Welcome to SEVENTH RIVER

Hi - Ciaran Thapar here.

To new subscribers, thank you so much for joining me.

To loyal older readers, thanks for sticking around.

It’s been a while since I last posted. Let me quickly explain.

Across 2025, my life changed profoundly.

In the summer, my wife and I bought our first home. After years of renting in south London, now we finally have a patch of land to call our own.

Around the same time, we found out that she was pregnant with our first child. He will be born any day now. I can’t wait.

This period has forced me to reassess my life and where my priorities lie.

It’s also unalterably, somewhat unexpectedly, affected my writing habit. For the final months of last year, I stopped writing regularly by hand in my paper diary, a ritual I’ve otherwise maintained since I was a teenager.

I couldn’t bring myself to open up Substack. It didn’t feel natural.

Then I realised why — and how I might remedy my writer’s block.

I started All City in January 2023. Back then, I was still a freelance youth worker and journalist. I created All City as a space to keep the world of my first book, Cut Short, alive, and to experiment with new ways of writing about youth culture, music and London.

I achieved this. I wrote features about my youth work, conducted interviews that still get shared to this day and started a series of music recommendations. I’m proud of all of this.

But everything is different now. As I’ve written in these pages, I have a full-time job at the Youth Endowment Fund and I’ve been in regular therapy, which has taught me to slow down and focus honestly on what matters most to me.

When I started writing All City, the vision for my next book — a memoir about growing up on the River Thames whilst uncovering the legacy of Punjab’s partition and World War Two through my family history — was a distant, vague aspiration. I was just getting started.

Three years later, and now it’s a fleshed-out concept and story, which I am edging closer and closer to being able to share with the world. To write it, I’ve drafted hundreds of pieces. I’ve travelled to both sides of the border in Punjab. I’ve chipped away at sustaining transformative conversations with family members. My research pulls me deeper and deeper into a new headspace, a new era.

Soon, I will have a son to dedicate this project to.

In sum, All City served its purpose.

But it’s time for a change.

So from now on, this newsletter will be called SEVENTH RIVER.

This is — you heard it here first — the working title of my next book. I’ll explain why I chose this name another time.

The main thing to know is that it will function as a weekly diary of reflections, ideas and updates, pulling together the different strands of my life and work spent writing from the banks of the Thames: from music reviews, to research about youth violence prevention, to discoveries about British Punjabi identity and culture, to observations about life in London, and more.

I will also be posting and interacting more on the Substack app. In the three years since I started using it, its functionality and community has grown, and I am increasingly discovering great writers and writing on here, away from traditional news media.

For the time being, whilst I get into a flow, aim to hit my target of weekly posting and find a new audience, I will keep everything free-to-read. Of course, if you’re enjoying it and are able, please consider making a paid contribution to keep this newsletter alive.

Thanks again for being on this journey with me.

Ciaran

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