An exclusive interview with Charlie, Joe and Vicky
Famous dead people answer our questions
Welcome to your free, Monday edition of London in Bits. Today we’re reanimating the corpses of some of London’s more notable residents to ask them which pubs they like to drink in. Plus, we’re catching up with the latest pronouncements coming out of Westminster’s new(ish) Labour-run council.
This issue is not behind any paywall, so if you enjoy it, then please feel free to share it wherever you like.
Unless you’ve been living under a (blissful, controversy-free) rock this week, you will have seen that there’s a new robot on the block in the form of Historical Figures Chat.
Thanks to the wonders of “large language models” this iOS app allows you to talk with dead famous people without having to pay to attend one of those psychic evenings they host at your local Harvester.
The app sits under the ‘education’ section of the Apple store, but it’s already caused all sorts of outrage thanks to the fact that the zombie bots spout complete nonsense quite a lot of the time; and the database of famous simulacra includes the likes of Hitler, Pol Pot, Jeffrey Dahmer and Jimmy Saville.
Never afraid to jump on a potentially explosive bandwagon, we decided to bring together three famous Londoners and ask them a few questions…
Hi, Joseph Merrick, Queen Victoria and Charles Dickens. Would you mind if we asked you a few questions about London?
Awesome. So, you’re all quite well-educated people. Would you have a favourite book about London that you would recommend to people?
Okay, a tad on the egotistical side there Charles, but maybe we should have predicted that (also, we always thought the two cities in that book were London and Paris, not London and London).
What about you two, anything a bit less self-promotional to add?
You lot are obsessed with comparing Paris and London. But that’s an interesting pick Joseph, especially as Orwell wrote that book 43 years after you died. And who knew you were such a suck-up, Victoria?
What about going out, do you have a favourite place you go to eat?
Huh, weird. We were always told that Rules was Dickens’ favourite restaurant (he apparently had his favourite table there which looked out on to the factory he worked in as a boy). Also, we hate to be the ones to break this to you Charles…
What about you Joseph?
Riiiiight. We definitely would not have guessed that. It’s a great restaurant and everything, it’s just that’s it’s been open less than ten years. So, I guess we’re pretending you’re still alive and that you enjoy dining in contemporary Middle Eastern joints. We can go along with that.
What about pubs? Where do you guys go to after work to let off steam?
This is actually a pretty impressive set of responses, although Joseph seems to have stolen Charles’ answer.
The George and Vulture, which has been there since 1142 (and is still serving ’excellent ales’ out of Castle Court in the City), was a favourite of Dickens and featured heavily in The Pickwick Papers. The closest White Horse to Oxford Street meanwhile is the one on Newburgh St, which has been there since 1700 apparently, but maybe the great author is getting confused with Ye Old White Horse in Holborn. That pub used to sit in the middle of Clare Market, which Dickens wrote about in his Dictionary of London, describing the man you would inevitably find there, “drinking himself to a point of stupidity at the public-house at the corner”. Plus, the Old Curiosity Shop is right around the corner.
No one would describe The Goring as a pub, but it does have an impressive cocktail bar, plus it is the closest hotel to Buckingham Palace and is “the only hotel to have been granted a Royal Warrant for hospitality services”. One slight hitch: The Goring opened in 1910, nine years after QV kicked the bucket. We do enjoy the way Queen Victoria writes like your typical TripAdvisor reviewer though,
On to more serious matters… How do you think you’ll be voting in the upcoming mayoral elections?
Wow! A clean sweep for Sadiq. That’s impressive. We hope someone on the mayor’s team is paying attention to this app. Although it’s likely you’d get a similar endorsement from AI Pol Pot, so maybe best not to risk it.
Okay, before we go, how about a quick poetic ode to London from all of you?
What can we say, Dickens… We had high hopes, but that it downright awful. ‘Faces aglow with taste’? What does that even mean?
Please do better Queeny.
Well, it started off okay, but then it just descended into naked self-aggrandisement. Come on Joseph, finish us off strong:
Awww. That’s actually quite touching (watch and learn Dickens!).
Right, before we go, there’s just one more person we need to speak to…
Well, it was worth a shot.
The future of Oxford Street: More touristy, but in a less illegal way
There were so many updates coming out of Westminster Council last week that we didn’t have room to include them in the Weekend Roundup, so we thought we’d put them here instead.
You might remember that, last October, Westminster said they were going to ‘refocus’ their plans for Oxford Street, which meant abandoning plans for the “complete pedestrianisation” of the road. Now, council documents show that they’re planning to spend a total of £60.5m on Oxford Street over the next two years (that’s about half what the previous Tory council was planning to spend, and ten million less than Thames Water are spending on the Northern Outfall Sewer). The council plans to start the development with “three or four different elements [that] will make the street much more exciting and will make the street touristy and commercial.” But we’ll have to wait for a few more months to find out what that actually means in practice, as the plans are still in the “design stage”.
At the end of last week, there was another headline-grabbing ‘raid’ on the street’s infamous ‘sweet shops’, during which £100,000 of products were seized and nine shops were shut down. Products seized included “6,500 vapes with excessive nicotine, 145 cosmetics products without labelling, 481 nicotine pouches, 91 counterfeit Apple products, 75 power banks without safety labelling and 136 shisha products without health warnings.”
Around the same time, the (paywalled) FT caught up with Westminster Council leader Adam Hug to see if the new Labour regime has become “the People’s Republic of Westminster” as some had feared. Unsurprisingly, the fears of a ‘woke’ socialist administration have not come to pass.
And the final bit of Westminster Council news concerns their plans to ‘crackdown' on “rip-off pedicabs”. Unfortunately, those plans have been scuppered by the government’s decision to ditch a proposed transport Bill that would have “paved the way for laws to license pedicabs and ban pavement parking by hire bikes and private cars”.
5 little bits
Last week, The Lancet published new research out of Imperial College London, which shows that, although life expectancy has gone up overall in London, the difference in life expectancy between the ‘richest’ and ‘poorest’ areas has grown substantially, going from around 11 years in 2002, to about 18 years in 2019.
Some more positive research also came out last week, showing that low-traffic neighbourhoods do reduce the number of motor vehicles within their boundaries; plus, they do it without pushing traffic on to roads around their edges.
Planning approval has been granted for the first section of the Camden Highline, the 1.2km ‘park in the sky’ that would run through a disused railway line between Camden and King’s Cross. The development still faces a few challenges if it’s going to meet its 2024 launch date though, least of all the fact that it will run right next to an active rail line.
Croydon has become the latest council to block attempts to install the cameras needed to expand the Ulez. The borough’s mayor said that “punishing those who cannot afford to buy a more modern vehicle is deeply unfair and out of touch, particularly at a time when the cost of living is increasing.”
From today, Black Boy Lane in Tottenham will be renamed La Rose Lane. The new name honours the activist, author and publisher John La Rose, who died in 2006.