LONDON GRIP DATA LOSS  –  THE FINAL OUTCOME

Following a problem at our web hosting company, all items posted on London Grip since Autumn 2023 have been lost and the loss now seems unrecoverable.  Here is how we will make the best of the situation

Our site logo of a broken and bleeding phone box now seems to have been a prescient choice back in 2007!  On December 4th 2025 a still-unexplained mishap at our web-hosting company caused the loss of about 200 posts — everything we’d published since Autumn 2023.  We’ve been working hard trying to find the missing data lurking somewhere in our site webspace; and recently our detective work located a folder which appeared to contain the missing items.  It took some effort to tidy up the site before we could attempt to slot this folder back where it belonged.  But alas, it has now turned out that the folder is corrupted in some way and it persistently refuses to be moved to where it’s needed.  And that, we think, has to be the end of our attempts to get back everything that’s been lost.

So what’s to be done to repair the damage? What we have done already is to re-post quite a few of the most recent reviews which had hardly had a chance to get read.  We’ve also managed to restore the most recent posting of London Grip New Poetry which  had only been on-line for a couple of days when the crash occurred. Fortunately all issues of London Grip New Poetry had already been archived; and, although three editions (numbers 55-57) are still currently off-line, we expect the full set to be available in a week or two.

Having spent more than a month looking backwards we now want to turn to the future and start dealing with the backlog of new material that has built up.  We haven’t entirely given up on the idea of re-posting some more of the lost articles and reviews.  But this will now be a relatively low-priority activity because we are delighted to report that a great deal of London Grip material has survived elsewhere. Let us explain …

Some of our readers may already know about  wonderfully named Wayback Machine which resides at http://web.archive.org/. If you visit that website and type our address https://londongrip.co.uk/ in the search box you may be amazed to learn that our site has been visited and recorded over 450 times since the year 2011.  If you scroll along a timeline and click on a particular date and time you will see a snapshot of London Grip as it appeared on a particular day in the past.  So anyone whose book review has disappeared from our site should be able to find it here.  It’s only fair to say however that the working of this site isn’t as smooth as ours and its search functions aren’t quite as reliable. So when it comes to tracking down an item some posts may be more troublesome than others!

We shall shortly begin posting new items in pretty much the same way as before.  And of course it’s important to say that the poetry submission window is open till the end of January with a view to the next posting of new poetry happening on schedule in March. 

To conclude by looking on the bright side, it’s fair to say that we have learned a bit more about the nuts and bolts of the London Grip infrastructure and we shall be continuing discussions with the hosting company on how to keep the site in better shape and protected against any such mishap occurring again…

With all good wishes
Michael and Stephen