris Johnson, who was heckled by Anjem and his friends after he appeared to skip a red light on his bike.

Back in the present day, we catch up with Anjem once more outside the Houses of Parliament, where he is telling a media scrum why Muslims should not vote in the upcoming election.

Keep up with all of VICE.com's Election '15 coverage here.

Follow Gavin Haynes on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='852' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='crime-and-death-in-paris-philippe-charlier-photography-876-body-image-1427794320.jpg' id='41384']

This scene shows the methodology used to photograph a cadaver before an autopsy. Photos courtesy of the Prefecture of Police of Paris

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

Note: Some of the below images are disturbing.

Even though it was invented in 1839 by Louis Daguerre, modern photography was only made available to French police investigators in the 1870s, and it wasn't until 1887 that criminologist Alphonse Bertillon introduced the method to criminal identification practices. Thanks to his foresight,the photographic archive of the Paris Police Prefecture is now one of the richest in the world—a collection of millions of images that date back to the beginning of the 19th century.

After spending quite a long time investigating murders that have made history—which earned him the nickname "the Indiana Jones of the graveyards"—medical examiner Philippe Charlier focused on these first pieces of forensic evidence. In his book Seine de crimes, he compiles and attempts to analyze nearly 100 shots illustrating murders, assassinations, suicides, and fatal accidents that took place in Paris between 1871 and 1937.

"Looking through several decades' worth of photographs from crime scenes in Paris is, above all, a way of revealing the evolution of the police methods used to investigate and deal with crime," explains the author in the book's preface. "Aside from their obvious medical interest, these snapshots testify just as much to the savagery of humans as to the everyday lives of those who came before us."

[body_image width='1200' height='1625' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='crime-and-death-in-paris-philippe-charlier-photography-876-body-image-1427794449.jpg' id='41388']

The knife held by the victim suggests a suicide, but the investigation and fingerprints indicated that Mademoiselle Ferrari was stabbed in the heart by her lover, Monsieur Garnier.

If a couple of famous scenes make their way into the book—like the attack on the Louvre of 1905 and the assassination of Jean Jaurès in 1914—the majority of the shots concern anonymous people, often assassinated in the most horrible ways. For instance, we learn about the death of a certain Julien Delahieff, who was "wrapped in cloth and locked inside a piece of luggage" in 1896; the killing of Madame Candal, "who loved cats" and was seemingly punched to death in 1914; and the murder of Suzanne Lavollée, a prostitute who was savagely strangled and mutilated in 1924.

Unsurprisingly, publishing photos like these raises some questions. "These photographs are historical, the cases are classified, and their age is well beyond the 30 years required in order for something this sensitive to be made available to the public," Chartier explains. "The problem is not so much legal but more of an ethical one. Even if it is legal to publish pictures like this, is it acceptable to overstep medical confidentiality and the respect for the privacy [of the victims]?"

In response to these questions, the medical examiner puts forth the "concept of a ' science pudique' [modest science] that manages to be respectful of others without preventing itself from advancing towards progress and knowledge."

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427732343.jpg' id='41163']

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

A few weeks ago we ran a bunch of photos of the bathrooms, kitchens, and bedrooms of England's single young lads. Mostly, they were disgusting. Living environments playing host to the kind of conditions that might be responsible for whatever germ it is that causes the next global health crisis.

This representation of England's young men didn't go down so well in the comment section. In fact, in a couple of instances we were accused of sexism for perpetuating stereotypes that, thanks to the photographic evidence in the article directly above them, we can see are actually 100 percent true. Still, that didn't stop the criticism. "It's not only guys living like this," some suggested. "Girls can be just as gross."

I thought I'd test this theory by visiting the homes of some of my single female friends and photographing what I saw. This research clearly isn't scientific in any way whatsoever, but below are some of those photos, contrasted with the pictures of the guys' houses, just to make it easier to spot any differences.

CHARLEY, 29, SHOREDITCH

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427735604.jpg' id='41183']

VICE: Why is your room so tidy? Is everything hidden under the bed covers?
Charley: It's a pretty high up bed, which is great for storage. That's all I'll say on the matter.

You have a lot of plants in your room, and a lot of pillows.
Well, I don't have a garden, so that's why I put all the plants in my room. I took my desk out and put plants in there, which is a totally responsible life choice. The cushions—I think it's because I'm going to be 30 this year and I live in a shared house, so I'm having a crisis. So what better way to show that I'm a responsible adult than having loads of cushions? Because a teenager wouldn't spend all their money on cushions, would they? I've gotten really into the mom-like homeware to prove that I'm a grown up.

So buy a bunch of flowers and cushions and that makes you grown up?
That's how it works, right?

This whole place is pretty tidy. Have I caught you on a good day or is it generally like this?
It is actually generally pretty tidy. The two guys I live with are very neat, so I'm lucky in that sense. I'd say it's tidy rather than clean—sometimes we let the washing up slide.

You're right in the mix of it here, aren't you?
Right in between [the night clubs] Dragon Bar and Cargo, the two worst places ever. It's impossibly loud, but I'm amazing at sleeping, so it's all right. Mind you, people piss on our doorstep because it's right opposite Cargo, and the piss comes under the door. I'm making this sound dreamy, aren't I? Come hang out at my house—it's covered in strangers' piss, and I've got a lot of cushions instead of a boyfriend.

More photos of Charley's flat—this time compared with photos of a flat belonging to Ike, one of the guys we visited for the previous article.

Here's Charley's kitchen:

[body_image width='1200' height='1798' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427735869.jpg' id='41186']

And here's Ike's kitchen:

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427735896.jpg' id='41189']

Here's Charley's bathroom:

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427735980.jpg' id='41195']

And here's Ike's bathroom:

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427736119.jpg' id='41200']

Here's Charley's bedroom:

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427736041.jpg' id='41198']

Aaaand here's Ike's bedroom :(

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427736148.jpg' id='41201']

PAT, 28, PECKHAM

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427736209.jpg' id='41205']

VICE: This is the third very tidy bedroom I've seen.
Pat: I dunno—I go through my phases. I do tend to like my room really tidy, so it'll get really tidy and stay tidy for a couple of days, and then the mess comes.

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427736336.jpg' id='41208']

What's that weird head?
Oh, it's Rodney Trotter, apparently. I found it outside a church in Greenwich. I think one of the antique shops was having some sort of clear-out, and the guy told me it was a waxwork of Rodney Trotter.

Fair enough. How often would you say you clean your place?
I try to do a big clean up once a week, but it depends how busy I am because I work really long hours. Once I didn't do it in a couple of weeks and it was like a full-on explosion.

How often do you change your bedsheets?
Every couple of weeks. Is that what grown-ups do?

You tell me.
Yeah, I change them every couple of weeks, when I do my big cleanup.

[body_image width='1200' height='847' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427736472.jpg' id='41214']

What's with the Morissey pillow?
I'm pretty obsessed with him. I went to see him a couple of weeks ago, and they had that pillow. I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen, and I couldn't believe they actually sanction that as part of his merchandise. I was quite drunk by the end of the gig and decided it was a good idea to spend however much it was—I don't remember—on that pillow.

Do you think you were ripped off?
Possibly, but I get to sleep with Morrissey every night.

More photos of Pat's flat, compared with photos of a flat belonging to Chris, another guy we visited.

Here's Pat's kitchen:

[body_image width='1200' height='1798' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427736636.jpg' id='41218']

Here's Chris's kitchen:

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427736704.jpg' id='41220']

Here's Pat's bathroom:

[body_image width='1200' height='1800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427736787.jpg' id='41221']

Here's Chris's bathroom:

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427736811.jpg' id='41222']

Here's Pat's bedroom:

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427736928.jpg' id='41225']

Here's Chris's bedroom:

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427736968.jpg' id='41227']

ALICE, 21, DOCKLANDS

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427732316.jpg' id='41162']

VICE: Disappointingly, your flat is pretty immaculate. Do you and your roommates ever argue over tidiness?
Alice: We kind of do our own bit, so there haven't been any arguments about it. No rotas or anything. I made a rota for my old roommates last year and they just hated me. They were so lazy. Living with boys was so messy—there was mold everywhere.

No plates available because they're always dirty?
Literally, no plates ever. And there was, like, seven other people. It was awful.

How often do you change your bed sheets?
My mom will be so angry at this. I try to change them twice a month, but it's probably more like once a month.

That's not too bad. One of the guys we spoke to said he went five months without any sheets at all. He just slept rolled up in a leopard-skin rug. What about underwear? How many days is too many days for a pair of pants?
My underwear I'm pretty good with; I haven't had to do any inside-out tricks or anything like that.

T-shirts?
T-shirts can last a long time. You don't need to wash a T-shirt every time. I don't have time to wash them that often. I'll wear it until it makes its way into the dirty washing bag, and then it'll sit there for a few months until I never wash it.

Thanks, Alice.

More photos of Alice's flat . The kitchen:

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427734777.jpg' id='41174']

Bathroom:

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427735182.jpg' id='41177']

Bedroom:

[body_image width='1200' height='1798' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427735452.jpg' id='41181']

TABITHA, 29, TUFNELL PARK

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427737010.jpg' id='41228']

VICE: How do you and your flatmates get on in the cleanliness stakes? Do you have a rota?
Tabitha: We had a rota once, and it didn't work. Now we have a cleaner and we just try to keep our areas clean and tidy.

How often do you change your bedsheets?
I try to do it every two weeks, and I do try and stick to that. I wouldn't do it once a week—that would be too much. Sometimes it slips a little when I get lazy or if I'm working a lot.

OK.
I like my room to be tidy; it makes me feel a little more organized in myself. If it's messy for too long it gets stressful. I don't like coming home to a messy room. Finally, at the age of 29, I've started to make my bed every day. Who knew that it was this brilliant! Who knew it could make you feel so amazing? I feel like a grown up. And I've got cushions—decorative cushions!

I need to find some dirt here somewhere. Festivals—how are you there? How acceptable would you say it is at a festival to not shower or change your clothes?
I would always take enough pants and socks to not smell, but I'm not really fussed about having a shower. I mean, it would be nice, but I would always make sure I've got clean clothes. Clean clothes, clean socks, clean pants. Those are the important bits. The clothes can be a bit messy, but the under-bits need to be clean. I can be a bit gross.

Thanks, Tabitha.

More photos of Tabitha's flat. The kitchen:

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427737464.jpg' id='41238']

Here's Tabitha's bathroom:

[body_image width='1200' height='1798' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427737629.jpg' id='41241']

Tabitha's bedroom:

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427737790.jpg' id='41243']

BO, 20, WALTHAMSTOW

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427738014.jpg' id='41248']

VICE: So we did some guys' flats a couple of weeks ago and most of them were a pit. Yours isn't. Do you think most girls share your attitude to cleanliness?
Bo: I'd like to say most girls are like that, but generally speaking I'm a tidy person and, genuinely, some are so disgusting. I lived with one girl in second year of uni, and I thought she'd end up with a disease or something because she just couldn't clean up after herself.

What do you think about messy people?
Messy people? There's messiness and cleanliness, which are two separate things. I think it's fine to be messy, as long as you're clean.

Where do you fall on the messy-clean spectrum?
I'd say messy, because I'm a clean person but I'm untidy. I'd rather be untidy than not clean, because that's just not good.

What's the longest that it's OK to wear underwear for?
Last year I worked festival season. I didn't go home for about two and a half weeks, and it got to the point where I thought, 'I don't know what I'm going to do—I'm in the middle of nowhere.' So I had to put my underwear on four days in a row.

Thanks very much, Bo.

More photos of Bo's flat. The kitchen:

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427738364.jpg' id='41249']

Bo's bathroom:

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427738409.jpg' id='41251']

Bo's bedroom:

[body_image width='1200' height='801' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='photos-of-the-bathrooms-and-kitchens-of-englands-single-young-ladies-249-body-image-1427738507.jpg' id='41253']

carlwilsonphotography.com

[body_image width='1920' height='1080' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='would-you-really-call-social-services-because-a-kid-was-playing-gta-042-body-image-1427796004.jpg' id='41415']

A screen shot from the upcoming PC version of 'Grand Theft Auto V'

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

No, you wouldn't, obviously. Unless you're a terrible person and live in Cheshire, renowned haven for the Northwest's finest Premiership soccer players, and your kid('s friend) attends one of 15 primary schools (or just the single secondary academy) campaigning to make the playing of mature-rated games by those under the recommended age an offense worthy of a call to the police, or worse.

As reported by the Guardian and subsequently picked up on by the games press, the Nantwich Education Partnership intends to classify parental permission to play games like Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, and Gears of War as neglect of a level severe enough to call in the law and social services.

Seriously. That tea you had this morning wasn't spiked with dishwasher cleaner. Head teachers are genuinely threatening parents with intervention from social services if they allow their children access to video games unintended for their age range. Social services. For playing games.

OK, I get that it's pretty dumb to let an overly impressionable pre-teen loose with a copy of GTAV unsupervised. There's a lot of sick shit in that game, and nobody needs their pride and joy dragged into any faculty's disciplinary system for telling their year three teacher to go fuck themselves. There are over 1,000 utterances of the F-bomb in Rockstar's record-breaker, along with many mentions of that C-word Scots like to use in place of "person." It's friendly, apparently.

But let's be reasonable here. Yes, we must protect our kids from heinous shit they shouldn't see until their brains and emotions are developed enough to process it all without bursting into tears, voiding their bowels, coughing up their candy-filled stomachs, or a combination of all three simultaneously. I'm a dad, and there's no way I'm digging out my old Wii copy of Manhunt for some rainy Sunday afternoon entertainment in the company of my four-year-old. But when I started up Bloodborne, a PEGI-16 game intended for grown-ups with developed tolerances for grotesque monsters and brutally demanding difficulty, I let him create my character with me: Elvis, a red-head girl who just wants to slay a few beasts before breakfast.

(Brief aside: PEGI stands for "Pan European Game Information," and it's the body that assesses the age suitability of video games for the, you guessed it, European market. According to their figures, around only four percent of games released are aimed exclusively at adults, earning the top 18 rating, while almost half of all video games are considered suitable for all. Video games in America are rated separately, by the ESRB.)

[body_image width='1600' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='would-you-really-call-social-services-because-a-kid-was-playing-gta-042-body-image-1427796040.jpg' id='41416']

'Bloodborne' is a PEGI-16, but gruesome baddies and OTT gore are things we've seen in countless games before the ratings came in

Son number one sat happily through my earliest deaths, too—to pitchfork-wielding psychos eager to skewer me, dirty great diseased rats down in the sewers of Yharnam, and those werewolf-type things you find on the bridge before You Know What. He didn't cower from the nasties. Nor did he pop out to the shed to find a spade to shatter my skull. "I'm not scared, daddy, because they're not real." Well observed, son. But then, you're not the one holding the controller are you and what the fuck was that?

We usually play more age-appropriate games. Mario's a favorite, likewise the LittleBigPlanet series, and any number of LEGO titles. But hold up, what's this? The LEGO Movie Videogame, which we both enjoyed together last year, is appropriate for ages seven and upward, according to PEGI. As is LittleBigPlanet 3, and the entirely child-friendly Rayman Legends. The frenetic Hyrule Warriors, which he sat in on without once reaching for a broom handle or curtain rail and smashing the fuck out of my front room, is recommended for players aged a minimum of 12 years old.

I appreciate that the intent of the Nantwich group isn't trying to restrict junior school kids from enjoying these games just because they're a little south of the PEGI-scaled seal of suggested censorship adorning each title's cover. They're more concerned with the 18+ affairs that we've all seen moms buying their little darlings any given day in Sainsbury's. Sometimes you're tempted to grab them, seeing as they're just a couple of places ahead of you in line, in their own little world of ensuring their not-yet-pimpled progeny will no longer suffer the peer pressure of the playground, and scream: "Little Danny here is going to grow up a murderer if you buy him Bayonetta 2, because that's what video games do to kids, you prick." Except, that'll never happen. Because nobody under the age of 27 actually owns a Wii U that they'll admit to by buying software in public.

[body_image width='1280' height='720' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='would-you-really-call-social-services-because-a-kid-was-playing-gta-042-body-image-1427796074.jpg' id='41417']

A screen from 'Bayonetta 2', here, portraying the very realistic situation where a witch battles angels on the back of a jet plane

In a letter sent to parents, head teacher Mary Hennessy Jones writes: "If your child is allowed inappropriate access to any game or associated product that is designated 18+, we are advised to contact the police and children's social care, as this is deemed neglectful." She has since reinforced her position to the Sunday Times, telling the newspaper, "We are trying to help parents to keep their children as safe as possible in this digital era... Parents find it helpful to have very clear guidelines."

That being the case, let me address the parents reading this piece, right now: Ignore this batshit-logic to protecting our offspring from the evils of the everyday. Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty are as much a part of childhood today as arguments over who was better between Sonic and Mario were in 1992. And even if they're not actually playing them, they're going to watch playthroughs on YouTube.

It's also time you learned a little more about video games yourselves. The most important lesson, perhaps, being that games today simply aren't the same as those you played in your own youth. If you skipped a few console generations, bloody hell, were you ever shocked on Christmas morning when your 11-year-old daughter unwrapped that PS4 bundle packing Killzone Shadow Fall, Battlefield,sexual predator-ready online capabilities, and Singstar: Ultimate Party compatibility.

High-def murder-sims can move with strikingly realistic animation, the audible cursing coming on as if blue-barked by somebody actually in substantial bother, but let's be clear: They're hyper-stylized, adrenaline-overloaded experiences that riff on every Hollywood cliché, and subsequently presented as entirely unreal. Hell, that's the name of the engine that so many games are made in, including Gears of War. I mean, as soon as you've got a command for "strafing," the illusion of reality is shattered—who the fuck strafes in real life? (As much as it might be useful when approaching festival bars.)

[body_image width='961' height='542' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='would-you-really-call-social-services-because-a-kid-was-playing-gta-042-body-image-1427796136.jpg' id='41418']

The moody meat bucket that is Marcus Fenix

The characters of Gears of War look like the CGI cast from Small Soldiers—a film ostensibly for kids—gone wrong, with their necks replaced by shoulders of steroids-enhanced ham and their weird, podgy palms entirely comprised of Silly Putty left out under the Sera sun too long. If anyone plays Epic's shooter and thinks what they're seeing is in any way connectable with reality, the problem sure isn't the game itself. The violence in it doesn't feel any worse, to me, than what I played through in Moonstone, or Cannon Fodder, back when I was gaming on an Amiga. It's just been rendered in glossier shades of goriness as befits the technological progression of the games industry.

But don't misunderstand me. I'm not about to let my kid fill the boots of Marcus Fenix. Not at four. Not at eight. Twelve? Maybe, but it really depends on how I feel he's connected with video games that are more age appropriate, and what I think he'll gain from playing an PEGI-18 title, as not all of these adults-only releases are base blasters where the sole goal is dismemberment of antagonistic aliens or the permanent neutralizing of opposition soldiers.

If I've played through a game and I feel it's OK for someone younger than me to be a part of, then that's my call to make. There's great beauty in Grand Theft Auto V, and so many activities within the game that don't insist upon the presence of firearms. I've gone hours in that game without pulling a gun once, just drinking in the day-night cycle as I drive around the perimeter of its magnificently realized map, listening to the radio, sight-seeing my way across this incredible analogue of California. It's a most meditative method of participating in one of gaming's most controversial titles, and one that the headlines will never favor over "Grand Theft Auto Blamed After Eight-Year-Old Shoots Grandmother." Not that anyone needs it repeating that violent games alone do not make violent kids. Surely.

The linear campaign of your average Call of Duty isn't likely to tell any player of any age much about army life, but games like BioShock and Spec Ops: The Line go way beyond the gunning down of grunts in gorgeously drawn corridors. The former series' three main games tackle themes like American exceptionalism, of choice and individuality, and religion taken to controversial limits. The Yager-developed Spec Ops, meanwhile, draws from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to deliver a denouement that may make you feel awful for playing through the preceding hours (two words: white phosphorous). It shows you a memorable side of military engagement that, while fictionalized, nevertheless feels a thousand percent more lifelike than Gears' campaign against the Locust.

[body_image width='1176' height='701' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='would-you-really-call-social-services-because-a-kid-was-playing-gta-042-body-image-1427796170.png' id='41420']

'Spec Ops: The Line' is a standard third-person military shooter—until this

Both BioShock and Spec Ops are 18 certificates—but when a game isn't rated by the British Board of Film Classification, using the system you'll find on DVDs and TV box sets, it can confuse parents buying games for younger players. I'm lucky enough to live a six-minute walk away from an independent video games shop that also stocks movies, and its proprietor is well aware that the PEGI system became British law in 2012. But she's received so much shit in the years between from underage customers (and their parents, too) who've demanded she does sell to them, because other shops do.

And I know they do—I was in the center of Brighton only two days ago and witnessed a kid aged maybe 13 purchasing Battlefield: Hardline from a well-known games retailer, the kind that's always swamped with school-age shoppers come the holidays. That's a PEGI-18 title, right there. Not long ago I saw a mom buy Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare for her trailing teenage son—14, at best—in a popular supermarket, and the person behind the counter didn't even ask if it was for her or said skulking minor. Judging by her question of "Is this the new one?" assumes it's unlikely that she'll be taking a virtual Kevin Spacey for a spin any time soon.

Education is therefore key in this discussion—but to come in so heavy handed as the Nantwich Partnership is utterly misguided. Parents need to know what is in the games they allow their children to play, but here's the thing, if they looked at the packaging, or just read a little about the games online, they wouldn't find themselves at any loss as to what's inside the box. "I think the schools are stepping outside the realm of what's probably acceptable," was the opinion of Margaret Morrissey of Parents Outloud, responding to the threat of legal proceedings against the guardians of these inappropriate gamers. "It will be construed by many parents as a threat, and it is not helpful. If schools want to get the support of parents and gain their confidence, threatening them with social services will not help."

[body_image width='796' height='495' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='would-you-really-call-social-services-because-a-kid-was-playing-gta-042-body-image-1427796198.jpg' id='41421']

The imminent 'Mortal Kombat X' is significantly sicker than the ( controversial!) original of the early 1990s

A game's PEGI rating should influence any parent's decision at the register, if they're unable to take the time to play the game themselves (assuming they've any interest in doing so, but why wouldn't you care about what your kids were exposed to?). If your child is 13, and the game you're holding is an 18, maybe pause for a moment. Read about it. Check out what qualifies it as "adults-only" interactive entertainment. There are sites that lay out these points with parent-aiding precision: CommonSenseMedia.org, FamilyGamer.TV, FamilyFriendlyGaming.com, and a stack more. Nobody's pride and joy is going to self-combust if they have to wait a while for dad to determine whether or not Bloodborne is OK for them. To be honest, if my oldest was 12 or so, I'd probably let him at FromSoftware's newest nightmare, albeit in a padded room so that my controller's not broken the first time he hurls it against the wall. Any 14-year-old participant in a CoD online match is unlikely to be adversely affected by the experience, just another (modern) way of playing with friends.

I'll judge whether or not a game is suitable for my kids. If you need out-of-touch head teachers to tell you what your children shouldn't be doing in their spare time, then you're living in a past that was banished long before Minecraft came online. Your kids are just doing what we did years ago, with Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse—the difference is that gaming culture moves more rapidly than any other entertainment medium, and it's the fault of the parent, not the underage player, if ignorance about these products is abundant in any household. Families that play together will be better positioned to stay together, especially if the Nantwich Education Partnership ever sees its overzealous attitude actively enforced.

Follow Mike on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

When the housing benefit cap was announced in 2010, London Mayor Boris Johnson said he would "not accept any kind of Kosovo-style social cleansing of London," adding, "The last thing we want to have in our city is a situation such as Paris where the less well-off are pushed out to the suburbs."

Fast-forward five years and everyone to the left of Boris has at some point bemoaned the ongoing social cleansing of the city. But who is actually being purged from London, and how do they feel about it? Sadly, the most underreported aspect of the rapidly changing capital is the fate of the people who are being forced to leave it. There was a flurry of headlines in 2012 and 2013 about London councils finding speculative locations for their homeless tenants in places like Stoke, Hastings, Birmingham, and beyond. But it was always speculative: No one has actually demonstrated how many people are being pushed out—until now.

For the first time, VICE can confirm with hard facts what had always been the possibility of an exodus of London's poor. It's not an easy trend to measure, or give flesh to—quite simply, there is no London-wide monitoring system. But a data set gleaned from a series of FOI requests submitted by the Green Party over the last five years, seen exclusively by VICE, fleshes out some details on one of the most significant issues to be debated in the forthcoming election.

All the graphs below show figures for the 15 out of 32 London councils that have provided consistent answers to the Green Party's five years' worth of FOI requests.

The first graph—below—shows the number of families with children who have been moved out of London each year since 2010/11:

[body_image width='1000' height='600' path='images/content-images/2015/03/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/29/' filename='dan-hancox-forced-out-of-london-data-body-image-1427668265.jpg' id='40860']

In this substantial sample—which includes inner boroughs such as Camden, Lambeth, and Kensington & Chelsea, as well as outer boroughs like Bromley and Merton—the number of families with children forced out of London rose from 10 in the municipal year 2010/11, to 307 in 2013/14, and already stands at 364 for the current year, with several months' worth of data still to come in. While the sample is incomplete, the pattern is clear: according to our data, over 35 times more families are having to move out of London this year compared to five years ago.

"They tell me I don't have any choice. They send me these letters saying I have to move. I can't sleep from the worry." –Amal

These people aren't just numbers on a bar chart. They are people like Amal, a single mother of three children, all younger than seven years of age, who Wandsworth Council are trying to send out of London. "They tell me I don't have any choice. They send me these letters saying I have to move. I can't sleep from the worry." We are sitting on a grimy sofa in the family's temporary accommodation in Tooting, and she has just stopped crying. "I wake up so sick, you know? I have to go to study but I feel so sick."

The housing crisis triple-whammy of social housing shortages, welfare reforms, and rapid gentrification have seen Wandsworth Council sending its poorest and most vulnerable further and further away. While the Battersea Power Station luxury development continues on one side of the borough, last year the council announced a £5 million [$7 million] project to buy properties to house its homeless outside the borough. They've just announced more emergency funding, and arrangements with private landlords in Leicester, Portsmouth, Birmingham, and West Bromwich.

"The council asked what situation would you like ideally. I told her I would like Tooting or Battersea, because I don't know any other area," says Amal. She is studying business administration at a local FE college, doing voluntary work at a nearby nursery and desperately relying on her neighbors and ex-husband—who left last year by mutual arrangement, after he hit her for the second time—for childcare support. "At the end of the call she said, 'OK, I found the house for you.' I didn't know the area, and I asked where is it, and she said 'near Newcastle.'"

After this, they repeated the same dance they have performed a few times: Amal pleading "no,' and the council maintaining "you have to, you have no choice, you're homeless."

The council eventually demurred. The next time they spoke, they said they'd found another property for Amal—in West Bromwich. "I said to them, 'I already told you, I have a job interview in London, I am studying in London, my children are at school in London, my ex-husband visits every week to help with the children.'" This, they explained, was the last chance, no more debate—come and see the property in West Bromwich, because that's where you're going. "They said: 'No option, just one option: West Bromwich.' If I said no, they wouldn't give me another chance." She said no, and is now waiting on a distant court date.

The example of Paris given by Boris Johnson in 2010, where the poor "banlieues" on the outskirts are hidden from the gleaming tourist and business-friendly center, is a sadly apposite one. Finding data to supplement the substantial anecdotal evidence for this "banlieueisation" of London is hard, but by no means impossible.

The map below shows the number of housing benefit claimants in London who are claiming Local Housing Allowance in the private rented sector—i.e. those who are supplementing the rent they pay to private landlords with government money—and the change in those numbers since 2011:

[body_image width='997' height='681' path='images/content-images/2015/03/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/29/' filename='dan-hancox-forced-out-of-london-data-body-image-1427669662.png' id='40870']

The substantial drop in housing benefit claimants renting in "Inner West" (a grouping which contains expensive places like Camden, Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea, Wandsworth, and Westminster) contrasts sharply with the rise in "Outer West and North West," which contains Barnet, Brent, Ealing, Harrow, Hillingdon, Hounslow, and Richmond-upon-Thames.

The reason is simple: with their benefits capped and rents soaring, thousands are being forced away from their homes in inner London boroughs. Anti-poverty charities like the Westminster-based Zaccheas 2000 Trust have seen these trends dramatically alter their case-work. Week after week, they have had new clients, many of whom are in work, turn up in their surgeries—people who have lived in Westminster for decades, and can no longer afford the rent. A 2014 study found that the average two-bedroom monthly rent in Westminster had risen to £4,174 [$6,198]. Only two boroughs out of 32 had average monthly rents less than £1,000 [$1,500]—Bexley and Havering.

Official Mayoral policy dictates that the upheaval of families with school-aged children is of particular concern. Boris Johnson has previously said in Mayor's Question Time that he was successfully lobbying councils "to allow those families who are in particular need, who needed to live near their place of work, or keep kids in school, to have special circumstances."

[body_image width='1000' height='600' path='images/content-images/2015/03/29/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/29/' filename='dan-hancox-forced-out-of-london-data-body-image-1427668295.jpg' id='40861']

The reality on the ground appears rather less successful. The churn of the capital's most vulnerable families between different London boroughs is also seeing consistent rises. In the year 2010/11, 928 families with school-aged children were relocated from one London borough to another, rising to 1,828 by 2012/13, and 2,483 in 2013/14. The implications for "poverty exiles" pushed out from inner London boroughs like Westminster are severe: a life of stressful, 90-minute commutes from far-flung hostels for children as young as five, and exhaustion, worry, and depression for their parents.

This year, the figure currently stands at 2,332—so it looks very likely to rise again.

Rebutting a parliamentary question about "benefit migration" as a result of his new welfare legislation, Iain Duncan Smith said in November 2014: "There has been very little movement of more than about five miles from people's existing homes as a result of the benefit cap." Five miles is the government's chosen watershed of acceptability, but the thing is, even for those Londoners who have not been sent hundreds of miles away, five miles is not an inconsiderable amount of space to traverse in London. In more rural areas, five miles might mean moving from one small town to a neighboring town. In London it is the difference between Bow and Ilford—and potentially new schools, longer commutes, and a substantial estrangement from childcare and support networks.

For Amal, the future offers only insecurity. She told me she tried to think positively about the idea of West Bromwich, and agreed to go and visit with a council employee. Maybe if it was a new house—a warm, dry house, somewhere with space, somewhere that gave her a good feeling—she would try to get her head around starting from scratch, as a single mother of three young children in a region where she knows literally no one.

She showed me photos of the West Bromwich property: it looked dilapidated and damp. There were exposed wires and ripped up skirting boards, dirty carpets and suspicious bulges in the wallpaper. The council employee who accompanied her sounded bored and unsympathetic about the whole process. "I asked her, 'Where is the school?' She said, 'I don't know.' I asked her, 'Where is the college?' She said 'I don't know.' I asked, 'Where's the hospital? My son has asthma.' She said, 'I don't know—wait for the landlord.' Eventually, the landlord came and I asked him all the same questions, he said, 'I'm sorry, I came from Birmingham, I don't know.'

"I am always so polite with them, even when they are rude. I said to the council lady, 'Would you live here?' She said, 'I'm not homeless. You're homeless.'"

In a letter to the mayor seen by VICE, Green Party Assembly Member Darren Johnson condemned the rising incidences of children being uprooted from their schools, while their parents are separated from friends and families, and the vital support networks they provide. Johnson also lamented the worrying lack of oversight at council and Mayoral level. Over half of the boroughs failed to reply to the Green Party's FOI requests at all. "With such huge public concern about the impact of the welfare cuts," he wrote, "I find it astonishing that many boroughs aren't keeping an eye on the impact in their own local area."

The problem is simple: without oversight—or at least, FOI compliance—it is impossible to gauge the true scale of the exodus. Some boroughs, like Tower Hamlets and Hackney, have provided answers one year, then failed to do so the next. Croydon and Westminster said it would be too expensive to answer the question, Kingston said it would be too complicated, and Newham, Redbridge, Harrow, and Lewisham are now months overdue in replying. Tower Hamlets managed an intricate, multi-layered excuse which said it was too complicated, and anyway they publish their own (impenetrable) data, and then finally that they thought about it, and decided it wasn't in the public interest to answer the FOI.

Nevertheless, the data obtained by the Green Party and presented here by VICE makes it clear that the forced exodus of London's poor is not only happening, but worsening every year. The housing crisis will be a key issue in the general election, with "generation rent" a buzz-phrase on the lips of earnest politicians. But its greatest victims are already being submerged by the sham campaigns of property industry lobbyists and saturated by the navel-gazing of those in a position buy a house in Redbridge but not in Hackney. As ever, it is those at the bottom whose voices will go unheard.

Amal's name has been changed.

Follow Dan on Twitter.

The issues raised in this article are explored more fully in VICE's brand new film, Regeneration Game—a documentary about the war to live in London that you should watch here.

More from VICE's Election '15 coverage.

[body_image width='900' height='598' path='images/content-images/2015/03/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/23/' filename='eastern-promises-east-kent-body-image-1427121745.jpg' id='38841']

The site of the former Lido, Margate. Photos by Hayley Hatton

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

What is it with the East of England? In recent years metropolitan consensus has characterized it as a wasted land, strewn with towns that are less functioning communities than they are grim pockets of abandonment. Coastal settlements such as Clacton, Great Yarmouth, and Margate have undergone existential crises as tourism and industry have withdrawn in a time of cheap air travel and globalization.

The East of England is a part of the UK that seems to have been dismissed, cast off, as "UKIP country," populated by those southerners who aren't privy to London's economic miracle and who have in turn become pariahs for our political class. Journalist and former Conservative MP Matthew Parris advised the Tories to abandon Clacton as it represented a Britain "going nowhere" compared to places with "ambition and drive" like Cambridge.

MARGATE

If the East's seaside towns are to be revived, goes the theory, it will happen via the Brighton Equation: cultural revival + artists moving in for cheap rents = new destination for the seepage of creative London.

Margate is now well into this process, and the town was named one of the 30 most fashionable places to live in the UK by the Times this month. There has been a big run-up to Margate becoming Kent's center for art—the Turner Contemporary opened in 2011 but was announced nearer the turn of the Millennium—and the town has received all the usual editorial fanfare in the property pages to suggest that it's on the up.

[body_image width='900' height='594' path='images/content-images/2015/03/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/23/' filename='eastern-promises-east-kent-body-image-1427121871.jpg' id='38842']
Dreamland, Margate

Margate's regeneration showpiece is Dreamland, the derelict amusement park built in 1920 that will reopen later this year as a kind of vintage funfair, designed by Wayne Hemingway. Tickets for Dreamland's June opening went on sale last week. Those queueing were treated to a visit by none other than Only Fools and Horses' John Challis, who seems to have turned his life into one long nostalgia tour of England, as he shuttles from Redditch to Kettering, permanently in character as "Boycie."

Jamie Dobson, the owner of the Joke Shop at the bottom of the high street, is not convinced about the benefits of the revived funfair for Margate: "You need to take a lot of money to maintain those small little restored rides, and it is a big spot."

Jamie has lived and worked in Margate all his life. His father ran the joke shop before him, when it was nearer Dreamland on the front. He doesn't predict victory for UKIP in Thanet South or Thanet North, both of which contain Margate, despite the efforts of Nigel Farage: "UKIP have turned up and played around a bit, but people aren't as interested as they like to think."

Following Margate's decline in the 1970s and 80s, a lot of the big hotels in the deprived area of Cliftonville, where TS Eliot wrote The Wasteland, were turned into bedsits for London councils to rehouse their poor. "Cliftonville got carved up, usually by the chums of Tory councillors, into small, crappy bedsits and flogged off cheap to housing associations," says Jamie. "[They were] moving people around like chess pieces to make their money."

[body_image width='900' height='599' path='images/content-images/2015/03/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/23/' filename='eastern-promises-east-kent-body-image-1427121979.jpg' id='38845']

Investment has followed the Turner gallery, via arts-focused entrepreneurs and small businesses such as cafes and the like, and Jamie applauds the fact that people are buying up big Victorian houses and turning them back into family homes, rather than multiple-occupancy bedsits. But he questions the validity of companies such as Haeckels, which makes beard oil from Margate seaweed and last year set up a Kickstarter for a luxe new version of the Victorian bathing machine that once lined the beach. "You do think: 'Who is this product aimed at?' Because it is very expensive stuff, produced in an area where unemployment statistics are quite scary."

Jamie argues that Thanet Council should provide for a wider range of the community than just the incoming artists and creatives, but he isn't holding his breath – especially when it comes to the area's youths. "A few local lads made a concrete skate park near Cliftonville on an old crazy-golf course near the lido that no one had used for decades, and did a cracking job. All the community were involved, different nationalities, kids, adults, builders, lawyers...

"But after initially giving them the green light to do it, the council came along and bulldozed it. They spent more money on the bulldozers than anyone spent building this thing. Now it's just fenced off rubble. Prime development spot."

Uncertainty brings with it a desire to turn the clock back. UKIP supporters want to return to a more thriving United Kingdom closer to its former imperial splendor, so they dress in tweed, drink during office hours, and tell jokes from the 1970s. The gentrifiers look to solve problems of local economies by opening vintage clothes shops that celebrate past subcultures, kitsch fun fairs, and cute art galleries. It speaks to the feeling of dread one has about the future in this country, young or old.

[body_image width='900' height='598' path='images/content-images/2015/03/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/23/' filename='eastern-promises-east-kent-body-image-1427122205.jpg' id='38847']

A kid skates on the streets in Cliftonville, following the destruction of the DIY skate park by the council

We walk into Cliftonville, where South Thanet, the seat that Nigel Farage hopes to take, begins. We pass the Winter Gardens, where UKIP's 2015 conference was held. Scraps of trash float about the muted cliffside, which itself seems as if it's been left to blow about in the wind.

Cliftonville holds some of the poorest streets in Kent, and is never far from the news. There's been negative talk surrounding immigrants since it was known as "Kosoville" in the early noughties.

But Cliftonville doesn't feel too despondent. On Dalby Street, kids are playing in the street in a way you don't see much in more middle-class suburbs, shouting to each other in English with varying accents (at one of the local schools, 20 languages are spoken). The main stretch, Northdown Road, is made up of ragged, but mainly open and well-used shops: east European groceries, an unreconstructed 1960s bakery, second-hand shops, restaurants including the much-lauded Sri Lankan restaurant, Riz.

In the Bellevue pub on the corner of Godwin Road, two men watch the soccer. The elder is quite animated, talking excitedly about going to see local non-league side Margate FC every week. But soon, it is impossible not to notice how sad his eyes are. Conversation turns to the town itself. It is a "dump ... a shithole" he says, citing council corruption as the reason for its decline. In an independent report in 2013, Thanet District Council was deemed a place "surrounded by secrecy and corruption." The huge white fence that surrounds nearby Ramsgate's former Pleasurama site is known locally as the Great Wall of Ramsgate, a local symbol of the incompetence of a council that has lasted a decade or more.

[body_image width='900' height='599' path='images/content-images/2015/03/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/23/' filename='eastern-promises-east-kent-body-image-1427122312.jpg' id='38849']

The Pleasurama site, Ramsgate

DOVER

"People think Margate's bad—wait until you see Dover," was the reply of one local in the pub when we said we were headed for the port town. The days in which "managed decline" was talked about as a viable option politically—as it was by the Thatcher government after the Toxteth riots in Liverpool—are gone but we live through a different time: of mismanaged decline. Nowhere is this more stark than in Dover, which has been the brunt of bad planning and indecision since it was flattened during World War II. Shops are boarded up. The port obviously dominates, but it feels separate from the fortunes of the town's inhabitants.

A vast car park (in Dover, the car park is king) peters out into a fenced off building site and the Castle pub. A badly conceived block of flats conceals the view of the English Channel. Up on the cliffs behind is Dover Castle, a vision of magisterial English pride, out of reach.

The Castle is owned by one Paul McMullan, the former News of the World journalist who was famously hacked by Hugh Grant and who is notorious for openly defending the hacking practices of the tabloids, advocating voyeurism as truth: "Privacy is for pedos."

[body_image width='900' height='599' path='images/content-images/2015/03/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/23/' filename='eastern-promises-east-kent-body-image-1427122431.jpg' id='38851']

McMullan is not at the pub when we visit—Twitter says he is in the Arctic. I talk to him later by phone. He bought the pub after looking for somewhere to run his paparazzi agency from. The agency never took off so he started selling beer. It opened as a wine bar, but things only picked up when he started putting on drum and bass nights, adding a backpacker hostel upstairs.

"To call Dover a shithole is glamorizing it," he says. McMullan points the finger at Dover council, who destroyed 13th century cottages and Roman ruins in return for yet more car parks. "The white cliffs are one of the wonders of the world. And Dover at night looks lovely. It's just when the sun comes up it's, 'Oh my god...' When Hugh Grant first came into the pub, he said: 'What have they done to Dover?'"

McMullan made an unsuccessful bid to run for UKIP. He claims the drinkers in his pub blame immigrants for the town's decline. A recent poll in the Dover Express, which under editor Nick Hudson looked to set the agenda for immigrant-bashing in the late 90s, said that there would be a UKIP surge in the election. "UKIP is far too mild for the average Dovorian ... It's very much them and us."

Dover Immigration Removal Centre is housed in a series of large Napoleonic fortifications, known as the Western Heights. The site was converted into a prison in the 1950s; in 2002 it switched from a Young Offenders' Institute to its current usage.

[body_image width='900' height='598' path='images/content-images/2015/03/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/23/' filename='eastern-promises-east-kent-body-image-1427122508.jpg' id='38852']

In February, the Sun ran a story in complaint against a dental surgery that had been built to provide for migrants kept at Dover Immigration Removal centre: "Tools are locked up in case they are stolen as weapons and patients can't floss for fear they weave it into rope. Staff have a panic button."

The charity Samphire was set up in 2004 to provide support for the detainees of the removal center. (There is a visitor group for each detention center, and there are 15 detention centers UK-wide.) "The tabloid view of immigrants is far removed from the reality," says Samphire's Fraser Paterson. "It is particularly challenging to get the truth out there, as it's contrary to what people want to believe, and the image of immigration that is given to them. We hope that people will see the long tradition that the UK has of human rights and start treating people like humans."

The title "Immigration Removal Centre" is misleading. "Suspected terrorists have a 14-day time limit on detention without charge but there's no time limit to how long a migrant can be detained here," says Fraser. Of the detainees Samphire currently helps, three-quarters have been there longer than a month (most are detained for at least a month). About five percent are detained for over a year, with a few at any one time detained for several years. Those deemed unreturnable are released and housed but can't work.

[body_image width='900' height='598' path='images/content-images/2015/03/23/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/23/' filename='eastern-promises-east-kent-body-image-1427122585.jpg' id='38853']

Dover has a capacity of 400, and there are ten times that many detention spaces in total countrywide. It is run by the Prison Service but most are maintained by private security firms, who don't always have the most useful or relevant training—for example, it is not clear that they have the sufficient skill set to ensure the safety and welfare of at-risk detainees suffering mental problems.

The migrant as a type is the fall guy of late-capitalist decline. Political duplicity masked by shorthand scapegoats. Refugee stowaways are being beaten up by truck drivers over the channel at Calais. In England, it can sometimes feel as if the hope of a civil society is drying up and crumbling into the sea, until the only way people think they can make a difference is through the negative, angry politics. Nowhere is this more so than in Dover. White cliffs sharpened, turned into a guillotine.

Thanks to Kit and Valerie Caless, and Iain Aitch.

Follow Tim on Twitter.

[body_image width='1500' height='1002' path='images/content-images/2015/03/30/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/30/' filename='twenty-years-later-tokyo-subway-gas-attacks-330-body-image-1427756318.jpg' id='41289']

A graffiti portrait of Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum Shinrikyo. Photo via Flickr user Thierry Ehrmann

On March 20, 1995, during the morning rush hour, five men dropped 11 bags of sarin on five subway trains in Tokyo. They punctured the plastic bags with the sharpened ends of umbrellas and exited the cars as the deadly liquid leaked onto the floor and evaporated into the air of the crowded trains. In the end, 13 people were killed and 6,300 more were injured, many of them left blind or paralyzed. Japan was flung into crisis mode.

The men who caused the havoc were members of Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese quasi-Buddhist cult led by a former acupuncturist called Shoko Asahara. They hoped to bring about the apocalypse. At its height, the cult claimed more than 50,000 members (tens of thousands of them in Russia) and presided over a vast pool of funds, at one point claiming to control more than a billion dollars.

It's been 20 years since the Tokyo subway attacks. Asahara and the other major planners of the attack sit on death row. Its chemical weapons laboratories have been shuttered. But where Aum failed in its mission to bring about a global apocalypse, it succeeded in leaving a dark bruise on Japanese society, one that still aches two decades later.

Aum Shinrikyo, or "Aum Supreme Truth," was founded in 1987 by Asahara, who was born Chizuo Matsumoto, a bearded, chubby half-blind son of a poor tatami-mat maker. What began as a new age-y group would grow into a powerful, insular, and hyper-paranoid religious movement bent on bringing about the apocalypse. Asahara dressed like an Indian guru and claimed supernatural powers, such as the ability to levitate and read minds. He even sold his own piss as a magical elixir.

Surprisingly, Aum's massive membership included some of Japan's sharpest minds. It had more than 300 scientists in its ranks. Many more were accomplished businessmen. Three of the Tokyo subway attackers held degrees in physics. One was a medical doctor.

All this expertise came in handy when Asahara wanted to build an arsenal fit for a supervillain. In a gated community on Mount Fuji, Aum's biochemists engineered boatloads of chemical and biological weapons, from anthrax to weaponized Ebola. A weapons factory nearby produced AK-47 parts. In 1994 the group purchased a twin-turbine Mi-17 helicopter from Azerbaijan for $700,000, according to reporting done by Andrew Marshall and David Kaplan for their bookThe Cult at the End of the World: The Terrifying Story of the Aum Doomsday Cult, from the Subways of Tokyo to the Nuclear Arsenals of Russia. Before Aum dug its own grave with the Tokyo gas attacks, the cultists were getting terrifyingly close to obtaining a nuclear bomb. It is no wonder that Japan has been so deeply scarred by the group—they were petrifying.

The Aum Affair, as it is commonly referred to in Japan, seeded a culture of fear in one of the world's safest societies. It shattered Japan's image of itself as an orderly, well-maintained place. The scariest part was that the group was homegrown. Japan was utterly bewildered that young, educated people would give up everything and devote themselves to such a deranged organization.

Aum dominated headlines and talk shows for several weeks following the attacks. An entire industry of Aum-related literature soon arose and perpetuated the sensationalism. The ongoing manhunt for the Aum leadership and their subsequent trials ensured that the group would periodically return to the spotlight. Today, politicians and security officials often allude to Aum to appeal for public funds or score political points. In Japan, Aum is the eternal boogeyman that might return at any moment if society lets its guard down.

Propping up Aum as an ongoing threat is made infinitely easier to do when the cult still exists. Aleph and Hikari no Wa are both religious groups formed by former Aum cultists. (They are allowed to operate, albeit under close government surveillance.) Hikari no Wa, which means "Circle of Light," was started by a former higher-up of Aum as a splinter group. Aleph is the original cult, just with a different name.

But what makes a person stay with an organization associated with one of the most heinous terrorist attacks in recent history? And how does such a group survive in a place where nearly everyone fears or hates them? These are the questions that fascinate Erica Baffelli, an associate professor at the University of Manchester and one of the world's foremost experts on Hikari no Wa. She is in regular contact with the group and says that they are in the process of distancing themselves from Aum, mostly through social media campaigns. They have cut out some of the strict ascetic practices of Aum and most of the crazy dogma, such as the part about egging on the apocalypse. They have also publicly denounced Shoko Asahara and the very idea of an all-powerful guru.

"But they are still trying to find their way," says Baffelli. "You take away all the dangerous things— prophesy, a leader—and there is not much left. So they need to create a new teaching."

Aleph is the bigger of the two offshoots, with an estimated several hundred members, and it has not done as much to distance itself from the former leader. A couple of Asahara's daughters and his wife are heavily involved in the group, which has been reluctant to speak with the media or curious academics. Aleph's close ties to Asahara and its secrecy has people worried. Protests often erupt outside its facilities and many refuse to buy products made by businesses with ties to the group.

"The image of religion as something potentially dangerous became very, very major in post-Aum Japan. I think that still has an impact." —Ian Reader

But Ian Reader, a professor at Lancaster University and a leading expert on Aum, thinks the threat posed by Aleph and Hikari no Wa are overblown. "They are actually a small inefficient group who are not going to do anything but they are still seen in the public eye as highly dangerous," says Reader. He thinks that some government agencies use Aum's legacy of fear to further their own agendas. "The security forces have used this image of Aum as dangerous to constantly push for more state control over religious groups and for increased surveillance budgets, much as we are seeing in the West with the idea of radical Islam," he says.

Prior to the Aum Affair, police stayed away from religious groups. During the prewar period, the state used security forces to target groups that were seen as subversive—basically anyone who didn't blindly follow the emperor and his militarism. Religious groups were often victims of the emperor's witch hunt.

In the postwar, pre-Aum period, the police tried to distance themselves from that legacy and were reluctant to investigate religious groups for fear of being accused of interfering in religious freedom. That all changed after the subway attacks. There is a much greater readiness today by security agencies to intervene in religious affairs and they regularly do.

There is also a readiness in the general public to discount religion as a practice. One of the most lasting marks of the Aum Affair was that it created a suspicion toward religion that hadn't existed before in Japan. "The image of religion as something potentially dangerous became very, very major in post-Aum Japan," says Reader. "I think that still has an impact."

Shortly after the subway attacks, a Japanese scholar of religion remarked that Japan was witnessing " the death of religion." While religious groups still exist and a minority of Japanese still consider themselves religious, the general sentiment that religion is something that can cause harm to society has lingered. Three years after the attacks an academic survey conducted by Nanzan University gauging public trust in societal institutions found that religion ranked the lowest, behind both the media and politicians. In 2008, when several Japanese telecom firms installed filters on their smartphones meant to keep children safe from harmful influences, websites associated with religion counted as blocked material, along with pornography and gambling sites.

The Tokyo subway gassing remains the most serious terrorist attack in modern Japanese history. The attack and the subsequent revelations regarding Aum and the utter derangement of many of its members shocked Japan in profound ways. Not all of its repercussions were negative: It sparked a nationwide debate about the highly ordered nature of Japanese society and its rigid educational system, which many had blamed for pushing some of the cultists towards Aum in the first place. It also forced Japan to strengthen its security infrastructure, which the Aum Affair had shown to be frighteningly inadequate to cope with modern threats. Aum had committed several crimes leading up to the Tokyo attacks, including the nighttime murder of a lawyer and his family and a sarin attack in 1994 on a rural town that killed eight people. The police absentmindedly arrested an innocent resident of the town for the gassing, whose own wife had been killed in the attack.

But in many ways the Aum Affair is an open wound in Japan. The terror and images of violence from the events remain a factor of life. "Even if the affair is shifting from being a contemporary to a recent historical event, the shadow the movement has cast remains extensive," wrote Baffelli and Reader in a joint 2011 paper. The Aum Affair regularly returns to the national spotlight. Just last week, a daughter of Shoko Asahara published a memoir of her experience growing up in the shadow of the cult.

Kids attending college now in Japan would have only been two or three during the Aum Affair. It will eventually fade into history and new series of crises will take its place. But for now, 20 years on, the macabre mania of the cult still resonates, buzzing in the background like the lingering hum of a singing bowl.

Follow Brent Crane on Twitter.

[body_image width='700' height='3058' path='images/content-images/2015/03/31/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/31/' filename='honeycomb-rabbits-015-body-image-1427832071.jpg' id='41719']

Look at Steven Weissman's blog and buy his books from Fantagraphics.