The northlondonhippy

The mem­bers of the northlon­don­hippy col­lec­tive have decided to finally dis­close the truth about this web­site and the inter­net char­ac­ter we’ve cre­ated, called “the northlondonhippy”.

About 5 and a half years ago, a group of writ­ers and artists decided to band together to cre­ate a fic­ti­tious blog­ger that would be both con­vinc­ing yet weird.

Our exper­i­ment in online fak­ery has been very suc­cess­ful as no one ever doubted “the northlon­don­hippy” wasn’t real. We think its down to the mix of humour, drama and pathos that we’ve used to con­struct “the northlon­don­hippy”, but we’re not really sure.

Who belongs to the northlon­don­hippy collective?

We are group of 30-something media types who thought it would be amus­ing to cre­ate a fic­tional online loser and make-believe hippy, mainly to for our own entertainment.

We never expected to keep it up for so many years, though if you look at the fre­quency of posts to this site, we haven’t really worked very hard.

We all share respon­si­bil­i­ties for work­ing on the web­site, as well as “the northlondonhippy’s” other online activ­i­ties, such as “his” Twit­ter pres­ence and “his” videos for YouTube. We all take turns answer­ing “his” fan emails too.

One of us runs the actual web­site side of things, the rest of our group write the con­tent that keep the nar­ra­tive of “the northlon­don­hippy” alive.

While “the northlon­don­hippy” is a cre­ation, there are aspects of him that we’ve bor­rowed from our own per­son­al­i­ties. For exam­ple, I’m sure it won’t sur­prise any­one to find out that we’re all pro­lific cannabis smokers.

A few of us are jour­nal­ists, a few work in tv pro­duc­tion, sev­eral work for internet-based media firms, one is inde­pen­dently wealthy and yet another is cur­rently between jobs. And one of us is a minor celebrity and yes, you would prob­a­bly recog­nise his name. We are an eclec­tic col­lec­tion of smug, clever and edu­cated men (and one woman) who have built up a rather loyal fol­low­ing online as “the northlondonhippy”.

When we came up with the idea of a northlon­don­hippy branded RooR bong, we never thought any­one would be that inter­ested, but it turns out it has sold out­ra­geously well. So well that we’ve had to set up a lim­ited com­pany (the northlon­don­hippy col­lec­tive ltd) to deal with the prof­its from the licens­ing and sales, plus VAT and now cor­po­rate tax.

Now that you are think­ing about it, you’re start­ing to remem­ber all the tiny lit­tle clues you’ve missed that were unin­ten­tion­ally left in the hippy’s writing.

If you go back and re-read a bit, you’ll soon spot that the entries were writ­ten by more than one per­son. Once you know the truth, its bla­tantly obvi­ous that this has all been an elab­o­rate hoax. No one could really be as can­tan­ker­ous, sad and twisted as “the northlon­don­hippy”, yet still man­age func­tion in nor­mal society.

The way the char­ac­ter is drawn, we thought it would be obvi­ous to any semi-intelligent reader that “the northlon­don­hippy” is a com­pletely fic­tional con­struct; an imag­i­nary being.

I guess ulti­mately the joke is on us because we’ve had to do this for so long, but now it has grown labo­ri­ous and tire­some. We hoped some­one would dis­cover and reveal the truth, but that hasn’t hap­pened, so we decided to do the “big reveal” ourselves.

We’re still work­ing on what to do next with “the northlon­don­hippy” brand. Now that we’ve built and estab­lished it, it would be a shame to just let it go.

We’re think­ing either northlon­don­hippy tee-shirts or a northlon­don­hippy theme park for hedo­nis­tic adults in the Nether­lands. Its still too early to say.

Thank you every­one for your sup­port and we hope you’re not too mad at us now that we’ve finally let you in on our lit­tle joke.

With thanks for 5 fun years,
– the northlon­don­hippy col­lec­tive (ltd)

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