Mission statement

Whatever the nature of your business, you will use the written word. Whatever your final product or service, you will have to communicate with your customers, your suppliers, other businesses and service providers. And, however good your business is, if your use of the written word is not what it could be you are like a supermodel arriving for an audition with a missing front tooth.

I can provide a copywriting service to suit your business environment and a proofreading resource which will ensure that your ability to communicate meets the high standards of your other commercial transactions.

My rates are £50 per thousand words for copywriting and £20 per thousand words for proofreading.

Examples of my work can be found on this website. Just select a piece from the sidebar on the right, or simply scroll down the page. I can be contacted at mark_gullick@yahoo.co.uk

I look forward to hearing from you.

Mark Gullick PhD

Art exhibition

The following was written to accompany a picture in an art exhibition:

The London of the Victorian age saw building, engineering and architecture on an unprecedented scale. John Nash, the architect whose Arcadian grandeur delighted George IV, gave the city Regent Street, Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Circus. Joseph Bazalgette designed the Embankment, as well as the Battersea, Hammersmith, and Albert Bridges, and his sewage tunnels and pipes, which ran to over 2000km, did more to banish cholera from the capital than any medical advance. Barry and Pugin replaced the ruined Houses of Parliament with the imposing Gothic stage-set which stands today. The National Gallery followed Trafalgar Square. London’s first railway ran from London Bridge to Greenwich in 1836, and was joined by stations at Euston, Paddington, Fenchurch Street, Waterloo, and King's Cross.

In the suburbs of this architectural Monopoly board, Joseph Paxton built the incredible, though doomed, Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851, a magnificent folly which also bequeathed the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert. Father and son team Marc and Isambard Brunel, collaborated for the only time to build the first ever tunnel beneath water, the Thames Tunnel near Rotherhithe. It was a project which almost cost them their lives as the tunnel flooded. Alongside this urban evolution, and with rather less fanfare though no less importance to the public, it was also the great age of pub building.

The Princess Louise in Holborn – pictured above – was named for the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria. Built in 1872 and refitted in 1891 by architect Arthur Chitty, the tile-work was by Simpson & Sons, the glasswork by Morris & Son and the joinery thought to be by Lascelles. These were the cream of architectural artisans, and the love with which they imbued their creations can still detain the drinker even in these sterile times. Now, in London’s second Elizabethan age, pubs such as the Louise are an anachronism, fleeing like overstayed shades of morning before the march of the chain pubs, with their homogeneous cod-nostalgic decor designed by PR men to satisfy the whims of tourists whose country may have no comparable history.

Modernisation, the watchword and security blanket of the contemporary politician, despises institutions such as The Princess Louise. Anything which speaks of and from history, particularly an epoch responsible for Britain’s great imperial adventures, represents an intolerable impertinence to the moderniser. Fortunately, history simply views the pigmies of the modern through lazy eyelids, and continues to speak…

So let us listen, and drink to history. Look in at The Winston Churchill in Kensington Church Street, hiding behind its camouflage of hanging baskets a bunker of pictures of the great man. Detect The Sherlock Holmes behind Charing Cross, with its memorabilia charting the literary and cinematic career of the world’s most famous non-existent detective. Saunter down Soho’s Dean Street to The French House, one thing the French did capture from the Germans – it was formerly German-owned – and a favourite salon of de Gaulle. Cross Blackfriar’s Bridge and enter the Black Friar – just along from where Shakespeare’s company rehearsed – and marvel at the mosaics of monks at work and rest as you read the mottoes on the walls and relax. Festina lente, it says there; make haste slowly.

But pubs are many things to many people: places of quiet repose, a Sunday lunchtime retreat in which to dine and spread the newspaper, or an adventure playground in which fights, love and money may be won or lost.

Fights, love and money, and certainly fights over love and money, have spattered the walls of some of London’s pubs with blood. Come now, to the Spaniard’s Inn in Hampstead, where Dick Turpin’s pistol still hangs. Across town to The Ten Bells in east London’s Commercial Street, frequented by one Mary Kelly until, in 1888, she had her last tipple before an appointment with Jack the Ripper. Back to Hampstead again, to see the bullet hole still in the wall of The Magdala in fashionable NW3, where peroxide nightclub manager Ruth Ellis shot her lover David Blakeley in 1955 and became the last woman to hang in Britain.

To Belgravia, driver, 1963, and The Star in Belgrave Mews, where the £50 million great train robbery was apparently plotted. Forward three years to two of England’s iconic moments. The World Cup was famously held aloft by Sir Bobby Moore, who had briefly managed The Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel, where in the same year Ronnie Kray infamously shot fellow gangster George Cornell in the head to the jukebox accompaniment of The Walker Brother’s The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore.

The blood continued to flow like wine in The Plumber’s Arms in Lower Belgrave Street where, in 1974, a blood-caked Veronica Lucan, estranged spouse of the Seventh Earl of Lucan, screamed that her childrens’ nanny, Sandra Rivett, was dead. She herself had also escaped an attack from a man who, if he is still alive, won’t be drinking in the Plumber’s again. Haul anchor to The Captain Kidd in Wapping, former watering hole of two collectors of doubloons. Scottish pirate Kidd was supposedly the model for Johnny Depp’s cinematic Jack Sparrow, and was hung by the banks of the Thames. In modern times, Barings Bank trader Nick Leeson, another irregular regular, was merely hung out to dry by the banks.

And just as pubs have played their part in the writing of history, history records too the writing done in pubs. And so we join George Orwell, with wonderful appropriateness, writing Animal Farm in The Dog and Duck which, naturally, is close to Oxford Circus. Along the bar is Jeffrey Barnard, sinking sufficient vodka in Soho’s Coach and Horses to compose his Low Life column for The Spectator. And we can go further back, back to Dr Johnson mulling over his dictionary in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a Fleet Street pub also patronised by keen young journalist Charles Dickens.

The thirsty Dickens brings us back full circle to the Spaniard’s, another favourite of the author. John Keats composed Ode to a Nightingale in what is now the beer garden at the Spaniard’s, and Byron would often drop in to nurse a hangover or search for a muse.

And the public house is itself a muse. At once oasis and carnival, sanctuary and bawdy-house, temple and black mass, the traditional London pub is, like Victoria’s daughter Louise, a princess among paupers.