About Fieldfare

Print journal celebrating our connection to place—a longer, slower read. Issue 5 publishing October 2025.

Fieldfare started life as a print journal in 2021. Since then we have published four issues in print and digital format, available on our website. Our Substack is a compilation of favourite stories from our archive as well as new articles and essays, commissioned just for Substack or submitted in response to our quarterly writing prompts.

More than anything, Fieldfare is about the places that really matter to us. You’ll find a mixture of photo essays, travel features, personal narratives, interviews, profiles of artists and gardeners, and beautiful homes and buildings—all with a focus on the importance of place and connection.

Our next print issue is due to publish in October 2025.

About the editors

Skye O’Neill and Mendy Waits met in London in 2016, through a little app called Instagram. Neither of us was from London originally (Skye is Australian and Mendy is American), but we bonded over a shared love of the city we both called home.

We have always been reluctant to call ourselves creatives. It’s not in our practical nature, but there is mounting evidence that we have a desire to communicate through images and words our shared love of place.

A quick glance through either of our Instagram accounts and you’ll see we enjoy a bit of history and trivia, architecture, and personal story. We really wish there were one word to encapsulate the elusive concept of sense of place, and the people and things that give meaning to its shape. (We tried to call our magazine “Locus” but said aloud it’s too similar to Locust, and we thought “Genius Loci” was fitting, but pretentious.)

As the bots infiltrated Instagram and our experience became less enjoyable over the years, we began asking ourselves, “what’s the point?” Why are we continuing to make content for an app that only looks after its ad revenue and not its users? Or for brands that treat our work as if it’s expired seconds after it’s seen? Then, you might recall, there was a global pandemic. Among all of the effects of this, these questions of futility were exacerbated and eventually untenable.

The consensus: scroll fatigue anaesthetised our authenticity.

Discussions of transferring to a different medium ping-ponged between us. Could we create something more tangible and meaningful—giving pause to appreciate not only photos, but pay homage to places, people, and moments that contribute to our sense of community, wherever it is and whoever constitutes our feeling of belonging? Tell stories of home and self and not Like Counts? We wanted deeper conversations about these places where we feel connection, and to explore our interest in how identity is rooted and expressed in that attachment.

We wanted substance. We wanted print. And so Fieldfare was born, initially as a print publication (which you can buy here). However, the spiralling costs of print have forced us to think about longer term sustainability, and our interest in Substack grew as a publishing platform where we could continue to have some of those conversations and share more stories from the writers and photographers we’ve loved and featured in the magazine, without the huge overheads. It’s a place where we can share our archive of stories, commission new ones, and find the contributors we want to feature in our next print publication (currently scheduled for October 2025). To that end, we will be sharing quarterly thematic writing prompts to all our subscribers as an encouragement to send us your work with a view to featuring it on Substack and, hopefully, in print.

New to our Substack? Here’s how it works

There are two versions of Fieldfare on Substack. The basic version is free. If you subscribe to this free version, you will receive occasional free posts, letters from the editors, and essays submitted to Fieldfare via our quarterly creative prompts. We will select the best of these articles to be published in the forthcoming print version of Fieldfare.

The second version is paid. If you subscribe to this paid version, you gain:

• A FREE COPY of the forthcoming Issue 5 of Fieldfare (publishing October 2025), worth £15, for people who sign up as paid subscribers by 31 March 2025

• occasional discounts on our back issues

• access to everything we post on Substack

• access to the subscriber Notes and Chat functions on Substack, so we can chat to our paid subscribers in real time

• full access to the archive

• most importantly, the warm satisfaction of keeping Fieldfare alive and ad-free in print.

All this for less than the price of a cup of coffee per month in central London—BARGAIN!

You can read our posts in the emails you receive, in your browser, or on your phone or tablet in the Substack app. You can unsubscribe at any time.