All the London we cannot see
The city's disappearing acts, including stars, animals, workers and gigs
It’s a sad fact that, every time we write a Weekend Roundup, we have to decide how many items about bar/restaurant/shop closures we’re going to include. The number is escalating at such a rate now, that we’re in danger of becoming some kind of business extinction tracker.
But it’s not just pubs and cafes that are disappearing from London. There are other, maybe less obvious but still important things that are slowly fading from the city. In this issue we wanted to highlight a few of them and we’ve also included some positive news alongside each one, just to try and even things out.
Celestial bodies
Light pollution has been back at the top of the news agenda in the past couple of weeks, thanks mainly to Stratford’s MSG Sphere getting approval to cover itself in “more than one million light emitting diodes,” which (if it’s anything like the one in Vegas) will turn it into a “sun on Earth”.
But it’s not just the ‘orb’ that’s put light in the, erm… spotlight. The 12-storey British Library extension, which also just got approved, has prompted questions about light pollution from residents. And when C/2022 E3 (ZTF) (aka ‘the green comet’) made its once-in-a-lifetime pass over the UK last week, all the advice on how to see it carried the disclaimer that you needed to be in an “area with minimal light pollution,” which instantly ruled out most of Greater London (in an article from the Natural History Museum last month, one of their Fellows admitted that their own meteor-spotting camera “can’t detect all the meteors that a camera in the countryside would”).
In November last year, London was even voted the ‘worst place to watch fireworks', thanks mainly to the amount of light pollution.
At the beginning of this month, the BBC’s Science Focus website interviewed astronomer Dr Greg Brown, of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, where they often start shows “with an estimate of the current light pollution around London” to demonstrate how the “fainter objects in the sky… are already basically impossible to see from suburban areas let alone the centre of cities.”
Doc Brown (sorry, we had to) stresses that it’s not just the stars we risk losing due to light pollution, but also our sleep and, potentially, our minds:
“As humans we are used to being awake during the day and asleep at night. The more light we introduce into our nighttime skies, the harder it is for our bodies and our body clocks to determine what time it actually is. This leads to insomnia and the issues that come from that - tiredness, fatigue and not to mention also poor mental health.”
Brown also mentions one of the biggest causes of modern light pollution: the rise in ‘blue light’ that has come from “replacing sodium lamps, for example in street lighting, with LEDs”.
If you look at these images of London taken by astronauts on board the International Space Station, you can see how much lighter and brighter LED bulbs have made the city in just the past ten years; and that’s largely thanks to the very well-meaning commitment made back in 2004, to spend the next decade replacing 35,000 of London’s 52,000 street lights with LEDs.
There’s no way those bulbs are going to get changed again anytime soon, so Dr Brown thinks the solution might be found in directing the light downwards (as he points out “light that goes upwards is useless. It’s not helping anyone down on the ground”) and finding a way to have streetlights “come on at the specific times when they're actually being used”.
The good news: The City has recently installed a network of LEDs that are of the ‘smart’ variety, so their brightness and colour temperatures can be set to “various levels depending on location, time and other data that shows aspects such as when it’s busiest.” Now we just need other boroughs to follow their lead.
Endangered animals
When you think of businesses effected by Brexit, you don’t immediately think of zoos, but last week London Zoo and the London Aquarium signed an open letter to Rishi Sunak, complaining about the red tape that has come into place since Britain left the EU.
In the last three years the bureaucracy around animal transfers has gone through the roof, and that means the number of animals transferred each year between British and European zoos and aquariums has gone from a pre-Brexit number of around 1,400, to a post-Brexit number closer to 200.
And this isn’t just about keeping a tourist attraction stocked up with captive animals. These transfers are part of breeding programmes designed to save critically endangered species, and the more costly and time-consuming the process gets, the fewer animals get saved. For example, London Zoo was supposed to take delivery of an endangered golden lion tamarin seventeen months ago, and it took even longer than that for them to export a giraffe to the Czech Republic.
The good news: Two very cute baby porcupines (also known as porcupettes) were born at London Zoo last week.
The people who keep London ticking
The ‘mass exodus’ out of London prompted by Covid, never really materialised, but now there’s a greater force shoving people out of the city: rent prices.
The affordable housing charity, Dolphin Living, put out the results of a survey last week, which showed that eight out of ten people renting in London are struggling to keep up with the cost of accommodation, and a full quarter of them say their rents are already “unmanageable” (not surprising when you consider the average London rent went up by more than 16% in the past year).
And this isn’t the Covid scenario of City workers choosing to buy a new place in Devon while keeping their pied-à-terre in the Square Mile ‘just in case’. These are mainly “critical workers who kept London functioning during the pandemic”.
To quote Dolphin Living’s chief exec’:
“By critical workers, we mean everyone who has a job that makes London tick, from restaurant and hotel staff working unsociable hours to supermarket workers delivery drivers, whose fundamental role received deserved attention during the pandemic.”
The good news: It’s hard to find a silver lining here, but last weekend the Guardian reported on the rise of housing co-ops in places like New Cross and Walthamstow, where a month’s rent is closer to £300. But it’s a little sad that this is all we have to be optimistic about.
However… A couple of weeks ago councillors in Bristol voted to follow Scotland’s example and “demand the government grants it powers to bring in rent controls”. If that happens it makes it much more likely that London will follow suit.
Grass roots venues
At the end of last summer, we spoke to Mark Davyd, the founder of the Music Venue Trust about the important of live music venues and clubs and what can be done to try and save them.
Last week the MVT put out their annual report, which showed that, across the UK, live performances in grassroots music venues were down by 16.7%, and audience numbers were down 11%. That came off the back of last year’s news that the number of nightclubs in London had gone from 497 in 2006 to 221 in 2022. Then there was January’s announcement that the number of Londoners working evenings and nights had fallen by 27% in the last five years.
The good news: There is plenty to be hopeful about here. Mark Davyd told Parliament last week that any new large arenas (like the MSG Sphere for instance) should have to “contribute to the security of the wider music ecosystem by investing a percentage of every ticket they sell into the grassroots music ecosystem…. Because it’s possible that The Rolling Stones will eventually die.” On top of that, the MVT is calling for a reduction in VAT applied to venue ticket sales, an end to “excessive and anti-competitive” business rates, and (crucially in London) a ‘Theatre Trust’ style approach to planning applications from neighbouring developments, to try and prevent noise complaints that can potentially shut down existing venues.
A few days ago, at a speech in London, Manchester’s Night Time Economy Adviser, Sacha Lord, called on the government to introduce a nationwide nighttime economy adviser who could “fight for those independents”. That sounds like a great idea, especially as the general consensus seems to be that Amy Lamé is overpaid and under delivering.
One other bit of related good news: A former working men’s club in Catford, which has been empty since 2016, is being taken over by the South London collective Sister Midnight. They’ve negotiated a 10-year lease “at a peppercorn rent” as long as they fund “the renovations needed to bring the site back into use as a thriving music venue and cultural community hub.”
Coming up on Wednesday 😀
January hasn’t exactly been a barrel of laughs, so on Wednesday we’re running our semi-regular ‘good news issue’. Expect flowers, animals, sunshine and cakes.
Subscribe to LiB today to make sure you don’t miss out:
5 little bits
Reuters has checked in on the legislation that was introduced after the invasion of Ukraine, which requires foreign companies holding UK property to identify their “beneficial owners”. Those companies had until last Tuesday to add themselves to a new public register, but as of Wednesday “only four Russian nationals under British government sanctions appeared on the register” and there were plenty of absent names “including Roman Abramovich”.
The Science Musuem has said it is going to continue its association with the Adani Group, despite the fact that fraud allegations have wiped $108bn off the company’s market value over the past few days, and it also “one of the world's largest traders of fossil fuel.” Adani is sponsoring the Energy Revolution gallery that’s due to open later this year, which will “examine how the world can undergo the fastest energy transition in history to curb climate change,”
The latest ‘How much?!' story to come out of Westminster is that of the Peers Entrance to the House of Lords’. The work to create a more secure ‘portico’ was supposed to cost around £2 million, but thanks to “inflation” and “delays” it’s now going to cost somewhere in the region of £7 million. Could they not just stick a Ring doorbell on there and be done with it?
An application has been made to Westminster City Council, as part of the Young Entrepreneur Support Scheme, to turn two red phone boxes on Coventry Street in the West End (we’re assuming it’s these two) “into machines dispensing snacks and drinks”.
An exhibition of art by “Britain’s most violent prisoner,” Charles Bronson, is going on display at the Henarch Galleries in Spitalfields later in February. Bronson (who has now changed his name to Charles Salvador) has been in jail for 47 years and is due to go in front of a parole board next month. The curator of the show believes that “there's definitely a good chance [the show] can help with his parole.”
Bonus link for FT Subscribers: The paper just ran a really long and very good interview with “London’s most notorious graffiti writer,” 10 Foot (and the people who want to arrest him). Quotes include “I’ve painted in Shoreditch before and found people cheering me on while they drink their negronis. I like painting in places that exemplify the extremity of control.” and “I remember when Chelsea was full of French restaurants and scarf wearers; now it’s just confused, wealthy Chinese tourists looking for a mass-produced panini.”