Twos Magazine is a rotatable culture guide on everything good and bad about London

You don’t have to be a huge fan of magazines to become a fan of Twos Magazine, they welcome haters. That’s why this janus-faced magazine – a rotatable, double sided culture guide – is so refreshing. You have your populist movies and television shows, pop stars that feel like they were created in a lab, and magazines with bubble wrapped prose that stroke the ego of the guppie who bought it – then you have Twos, the mag that might one day end up having a defensive case for all of the aforementioned. The reason why? Its editor Morgan Allan is an empath.

He’s not a type of empath that you’ll hear talked about all over social media reels, but one of many sensitive citizens of London who find themselves feeling a lot in this metropolitan vortex of information. Those sliding down the cracks of two massive circuit boards that are shooting sparks, whiplashing between “I love this place” and “I hate this place”, which is exactly what the third issue of Twos Magazine is all about.

“I had had one of those exhilarating, rolling London nights out – jumping from place to place until the early hours – woke up and realised I had to sell all my Stone Island to pay council tax,” says Morgan. “I just thought ‘the emotional floor and ceiling of this place are so far apart’”. Looking to push the format of Twos, Morgan felt inspired to merge one of these kaleidoscopic nights out and their inevitable descents into a cash-strapped state into the magazine’s unique design – a magazine where when you finish one side, you flip it upside down and read an inverted perspective on the first half. “Templated magazines are boring,” says Morgan, that’s why he treats every column, list or feature as its own design project. Taking inspirations from 1970s newspapers to generative slop by intentionally fucking with Midjourney imagery, Twos creates a coherent magazine that feels true to London – it’s the real deal, it’s so fake, maybe it’s both at once.

Utilising hand scanned textures of the signs, walls, windows, toilet stalls, you name it, Twos creates a textile library inside of its pages, a magazine literally made of London. Some existing Big Smoke visual language finds itself reappropriated in Twos, such as the TFL network, whose iconic 1913 font P22 Underground is used as the mag’s headline type. The Twos logo, redesigned for this issue, is an adaptation of an arrow taken from London tube signage.

In the process of designing and visualising love and hate as distinct aesthetics, Twos incorporates opposite colour schemes: pink and blue for love, the inverse green and gold for hate. Covering topics such as where to piss in central London, how terrible BrewDog is and stories like ‘Friday Night Pints’, a cautionary tale about getting stuck in the pub with the worst people in East London, the hate side of Twos takes on the spirit of William Cobbett, a radical “pamphleteer” in the early 1800s who described London as The Great Wen – wen meaning a cyst, London meaning “a pathological swelling on the face of the nation”. However, the love side sends letters of adoration to Lime bikes, the DLR and Venue M.O.T, a raw, warehouse night club tucked away in South Bermondsey, channellingTime Magazine’s labelling of London as ‘The Swinging City’ for its vibrant youth culture, rebellion and revolutionary music and fashion.

“The reader owes me nothing – if they’re not enjoying Twos they should put it down,” says Morgan. “This isn’t a coffee table book you should buy to flex on houseguests. It’s designed to be read – on the toilet, on the tube, wherever.” Taking shots at “posh boys with meme accounts”, the magazine mocks the commodification of culture and aims to become a text that represents the full emotional spectrum of living in “massive, complex, formless place”. The magazine fights against the reader’s ability to simply flick through the pages with its visually disruptive, observational journalism. Love and hate are two sides to the same coin and the coin, as Morgan puts it, is the question “what’s London like as a young person in 2025?” The third issue of Twos Magazine may just be evidence of our best guesses.