I don’t often write in the first person, but this issue is a little different, so you’ll have to bear with me for a few minutes.

This is going to be the last issue of London in Bits for a little while. Maybe forever. I’m not sure yet.

I’ll take a second to explain why, but if you’re a paying subscriber and you just want to know what the situation is about refunds etc, then you can skip to the section headlined ‘The money bit’.

The personal bit

I started LiB during lockdown because I was fed up with the lack of good, independent writing about the city I live in. That obviously struck a chord, because thousands of you have subscribed over the past two and half years, and hundreds of you have been good enough to pay to support what I’ve been trying to do.

I’m really proud that I haven’t missed an issue in all that time (apart from planned breaks) and being able to publish great writing by people that I admire is incredibly gratifying. So is watching new subscribers come in and receiving emails and messages of encouragement from readers.

I have had a great time doing this and I don’t want to stop. But…

Two and half years is a long time to be writing, commissioning and editing a newsletter. This isn’t my day job and LiB only makes enough money right now to pay contributors, not ‘staff’. I have to balance the production of this newsletter with the other parts of my life, and if that balance tips to the degree that it starts impacting the quality of what people are paying for, then I have to really think hard about what to do next.

I could change the frequency of the newsletter and/or the cost of it, and I have thought seriously about those things. But managing that also takes time and effort and raises questions about how much of LiB I could keep completely free; something which has always been very important to me. At the bottom of this email you’ll find a poll, with a few options that I’ve considered. If you feel strongly about any of those then please do click the relevant buttons. It will help shape what happens next.

The money bit

So, what does happen next?

Short answer: I’m going to take some time to think about it. That might mean I revive LiB in a month or two in exactly the same format, or it comes back in some new shape, or I go do something else entirely.

Substack gives writers the choice to ‘pause’ a newsletter (stop charging paying subscribers and not accept any new ones), or to turn off paid subscriptions entirely (cancel all paid subscriptions, and refund them for any time remaining).

I’m choosing to turn off paid subscriptions entirely because I’m not sure when or how LiB will come back and the last thing I want to do is mess you around, especially if you’ve been good enough to pay for this thing!

That means if LiB does come back then I’ll have to start building up paying subscribers from scratch, but I’d much rather do that than keep things in limbo indefinitely.

If you’ve become a paying subscriber in the past month then I’m going to manually refund your money, I’m not sure how Substack works out it’s ‘prorated refunds’ so it feels easier (and fairer) just to give you the £5 back.

Everyone else should automatically get a refund for the time remaining on their subscription, as well as an email from Substack confirming the refund and saying your subscription has been cancelled.

If you have any questions, you can email me on londoninbits@gmail.com.

Thank you!

Thank you so much for reading London in Bits, whether you’ve been here since the start or just found us in the past few weeks (sorry!). I am really happy that I was able to do this for the past few years.

If you want to replace LiB with another newsletter I won’t be offended (much). Have a look at what London Spy is doing; definitely subscribe to The Fence’s newsletter if you haven’t already; Vittles is essential reading if you ever eat food; and John Grindrod and Paul Wood are both doing exceptional things.

Here’s a quick poll. If you want to tell me anything else, the comments are open and you can always email me.

See you soon…

Happy weekend! Here’s you regular download of nuggets and tidbits from the last seven days. This week we have news of Jay-Z’s Spurs bid, a Morley’s branch with a difference, a bridge covered in fruit stickers, and Llama Del Rey.

If you’re not a paying subscriber you will have missed our mid-week issue, which was a fantastic chat with the manager of the legendary French House, Hilary Heath. There’s a rather low paywall on this one if you want to go take a read:

A subscription is just £5 a month or £50 a year. Sign up using this button and you get a week free:

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If you’re already a paying subscriber, then thank you very much for supporting us. We really do appreciate it.

News bits

🛏 Some pretty miserable stats emerged this week. First, the cross-party group London Councils said that nearly 170,000 people in London are homeless, i.e. they’re living in hostels, bedsits, or other temporary accommodation. That’s an increase of about 17,000 on last year and means that one in 50 people in the city are now classed as homeless. Most depressingly, “the organisation estimates that this includes more than 83,000 children”.

🏠 Following on the heels of that, City Hall published its analysis of future London rents, which predicted that “private rents in London could soar to upwards of £2,700 pcm next year”. Off the back of those calculations the mayor has (again) called on the Government “to urgently introduce rent controls in the capital”.

💊 The tribunal panel looking into allegations that the senior officer who wrote the Met’s anti-drugs strategy himself took LSD and magic mushrooms, has said that it “can't conclude, on the balance of probabilities” that Commander Julian Bennett took “magic mushrooms on holiday in France and LSD at a party” because the evidence is “hearsay”. Bennett still faces allegation of “regularly smoking cannabis before work” and “failing to provide a sample for testing and lying about why he would not do so.”

🚈 The first of the 94 new Piccadilly Line trains have been for a test drive Germany, so we can now see what those walk-through, air-conditioned carriages look like (from the outside at least).

🚙 The big ULEZ story of the week was that the £2000 scrappage scheme has now been extended to everyone in London; but it wouldn’t be a week in London without a few, more bizarre, ULEZ-related stories. First of all, the mayor’s office “expressed concern” over tweets that falsely claimed Khan was planning “to exempt Muslims and other ‘minority religions’ from the charge”. And then social media disinformation consultancy Valent published their investigation detailing how "hundreds of thousands of pounds” has been spent undermining ULEZ via 3,700 fake Twitter accounts.

💼 According to new figures compiled by Rightmove, demand for office space is higher than it was pre-Covid in pretty much every city other than London. In Leeds demand is up 46% compared to 2019, in Glasgow it’s up 26%, and Liverpool has 17% more demand. In London it’s down 1%.

👮 The Guardian’s Science Editor, Ian Sample, has taken a closer look at the Met’s data-driven ‘Precision policing’ approach to removing “the most serious criminals” from the streets. A pilot trial of ‘precision stop and search’ is currently under way in Lambeth and Barking and Dagenham.

⚽ According to Daily Express US, Jay-Z is preparing “an audacious bid” to buy Tottenham Hotspur if current owner Joe Lewis is convicted of fraud and insider trading.

🎤️ Here’s a lovely interview with 74-year-old Roger Mairlot from south-west London, who started going to gigs in his 60s to combat depression and now tries to go to at least one gig every night.

🚇 Last Sunday, an eastbound Jubilee line service travelling between Green Park and Westminster managed to make a diversion to the Jubilee branch of Charing Cross station. A station which which hasn’t been in use for 25 years.

Food and drink bits

🧑‍🍳️ Live by the social media, die by the social media - or at least get badly burned by it. That’s what happened to ‘chef bro’ Thomas Straker this week, when he posted a photo of his restaurant’s kitchen team on Instagram… A team that consisted solely of eight white men. And did we mention that the restaurant is in Notting Hill (the real one, not the Richard Curtis version)? Straker’s first reaction to people’s criticism of the lack of diversity was ‘Honestly people need to calm down’. That was swiftly followed up by a more contrite ‘apology’ and an admission that he needed to “improve”.

🐔 Morley’s has teamed up with Heinz to launch a month-long pop-up at the Double Standard bar (in the Standard hotel). The menu will contain “playful and nostalgic takes on icon chicken shop favourites.” alongside “boozy floats” and live music from “emerging London artists”.

🦙 Llama Inn is a ‘modern Peruvian’ restaurant that opened in Brooklyn in 2015 and quickly gained ‘must go’ status, with Grub Street calling their Rabbit Potpie “a triumph of fusion comfort food” and the New York Times giving the spot a place in their Top 100 Restaurants list earlier this year. This September, founders Juan Correa and chef Erik Ramirez are bringing “the spirit of the Brooklyn original” to the rooftop of The Hoxton, with the opening of Llama Inn London. For us, the main reason to go will be for the ‘Llama Del Rey’ cocktail (pisco quebranta, dark rum, red wine, chicha morada and pineapple).

Read more

For August’s edition of WDYG? we spoke to Hilary Heath (above), the manager of legendary Soho institution, The French House about the greatly exaggerated rumours of Soho’s demise, her number one place for a good lunch, and the only customer of the French House who is allowed to drink from a pint glass.

You can find all the previous editions of WDYG? right here.

Who are you?

I am a big old Australian hussy/wine bag/fromage freak. I arrived in London by accident in 1990 after one of my travelling companions tried to strangle the other one in a hostel in Rome. I cashed in my return ticket and took a job at the Groucho, where they seemed to think l knew what l was doing because l had worked at the Sydney Opera House. I lived in Dog Kennel Hill. A high school friend introduced me to the French House and it was love at first sight.

Why should we trust you?

I am licensed to serve intoxicating liquors of all descriptions and l have a diploma in sabrage.

You’ll have been at the French House for 20 years next year. What’s kept you there all this time?

I absolutely love it. I just think it’s a brilliant place.

I love that Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Dylan Thomas all used to drink in here, and I love that there’s still great artists coming here and that we can put exhibitions on that can encourage that. We’re currently showing some amazing paintings by Rupert Shrive, who donated a print to the auction we had to raise rent money during lockdown. The auction was incredible, with about 200 artists donating work for it. The pub sign outside was painted by Neal Fox, who also contributed a painting that helped save our bacon.

There’s just this really good feeling of a community…. and of enjoying a drink as well.

You came over in 1990 with little more than a backpack and got a job at the Groucho. Do you think that could happen in 2023?

I’m not sure. When I went to the Groucho, I just walked in and they took me in. I think they were quite keen on people like me who were ‘fresh off the boat’, because they thought we wouldn’t see half the stuff that was going on behind the scenes.

I had no idea that people were doing so much coke in the place! People used to say it would come through the air conditioning. I’m not sure that’s still the case though.

We have to ask: Is Soho dying? Or is that just the same complaint that people have been making for decades?

Jeffrey Bernard was complaining about that in the 60s and 70s. Michael, my husband, complains about it as well, but I’m sure he was complaining about it 30 years ago.

When Lesley took on The French in 1989, people complained bitterly because it wasn’t Gaston’s pub anymore. She had a terrible time there when she first took over. But thing change. That doesn’t mean they get worse. I think Lesley has done an amazing job to keep things going.

They just had the Soho Fete and waiters’ race and hundreds and hundreds of people turned up. It was the busiest one ever. And Soho Food Feast is still drawing massive crowd, that’s always sold out.

The other the other big debate that’s going on right now is rich people moving into Soho and then complaining about the noise…

Well, those people are just idiots.

It’s appalling about what’s going on at Trisha’s, the people who complained about that lived two blocks away.

Can you reassure us then that so that the French House is going to be okay?

The French House is always going to be okay!

We had the crowdfunder and art auction during lockdown and I don’t think anyone who contributed to either of those would stand by and watch the French go down. It’s got an incredible amount of support.

Unfortunately we have lost a few of our old regulars, but there are new ones coming in all the time, especially young artists, actors and writers. I really feel like it’s a breeding ground for creativity.

Okay, on to the usual questions… Where do you go to have a great time?

Can l go back in time? The Colony Room Club. The best place on earth.

Where do you go and always end up spending too much money?

The Soho Dairy in Berwick St. Remember there was a fruit stall in that market that sold ‘extras’? Cheese is my drug and when I get milk for the French in the morning they always have some truffled cheddar to wave under my nose like poppers. 

Where do you go that can never close down, because if it does you might cry?

SOHO! Camisa’s, Gerrys booze store (above) and the French… They have been like my London family for over 30 years. Long may they live!

Where do you go to cheer yourself up?

I go ‘window licking’ as they say in France. There are some gorgeous shops in my part of town, my favourites are Maggie Owen, Fisher antiques and Antoni & Alison.

Where do you go to impress someone?

Any Hart Group restaurant. l love the Barrafina in Coal Drops Yard and it is always a joy to dine at Quo Vadis with the divine Jeremy Lee at the helm! 

Where do you go that’s within walking distance of your house?

Read more

The source of the problem was data centres in the Thames Valley that were hoovering up electrical capacity and leaving the grid unable to guarantee power for badly-needed new homes. At the time it was reported that there were around 50 different housing projects effected, including some that were part of the Affordable Homes Programme.

A few months later Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks announced that it had reached an “innovative whole system solution” with the National Grid that would allow “smaller demand” housing projects to go ahead. That didn’t help the hospitals and electric vehicle charging points across west London though, they still faced an uncertain future.

But it seems that data centres aren’t just power hungry. They’re thirsty too.

That’s right. The internet is coming for your water.

As if Thames Water doesn’t have enough to sort out, a few days ago the company had to announce that it is now thinking about reducing the amount of water that data centres can use, either by adding ‘flow restrictor’ to pipes or by charging them more at peak times.

But how much water can a data centre use? Well, luckily, Google released their annual environmental report earlier this month, and in there they reported that their data centres had slurped up 5.2 billion gallons of water in 2022. That’s 20% up on the previous year.

That jump in use is entirely down to the increased use of AI. The University of California recently published some research which estimated that ChatGPT needs to “drink” a 500ml bottle of water to answer a string of 20-50 queries. Think about that the next time you ask Midjourney to create a picture of cat playing the drums in the style of Van Gogh.

Microsoft has already been caught out for its wildly inaccurate estimates of how much water is needed to cool their data centre in Middenmeer, Holland. And a few weeks ago there were protests in southern Uruguay after Google bought land for a new data centre there, “that will use millions of litres of water a day”. Uruguay is right now suffering its worst drought in 74 years.

Last year, Robert Goodwill (who is the Conservative chair of the House of Commons environment, food and rural affairs select committee) called for an investigation into the impact of data centres on water supplies. “We need to figure out what their demands will be and what the impacts will be on other consumers,” he said.

So far, there has been little to no figuring out. Mainly because companies like Google and Microsoft aren’t all that keen on disclosing just how much electricity and water their data centres use up, or even where some of those data centres are.

Meanwhile, at a former paint factory in Slough (which is already home to the world’s second largest data centre hub) an £800 million data centre development is underway by a company called Cathexis Holdings - the same company that built that Microsoft data centre in Holland and claimed it would use 12m to 20m litres per year, when it ended up using 84 million litres.

Right now, the forecast for the rest of the summer is for no heatwave, and the ‘unsettled’ July weather has let Thames Water swerves a hosepipe ban. But with the likelihood of temperatures “exceeding 40C somewhere in the UK in a given year” increasing all the time, the chances are that it won’t be long before we find ourselves in a battle with artificial intelligence over our most precious and vital resources (not a sentence we could have imagined ourselves writing a year ago).

Here’s a picture of a cat playing the drums to cheer you up…

5 Little Bits

• Talking of west London housing developments… The PM was at one of those on Friday to promote an announcement that the government “is spending £200m on housing initiatives in the capital”. In an accompanying (and unusually party-political) press release, Number 10 said that £150m of the money had to be allocated to London boroughs, because “the mayor has failed to deliver the homes that London needs.” Khan came out swinging, replying to Sunak’s tweet with “Are you the same guy who dropped his house building targets? Because I’m the guy who started building more council homes than the rest of England combined, exceeded your affordable homes targets & built more homes of any kind than since the 1930s.” He also called the PM’s press release “desperate nonsense”. (In related news: This disused stairwell could be yours for just £20,000.)

• The City of London police put out an appeal to black cab drivers on Friday after a father left an urn containing his child’s ashes in the back of a cab. The general secretary of the London cab drivers’ trade union, responded by saying “I’m not in the slightest bit surprised… The stuff that gets left in cabs is literally beggars belief. We’ve had babies and tens of thousands in cash.”

• A new report from Trust for London has shown that “one in four Londoners are in poverty”. The charity’s research puts the poverty rate for Black Londoners at 38%, “a massive 20 percentage points higher than white Londoners, who have a poverty rate of 18%”.

• The Horniman Museum has been given £5.7m by The National Lottery towards its £10m ‘Nature + Love’ project. The money will go towards redeveloping the Natural History Gallery, creating an “Action Zone focused on local wildlife with interactive elements designed for families with young children” and transforming two “currently under-used areas” of the museums’ gardens.

• Esquire has a profile on Edward Sexton, the Dagenham-born Savile Row tailor who died last week. Sexton “redefined the codes of British tailoring” in the 60s and 70s (three out of the four Beatles are wearing Edward Sexton suits on the cover of Abbey Road).

We got a bunch of new subscribers this week because someone said something nice about us on Reddit. So, if this is your first LiB, welcome to our regular roundup of everything that’s happened in London over the last seven days. This week we’ve got striking parking wardens, a hot new hotdog offering, and an exhibition about skateboarding,

If you’re not a paying subscriber then you’ll miss about 66% of this issue, so if you’re enjoying LiB then please do consider becoming a supporter. Your subscription helps pay our contributors and will mean you can read the whole of today’s Roundup, access our ever-growing archive of back issues, and start receiving our mid-week edition.

This week we interviewed artist Max Colson about trying to not get arrested while scanning oligarch’s mansion houses with a laser:

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News bits

🚗 You know what they say: A week is along time in Ulez arguments. Since last week’s by-election defeat, there’s been a bit of a Sadiq pile-on with shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, saying that they mayor should “look again” at the policy, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves insisting that now is not the right time to “clobber” Londoners with the charge, and Keir Starmer going on Radio 5 Live to say Khan should “reflect” on the expansion due to the “impact it’s having on people”. City Hall responded by saying that the mayor is “committed” to the expansion but is “listening”. That listening seems to have led to Khan’s request to the government for more funding in order to finance a more generous scrappage scheme. That move came a day after some of the papers picked up on a TfL response to an FOI request, which stated that “the Marketing and Campaign budget allocated for the ULEZ expansion into outer London boroughs is £9m.” And we’re not done yet…. Just as we were finishing this issue on Friday, the news came through that the legal challenge to the scheme by five Conservative councils had been dismissed by the high court.

🙋At the end of last week, the Mayor launched a campaign “empowering men to challenge misogyny by saying ‘maaate’ to their mates when they cross the line” (a follow up to the recent #HaveAWord campaign). The campaign, created by Ogilvy and launched with the support of Romesh Ranganathan and LadBible, has not a had a great reaction. The Times called it “grating and patronising”, The Critic dismissed it as “patronising and silly” and in The Standard, Melanie McDonagh wrote “the obvious riposte to the campaign is that the real problem for women in London is way bigger”. Meanwhile, in the New Statesman, Josiah Gogarty branded it “strange and awful,” said that the campaign doesn’t understand the male psyche, and that it is Khan’s “relative powerlessness” that leads to him focusing “on loud public-awareness campaigns.”

⚖️ Seven months on from the awful events at Brixton Academy, The Face has gone through official documents and pieced together eye-witness accounts “to stitch together a (still incomplete) timeline of what happened” that night.

🚓 The police watchdog has launched an investigation into last week’s incident in Croydon where a Black woman was arrested in front of her young son because officers wrongly believed she hadn’t paid her bus fare.

🏠 Last week we told you that the mayor had called on the government to introduce greater regulation of ‘Airbnb-style holiday lets’ in London in an effort to try and ease the housing crisis. This week AirBnB came out fighting, issuing a statement that said “Airbnb was built to help people afford to stay in their homes” and that “as living costs continue to rise, hosting is a vital source of income that helps people pay their rent, mortgages, food and energy costs.”

🛺 The latest pedicab overcharging incident saw Belgian tourist April Argenau charged £464 for a seven-minute ride from Oxford Street to the Royal Lancaster hotel. Unlike some of the previous incidents, Argenau did look at the amount she was being charged before she paid, but “the driver refused to back down and was intimidating towards her, demanding immediate payment”.

🚙 Parking wardens working in Camden began “indefinite strike action” this week. 100% of the wardens balloted by Camden Unison voted to go on strike until a pay dispute was resolved. The wardens are currently paid £12.70 an hour and are looking for £15.90.

💻 City Hall has announced the winners of the ‘Poverty Prevention Challenge’ which aims “to find innovative solutions to tackle the impact of the cost-of-living crisis”. The seven London tech companies who will receive up to £50,000 include an app that uses AI technology “to help families at risk of falling into food poverty maximise their budget” and a ‘Refugee Next Step Guide’ which uses OpenAI to “help provide new refugees in London with information about study and work opportunities”.

🏗 Dylan Jones has written another editorial for the Standard. This time it’s about the regeneration of Olympia and why he thinks it’s going to be better than Battersea Power Station, which Jones describes as “a load of old shops”.

💰 Writer and ‘communicator’ Ben Cope, has penned a column for City AM about why we shouldn’t resist gentrification. Headlined ‘Don’t fight the gentrification of areas like Brixton, it’s time to give in to the local Gail’s’ the piece argues that it was Nimby’s who “thwarted” the development of the Hondo Tower, and that “well-connected, central locations like Brixton” need to “cater to more monied residents” who should have the “opportunity to remake the area as they wish”.

📰 Talking of City AM… The paper is now owned by an online beauty retailer. “Multimillionaire businessman Matthew Moulding” saved the freesheet from administration by buying it “for an undisclosed sum” earlier this week. If this is Moulding getting his own back on the FT for a story they ran a couple of months ago, it’s a move of almost Muskian proportions.

🛋 If you’re a fan of art deco furniture, or you just need a few extra wine glasses then you might want to have a look at this huge auction of items that are being sold off by The Maybourne Group, owners of Claridge’s, The Berkeley and The Connaught.

Food and drink bits

🍽 Jeremy King only just announced that he’s planning to open a new “grand café and brasserie” on the corner of Bayswater and Queensway next year. Now he’s told the FT (paywall alert) that he’s also considering another West End opening and might be eyeing up “the Grade II-listed former NatWest bank on Piccadilly - just across the road from The Wolseley”. Sweet, sweet revenge.

🐟 Michelin has made a few new additions to its eponymous guide, and just one London restaurant had made the cut… And it’s a ‘tinned fish restaurant’. Saltie Girl opened on North Audley Street in Mayfair at the end of last year, where it offered £18 shrimp cocktails, £16 anchovies and £36 ‘lobster on waffle’. Grace Dent called it ‘slapdash’ and Kate Ng said she’d probably stick chippy next door. Maybe it’s got better since then?

Read more

“I tend to be drawn to trying to making projects about changes in London that are hidden or invisible,” Max Colson tells me from the opposite end of a Zoom call. “Maybe it’s a sort of creative challenge that I set for myself, but I look for things that are not easily seen from street level, like security apparatus or privatised public spaces.”

Max’s documents of changing London has been mentioned in this newsletter before. Last December the writer and curator Matthew Harle wrote an issue for us about the director Patrick Keiller and the creeping sanitisation of Keiller’s London through digitally rendered architectural imagery. It was this kind of imagery that Colson used (or removed) to create his series Images of Enjoyment and Spectacle, highlighting how developers were literally airbrushing away some of the messier realities of the city.

A few years after that project Colson found himself drawn to another aspect of ‘invisible’ London: the so-called ‘iceberg homes’ that have subterranean extensions, making them larger beneath the ground than above.

“I made a film in 2017 called Construction Lines about a Knightsbridge billionaire’s iceberg home,” Colson says. “In the film I show the architectural plans of what was proposed along with a script that’s made up of a selection of the complaints that the neighbours submitted to the council. Some of the complaints are quite obnoxious and wonder what this billionaire might get up to underneath the ground. So the project was partly about people’s speculations about the one percent, a category of people that most of us don’t have any contact with. Mainly it was about this hidden city that’s hard to see and access but which is very much part of the architecture.”

There’s a direct line between Construction Lines and Colson’s more recent project, Offshore Capital, which has seen the artist create 3D laser scans of London properties owned by offshore companies, most of which are based in tax havens.

“I was blown away by when Private Eye put out an interactive map of all the properties owned by offshore companies” Colson explains. “I knew that London was a haven for offshore property but I was just astounded by the volume. I think we all know that there is this kind of hidden world in London, but what I found really interesting was that you can’t discern which properties are part of this network because, from ground level, they’re camouflaged by the architecture of the street.”

Around this time Colson had access to a LiDAR scanner, a piece of kit that uses a laser to create 3D digital representations of any environment you point it at. “I’d been looking for a way to use the scanner, because it has this very shadowy way of rendering the world,” he explains. “It renders architectural shapes through points and voids, so the aesthetic is shadowy and cavernous. I’m revealing information that people already know about, but the aesthetic of the LIDAR scanner is the thing that gives it that haunted, ghostly nature.”

To capture these images Colson ventures out on to the street wearing a backpack that contains some of the hardware, and holding the scanner itself which, when switched on, rotates in a manner that seems bound to attract attention. Particularly if you happen to be stood outside an oligarch’s mansion house.

“When I walk down the street people do get quite suspicious,” admits Colson, “because they’ve probably never seen this kind of device before, apart from maybe in the hands of someone from Google. I actually find it quite stressful!”

Max says that, along with the odd person making a Ghostbusters joke (“Which I love!”), he has had just one police stop to date, “when I was scanning in Mayfair a couple of weeks before the coronation and they were on high alert. The police spent about 25 minutes asking me questions, trying to work out if I was part of Just Stop Oil or if I was working for a foreign state. I showed them the Offshore Capital website and they were a bit bemused.”

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If you become a subscriber then you’ll start getting our Wednesday issues (this week we have an interview with the artist who uses laser beams to capture London properties owned by offshore companies), as well as access to the entire back catalogue of paywalled articles, including our growing ‘Before You Go’ series, in which we visit some of London’s most beloved but endangered spots; and our ‘Electric Theatre’ series, where a different contributor writes about one of their favourite examples of London on film every month.

The Oxford Street shuffle

The last time we wrote about Oxford Street was back in March, and things were not looking great. Westminster Council had just scrapped its doomed £150 million ‘pedestrian piazza’ project; the number of candy shops had returned to peak levels despite the council’s best attempts to rid the area of overpriced gobstoppers and dodgy vapes; and, of the 269 retail units on the street, 42 were lying empty:

The “more detailed plan for the Oxford Street project” was due later that month, but it didn’t actually materialise until last week when Westminster Council published their “long-term vision for the nation’s favourite High Street”.

Proposed changes include improving the overall appearance and usability of the street, increasing space and safety for people on foot, enhanced lighting, and the addition of more green areas with seating. There’s also a proposal to add “12 new controlled pedestrian crossings” and 16 “designated amenity spaces” (they really know how to name something at Westminster Council don’t they?).

One of the biggest changes will be the extension of the traffic restrictions, making more stretches of Oxford Street “bus, taxi and cycle only areas” from 7am to 7pm seven days a week.

If you want to have your say on the plans you can find the full thing here and you’ve got until midnight on 31st August to respond to the questionnaire.

Fewer sweets, more start-ups

A couple of days after that consultation, the council followed it up with the launch of the overly-coloned Meanwhile On: Oxford Street scheme, which offers “innovative, cutting-edge and up-and-coming brands” the chance to “take over a shop on Oxford Street, rent-free” for a six-month period.

There are nine empty stores up for grabs to begin with, all of which were previously occupied by the ‘candy stores’ or other businesses that the council perceives as “low quality occupiers”. Although the ‘Candy World’ at 363 Oxford Street has already been snapped up by HMV, which used to have its flagship store at the site.

The first small firms are expected to set up shop in August.

We don’t get knocked down

The third and final bit of Oxford Street news from last week came in the form of a 127-page report from the Department of Housing & Communities; the TL;DR version of which is ‘Michael Gove says Marks & Spencer can’t demolish its Oxford Street store’.

M&S had wanted to flatten their 1930s flagship store and replace it with a building designed by architects Pilbrow & Partners, which, it was claimed, would “lead to lower lifetime carbon emissions than could be achieved with a retrofit”.

But the Secretary of State for Housing and Communities decided that the almost 40,000 tonnes of embodied carbon that would be generated by the demolition was just too much. Gove also said that “the height and appearance of the cornice of the proposed development would be prominent and distracting from the Selfridge’s facade” (the M&S building is directly opposite Selfridges).

The campaign group SAVE British Heritage put out a statement following the decision, calling it “a hugely important decision that rightly challenges the way we continually and needlessly knock down and rebuild important buildings across our towns and cities. Repurposing and converting buildings we cherish and saving thousands of tonnes of C02 in the process is a no brainer. This is a massive positive step and we salute the Secretary of State.”

Don’t worry though, another proposal has arrived for everyone to start arguing about. A couple of weeks ago, the London Heritage Quarter business group, released their blueprint to make Parliament square “more accessible and pedestrian-friendly”.

Mark my words

Another hefty and long-awaited report was published last week. A New Met for London is the force’s (and, more specifically, Commissioner Mark Rowley’s) response to the Baroness Casey report, which accused the the Met of being “institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic”. The report lays out a two-year, £366 million plan that it hopes will “increase trust in the force, reduce crime and raise policing standards”.

Rowley hopes to achieve this ‘mission’ by “working with the public to build a new, communities first approach;” becoming an “anti-discrimination organisation” that is able to “uphold the highest standards and remove those who don’t meet them;” and fixing recruitment and improving leadership to create “a well-run organisation” (we are summarising ruthlessly here; for more detail the Met has a summary of the report’s aims on this page).

One of the biggest stories to come out of the new plan was the introduction of the Cambridge Crime Harm Index to target “the most prolific perpetrators of violence against women and girls”. The Cambridge Crime Harm Index is a system that measures the seriousness of crimes (rather than just the number of them) and it’s previously only been used on terrorism and organised crime. But the Met says it will be applying it to assess the 35,000 offenders reported each year for crimes against women and girls “in a bid to rank the 100 who are most dangerous to the public”.

On the subject of ‘removing people’ from the Met, Rowley went on the Today programme last week, to complain that he still hasn’t heard the results of the Home Office review that would help him to sack officers more easily. “I need those changes in regulations,” Rowley said, “because some of the processes are too long and too bureaucratic.”

We wish we could say that the plan came out in a week absent of Met bad news stories, but those don’t really exist anymore. As well as the revelation that data on people using the Met’s website “to report sexual offences, domestic abuse and other crimes” had been passed to Facebook; there was also the publication of a “damning report” criticising officers’ use of schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act to confiscate a French publisher’s phone and laptop at St Pancras station in April; and the announcement of four separate IOPC investigations into the Met's handling of reports about David Carrick.

And, of course, last week also saw the Met publicly apologise for its “corrupt and incompetent” inquiry into the Daniel Morgan murder, which was followed by the payment of an unprecedented £2 million settlement to Morgan’s family.

Following the Met’s apology, the Morgan family’ solicitor was quoted as saying:

“The challenge for [Rowley] is to find the courage and integrity to put those words of his apology into action. It is for him to find the courage and the integrity necessary to face up to the sickness in the Met with which this family has had to live over the decades: a sickness where a perceived need to protect the organisation from reputational damage has served only to nurture and encourage a culture of impunity in his organisation.”

5 Little Bits

• In the early hours of Friday morning a derelict mansion located on ‘Billionaire’s Row’ (aka The Bishops Avenue on the north side of Hampstead Heath) was gutted in a huge fire. The house, which is locally referred to as The Towers, has been abandoned for years and the only people to occupy it recently have been ‘urban explorers’.

• Over in The Guardian, columnist Simon Jenkins has written a gleeful obituary for Canary Wharf, which is also a plea for London to end its “slavish devotion” to “random high-rise office developments” and instead create the kind of “stylish, informal, human-scale spaces, as is offered in London by the West End and fringe neighbourhoods.”

• Meanwhile, over in The Telegraph, Emma Beaumont has joined the chorus of people bemoaning the demise of London’s nightlife, who complain that “finding somewhere decent to eat and drink after a concert has become a quest of epic proportions” and “Westminster Council, would rather have Harry Potter merch shops and American candy stores than bars or clubs”.

• The finalists for the Great British Pub awards have been announced, and in the ‘Best City/Urban Pub’ category you’ll find Bexleyheath’s The Kings’ Arms, The Audley in Mayfair, The George IV in Chiswick, and Twickenham’s The Turk’s Head. The Kings’ Arms is also up for ‘Best Pub for Entertainment’ along with The Phoenix Arts Club.

• Twitter isn’t good for much these days, but thankfully you can still watch the adventures of cyclist Travis and his cat Sigrid, specifically what happens when Sigrid catches site of a fox.

• Bonus links (because they’re paywalled): The FT has interviewed Michael Chambers, the 81-year-old owner of the beautiful Garden Cinema in Covent Garden; and Caity Weaver has been on a very entertaining search for Tom Cruise’s semi-mythical Biggin Hill home for The New York Times.

There was a lot going on in London this week, what with the by-elections and the results of the Tory mayoral candidate competition. So, we’re going to save our analysis of what’s been going on over at Oxford Street and the Met for Monday’s issue. There’s plenty to be going on with though, including some major news for Brixton, the launch of a brand new food destination, and one new play that’s getting all the stars and another new play that’s getting… well, far fewer stars.

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This week we sent out the latest in our ‘Before You Go’ series, where we invite someone we like to pick one spot that they absolutely adore but that might be at greater risk at disappearing than it was a few years ago. This time author and lecturer Matthew Turner told us about the bar that made him fall in love with London again:

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News bits

🙌 Let’s start with the good news: next week’s tube strikes have been cancelled after the Aslef and the RMT unions reached a last-minute deal with TfL. The mayor said it was ‘great news’ that “despite the onerous funding deal conditions imposed by the Government we have managed to avoid industrial action”.

🗳 About a week ago, new research by “global polling and strategic consulting firm” Redfield & Wilton, seemed to show that “Londoners generally support the Ulez expansion” with “47% coming out in support of expanding the zone and 32% opposed to the idea.” After Thursday night’s by-election result in Uxbridge they might want to go back and check those numbers, with the victorious Tory MP Steve Tuckwell putting his win down entirely to the “damaging and costly Ulez policy” and even Labour’s justice secretary Steve Reed insisting that the people of Uxbridge didn’t like the fact that “the Ulez was going to cost people more to drive around at a time when there’s a cost-of-living crisis going on”.

P.S. Count Binface beat both UKIP and Piers Corbyn in Uxbridge on a platform which mainly focused on” affordable croissants and for a revolution in hand dryer placement in northwest London pub toilets”.

🚗 Whether it was Ulez ‘wot won it’ or something more complex than that, this wedgiest of wedge issues will undoubtedly be weaponised even more than it already has in the run up to next year’s mayoral election. And this week we were told that the mayoral battle would be a fight between Sadiq and Susan, as Susan Hall was announced as the Conservative Party’s Mayoral candidate, beating Moz Hossain by 57% to 43%. The latest polling (done before the Uxbridge by-election) puts Sadiq ahead of the Tories by 12 points; so the question now is can the Trump-supporting “former Harrow council leader, hair salon owner and once garage worker” do anything to bridge that gap?

😕 Following the announcement, Downing Street was quick to put out a statement declaring that Hall had the Prime Minister’s “full support”, but when he was asked if he agreed with Hall’s comments that Suella Braverman was right to call refugees coming across the Channel an “invasion” Rishi Sunak’s spokesperson told journalists that “he would not characterise it in those terms,” and he was similarly reticent when asked if he would endorse Hall’s opinion that Boris Johnson was an “awesome” Prime Minister.

🗞 The strangest bit of Hall-related news though concerned The Standard’s front page following the announcement. The firmly Tory-supporting paper published a full-page image of Hall looking, frankly, deranged, which prompted the Conservatives to complain to the paper’s new editor, Dylan Jones, branding the choice of photo “a clear mockery” and “contemptible, especially as the first female candidate for London mayor from either of the two main parties” (although Susan seems to be doing a grand job of damaging her reputation all on her own).

🏬 Also, if you were in charge of The Standard’s budget (which is increasingly diminishing) would you spend a big chunk of it projecting “an exclusive animated version” of your front page on to the “23,000 square feet of wrap-around, floor-to-ceiling 16k-enabled screens” of the Outernet? Unless (and this is pure speculation) the Standard got some kind of deal in return for favourable coverage of what it has just described as “London’s version of Times Square”. In related news: The Standard has not yet submitted its accounts to HMRC (they were due at the end of June).

🧔 Amongst all the election news this week, Jeremy Corbyn was asked by LBC if he was considering a mayoral bid. Corbyn replied that he is “ruling nothing out”, a move that prompted former mayor Ken Livingstone, to say he would “do everything he can to help” get Corbyn elected.

👴 And talking of Ken… We don’t normally link to MyLondon, but we have to give them some credit for taking the opportunity to interview Livingstone after they spotted him “stepping off the 316 bus outside Kilburn Tube station,” and for capturing his admission that he now spends a lot of his time “down the local pub talking to other old men who are also out of work”.

🏢 Away from the world of politics, there was big news for Brixton this week as the planning application for the controversial ‘Hondo Tower’ was withdrawn just a few days ahead of the Public Representation Hearing that was due to take place yesterday. A letter written on behalf of Hondo Enterprises to City Hall, said that “the applicant needs to reconsider its position and can only do this by withdrawing the application,” but that a “revised approach” would be delivered soon that would “deliver lasting benefits for Brixton’s businesses and residents”. Brixton Buzz has more on the story and you can read Save Nour’s victory statement here.

🏙 Helen Barrett has written a pretty in depth article for the Telegraph on the “£1.3 billion mission to save London’s white elephant” (also known as “the dilapidated Olympia exhibition hall”) in which she interviews Thomas Heatherwick, whose studio is co-leading the redevelopment.

🚲 TfL has opened ten new “low-traffic cycleways” which means that “the number of Londoners within 400m of a high-quality cycle route” is now over 550,000. The routes include a 10km path in Enfield, the new cycleway between Battersea Power Station and Nine Elms, and a new route between Finsbury Park and Angel.

🚴 Meanwhile, plans for shuttle buses that will take cyclists through the Silvertown Tunnel were published by TfL this week as part of a consultation on what the scheme should look like. But, as the Greenwich Wire points out, a shuttle bus isn’t much use if access to the pick-up points are pretty ‘inhospitable’ to those on two wheels.

🏡 The mayor has called on the government to introduce greater regulation of ‘Airbnb-style holiday lets’ to try and ease the housing crisis. Sadiq says the growth in short-term lets (there were 81,792 Airbnb listings in London last month) is helping to fuel the crisis and wants local authorities to be given powers to limit the number of Airbnb properties in their area.

📞 Four tube station phone boxes have been given Grade II-listed status for their “architectural and historic interest”. You can find the rare boxes (none of which are painted red) at High Street Kensington and Chorleywood (blue), Chalfont and Latimer (maroon), and Northwick Park (white).

🏅 According to the BWC 2023 Ranking, London is the third best ‘sports city’ in the world. We were beaten only by Paris and Los Angeles and came just ahead of New York and Manchester.

🏗 A (paywalled) column in The Times this week by Richard Morrison worries that the “cluster-mess of architectural monstrosities” that is the south bank of the Thames is at risk of causing the “area around the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey” to lose its status as a Unesco world heritage site.

🕌 Westminster City Council has approved plans for parts of The Trocadero building to become an Islamic community centre. The plans come from The Aziz Foundation, founded by Asif Aziz, who is also the chief executive of Criterion Capital and has previously been called “the meanest landlord in Britain”. (If you fancy a bit of nostalgia, the Mail took advantage of this news to publish a bunch of old photos of the Trocadero, including the much-missed ‘Alien War’ game).

🔪 In case you missed the news, apparently Jack the Ripper was an alcoholic cigar maker called Hyam Hyams.

🚕 Massive YouTube channel Yes Theory paid East London cab driver ‘Cockney Reg’ $10,000 to see how far it would get them:

Food and drink bits

🧑‍🍳️ According to The Independent when “Lily Allen tweeted that she’s noticed ‘standards have slipped’ in many of London’s restaurants, people began asking themselves whether she was right.” Whether that’s entirely true or not, the paper has been to interview some chefs and restaurateurs to see how “vibrant” London’s food scene actually is.

🥩 In related news, Bloomberg reports that this month’s strikes (pre-cancellation) “will cost bars and restaurants in the UK capital some £210 million”, while The Caterer reports on the restaurants offering various discounts to lure people in despite the strikes (including the £15 steak frites at Hawksmoor, which they’re calling “strike steaks”).

🥻 Dishoom has launched a range of merch, teaming up with illustrator Manjit Thapp, to create three exclusive T-shirt designs, that feature images of inspirational and underrepresented women from Indian history.

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It might be a small family-owned restaurant, a backstreet pub, or a community garden… Any kind of place of which there are far fewer of these days. The idea is to go and visit the place with the person who nominated it and talk about what makes it so special: the people, the food, the drinks, the atmosphere, the decor and the history. In doing so, maybe we can tempt a few people to visit it for the first time or to go back and reacquaint themselves with an old favourite.

For this edition we're moving away from Soho and going south of the river to Little Portugal with the writer and lecturer Matthew Turner.

Here are the first two instalments of the series in case you missed them:

Estrela Bar on South Lambeth Road, with Matthew Turner

“It was a complete accident that I even lived in this area,” says Matthew Turner as we sit down at a table outside the Estrela Bar on the South Lambeth Road; a part of south London that Will Self once described as the ‘Stockwell-Vauxhall hinterland’ (a concept to which we’ll return later).

“I’d been living in Green Lanes, but I needed to find somewhere closer to Chelsea where I work,” he remembers. “So I was looking for a new flat but at the same time I was housesitting in Birmingham. One day, after realising I had fallen for a fake apartment and had lost all my money, I was in London and had to be in Chelsea the next day which meant I couldn’t go back to Birmingham. While I was working out what I was going to do, I just happened to meet an old friend on the bus and she offered to let me stay at her flat on the Wandsworth Road for the night.

“I remember approaching her place and I was fascinated by it, because there was this stretch of Portuguese bars and restaurants and then just this big, derelict piece of land with an overgrown play area. In the morning I walked outside and I thought ‘This area is quite cool’. It had wasteland, which wasn't for me a depressing sign of dereliction but more an optimistic sign that not everything had been developed, and MI6 was quite close by. Even though it was a place you would never really visit unless you lived there, it seemed like a weird coming together of all the things I was interested in.”

Proximity to wasteland and MI6 might not be on everyone’s list of property ‘must haves’, but if you know Turner’s work then it makes sense. As well as being a lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts, Turner is also the author of the novel Loom, which the book jacket describes as “a story about hidden wealth, identity, edges becoming centres and how our homes are a crowd of strangers.” Turner is also the sort of person who, when asked to write about his fantasy home for the FT, chooses the “purple 1974 Cadillac Eldorado convertible with leopard print interior” from True Romance.

“When I was in that flat for that one evening, I felt a bit out of place,” he says, “but in the morning I walked out on to the street and went for a coffee in one of those Portuguese places I’d passed the night before, and it just felt like I’d been transported somewhere else.”

A few months later, Turner found his own flat in Stockwell and stayed in the area for the next four years or so. During that time he also learned to love London again.

A south London portal to Porto

Like most people who move to London from somewhere else, Turner had initially been besotted by his adopted city. But, by 2016 he was approaching the end of his London honeymoon period.

“When I moved to Stockwell I was at that ‘I really hate this place’ point,” he says sipping on a Super Bock, “but this areas helped me out of that. I would walk to work through the back streets, down past Larkhall Park, then turn down Wilcox Road to O Fumeiro, another Portuguese place; where I would stop and have a coffee and then continue on to work. I always think of that time as being the turning point of going from really disliking a place to loving it again.

“Without an oven, or plates and cutlery in my new place I would stop at Estrela on the way back from work some nights, that was my ritual for the first few weeks. Getting by in London often means finding those small patches of relaxation and escape. I had forgotten that and found it again here. I always ordered the same thing and I still order the same thing now: wild Clams in white wine garlic sauce, deep fried battered white bait and king prawns ‘Estrela style’. With either Super Bock or a Vinho Verde. 

“If I come here with friends we will have some drinks until it closes and go to Grelha D'Ouro Cafe-Bar for a game of pool in the basement, where we can be judged by the old Portuguese hustlers that keep a close eye on the games being played.”

Estrela Bar is just one of multiple cafes, bars and food shops that serve the 25,000 Portuguese speakers that live in the borough. The South Lambeth Road is a busy, noisy road, but the curious mix of exhaust fumes and engine noise mingling with the smell of petiscos (Portuguese tapas) and the sound of European football commentary, gives this slice of south west London an utterly unique charm.

“There was one restaurant on the Wandsworth Road that had astroturf outside,” Turner remembers, “so you could almost pretend you were in Porto or somewhere when you were sat there. But then you’d look up and you’d have the traffic roaring past you. I love that contrast. It almost feels like you're in two places at once.”

Cristiano and community

You don’t have to talk to Turner for long to realise that he has chosen Estrela as his beloved London space, not just because it feels like a slice of Lisbon transported into SW8, or because its menu contains a ‘Cristiano Ronaldo sandwich,’ but because it serves as a representation of the whole of Little Portugal. It’s an area and a community that Turner obviously still adores and that he’s rightly protective of.

“Will Self might have described it as a ‘hinterland’ but to most people who live here it’s not some in between place. There is a real sense of community here,” he says. “Obviously that’s centered around the thousands of Portuguese people who live here, but even if you’re an outsider you can still get something from it. I remember there was one conversation I had in a cafe when two women asked me which I preferred, Porto or Lisbon. I thought ‘Oh great, they’re trying to make friends’. Little did I know that it was a trick. One of them was from Porto and the other one was from Lisbon. I said Lisbon and the other woman never spoke to me again!”

It’s not only the pesticos bars and Portuguese cafes that give this area it’s character though. “Down the road you have the Cavendish Arms,” Turner says, “which I would say has one of the most unusual pub interiors I’ve ever seen. The whole of the inside is painted red and there are silver trinkets displayed everywhere. There's a shark hanging from the ceiling that’s got the head of the dog. It’s like it’s own little world because there are no windows, and there are only sofas to sit on so it’s like being in someone’s living room. That’s another of those places that doesn’t seem like it could ever succumb to all the things going on around it.”

Gentrification creep

Those ‘things going on around it’ are clear to see as you walk towards the South Lambeth Road from Vauxhall. That mysterious patch of wasteland that Turner was attracted to when he moved here is long gone of course. The transformation of Battersea and the arrival of the American Embassy in 2018 (not to mention the infamous sky pool) has utterly reshaped Nine Elms and created a blast radius of gentrification that is slowly creeping towards Little Portugal. Wilcox Road was effectively closed down in 2021, with multiple business being turfed out by “the meanest landlord in Britain” so the area could be ‘revamped’ (demolished to make way for luxury flats).

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Niall Kishtany’s new book The Infinite City attempts to place London “as the capital of utopian thought,” which might come as a surprise to some people, especially if you consider one view of utopia is a “place or state of things in which everything is perfect”.

Despite this apparent contradiction, Kishtany’s book has already picked up glowing reviews from Literary Review and The Telegraph, the latter of which described The Infinite City as “bravely challenging those who view London merely as an infernal maze, as a centre of wealth, power and empire”.

Well, we’ve definitely been guilty of painting London as some of those things in the past, so - never ones to shy away from a challenge - we got Niall on a Zoom call to talk to him about why London tends to produce visionaries and social prophets, how various characters have gone about trying to transform London over the centuries, and how much optimism and scope there is for visionary thinking in the London of 2023.

Before we get into today’s issue, just a reminder that our Monday editions are completely free to read, but if you enjoy London in Bits then you might consider becoming a LiB supporter for £5 a month or £50 a year. The only reason we don’t have to run adverts or take money from sponsors is because hundreds of people choose to support what we’re doing.

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If you become a subscriber then you’ll start getting our Wednesday issues as well as access to the entire back catalogue of paywalled articles, including our growing ‘Before You Go’ series, in which we visit some of London’s most beloved but endangered spots; and our ‘Electric Theatre’ series, where a different contributor writes about one of their favourite examples of London on film every month.

Hi Niall. Before we get into talking about the book we need to ask you the same question we ask everyone, which is ‘What’s your relationship to London?’.

I’m a born and bred Londoner. I was born and brought up in Wimbledon. My dad is from Iraq and my mum is from Cornwall, but they were both pulled to London because of its culture and that promise of the ‘London life’ I suppose.

I had a period in my twenties and thirties where I was working overseas in international development, but I’ve always gravitated back to London.

Your first book, A Little History of Economics, was really well received, but it didn’t have anything to do with London, so what made you want to write a whole book about utopian visions of the city?

The project of the book is to present an alternative story of the city that sits alongside these very dominant narratives: the city of wealth and power that’s the centre of empire and the centre of politics. I wanted to present a different thread; to try and recover a utopian heritage that I thought might be in there, and to try and crystallise that story.

I didn’t pick utopia just for the heck of it. I believe that utopia is a really important concept that has a lot to offer and I think that, as a society, we need to embrace utopian ideals.

There’s the concept of utopia and there’s the different ways we imagine London. This book puts those two things together to see how they enrich each other.

Can you just define utopia for us? Maybe explain how you would define it broadly, but also how some of the people you talk about in the book would define it. Because it means different things to different people, right?

The word was coined by Thomas More who was obviously a Londoner but who was maybe more famous for his political activities and his falling out with Henry VIII. But early on in his career he wrote Utopia, which coined the term. It’s kind of a pun really, because it could mean ‘no place’ or it could mean ‘good place’. So you have this idea of the good but also negation. In other words, something good that is slightly beyond the horizon of the possible.

Then you’ve also got this element of the place, something more than just imagining on the basis of some abstract set of principles or philosophy. Typically a utopian will clothe these principles in a real story populated with actual people and set it in a real place. It’s that combination of the abstract and the concrete that I find really interesting,

In the book I use London as the frame for that place and each chapter is a little utopian tale happening within a slice of London. Even though London itself is somewhere that has often been considered a sort of dystopia or, at least, a foil to the dreams of utopians, that creates a sort of narrative energy that people have used as a way to imagine something better.

More didn’t set his utopia in London though did he, even though he was a Londoner?

No, More’s utopia was a classic island story, probably located in the New World somewhere. But what’s interesting about it is that the main city of Amaurot has got these strange echoes of London in terms of how the river flows and the bridge that spans the river. It feels like a reimagined London that has been morally and spiritually transformed.

So what are utopias for, if they’re more than just dreams?

There are different notions of utopia, but the picture that probably springs to mind for most people is a 19th Century man, probably with white hair, with some eccentric followers behind him, who is handing out pamphlets that say ‘This is my plan for the regeneration of humanity. If only you will listen to me, this will fix everything.’

That’s the sort of classic idea of the fixed utopia that creates absolute perfection. But what I get to later in the book is that sense of a much more performative and experimental utopia, that doesn’t have an all-encompassing blueprint, but is more about improvising in the moment and acting as a process for exploring our desires.

You talk about different types of utopians in the book, but the one everyone thinks about is that demagogue figure who has a grand philosophical vision and a band of followers, who does an awful lot of talking.

In the early 19th century in London you couldn’t move on the street for zealous social prophets because it’s one of the most utopian periods in history. It’s the first phase of industrial revolution, there’s massive change in London, it’s the end of the Napoleonic war, a depression is happening and the old structures are no longer working. So there’s this frenzy of debate about what to do next.

You've got all these utopian communities being set up in America, while in London every other person has got some tract which they claim is the solution to everything, and the archetype of that kind of person would be something like Robert Owen who was one of the first socialists. The words socialism really came from his idea of the social system and the idea that solutions have to be social rather than individual and cooperative rather than competitive.

He was very much an early example of a utopian prophet. He had this plan that he announced in 1817, at height of social unrest in London, to set up these social communities. Around him was this profusion of mini prophets who were inspired by him, and each one of them was peddling their own utopian system.

After that period though, a kind of disillusion sets in as people realise that utopia is not just around the corner and it’s a bit more complicated than that.

That leaves the other kind of utopian visionary, the one who is more concerned with shaping the environment around them. The ‘town planner’ style of person who wants to design their way to a better world.

I try and capture this tension in the book: that sometimes, the utopian dreaming that happens in London is slightly abstract because London is so big it’s like trying to design a world. But, at the same time, it’s also a place with localities and concrete things.

So you have people like Ada Salter who are trying to do concrete things in a particular locality, but those things are coming from more abstract principles and yearnings. And that's why I think you can call Ada Salter a utopian, because she had that bigger vision.

The relationship between politics and utopia is quite complicated. Some utopians want to turn away from politics because they feel it’s an irredeemable system that they can’t sully themselves with. But there are points in the book where they do come together and London from the early 20th century is one of those points, because these city political institutions develop that eventually lean leftward. So you get people like George Lansbury and also Ada Salter whose work is a great example of utopia and the political system joining up briefly in Bermondsey.

We’ve written before about Ada Salter and her impact on Bermondsey, some of which you can still see today. Are there other utopian remnants in London that are still standing?

Alongside Ada Salter the other example of where politics and utopia come together is Berthold Lubetkin, the Russian socialist architect who was involved in rebuilding bits of Finsbury in the 1930s.

In the book I tell the story of the creation of the Spa Green Estate and the Finsbury Health Centre which prefigured the NHS. So there are definitely these tangible bits of utopian London that are still there. The Lansbury Estate in Canary Wharf is another example.

What about the 21st century? How relevant is utopian thinking in the London of 2023 would you say? And how optimistic are you about the future of utopianism?

Where I get to at the end of the book is the most recent utopian window that I think emerged during lockdown. Some of the later utopian movements in the book, the ones that are less about a blueprint and more about experimentation, they talk about the need to disrupt everyday life, which is an idea that was taken up by the Situationists and the psychogeographers, but during lockdown it almost happened by default. Because our daily lives were so disrupted there was lots of talk about not wanting to go back to the old normality, and a lot of people were suddenly reevaluating their lives.

The mid 20th century utopian theorist Ernst Bloch had the idea that these kinds of utopian yearnings are deeply embedded in society and they bubble up through the culture in all sorts of different ways. Not just by people who call themselves utopians presenting their visions, but also musicians and writers and artists who are just expressing a fundamental yearning that exists within society.

You see it it in what happened during COVID and you see it in some of the movements like Extinction Rebellion and Reclaim these Streets. It bubbles up even in the midst of what can feel like a very kind of anti-utopian time, and my book is saying that we need to embrace that and cherish it and take it seriously. We need to recognise that there is a utopian heritage out there that we can be inspired by and use to cultivate our own desires, and that's really essential for a healthy society.

So, yes, I am optimistic. We can’t just say ‘Oh, it’s too difficult’, because the whole notion of utopia is about finding possibility in impossibility and that's a very powerful creative force that we need to embrace.

The Infinite City: Utopian Dreams on the Streets of London is published on July 20th, You can order it via Harper Collins or via Bookshop.org.

There’s more about Niall here and he’s on Twitter at @niallkishtainy.

5 little bits

• The Met has announced that, as well as the 7% pay rise that was announced on Thursday, its officers will also get an annual salary increase of £1,000 a year, to help it “recruit and retain the best people”.

• Minister for London, Paul Scully has used the pages of The Telegraph to declare that “Susan Hall is the best candidate for London mayor”. However, most of the column is devoted to Paul letting us know how “gutted” he was not to have been shortlisted for the mayoral race; a decision that - he’s at pains to explain - came about because the “shortlisted candidates were specifically selected with less profile and political experience”.

• The Telegraph has also had a look at how the City of London is planning to convert “old offices nobody wants” into hotels “as part of plans to turn the financial district into a ‘global leisure destination’”.

• Footways, the social enterprise that “develops quiet and interesting routes for walking and turns them into beautiful maps” has created a map of the Camden Green Loop (the project that celebrates “the beautiful public spaces” across Camden Town, Euston and Kings Cross). The maps contains tips from local people and includes The British Boot Company, the Fiddler’s Elbow and (sticking with the theme of today’s issue) Oakshott Court.

• Darren Hayman (up to now, best known as the lead singer of Hefner) has been painting the nighttime London he sees while walking his dog, and the resulting pictures have been collected into a book called The Last Dog Walk. There’s also an exhibition of the paintings launching on Thursday at the artdog gallery near Forest Hill.

Welcome to your weekly roundup of all the London news, gossip and rumour from the past seven days. In today’s issue we’ve got the latest on July’s Tube strikes, which areas are topping the ‘healthy streets’ league table, the Islington restaurant that’s just raised the largest crowdfund ever, and the reviews are in for that new Mark Rylance play

LiB is a reader-supported publication that relies on subscriptions to help us pay contributors and ensure we don’t have to take money from advertisers. So, if you’d like to support us (and unlock the whole of today’s Roundup) then you can sign up for £5 a month or £50 a year. As well as the full Roundup, subscribers also get access to our ever-growing archive of back issues, and our mid-week edition. This Wednesday we looked at why parts of London are going a bit wonky in the heat:

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News bits

🚇 The RMT strikes planned for the end of this month were already due to “shut down the London Underground” according to Mick Lynch, but now that the drivers of the ASLEF union have said they’ll also walk out on Wednesday 26th and Friday 28th, it looks like getting anywhere in London from Sunday 23rd is going to be pretty much impossible.

🏠 Sadiq Khan has put an additional £20.2m into his Life off the Streets Programme, which is designed to tackle homelessness. Three-quarters of that is going towards the No Second Night Out service which “supports people who are seen sleeping rough for the first time”. At the end of last month GLA data showed that there were 1,700 more people on the streets than last year – a 21% rise.

🚲 A new survey from the City of London Corporation has shown that, in 2022, “cycles made up a greater proportion of traffic than cars” in the Square Mile. Compared to pre-pandemic 2019 there was a 20% decrease in motor vehicles and a a 2% increase in bikes.

😶‍🌫️ In related news, the 2023 Healthy Streets scorecard has been published and it has the City, Islington and Hackney at the top of the list, while Hillingdon, Bexley and Havering score the worst (Bexley and Hillingdon are two of the boroughs involved in the legal challenge against the ULEZ expansion).

👮 Meanwhile, new data from TfL has shown that crime on the Tube has gone up by almost 40% above pre-Covid levels. There were a total of 10,420 crimes recorded on the Underground between last December and May, fuelled by a four-fold increase in robbery, and a 66% rise in thefts. Fare dodging has also hit record highs, with TfL losing £130m and one in 25 passengers not paying to travel.

🚰 During an environment committee meeting about the resilience of London’s water supply on Tuesday, the chief executive of River Action warned that many of the chalk streams that feed the water supply to north London are permanently dry and London could face water rationing “imminently”. Thames Water said it had no plans to ration usage.

🛣 As the boring has almost been completed on the Silvertown Tunnel (“London's first road tunnel in over 30 years”) the BBC has taken a look at the “very controversial” scheme, which campaigners say will “increase carbon emissions and worsen air quality”.

🚂 Waterloo station turned 175 years old this week. To celebrate, Ian Visits has been for a look at the “vast hidden world underneath the station” including one room that used to contain a boxing ring, and another that once held “a rifle range for railway workers”.

🔥 The Salisbury Square Development in the Square Mile, has completed the first of 60 geothermal boreholes which run 240 metres deep (three-quarters of the height of the Shard). The geothermal borehole system will form part of a “closed-loop cooling and heating system” that will provide “an energy-efficient way to heat and cool the development using all-electric solutions powered by renewable sources”.

🛌 Following the story of the American tourist who found out that his AirBnB was just “a large-ish bathroom that the host put a bed in” (we’re linking to an LBC article because the tourist has since locked down his Twitter account), City AM has compiled ‘Five Rightmove ads that show how screwed the London rental market is’…Which is hilarious, until you realise that people will pay for these places because they are desperate.

👀 Did you see the headlines last week about Maybelline putting eyelashes on London Tube trains? You wouldn’t have seen the made-up trains themselves, because it turns out they didn’t actually exist.

Food and drink bits

🤴 The big news in the restaurant world this week was the return of Jeremy King, one half of the Corbin & King Group, which was behind legendary restaurants like the Wolseley and Brasserie Zedel. At the start of this week King put out an announcement saying he is going to be opening a restaurant called The Park next spring. The name comes from the fact that it will be located in the new Park Modern building near Kensington Palace Gardens, and we’re told it will be in the ‘grand cafés and brasseries’ style that King has made his name with.

🌮 Despite what you might have seen on Ted Lasso, it’s not easy for footballers to open successful restaurants in London. But that hasn’t stopped Chelsea’s Hakim Ziyech opening a taco restaurant in Shoreditch at the end of this month. Called Taco Taco, (“Food so nice we named it twice!”) this is an ‘intimate’, first-come-first-served type of place that looks like the very antithesis of the cliche premiership star bling palace. Although the tacos are not exactly traditional, with ‘roasted banana, sweet mascarpone and nutella’ on the menu alongside a ‘scrambled egg, bacon and hash brown’ option.

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If you were with us back in November of 2021, you might remember we published the first of our London book gift guides. In the non-fiction part of that guide we recommended Tom Chiver’s London Clay, a book which “uncovers the geological mysteries that burst up through the pavement and bubble to the surface of our streets.”

That book is, as you might expect, named after an actual geological formation (there’s also a Farrow & Ball colour called London Clay, but we’re almost certain the geological formation got there first).

London Clay is a “stiff and bluish” clay that’s found right across the London Basin, but it was the presence of this “soft yet stable” substance under the city itself that allowed for the Underground to stretch so quickly across north London (next time you hear someone moaning about the lack of Tube coverage south of the river you can push your glasses up your nose and tell them tha…

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For July’s edition of WDYG? we spoke to David Carter (above) about leaving London for France (and then coming back again), the rise of the ‘Instagram restaurant’, and where to find London’s most miserable shoppers.

P.S. You can find all the previous editions of WDYG? right here.

Who are you?

My name is David Carter. I have worked as an interior designer for almost 30 years, but I also ran a hotel, organised some of London’s most acclaimed events and parties, and dabbled in many other things that are probably of little or no interest to most of you.

Why should we trust you?

I wouldn’t! London is different for everyone, and we all have to find our own way of making sense of it. Find your own London. There is one waiting just for you.

The 40 Winks hotel was such a beautiful and unusual corner of London. Can you just give us your personal, potted history of 40 Winks for people who weren’t lucky enough to experience it?

40 Winks opened in 2009. We cheekily described it as the world’s first micro boutique hotel, and our rather grandiose plan was to revolutionise the hospitality industry by offering an immersive and emotionally engaging experience that was very different from the bland uniformity found in more conventional establishments. I think we succeeded.

When Covid came along, we had to close, and after almost two years of lockdowns and travel restrictions, I decided that it was pointless trying to carry on.

Do you still own the building? Are there any plans for it?

I sold the building and moved to France. The plan was to start something new there. I have always been interested in the idea of running a school. Not a conventional school, but one dedicated to teaching the art of happiness. We regularly had guests describing their stay at 40 Winks as a life changing experience, so the aim was to really focus on that. Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy living in France, and am now back in London.

I am still undecided about what to do next, but let’s see what happens!

You’ve been an interior designer of a quarter of a century now, you must have worked on some incredible London properties and spaces. Do you have any favourite projects that stick out to you?

Interior design projects are like love affairs. Always very intense while you are involved with them, but they all end with you having to hand the keys back.

Are there any that people could go and see (without breaking into a private residence)?

I principally specialise in high end residential projects so sadly they are not accessible without a crowbar. I did design a very cool bar and restaurant in Moscow, but my clients had to close it because of the political situation there.

You will have seen countless design trends come and go in London. What’s your take on the maximalist, ’made for TikTok’ restaurant and bar interiors we’ve been seeing or the past few years?

I was invited along to one yesterday. I hated it. Does it matter that they’re made for selfies if they’re done well? Not if they have thought about all the other important stuff you expect to find in a good restaurant like the food and the service. If these are less important than simply creating a fun backdrop for a selfie, then my advice is to choose somewhere else to go.

Is there one London property or space you would love to decorate? A dream project?

Mr Carter’s School of Happiness? Or, while I am waiting for that to happen, perhaps a pavilion for the Serpentine Gallery.

Okay, on to the usual questions… Where do you go to have a great time?

I love spending time at markets. My regular haunts are Spitalfields on Thursdays when they have the antique market, Portobello on Fridays for the vintage clothes market and Columbia Road on Sundays for flowers and curios.

Where do you go and always end up spending too much money?

If it’s my money, probably all the above. If it someone else’s money, like one of my interior design clients, I might be somewhere like PAD London or the Decorative Antiques Fair in Battersea.

Where do you go that can never close down, because if it does you might cry?

The Wolseley restaurant in Piccadilly. I have been going since it opened.

Where do you go to cheer yourself up?

Harrods in Knightsbridge! Not to buy anything, but just to see how miserable everyone else there is.

Where do you go to be alone?

Don’t move to London if you want to be alone. It’s not possible.

Where do you go to impress someone?

Scott’s in Mayfair (above).

Where do you go that's within walking distance of your house?

Gail’s bakery for my daily bread.

Where do you go when you can afford it?

Dover Street Market.

Where do you go to be romantic?

Dennis Severs’ House in Spitalfields. They have wonderful candlelit tours.

Where do you go if you want to feel comfortable?

A Curzon cinema. Best seats in London.

Where do you go if you want to switch off?

Bed.

Where do you go to get inspired?

The V&A or the newly reopened National Portrait Gallery.

Where do you go to think?

Flat White in Soho or Allpress in Shoreditch. Much easier to think with a perfect cappuccino.

Find more information on David here, or follow him on Instagram.

5 little bits

• Boris Johnson called the ULEZ expansion “an odious, unjustified tax on driving” this weekend, while promoting his Daily Mail column on the subject. This is the same scheme he called “an essential measure to help improve air quality” when he introduced it in 2015. Meanwhile the BBC has tried to summarise everything we learned from last week’s ULEZ court action (although, the section under the heading ‘What’s the issue with the cameras?’ begins with the very un-BBC phrase “Don't get me started…”).

• The Guardian has seen the new artist tenant survey that’s due to published later this week by Acme (“the largest provider of permanent cheap studios in England”), and it’s not good news. Almost a third of the London artists surveyed said they would likely be forced out of London within five years, just under half said they cannot afford to pay into savings or a pension plan, and “only 12% of those surveyed said they can support themselves solely through art.”

• Over 25,000 people took part in the Trans+ Pride march for trans equality and justice on Saturday. Pink News has collected some of “the most joyful, hilarious and powerful placards” from the day (‘It’s Raining Them’ is a personal favourite).

• Camden Council has visited Idris Elba’s King’s Cross wine bar, Porte Noire, for a spot check ... and left it with a one-star hygiene score. According to the council’s website, the ‘hygienic food handling’ needs ‘major improvement’ as does the ‘management of food safety’.

• Meanwhile The Good Food guide has just published its guide to Britains’s best local restaurants. The London section includes spots in Crouch End, Shepherd’s Bush, Kew and Blackheath.

• Bonus link because it’s paywalled: The FT’s Jimmy McIntosh has written an impassioned love letter to The Tarmon pub on the Caledonian Road, calling it “the type of bacchanalian, absurdist boozer full of warmth, wit and mild jeopardy that is gradually disappearing from the capital’s nightlife scene.”

Welcome to your Roundup for the week when an influencer’s cat put someone in the hospital and the Wireless Festival effectively excluded influencers by banning video equipment and makeup.

In today’s issue we’ve got the latest in the fight to save the Curzon Mayfair cinema, some Only Fans outrage, and Lily Allen’s hot take on London’s restaurant scene.

LiB is a reader-supported publication that relies on subscriptions to help us pay contributors and ensure we don’t have to take money from advertisers. So, if you’d like to support us (and unlock the whole of today’s Roundup) then you can sign up for £5 a month or £50 a year. As well as the full Roundup, subscribers also get access to our ever-growing archive of back issues, and our mid-week edition. This Wednesday we had a ‘mayor compare’ ‘with New York’s crystal-hugging, party-loving, rat-hating mayor, Eric Adams:

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News bits

🚈 If we didn’t already realise that the project to rebuild Euston station for HS2 was a complete shitshow, then a new report from the Public Accounts Committee has confirmed it. The report calls the Department for Transport’s original £2.6bn budget “completely unrealistic” and said that the government’s decision to delay construction for two years will cost at least another £200m.

🚂 On Thursday the RMT union announced a week of Tube strikes, starting on Sunday 23 July and running until Friday 28 July. There’s no detail yet on which specific lines will be impacted, but union leader Mike Lynch said that the action will “shut down the London Underground”.

🚇 There’s going to be quite a bit of disruption on the Bakerloo line and the London Overground over the next couple of months so that TfL “can carry out multiple complex projects at once”. The closures are happening in four phases and will affect the section of Bakerloo line between Queen’s Park and Harrow & Wealdstone and the London Overground between Euston and Watford Junction.

🚗 The ULEZ row reached the High Court this week, as Bexley, Bromley, Harrow and Hillingdon councils (along with Surrey county council) sought to block the expansion of the scheme by contesting both its legal basis and the consultation that took place over the shape of the scrappage scheme. The barrister for the councils has argued that the extended ULEZ would “bypass legal safeguards” and that that information given to people during the consultation was “unintelligible” and gave a “confused picture”. A verdict isn’t expected to be delivered for several weeks yet.

😶‍🌫️ Earlier in the week, Newsnight spoke to an air pollution scientist to see what a difference the existing Ultra-Low Emission Zone has made to the London’s air quality (it’s pretty dramatic)…

🏟 … But there’s still a lot to be done. On Thursday, during a panel discussion about the environment at Wimbledon, Seb Coe, the World Athletics president, told Gary Lineker, “We have made a decision that in future we probably won’t take our championships into landscapes where air quality falls below a certain threshold. And, actually, if I’m being a little closer to home, that would include London.”

🪧 While their appearance at Wimbledon got most of the headlines this week, Just Stop Oil also turned up at Harrods on Wednesday, where the store’s security “assaulted a press photographer” who was covering the protestor’s slow march.

🏠 New research from LSE and Savills has shown that the number of properties available for private rent in London “has plummeted since the pandemic”. The 41% reduction in available properties has “sparked warnings that more households will be forced into temporary accommodation with numbers on track to hit new record highs by the end of the summer.”

🚩 In related news, the artist Jeremy Deller has designed a “London flag based on a diagram of the rise in rents and decrease in affordable housing in the capital” for the Somerstown festival in Camden this weekend. (Adorably, Deller misspells Somerstown in his IG caption and inadvertently link to the account of a cat called Summerstown.)

🛤 TfL has confirmed that it wants to have six Overground routes named by the end of next year and that it’s working with the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm on some themes “ahead of a public consultation on potential names”. Those names will likely (according to Sadiq) include “historic locations and forgotten stories from our city that need retelling”.

🚅 Get ready for more a much improved DLR service in the next couple of years, as TfL has put in an order for 11 more DLR trains to go alongside the 43 it ordered a few years ago. The first of the 54 new trains are expected to go into service next year with the remainder introduced by the end of 2026. The trains should “help boost overall capacity on the network by more than 60 per cent”.

👮 The City Hall Conservative leader has referred Sadiq Khan to the Greater London Assembly’s watchdog for “allegedly breaking City Hall rules”. The mayor recently wrote to the Met Commissioner to say that the police station in Uxbridge and Ruislip should remain open. Uxbridge and Ruislip, of course, just happens to be Boris Johnson’s former constituency and the site of an upcoming by-election.

🎅 The Met announced this week that it is opening a new investigation into potential lockdown breaches at the party at Conservative HQ where the campaign team from Shaun Bailey’s unsuccessful mayoral bid ‘jingled and mingled’ in the most excruciating manner possible. The deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, Daisy Cooper, has called on Rishi Sunak to stop Bailey taking his seat in the House of Lords while the investigation takes place.

🗳 The Guardian ran an editorial this week, claiming that London isn’t the “liberal, secular, leftist haven” that everyone thinks it is, and the Tories would be “in with a shout of taking back the capital” if they hadn’t made such a “disastrous start to this contest”.

🍈 There were quite a few advertising stories going around this week; from Andy Murray’s groin on a billboard, to TfL banning an ad for a play because it included a picture of a cake (more on which in our Long Read of the Week, below). But the most controversial ad campaign of the week was the one for Only Fans which popped up in Harrow, Edgware and Lambeth. More specifically, the posters are advertising the Only Fans account of “model Eliza Rose Watson” who appears on the ads “in underwear,” and has defended the poster as “simply a torso shot of a 34-year-old woman”. That hasn’t stopped people spray-painting the words “keep porn off our streets” over one of the ads, or people complaining to the ASA in their… handfuls.

🏗 Just in case you thought Peckham’s gentrification was slowing down, this week it was announced that the fifteen disused arches between Brayards Road and Consort Road, are being turned into ‘Bronze Yard’ “to preserve their heritage and create valuable opportunities for new businesses in this area, contributing to the economic growth and vibrancy of Peckham.”

🪂 If you want to see footage of Steve-O jumping off what TMZ insists on calling ‘Tower of London Bridge’, while holding a Union Jack umbrella… Then here you go.

Food and drink bits

🪩 Trisha’s update: Westminster Council’s licensing sub-committee met on Thursday and decided to suspend Trisha’s license for two weeks, “during which the management will be required to make improvements to the club”. Those improvements include “the implementation of a digital members’ list, tighter security, and more robust staff training.” The committee said it has “considered legitimate concerns raised about safety from residents, the police and city inspectors” but had also “taken into account the willingness from the owner to make changes to preserve a historic Soho venue and unique part of Westminster’s heritage”.

🏪 Going back to Peckham for a second…. Next weekend Market Place Peckham is reopening after a bit of facelift. Part of the Market Place food halls group, which also has sites in Hounslow, Vauxhall and Harrow (but shouldn’t be confused with the Market Halls in Victoria and Oxford Street… or Market Peckham down the road), the 250-capacity space will have ten new street-food vendors across “five indoor seating zones” and there’s plenty of launch parties and giveaways happening in the run up to the launch.

🥖 The big closure news of the week was that of Le Pain Quotidien, which has gone into administration and shut the doors on all of its sites... Apart from the one in St Pancras station, bizarrely.

🇫🇷 Continuing the run of bad news for Canary Wharf, the French restaurant Platea, has shut down. The restaurant, which has been at Canada Square since 2003, blamed “a drop in footfall in the area following the pandemic as well as other economic challenges”.

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Only three people (all men) have been mayor of London since Tony Blair created the post at the turn of the millennium. Ken Livingstone held the position for two terms, then Boris Johnson came along on his way to No. 10, to be followed of course, by Sadiq Khan, who will be aiming for a record third term next year.

As the Tories have been deciding who to put up against Khan, there have been a lot of column inches dedicated to what makes a good mayoral candidate. Should it be a celebrity? A loyal, experienced MP? A criminal barrister? Or just someone called Susan?

And even more ink has been spilled discussing the perceived frailties of Sadiq Khan, particularly the potential for the ULEZ to ‘take him down’.

But the truth is, we don’t know what makes a good mayor yet. We’ve only had three of them and the previous two didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory. So, to try and get a bit of perspective on things, we thought it might be useful a speak to someone from a city that has had over 100 mayors and which has just elected a highly charismatic and - we think it’s fair to say - unusual person into the job.

is a journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. She’s a former Wall Street Journal columnist who now writes the brilliant CAFÉ ANNE newsletter, which highlights the more unusual sides of NYC, from examining photos of ‘strange sidewalk trash piles’ sent in by readers, to Q&A-style interviews with the city’s pigeons.

She also has a regular part of her newsletter, dedicated to “the weird doings of the most idiosyncratic mayor in NYC history,” one Eric Adams.

A 62-year-old former police officer, Adams was voted in as the 110th mayor of New York City last year. Since then he’s made a bit of a name for himself for being tough-on-crime, but an even bigger name for himself by being what Politico described as a “time-bending, crime-fighting, club-hopping, veggie-munching” mayor.

We spoke to Anne from her apartment in Brooklyn, to talk about personality politics post-Trump, whether you'd rather get bitten by a rat or a fox, and why being ‘weird’ is a great quality for a New York mayor.

LiB: Hi Anne! You are a self-confessed Eric Adams obsessive, and you regularly use your newsletter to talk about what he’s been up to, whether it’s eating french fries out of baby’s hands or releasing robot police dogs onto the streets. But the big question is: Do you think he’s a good mayor (and what would you say actually constitutes a ‘good’ mayor?).

AK: I didn’t actually vote for Adams, because he struck me as being quite an angry person and I don't like angry politicians. I think they create a lot of division, and tend to blame others for their problems and I don't think that's ever helpful.

But once he got into office, he seemed to be a much happier person. He looked to be having a good time and I think that’s really important, because New York was going through such a difficult time post-Covid, we needed someone who was a bit of a cheerleader. Someone to say ‘It's okay, go enjoy yourself’. It was almost like him having a good time gave other people permission to do the same thing. That was important, because New York City does need to feel good about itself.

LiB: Do you think that’s a big part of the NYC mayor’s job description? To be a personal cheerleader for the city?

AK: Well, one of the reasons people stay in New York City is to prove they can do it! You get to feel a little bit superior because you managed to make it. It’s so hard that, if you don’t get to feel good about living in the city, why else would you stay here? So, I feel like we needed to have some of our pride restored to us recently, and I don't think people give Eric Adams enough credit for actually having done that or how important it is to the city.

LiB: That’s interesting, because our mayor obviously has a part to play in promoting London and making it seem like an attractive place to live, work and do business, but all of that is farmed out to a PR company really. A couple of years ago, as lockdown ended, Sadiq Khan went for brunch with a contestant from Drag Race and people pretty much lost their minds! That’s how rarely stuff like that happens here

AK: It’s not easy. Every time Eric Adams would post a goofy video of himself jet skiing or dancing, there would be 300 comments saying things like ‘Stop wasting our time and showing off. Get back to work!’. As a result he doesn’t create those kinds of posts as much as he used to. I think maybe he’s had to balance things out a bit.

I don’t really follow approval ratings, but I was curious before I spoke to you, so I had a look. In the spring they were around 33% and now they’re up to 50%, which is pretty good for a New York mayor. New Yorkers love to hate their mayor, no matter what he’s doing. So 50% is pretty good.

Part of that comes from Adams making some hard decisions on crime. Post-pandemic there seemed to be a lot of disorder and getting on the subway was a very strange experience. A lot of people just didn't want to take the subway anymore. The city can’t function like that. Transit crime is down now, and I’ve personally seen things get better in my neighbourhood. I think people have noticed that and they appreciate the mayor took a difficult and maybe controversial stance on the police and on crime.

LiB: Do you think maybe a mayor gets more leeway to make those big tough decisions, if he’s also wearing cool outfits and out drinking and partying every night?

AK: Well, I imagine on a very basic level, that if people like you then they’re more likely to go along with what you do. So there might be some method to his madness.

LiB: Or he could just be a very unusual person?

AK: Well, beyond wearing interesting outfits and partying, he’s also said that he believes Gracie Mansion is haunted, that New York City is built atop of a giant crystal, he’s a big meditator and he believes that God told him to be the mayor. These are not normal ways of thinking about things!

Having said that, I’m a Buddhist and don’t even believe in God, so in terms of there being some force out there that thought Eric Adams might be a great mayor for New York City right now… Why not?

Getting back to policies for a second: Can you explain the rat thing for us British people?

AK: Okay, so Eric Adams used to be the Brooklyn Borough President, and he was talking about rats back then. He even tried to introduce this weird rat trap which featured a bucket full of acid. The rat would climb in and drown in the acid bath. He actually had a press conference where he produced one of these buckets that had a dead, acid-corroded rat in it.

It turned out he had bought a property in Brooklyn that was ran infested, and that seems to have scarred him. But he talked about rats so much that it started to become kind of a meme, because New Yorkers have always had a thing about rats. Remember pizza rat?

It’s always been a bit ‘us against the rats’. They’re an enemy we can all unite against, and I think the mayor, by being so over the top about the rats, has made the whole thing funny. He started having these entire press conferences about ‘the war on rats’ and then he hired a ‘rat czar’.

I have not noticed any reduction whatsoever in the number of rats in the city!

LiB: We have rats, but I guess the equivalent for us here in London would be urban foxes…

AK: What? They sound so cute!

LiB: Well, they are quit cute until they come into your house and start biting your children.

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Paul is the author of several books about trees in London including London is a Forest, and the editor of the Great Trees of London Map published by Blue Crow Media.

His column deals with the city’s unregarded landmarks, the wild inhabitants who may have occupied the city for hundreds of years, the people, policies and ideas that have influenced the environment, and the precarious entanglement of humans and nature in this ever-evolving city.

In this summer instalment, Paul discovers why wood from trees either felled or pruned in London mostly goes up in smoke, and talks to two people who are rethinking how this valuable resource could be used more positively.

London is a city of 9 million trees, so it stands to reason that, at any time, there are hundreds or even thousands that will need to be pruned or even felled. Having said that, some, like the Oakfield Road Plane, a perfectly healthy tree in north London, should be left alone in order to provide the essential ecosystem services this city so desperately needs. Only large, mature trees will have any real impact on pollution and climate once the overheads of transporting and planting them is considered, so we must remain vigilant for tree felling overreach by landowners, developers, and local authorities.

But, have you ever wondered what happens to all the wood from trees that must be felled or have their canopies trimmed?

Mostly it gets chipped. If you have ever spotted guys in white helmets and fluorescent suits dangling high in the trees with chainsaws in hand, you might also have noticed the chipper that accompanies them. These innocuous looking machines briefly but frequently spring into high decibel action to make short work of branches, twigs and leaves. They produce a pile of wood chips that might be used for garden mulch but most is simply burned as biomass. Biomass is claimed to be a ‘renewable carbon neutral’ fuel source, but these claims are facing increased scrutiny. Regardless of the pros and cons of using urban trees for biomass, chipping seems like a rapid and sad end to timber that has taken decades to grow, so might there be another way?

There are people out there who are beginning to rethink how we can make use of the fine timber that grows, literally, on our doorsteps. I’ll get on to them shortly, but first some history…

Everything you ever wanted to know about pollarding and coppicing…

In days of yore, London’s remarkable ancient woodlands (like Oxleas and Highgate Woods) were managed sustainably to provide fuel, wood for fencing, small artisanal items, and even timber for building. Evidence of this ancient industry can still be glimpsed as centuries-old coppice stools. Now they are overgrown, but once these multi-stemmed trees would be cut to the ground every few years to supply a ready supply of long, straight poles. In other places you can still find eerie pollards, where branches were lopped back to a bole high enough to keep re-growing shoots out of reach of grazing animals.

Coppicing was probably last carried out commercially in London at the beginning of the twentieth century, while pollarding – in London, a woodland management practice restricted to Epping Forest – ended abruptly in 1878 when the City of London Corporation became the forest’s ‘Conservator’. The chief woodland product was charcoal, used for all manner of things including baking, smithing and heating, but in the face of a rapidly growing population and abundant cheap coal, the supply of charcoal from London’s woods became so inconsequential that its production fizzled out. This left the few remaining woodlands to become fantastic deep, dark sanctuaries where Londoners can escape the frenetic city.

Today, most of the trees that are felled or lopped in London are those in our parks and gardens, on our estates and those growing on our streets. We import the vast majority of the timber we use, and so it is surely a reasonable question to ask “why don’t we use the timber from the trees we cut down every day in London to make stuff with?”

Local wood for local people

This is exactly what one company in east London, Fallen and Felled are doing. Setup by Bruce Saunders in 2017, it was the first and only supplier of homegrown timber in London and as Bruce puts it they “give London’s trees a second life”. Over the last six years they have sourced, seasoned (the process of slowly air-drying freshly cut timber) and supplied wood to furniture makers, craftspeople, kitchen fitters, architects and even the City of London.

Bruce says they have dealt with hundreds of trees and are now handling two trees every week. They could take more, he says, but it is difficult to get hold of trees of the right size and quality and, even then, they have to be in accessible locations. To complicate matters, councils, landowners and arboriculturalists often allow perfectly good and accessible trees to be chipped rather than giving them a second life. A case in point was the Hardy Tree, a famous ash tree that succumbed to a storm in December 2022. Bruce was straight on to the council to see if he could rescue the timber only to be refused and to discover the tree branches had already ended up as biomass. The carcass remains in situ in Old St Pancras Churchyard to this day.  

Bruce told me that his shock at how many London trees were going to waste motivated him into setting up Fallen and Felled, and that he felt it was possible to do more with the high quality hardwood from these trees. There are many benefits for using locally sourced timber, not least the carbon footprint of wood that is felled, seasoned, transported and fabricated locally is much less than for timber sourced from a Scandinavian forest, or even a Scottish plantation. Compared to burning, it is a no brainer: carbon remains locked up in wood that otherwise just goes up in smoke. 

There is a ready market of designers, architects and craftspeople who want to use London wood for all these good environmental reasons, but also because wood from trees grown in London has a compelling but intangible property: amazing provenance. One of the most frequent species growing in London is the city’s eponymous plane tree. The wood from London plane is one of the most attractive, but before Fallen and Felled came along it was almost impossible to get hold of. They have effectively created a market and now London plane can be seen in high end furniture, interiors like the L’Estrange store in Coal Drops Yard and as stunning artisan objects.

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New Craftsman: Skapa Woodturning

One customer of Fallen and Felled is Mike Groves (above), aka Skapa Woodturning, a designer who switched on to woodturning during lockdown. In a previous life, Mike was an archaeologist, but while unable to dig during the pandemic, turning became an obsession for him. Remarkably, Mike is self-taught. He set himself the challenge of turning four bowls a week and, after months of lockdown, he had served a solitary apprenticeship in an ancient craft. Although, the idea of his work being an exercise in some long-dead craft is something Mike is keen to distance himself from.

“My work is a f*** you to heritage craft” he says, going on to explain that some woodcraft purists want to recreate forms and working practices in use centuries ago, whereas he is quite happy to use ‘modern’ tools like a powered lathe and a bandsaw. 

Before I met Mike, wood turning conjured up lumpen bowls garishly coated in glossy varnish piled on a trestle table by an ageing hippie (or a retired accountant) at some country fayre. But Mike’s work is different. For a start he does not use varnish, instead his work is oiled so the wood is exposed to the world and its tactility can be experienced. His elegant bowls and platters are simple, and his material is shown off to its glorious best in the functional designs he produces. In fact Mike calls his wide Asian-inspired vessels ‘Fodder Bowls’ and insists they should be used to eat from. 

When I visited Mike’s workshop in Woolwich I discovered a cornucopia of finished products, raw materials, industrial machines and some very, very sharp tools. There are shelves filled with wooden objects below which are huge logs, some with their bark intact, and great planks of roughly sawn wood. I was immediately struck by the difference in the colour, texture and figuring of the various types of wood which is enhanced in the finished bowls and platters, each utterly unique while the shapes are broadly repeated.

His work reminded me of mid-century ceramics (I had recently seen the excellent Lucy Rie show at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge), which I put to Mike by way of a compliment. It seemed to go down well, and he explained that he was very interested in Asian ceramics albeit from a much earlier time, specifically Japanese Chawan and Korean Buncheong wares for their simplicity and ergonomic designs. While forms are similar between wood and ceramic work, they are very different materials, so were there any references from his own field? “Look up George Lailey, the master of English wood turning,” Mike told me. Lailey died in 1958 leaving a lifetime of turned wooden items mostly made from wood procured locally in Berkshire where he lived and worked all his life.

There’s an indirect connection between contemporary urban woodwork, and the rustic work of Lailey, much of which is a hundred or more years old. Lailey’s work was beautiful and functional, and used materials that were available to him in the English countryside, specifically elm, a pleasing warmly coloured wood with pronounced grain. Mike is also concerned with material and its provenance, and he is able to tell me exactly where every bit of timber in his workshop came from.

On one shelf a series of bowls of a remarkable deep brown, knotted material stood out. “These are from one of the London plane trees felled at Euston for HS2,” Mike tells me. I am immediately conflicted about handling these incredible pieces of wood which are at once repellant because they are a token of trees felled unnecessarily but - and this feeling wins out - they are also awe-inspiring. Here are objects that are made from iconic trees that have been a visible part of the city’s fabric for generations and are a memorial to human destructiveness and the protests that ensued. Mike’s work is such a good use of the wood, it represents an afterlife for the tree, one that has the potential to last as long as the tree grew, its carbon locked up in an object that will always be its memorial.

There are other woods to admire. Mike shows me ash, horse chestnut, walnut, beech and elm pieces, each with its own distinct character. But the majority of Mike’s work is hewn from London plane. “I want to be known as the London plane guy,” he tells me, and I can understand why. As well as his work with the Euston tree, Mike has pieces made from other individual trees, including one felled at Denmark Hill. These are less knotted, lighter in colour and show the distinct figuring known as ‘lacewood’, a feature typical of London plane wood. It is produced by tiny capillary-like structures – medullary rays – crossing the wood grain producing a delicate shimmering texture. Presumably it once reminded someone of fine lace work and the name has stuck. It is certainly intricate, but I can’t see a comparison with my grandmother’s antimacassars. While lacewood is not unique to plane wood, most plane wood displays it.

In the world of fine woodwork, Bruce Saunders and Mike Groves are two people who have a passion for their material, and an acute sense of where it comes from. What they have achieved is a blueprint for how our society can work with local materials: through the sensitivity they apply to the value chain of wood, from its source to functional objects, they are addressing our concerns for sustainability and environmental protection. By owning and using a Skapa bowl made from Denmark Hill plane wood or by purchasing planks of Barnet ash from Fallen and Felled, Londoners are buying into a process that gives new value to our trees. The knowledge of where the material is sourced can make us aware of another facet of the place we inhabit and, in a roundabout way, help contribute to the conservation of London’s urban forest.

Fallen and Felled have a shop in Walthamstow open on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Details on their website. Find them on Instagram.

Mike Groves may be familiar to some from when he appeared on the BBC’s Make It At Market. Skapa Woodturning has a website where Mike Groves’ beautiful turned wood can be bought. Find them on Instagram too. 

Find Paul’s newsletter, The Street Tree, here:

The Street Tree

Accounts of great British and Irish urban trees by Paul Wood.

By Paul Wood

5 little bits

• It has not been a great few weeks for Canary Wharf. Not only did it have to suffer the indignity of being covered in orange paint by Just Stop Oil protestors last Tuesday, but then HSBC announced that it was going to leave its dockside headquarters for a new, smaller home near St Paul’s, when its lease expires in 2027. It’s estimated that the bank’s departure will knock £542M off the value of the area’s office portfolio, and just like that all those articles proclaiming ‘Canary Wharf’s post-COVID comeback’ don’t look so great. In yesterday’s Observer Rowan Moore was asking if this is “the end for Canary Wharf,” while in the FT (which, just five days ago, was claiming Canary Wharf was ‘changing not dying’) Edwin Heathcote seems pretty convinced that there’s no coming back for the “moated, gated, privatised space divided from the rest of London”. The Times and The Telegraph try and look on the bright side, with both papers focusing on Canary Wharf’s ambition to become a tourist destination. “How do you turn the most corporate, concrete, soulless corner of the city, five miles from Trafalgar Square, into a place that people actually want to come and visit?” asks Greg Dickinson in The Telegraph. Well, quite.

• The next chapter in the Hondo Tower saga is due to unfold later this month when the public representation hearing for the development at Pope’s Road in Brixton takes place at City Hall on July 21st. The history of the controversial 20-storey tower is too long and complex to go into here, but Jason Cobb has written a good summary for Brixton Buzz, which concludes with the prediction that City Hall will “more than likely reject the application based on the proposals put forward”.

• The City of London Corporation has approved the plans to redevelop the ‘St Paul’s gyratory’, i.e. the area to the north of the Cathedral. The development will pedestrianise one side of the gyratory and install a new 3,000sqm public space at the cost of around £15-17 million. If you don’t want to wade through a bunch of council PDFs, Ian Visits has a good rundown of what’s planned.

• John Lewis has continued its move into the property market by submitting a planning applications to build 800 rental homes on sites in West Ealing and Bromley. John Lewis has told CityAM that “just over a third of the 428 new homes in West Ealing and 353 in Bromley will be affordable and targeted at key public sector workers such as nurses or teachers” (the Ealing development has been previously criticised for being too tall and not having enough affordable housing).

• Or, you could just rent a four-bedroom flat in Knightsbridge for £9,000 a week. It’s called ‘super prime’ renting apparently, and there’s absolutely nothing insane about it at all.

Welcome to your Roundup for the week when everyone was delighted to see a barn owl return to Hampstead Heath and no one was happy to see a swan get on the Elizabeth Line.

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News bits

🗳 On Monday, The Times published a piece by the writer Daisy Goodwin, naming Tory mayoral candidate Daniel Korski as the man who groped her during a meeting at No 10 a decade ago. On Tuesday, Korski went on TalkTV to deny the accusations and promised that he wouldn’t be backing out of the race for City Hall. The next day, he did exactly that, claiming that “the news agenda is becoming a distraction from the race,” a news agenda that happened to include Goodwin’s claim that she had been “contacted by other women with some very interesting stories”. On Friday the government announced that it will not be investigating the allegations.

🏠 The latest figures from the Combined Homelessness and Information Network (Chain) show that the number of rough sleepers in London has risen by more than 20% in the past year, while “people sleeping rough for the first time also rose by more than a quarter.” In total, 10,053 people were recorded on the streets of London between April 2022 and March 2023.

📱 This week, Met officers returned the iPhone and laptop seized from the radical French publisher Ernest Moret, who was arrested on his way to the London book fair in April. Moret’s lawyer, confirmed that officers had told him (deep breath) “the information on the devices had not been downloaded, but that the sim card on the phone had been downloaded, although the information on it had not been reviewed by counter-terrorism police.”

🏅 Sadiq Khan has been awarded an honorary fellowship by the Faculty of Public Health. The award was given to the mayor for “his willingness to take on major challenges for London to improve the health, wellbeing and economic productivity of all Londoners”.

😶‍🌫️ On Thursday night the mayor attended LBC’s ‘State of London’ debate, where a heckler in the audience shouted “No-one has died [of air pollution], stop lying!”. Evidence shows that 4,000 people die prematurely in London every year, because of air pollution.

🏳‍🌈 At the start of the week, the mayor announced a fleet of Pride-themed buses and trains “to help spread the message that in London, you are free to be whoever you want to be, and love whoever you want to love.” The responses on Twitter and Instagram were almost universally hateful and homophobic, so it was good to see Sadiq follow that up with the announcement that five new rainbow-coloured plaques are being installed in Greenwich, Peckham, Westminster, Ladbroke Grove and Haringey “to celebrate significant people, places and moments in LGBTQI+ history.”

🚽 The CEO of Tideway, the company behind the ‘super sewer’, has said that Thames Water’s financial woes will not derail the project and he has “no doubt” the project will “fulfil its objective of cleaning up the River Thames and that the city’s water supplies will continue uninterrupted.”

🚫 The Guardian has been to Hatcham Gardens in Lewisham to find out why a park that was boarded up in 2018 while new homes were built, is still boarded up, even though the homes in the development were finished in 2020.

🪩 Former House of Commons official, Eliot Smith has written a piece for City AM saying that London has a Soho problem, and we need to fix it now. Remarkably he manages to write over 500 words without explaining how we might fix it, and instead makes weird jokes about ‘dogging’.

🧳 This week, people living in Kensington and Chelsea were “encouraged to prepare an emergency grab bag” in case of flash flooding. Residents were told the bag should include things like “personal documents, such as a passport and insurance papers, a torch, blanket, power banks, batteries, medication, waterproof layers, welly boots and water,” which sounds less like a grab bag and more like a ‘grab suitcase’.

🌊 Talking of flooding… Not content with one Thames-related crisis this week, The Guardian asked How much longer will the Thames Barrier protect London?

🤑 Somehow The Telegraph is still making the claim that the reason ‘youngsters’ can’t afford to buy a house is because they won’t stop “paying for subscriptions services like Netflix and Spotify”. The headline for the article? No one has a God-given right to live in Notting Hill.

Food and drink bits

🍺 Oisín Rogers (previously of The Guinea Grill in Mayfair and The Ship in Wandsworth) and Charlie Carroll (founder of Flat Iron) will be opening a new pub in Soho in October. The Devonshire will be at 17 Denman Street (where Jamie’s Italian use to be) and will have an in-house butchery and bakery as well as a “wood-ember grill” in the restaurant upstairs.

🌮 Also coming this autumn is Ixchel, a “modern Mexican restaurant and tequila bar” that will open on the Kings Road in September. Continuing the very welcome trend of places finally serving good Mexican food in London, Ixchel will have an ex-Brat chef heading up the kitchen and all the artisanal tequila and mezcal you can handle.

Read more

For this latest instalment, Scott Barnett wades into the psychosexual mind games being played out between Mia Farrow, Robert Mitchum and a fully-charged Liz Taylor amongst the lush interiors of one of London’s most extraordinary houses.

Welcome to the Electric Theatre. Please turn off your phones and refrain from talking for the duration of the entertainment.

If you turn right when exiting Holland Park tube station, walk past Daunt Books, Nicolas wine merchant and the historic C. Lidgate butchers shop (founded 1850); go past the Ukrainian embassy on the other side of Holland Park Avenue; then turn left and continue down Holland Park Gardens, you will eventually arrive at one of the most jarringly ostentatious residences in the capital.

Debenham House was designed in 1905 by Halsey Ricardo for department store owner Ernest Debenham and granted Grade I listing in 1969. With its Italianate facade and Arts and Crafts interior, 8 Addison Road is an explosion of colour in an otherwise tastefully affluent neighbourhood (its other moniker, Peacock House, is entirely fitting). Although, the dearth of information available online about this fascinating mansion suggests that Debenham House has yet to strike a chord with contemporary architecture enthusiasts, and not everyone is a fan. Jonathan Meades once described it as “structurally stodgy — an alderman dressed as a hippy”.

Indeed, most people who know of Debenham House were probably exposed to it in the same way I was: through Joseph Losey’s misunderstood 1968 cult classic, Secret Ceremony; a film that continues confound and delight viewers over half a century after its theatrical release.

More haunting than Rosemary’s Baby!

In a dank and dingy London flat, sex worker Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor) looks into a mirror and removes a blonde wig as one of her clients exits. A little while later she leaves the flat and flags down a number 27 Routemaster bus. While sat on the top deck she is approached by Cenci (Mia Farrow) who is seemingly transfixed by her. When Leonora stands up to get off the bus, Cenci whimpers “Mummy” and follows her. Maybe in an attempt to evade Cenci’s advances, Leonora makes her way towards St. Mary Magdalene church in Paddington (Modernist architecture fans will no doubt be excited to see Princethorpe house looking brand new in the background), to place flowers on the grave of her daughter, who drowned at just thirteen years old.

Leonora turns and stares at Cenci, and the two maintain eye contact until Leonora begins to feel faint and almost passes out. Cenci escorts the older woman back to Debenham House, where Leonara discovers a photo of Cenci’s mother, to whom she bears a striking resemblance. This is just the beginning of the bizarre role-playing games that will fill the rest of the film.  

Secret Ceremony is an early example of the wonderfully-named Lizploitation sub-genre; a run of films Taylor made in the late sixties and early seventies following the Cleopatra fiasco, when her box office bankability was on the wane. These were odd little films, often critical and commercial failures in which Taylor nevertheless gave fully-committed (sometimes too committed) performances, usually in some of the most remarkable outfits ever committed to celluloid.

Prime examples of Lizploitaion would include Reflections in a Golden Eye, Boom! (more on which later), Zee & Co, and the gloriously bizarre adaptation of Muriel Spark’s deeply unsettling novella The Driver’s Seat.

I have a fondness for all these films, but Secret Ceremony is of a much higher calibre than the rest. Taylor’s performance is so watchable that you don’t mind that her accent can’t decide which side of the Atlantic it belongs, veering from RP English to sassy Bronx (“she didn’t give me a red cent”); and it goes without saying that she looks amazing as she helps herself to the contents of Cenci’s deceased mother’s lavish wardrobe. There is also a real complexity to Taylor’s performance, as her motivations - initially purely financial - become less clear and she disappears deeper into the role of Cenci’s mother.

Twenty-two-year-old Mia Farrow, on the cusp of stardom and in a turbulent relationship with Frank Sinatra at the time, is pitch perfect. Wearing a long black wig to hide the iconic Vidal Sassoon pixie-cut she sported in Rosemary’s Baby, Farrow gives an utterly convincing performance as the troubled, infantilised heiress. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the whole film hinges on the viewer being able to identify with Cenci’s trauma, and Farrow’s performance is more than up to the task. The scene in the kitchen where she acts out the abuse she has suffered (unaware that she is being watched by Leonora), is jaw-dropping. I’ve always felt that Farrow has never really received the credit she deserves as an actor and Secret Ceremony is evidence of just how good she can be.

The real head-scratcher here is Robert Mitchum’s sleazy and oddly indifferent performance as Cenci’s stepfather, which has to rank as the most unflattering role of his long, illustrious career. In his trench coat and unconvincing stick-on beard, Mitchum is quite blatantly phoning it in. I’m certain his reason for accepting the part was financial, but this somehow serves to make his performance all the more chilling. We have seen terrifying Mitchum performances before of course (Max Cady in Cape Fear and the murderous Reverend Harry Powell in the Night of the Hunter), but there is something here that I find much more difficult to watch. Before he eventually bulldozes his way into the narrative, Mitchum’s character is seen lingering outside the house, insolently whistling and it is achingly clear that this man is bad news. By all accounts, relationships were also strained behind the camera, where Mitchum spent most of his time writing poetry and reciting his efforts to Farrow. The rumours are that Losey was seriously consdiering firing Mitchum and giving the role to Richard Burton instead.

Just great cinema

If you’ve been made aware of the existence of Secret Ceremony before, it is quite likely due to it appearing on a list of camp classics or films that are ‘so bad they are good’. It usually gets mentioned in the same breath as the extraordinary Boom!, which was made in the same year and also starred Elizabeth Taylor in a, shall we say, full-throttle performance. This possibly reveals more about me as a viewer than it does about the film, but, with the exception of some of Liz’s more hysterical moments, I don’t find Secret Ceremony camp, at all. It’s just great cinema.

Boom!, on the other hand, is everything people say it is and a whole lot more. It will come as no surprise that the high priest of trash, John Waters, called Boom! “the best failed art movie ever,” describing it as “beyond bad. It’s the other side of camp. It’s beautiful, atrocious, and it’s perfect”. But, where Boom! is clearly a production that has come completely off the rails (Burton and Taylor’s rumoured Bloody Mary breakfasts probably not helping matters one bit), there is not a single moment of Secret Ceremony that feels like Losey isn’t totally in control of his material.

If I was going to compare Secret Ceremony to another Losey picture, it would be The Servant (1963), the film that is commonly considered to be the director’s crowning glory. Both take place in lavish London homes, where the lives of the naive, childlike occupants (James Fox as Tony in The Servant and Farrow as Cenci in Secret Ceremony) are irrevocably altered by the entrance of outsiders. The use of mirrors in both films is also ingenious, but that’s probably an entire essay in itself.     

When location scouting was taking place for Secret Ceremony, Wisconsin-born Losey - who had been working in the UK since being blacklisted during the McCarthy witch hunt - had no hesitation in suggesting Debenham House as the centre piece for his psychodrama. He passed the building every day while taking his son Joshua to school, and the cinematic potential of the property would have been obvious to the director who was renowned for his ability to create isolated, interior worlds.

At the time, the house had fallen into disrepair and was being used as a church-run refuge for mental health patients, so the financial boost from what was a big Hollywood production (although one being shot in the UK) would have been timely and very much welcome.

Within the bejewelled interiors of Debenham House, with its ostentatious tiles, stained glass and mosaics, Losey found the perfect place for his characters to cut themselves off from the real world. Throughout Secret Ceremony, Losey uses those interiors to masterful effect and even though the bedroom and bathroom scenes were shot separately at Elstree Studios, you really can’t tell unless someone points it out to you.

Regular Losey collaborator Richard Macdonald’s production design is flawless and Secret Ceremony is sumptuous to look at from first frame until last. I could watch those astonishing, almost wordless, opening scenes again and again, as Losey establishes his narrative and sets the rules of the game in a superlative display of visual storytelling.

Divisive and misunderstood

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Midge Gillies is many things. She’s a journalist who has written for titles like The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times; she’s a creative writing tutor; and she’s also written plenty of books herself, including biographies of both the music hall singer Marie Lloyd and Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from London to Australia.

Her latest book though is not a biography of a person, It’s the story of ‘the circus at the heart of London’, aka Piccadilly. Beginning with the arrival of Eros in 1893, the book tells the story of the next 50 years or so through the eyes of the flower girls, shop assistants, celebrities and sex workers who passed through that magical ‘third magnetic pole’ that sits at the bottom of Shaftesbury Avenue.

The book came out in paperback a couple of weeks ago, which is when we sat down with Midge to ask her why she decided to write an entire book about Piccadilly Circus, how close we came to destroying it, and who exactly the Piccadilly Commandoes were.

Hi Midge. Before we get into talking about the book we need to ask you the same question we ask everyone, which is ‘What’s your relationship to London?’.

My connection is really my mum. She grew up in Balham and I spent the first two years of my life in Pinner. After university I came back to work in London and stayed for about 15 years working as a journalist. I’m not there anymore but I go back quite a lot because my daughter is a student at Goldsmiths.

The obvious next question is what made you want to write an entire book about Piccadilly Circus?

Again, it was partly my mum because she used to talk very fondly about the Lyons Cornerhouse teashop. So, when I lived in London I used to love going to Piccadilly Circus because I felt it was a place where something a bit unexpected might happen. Even now when I go I’m completely in awe of it because I think there's nowhere quite like it in London.

The other thing that pulled me in was my interest in the Second World War. I’m fascinated by the story of the Café de Paris and the bombing there during the war. I originally wanted to write - if you can believe it - a whole book about the Café de Paris, because I think it’s got so many elements of chance in it along with lots of strange characters. My publisher said “No, you must write a book about Piccadilly Circus,” and actually it really suited me because I love social history. I love writing about things like shopping and transport (but not in a nerdy kind of way) and sex and music. In the end I really liked the idea of writing a biography of a place.

The structure of the book is really clever. It’s chronological, as you’d expect, going from the turn of the 20th Century up to the end of the Second World War. But within that there’s certain themes that you return to all the way through, like the shops and entertainment, transport and advertising. You use those themes to tell some really personal and fascinating stories. Did you have that structure set out from the beginning or did it evolve through your research?

I teach creative writing and I’m really fascinated about how you structure a book and how you structure the ‘life’ of a place; so I really enjoyed that part. I didn’t want it to be too hard for the reader to follow, so it does have that broadly chronological narrative, but within that there are some themes that I hope provide threads throughout. One of those is Eros1 because Alfred Gilbert the sculptor has quite a tragic story, and even the model for the statue was a really interesting character. But also the fact that the statue moves around the Circus over time, and the way he reflects social change; because, at first, people were very shocked by this scantily clad statue being in a place that’s well known for prostitution.

One of the other threads in the book is the history of the lights. Piccadilly Circus has always been this place of bright lights, so I was able to follow the technological advances there, but the subject lends itself to other themes. Cinema, for example, and how Hitchcock was obsessed with Piccadilly Circus.

I actually had a whole chapter which didn’t make it into the final book about Hitchcock’s Sabotage, his film based on the Conrad novel. At the end of the film a boy on a bus is delivering what he thinks is film reel, but it’s actually a bomb, which goes off as they reach Piccadilly Circus.

One of the other things you come back a few times in the book is this idea of Piccadilly Circus being the ‘people’s meeting place’. Can you explain a bit more about what you mean by that?

It’s a really strange place, Piccadilly Circus, because it’s liminal in that it can take you in all sorts of various directions, from shopping to protests, through Soho or to Theatreland. The Circus itself is a place to come together and pause between those different, discrete areas.

I think also, there’s a feeling that you could meet anyone there. There used to be a saying that if you stood there long enough, you’d meet everyone you’ve ever known. And still, today, people make a beeline for it, because there’s so much happening and it has this sort of natural energy. I think part of that is the lighting - it always seems brighter than the rest of London, and that means it’s always been a kind of natural meeting place and a place for celebration. If you think back through history, from the Relief of Mafeking, to the end of the First and Second World Wars, right up to big football tournaments, Piccadilly Circus always seems like the place people go to let off steam.

Was there anything that you found out during your research that really surprised you or you weren’t expecting?

So many things! I was really surprised by the story of Angelo Colarossi, who was the model for Eros. He’s such a sad character, because he started off as this beautiful young boy and then he kind of shuffles through history and becomes more and more like an office clerk. By the time the Second World War comes, he’s used to try and sell war bonds and there’s this photograph of him in his tank top and jacket. Also, there’s the fact that his son died in the Second World War in a plane, which for me is a poignant link to a time when Angelo was a god with wings.

Victor Barker was another story that took me by surprise. He was a concierge at the Regent Palace Hotel. He was six-feet-tall, a Colonel in the war with a Distinguished Service Order medal, who had been married twice and had two children from a third relationship. But he was also a trans person. It’s an incredible story and one that I didn’t know at all before writing this book.

You talk in the book about Piccadilly Circus being a crucible for social change, and it was really interesting to read all these examples, like the story of Victor Barker, but also how welcoming Lyons Corner House was to gay men, and the history of Rainbow Corner and the Piccadilly Commandoes - which I’d definitely never heard of!

I’d never had anything about Rainbow Corner either and it’s such an interesting place; this ‘home from home’ for American servicemen during World War Two, which was open twenty-four-hours a day and had eight Stars and Stripes flags flying outside.

Again you’ve got these amazing characters like Adele ‘Dellie’ Astaire (Fred’s sister), coming in to the picture; along with Irene Whittaker, the woman who started mending uniforms for the GIs. They all thought she must be an aristocrat and called her ‘Lady Whittaker’ but in reality her father rented horse and carriages in the East End. Irene ended up having two bomber planes named after her!

The Piccadilly Commandoes was the name given to the prostitutes who would stand outside the Rainbow Corner to pick up the GIs by shining a torch beam at their ankles or saying ‘‘Hello Yank, looking for a good time?”. Apparently, if you were a guest at the Regent Palace Hotel and you asked the receptionist for an ‘extra pillow’ then you would likely end up with a Piccadilly Commando.

The shops play a pretty big part in the book too. Lillywhites and Simpsons being the obvious ones, but I didn’t expect to be so interested in the history of Boots the Chemist!

I hadn’t expected the shops to be so interesting either. Simpsons is fascinating because there’s this whole idea that they had to educate men how to shop. But Boots in Piccadilly was their first twenty-four hour, seven-days-a-week shop; and when the British Medical Journal reported that the adder population in Epping Forest was increasing, Boots announced that they were stocking the antivenom serum in their Piccadilly Circus branch. This was before the NHS of course! It’s said that Prince Charles had the temperature of his first ever bath checked using a thermometer bought from that Boots store on a Sunday afternoon in 1948.

I think one of the most amazing shop stories though is the one of ‘Phroso’ the ‘man-doll’ who appeared in the window of the Swan & Edgar store as a PR stunt. The crowd outside was told that anyone who could make the ‘doll’ smile or blink would be rewarded with ten pounds, which would be around £1,000 in today’s money. They got so excited they nearly ended up smashing the window and Phroso had to flee.

I think what a lot of people mind find surprising is how close we came to losing Piccadilly Circus as we know it in the 60s and the 70s. Because it almost feels like one of those timeless London places that could never change too much.

It’s still possible to look at Piccadilly Circus and be transported back to the past, I think.

Some things change, like the digital screens that are there now. But it’s still essentially advertising isn’t it? People say it’s been sanitised, and it has some extent in that it’s cleaner, but I still think I’m risking my life when I try and get across it, so it’s still got that edge. And there’s still those little things like the blue police box in the corner and, of course, the Criterion Theatre is still there. I don’t see how they could ever change that, because it’s so tiny and compact that you couldn’t possibly alter it.

But in the 60s there were attempts to redevelop it and turn it into a motorway flyover surrounded by buildings that look like cereal boxes. It would have been awful! I like the fact that, because of who owns it and who’s got different rights to the land, Piccadilly Circus is always going to be a bit of a hodgepodge.

Lastly, who did you write this book for? Who do you think will enjoy it (and should buy it, obviously)?

I suppose the book has a lot of stories about women in there. So, I hope anyone who is interested in women’s history would read it; and there’s a lot of stories about underrepresented people, I hope they would be interested. There’s quite a bit about film, theatre and music hall in there. It’s got wars and trains in it too, so it’s probably a bit of a ‘dad book’ as well!

You can buy Piccadilly: The Circus at the Heart of London from Bookshop.org (or if you pop into Waterstones on Piccadilly of course).

Follow Midge on Twitter or on Instagram.

This is your final reminder that next week will be LiB-free, as we’re taking our annual summer break. Normal service resumes on Monday 26th.

Before we go we’ve got a bumper Weekend Roundup that includes all the latest on the Tory mayoral candidate infighting; the attempts to make the city cooler using roofs; why MyLondon’s use of AI ‘journalists’ might not be turning out how they intended; our weekly rundown of the new restaurant reviews; and the crucial information of where you can see an old packet of Hula Hoops on display in London right now.

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News bits

🏗 The row over the plan to turn Haringey’s Omega Works warehouses into luxury flats (making around 100 people homeless into the bargain) has now reached the BBC. So far, 6,000 people have signed the petition opposing the plan, and the campaign’s organiser told the BBC that the development was tantamount to “social cleansing”. The council said that their “planning policy seeks to secure a long-term sustainable future for warehouse and creative living and to ensure the unique characteristics of this type of accommodation are provided in new warehouse living developments.”

🏙 In related news, and with thudding inevitability, the developers of the Canada Water Masterplan have announced that they need “to slash plans for 120 affordable homes” at the site, and put in 86 private units instead. British Land are blaming the move on the mayor’s new fire safety regulations; claiming that, because all residential buildings over 30 metres must now have two staircases, they have no choice but to get rid of hundreds of affordable homes.

🏚 Staying on this topic: The Housing Ombudsman wrote a piece for City AM this week, revealing this his office now undertakes 10,000 investigations a year, and half of those are in London. “This crisis is limiting social mobility, disrupting communities and holding back the economy,” writes Richard Blakeway, and “London is the epicentre of this national crisis.”

🗳 Housing policies will be up there in the list of priorities for the eventual Tory mayoral candidate, and this week we got a bit closer to finding out who that will be, as the party whittled down the names to a shortlist of three. The big surprise was Paul Scully, not making the list. According to Wes Streeting, the reason the Minister for London (and the only MP on the longlist) didn’t make it through to the next round was because Rishi Sunak’s administration is “toxic” to voters. Ouch. The three that did make it were barrister Mozammel Hossain (who wasted no time in telling The Sun that he had no shoes growing up and he hates the ULEZ and “drill music knife crime”); London Assembly Susan Hall (who once called Gemma Collins a “stupid fat blonde woman” on Twitter); and Daniel Korski, who was David Cameron’s deputy head of policy about a decade ago but prefers to talk about how he is the son of Polish refugees and his time as a “war correspondent” (he was writing for The Spectator from Libya in 2011 when the civil war kicked off). On Tuesday, things got even uglier when Politico reported that Paul Scully was planning to launch a defamation suit against fellow longlister Samuel Kasumu, “after Kasumu accused Scully of scuppering his chances to clinch the Conservative nomination”.

💰 Unsurprisingly Sadiq doesn’t seem to be quaking in his boots at the thought of taking any of that lot on next year. Instead he was busy announcing £750,000 in funding to support migrant workers, after a report he’d commissioned revealed “shocking levels of bullying, racially motivated harassment, and exploitation of migrant workers consistent with modern slavery across London.” A few days later Khan also announced £10m to “enable 100,000 young Londoners to have a mentor by the end of 2024, as part of a drive to reduce youth violence in the city.” We sincerely hope none of these mentors are into drill music.

😶‍🌫️ No amount of mentoring will stop London getting more polluted though, and that was the main thing on people’s minds this week as the hot weather forced City Hall to issue a high pollution alert on both Tuesday and Wednesday. Somewhat ironically, all this happened while the mayor was at London Tech Week to announce the London Climate Resilience Review to “gain independent insight into what more needs to be done to make us a climate resilient city as we harness the power of our thriving tech industry.”

🌦 On the same day, City Hall released its Roofs Designed to Cool report, which explains how retrofitting schools, homes and businesses with “reflective and solar photovoltaic (PV) roofs” could lower temperatures inside and outside buildings. And the mayor wasn’t done yet. While he was at the conference, Sadiq also told MyLondon that he is going to “install a new network of flood detection devices across the capital in order to protect the city’s transport infrastructure.”

🙄 Despite all that coming out of City Hall this week, the only thing the tabloids wanted to focus on was the “leaked” City Hall inclusivity guide, which advises employees to “avoid using ‘men and women’ - say ‘people’ or ‘Londoners’” and not to refer to “asylum seekers” but instead say “people seeking asylum”. An “absurd” corruption of language by “elites” according to Tory MP Miriam Cates (who once linked trans people to predators in a Commons speech).

🌳 A man has been arrested on suspicion of cutting down 131 trees next to Cator Park in Bromley last weekend. The trees were in a privately-owned field adjacent to the park, but it’s still illegal to cut them down without permission, and they were under a tree protection order when the damage happened last Saturday.

🏺 Last year, the largest area of Roman mosaics in London to be uncovered in over 50 was excavated at The Liberty of Southwark development site near London Bridge. This week it was announced that they’ve hit the jackpot again, with the discovery of an “extremely rare” and “completely unique” Roman mausoleum on the site.

🚂 CityMonitor has ranked London’s railway stations. As well as questioning why Cannon Street even exists at all, they claim that Moorgate is going through “an awkward goth phase” and put Victoria right at the bottom of the list.

🤖 And while we’re talking about railway stations… MyLondon ran an article this week headlined ‘The most random and surprising things you'll find at one of London's biggest National Rail stations’. Don’t bother clicking on that link though, the article has been deleted now. Probably because it was jam full of lies and inaccuracies that can only have come from an AI chatbot. Platform 9 3/4? To be found at London Bridge. The Vaults? Under London bridge of course! We posted a few screenshots via SubstackNotes before it got wiped.

Food and drink bits

🏆 The National Restaurant Awards happened on Monday, which means that their list of the 100 best restaurants in the UK was also published. Welsh restaurant Ynyshir was crowned the winner for the second year running, but over half the remaining list are in London. Top ranked was Da Terra in Bethnal Green at number 3, followed closely by The Ledbury in Notting Hill at number 4, and then Cowcross Street bistro, Bouchon Racine at number 5.

👃 Guests dining at Sushi Kanesaka, the restaurant that sits in the 45 Park Lane hotel, have reportedly been told “that they should not wear perfume as it would overpower the scent of vinegar”. According to the Telegraph, there is a code provided to guests that says “We kindly ask that you refrain from wearing sportswear, caps or trainers in our restaurant [and] that you refrain from wearing perfume.”

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