Every weekend hundreds of people head into town and city centres. These people are not there to have a drink or spend the night clubbing but rather become Angels to help others have a safe and fun night out.

Street Angels was launched in Halifax, West Yorkshire in 2005. The town had the reputation of being the Wild West of West Yorkshire as between 8 and 12,000 people would visit the town on weekend evenings. Coach trips and visiting football fans, attracted by cheap booze and more pubs and clubs than any other town of in the UK, sadly meant that violence, binge drinking, sexual assaults and under-age drinking were commonplace.

Wandering round the town to see the problems for himself, Paul Blakey remembers, “My wife and I observed many horrendous incidents in the town centre. Police were struggling to control fights; we found trails of blood and vomit; people were passed out in the gutter and there were things happening in alleyways we would rather not have seen. As Christians we...

In the summer of 1967 a guy halts his steps in a field in Wiltshire, retraces his steps the way he came for a few yards – then turns back. He repeats this to-ing and fro-ing for a while. At some point he steps aside and photographs the line which has become visible in the flattened turf as a record of his walking.

July 2017: I halt in the middle of a large snowfield in Laponia, turn around to see that our feet have worn a brown line into the surface and press the button of the GoPro to film Tom struggling towards me across the ice.

The guy in Wiltshire is Richard Long, English sculptor and land artist. His photograph is in the Tate Modern and bears the title ‘A Line Made by Walking’.

Long and I have this in common: We are both fascinated by the meaning of paths and leaving traces.

With repetition, small interactions like ‘walking’ become well-worn marks in the landscape. But by and large, the only traces we register as human interaction with the landscape are toilet paper, ...

He’s one of the BBC’s highest earners – a broadcaster who has spanned the realms of radio, TV and politics. As Jeremy Vine prepares to release his memoir What I Learnt… he chats to Sorted about how he’s balanced his personal faith with his reputation for impartial interviewing and a radio show
that covers all sorts of current affairs.

“The first was Power of Attorney and worries over that. The second one was: ‘Have you ever given the kiss of life to a tortoise?’ The third one was that we revealed a ninth Strictly celebrity, who was Susan Calman. And then the fourth one – hang on, let’s just make sure I’ve got this right… ‘What were the Corn Laws?’”

Jeremy Vine has just determinedly cycled home following a midweek slot at Wogan House for his eponymous BBC Radio 2 show. The bizarre list he now reels out as he grabs a cup of tea and a muffin represents the topics he’s just spent the last two hours dissecting with the help of a 7.5 million-strong army of devoted listeners.

Power ...

Survivalist, television star, Chief Scout, Sorted contributor and all-round action man Bear Grylls
has been with us from the very start. In this exclusive chat to Editor Steve Legg, Bear talks about his journey with the magazine and Running Wild with Barrack Obama.

You always seem to be working?

I like to stay active. I’ve got so many old injuries but I know I am better when I am in the thick of it. I don’t want to arrive at the end of my life in a perfectly preserved body. That would feel like a waste. I want to scream in sideways saying, “What a ride.” I am proud of it. Sometimes the boys at night will put their hands on my face and feel the wrinkles and crow’s-feet but I like those things. They are gentle reminders of many great adventures.

Can anyone be a survivor? Has everyone got it in them?

Yeah, for sure. Knowledge is just one of many tools for survival, but the real key to it is about heart, the determination to keep going despite the pain and fear. And that ‘neve...

To celebrate Sorted magazine’s tenth birthday, editor and founder Steve Legg chatted with columnist and sci-fi author Alex Willmott about the journey so far.

As I reflect on a decade of Sorted magazine hitting the shelves, I’m reminded of how it all started – with a conversation in the school playground with my accountant, Leigh. I hasten to add that we both had kids at the school and weren’t just meeting there to go through my tax return. He was telling me how his ten-year-old son’s mates were bringing lads’ mags into the playground and we wondered about how great it would be if there was an alternative that was a good read, but didn’t objectify women and tell young men to merely follow their animalistic instincts. He said that you would need to be bonkers to start something in that industry, I thought ‘at last something I’m qualified for’.

I knew it was going against the tide of culture and print sales, and that there were doubters right from the off. But then when I heard some...

John Lord was a villain through and through. He was addicted to drugs from an early age and was considered a menace to society.

Not my words but his, although had you told him that, way back in the days before he accepted Jesus into his life, you might have been in serious danger, because he wasn’t the type of man you fooled around with.

He lived on the rough Ancoats estate – a mile from Manchester city centre – and as a youngster became involved in crime and drugs which saw him go from small-time burglar to associating with one of the city’s most feared criminal gangs. Now in his new book, Inside Out (Verité), this quietly spoken man has told the extraordinary story of how his life was turned around while he was serving a ten-year prison sentence for armed robbery and organised crime.

When he looks back at his old life today, he says, “I just had to write the book Inside Out because it is an incredible story of God’s amazing love and grace. It’s been a long time in publishing...

Sorted editor Steve Legg headed to Little Chalfont to speak to Gary Grant, the founder and managing director of The Entertainer, the UK’s largest independent toy retailer, to find out what has changed since his store opened in 1981, why treating kids like royalty is vital, and why family life is more important than opening on Sundays.

How did you build a multi-million-pound toy empire?

We moved to Buckinghamshire when I was three years old and we had no cash, so as a youngster I had many different jobs. I would sweep leaves up, clean snow off people’s drives and wash cars, and then when I went to senior school I had lots of other jobs, so I worked in a sweet shop, helped on a milk round and in a bike shop too. I had a morning and evening paper round and that’s how I earned cash and got going.

I left school at 16 with one O level in maths which has served me really well, and I started working full-time in the bike shop. The skateboard boom from the mid-1970s meant the shop...

The phone rang back in 1996. My vicar called to tell me that there had been a stabbing in the playground at a local school, and that he had told them that I’d go in and see what I could do. I’d been in London a relatively short period of time having grown up in Chelmsford in Essex. I’d visited London as a school kid, and couldn’t get the tragedy of poverty and exclusion out of my head as the class caught sight of cardboard city – people living in boxes under Waterloo Bridge – some barely out of their teens, while others wore the scars of long-term homelessness. I fairly much decided then and there, I needed to do something.

I came back a few years later as a gap-year student with Oasis, and after getting married to Diane, we moved into a small flat on an estate in Lambeth and I took up the post of youth worker in a local church. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, my heart was beginning to change and my life would never be the same. I was learning that God loves them all – eve...

Each November, a smaller and smaller number of men and women who fought in the Second World War are there at the Cenotaph, marching in remembrance of their fallen comrades. There is no one left at all from those who fought in World War One. Their voices have fallen silent. But – every now and again – something turns up that brings them back to life.

Walter E. Young fought in World War One. He went out to France, he endured the squalor of the trenches, the mud, the lice, the periods of yammering boredom that alternated with the fear, the noise and the carnage. He was there at Ypres, and was captured by the Germans in March 1918. Finally released from a prisoner of war camp sometime after the war finished, he came home, got on with his life and never mentioned his experiences. He got married, had children, then grandchildren, then died, still keeping his experiences to himself.

It was only when his son, David, was clearing out the family house in Cressida Road, Upper Holloway, that...