Bank Holiday Weekend roundup for 29 May
Includes personalised wheelchairs, private members' clubs, and pot noodle flavoured chicken wings
It’s a bumper Bank Holiday roundup this week, as we’re taking Monday off to enjoy the sunshine. Have a great long weekend, and we’ll see you on Wednesday!
🚨 Five men were arrested over the course of Wednesday in connection with the shooting of Black Lives Matter activist Sasha Johnson in Peckham. First police arrested a 17-year-old for “possession of an offensive weapon and possession with intent to supply class A drugs”. That led them to an address in Peckham where three other men were arrested for “suspicion of affray and possession with intent to supply class B drugs”. After one other man was arrested after “a police pursuit of a car,” all five of them were charged on suspicion of attempted murder.
🚦 With the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods scheme still fuelling heated arguments across the local message boards of London, the Mayor has thrown more fuel on the fire by announcing that some of London’s traffic lights “will be set to stay on red for motorists to give pedestrians priority”. To begin with, eighteen pedestrian crossings in areas including Bishopsgate, Smithfield, Richmond and Tower Hamlets will “default to stay on the green man setting to allow pedestrians to cross,” and will only change “to allow cars through if and when traffic is detected”.
🚕🚦 Although it’s only eighteen lights to begin with, TfL have said that they’ll likely roll out the scheme over the next few years, and that’s going to cause motorists to (have you guessed it yet?) “see red,” according to The Telegraph. The general secretary of the Licensed Taxi Drivers’ Association, Steve McNamara, is quoted as saying London is not a “theme park” where motorists go on “Sunday outings,” but is “a working city which needs to move around. All the traffic is working traffic. If you restrict the life blood of a city you get a coronary.”
🚕 😤 Cab drivers aren’t just annoyed about traffic lights, they’re also still battling Uber. Over 10,000 black cab drivers have just signed up to a group legal action against the company, claiming it broke the law between June 2012 and March 2018, “when it allowed its drivers to accept bookings directly when they were not licensed to do so.” According to Business Insider, the legal action “could be worth in excess of £200 million.” While the Taxi Point site reckons “up to 30,000 drivers are eligible and that for a full-time driver operating throughout this period, a claim against Uber could be worth in the region of £25,000 or more.”
🚕 💉 One positive cab story before we leave taxis behind: the 'Vaxi Taxi’ is driving around London “helping homeless people and rough sleepers get their jab”. ITV spoke to David Byrne, one of the drivers taking part in the scheme, and although we really really want him to be that David Byrne, we suspect it’s not.
🏗️ The building which was the flagship Debenhams on Oxford Street is going to be “transformed into new retail and office scheme” by architects Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (who also designed that wavy glass Zara building at 61 Oxford Street). The design will add “new facades and three upper storeys with terraces”.
🔬 The Science Museum has (along with Cambridge University) acquired a “large collection of items” belonging to Stephen Hawking. The items include his personalised wheelchairs, papers on theoretical physics and (most significantly, we’ll think you’ll agree) “his scripts from his appearance on The Simpsons”. Highlights from the collection will be going on display early next year.
👨🔬️ More science! A survey of microbes in 60 urban transport systems from around the world (including London) has discovered 11,000 new viruses and bacteria and also given each location an ‘endemicity score’, that is “the number of microbial species endemic to a specific area that can define the unique fingerprint of each city.” In other words, scientists can tell you live in London just by looking at your microbiome. Look out for ‘My boyfriend went to London and all I got was this lousy bacteria!’ t-shirts for sale on Oxford Street very soon.
🐷 The first people to move in to Battersea Power Station were handed the keys to their new homes this week. The ‘Switch House West’ section of the development is all done so the moving vans were able to roll in accompanied by “a special public performance by members of the London Symphony Orchestra, alongside Battersea Power Station’s own community choir.” Beat that Barratt Homes! The other parts of the Station (the Boiler House and Switch House East) will be ready in the next few months, along with half a million square feet of office space which will make up Apple’s new London Campus.
💰 If you’ve been on the Tube at all in recent months you’ve likely seen the ad for cryptocurrency exchange Luno which says “If you're seeing bitcoin on the Underground, it's time to buy”. Well you won’t see it anymore because the Advertising Standards Authority just banned it for being “misleading and leaving out important risk warnings.” Or, in other words: you can’t just advertise something as being a sure thing because there’s an advert for it.
🚆 Obligatory Crossrail update. The good news is the station upgrade at Ealing Broadway is all done. The bad news is Sadiq has confirmed what we all knew anyway: that the Evening Standard article which said Crossrail was going to be open by Christmas was utter guff. While answering questions from the London Assembly on Thursday the Mayor said he’d be “pleasantly surprised” if the central section of Crossrail was open by December, “but I think the most likely outcome at this stage is an opening in the first six months of 2022.”
♻️ The Conduit club has had a bit of a rocky relationship with London. The private members’ club opened in September 2018 with a mission to “bring about positive social change” (which just meant the press called it “London’s wokest private members’ club”), but it went into administration last October because of a “technical loan default” (aka the Covid effect). Now it’s coming back, taking over “six floors of a grade II listed building on Langley Street” in Covent Garden, to install “an all-day dining public restaurant… a bookshop with more than 1,000 titles” and a meeting place for “high impact social businesses,” as well as a rooftop restaurant and terrace. If you’re tempted we do feel we should warn you that membership is £2,650-a-year… and you might bump into Carrie Symonds (she’s a member).
🏨 If you don’t fancy the Conduit then the next members’ club to consider (alphabetically at least) is the Curtain Club, which will be housed in the Mondrian Shoreditch London once it opens in July. What was The Curtain hotel has had a massive upgrade that includes the addition of Spanish restaurant Bibo from three-Michelin starred Dani García, an all-day café and cocktail bar called Christina’s “highlighting the produce of local farmers” (all those Shoreditch farmers will be so happy), a screening room to house “artistic pop-ups and live performances” and the Altitude Rooftop bar.
👵 Or, if all that seems a bit much, the Guardian has a feature on south London’s “purpose-built apartment blocks for older people”. The Audley retirement village in Clapham also has a pool and a library, and you are far less likely to bump into Carrie Symonds. Sounds like a win to us.
🌩️ We linked to the work of timelapse photographer Matthew Vandeputte the other week, and now he’s back, this time documenting the insane storm clouds that have been hovering over London this last week. Even if you got drenched while sat in a beer garden you should still be able to appreciate the sheer beauty of the clouds that drenched you.
Some bits to do over the bank holiday
🍺 Trumans Social Club in E17 is the “UK’s biggest beer hall” and on Bank Holiday Monday they’re filling it with Show & Tell “a new event for DJs and record collectors to get together and spin some of the gems in their collections”. And if you’re around the following Sunday they’re turning the place over to the first ever Walthamstow Flea Market.
💡 Another E17 institution, God’s Own Junkyard, has moved into Leadenhall Market from this week to create ‘Electric City’, “an immersive technicolour production” that takes some of the key neon highlights from the Junkyard’s work on films. There’ll be signage from Eyes Wide Shut, Judge Dredd, Batman, Tomb Raider, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Dark Knight on display.
🎸 Seven Dials Unplugged happens every Saturday between 2-7pm, and features “live acoustic performances from some of the UK’s most exciting, up-and-coming artists”. This Saturday includes the “improvised organic dance music” of Michael Sebastian and “the Empress of Roots Soul” Teshay Makeda.
🍗 If you are down in Seven Dials, it's worth remembering that the food market is now reopen, and they have some new options down there including Bong Bong’s Manila Kanteen, Bad Boy Pizza Society, fish specialists (but impossible to Google) BAIT, and Texas-style BBQ from Smoke & Bones.
👮 Or, if you’re in Covent Garden and need a nice sit down after all that food, you can always go and sit in a detention cell for a bit. Bow Street Police Museum used to be the police station and magistrates' court where the likes of Oscar Wilde, Emmeline Pankhurst, the Kray twins and Augusto Pinochet once appeared (not all at the same time). The station closed in 1992 and the court followed in 2006, but it reopened yesterday as a museum where “visitors can view the former station's ground floor cells and offices… old uniforms, handcuffs and the original dock from court number two.”
🎞️ The Travel Photographer of the Year exhibition is on display over at Coal Drops Yard right now, and considering nobody has travelled anywhere for a while now there’s some incredible images on display. Plus it’s all outside, so no mask required.
📷 If you’re over in East London, the Maureen Paley gallery on Three Colts Lane has a fantastic exhibition of Peter Hujar’s photographs of New York’s underground drag culture of the 70s and early 80s. Hujar captured his East Village peers “applying make-up or in full drag” and, in the process, captured these remarkable images that “document a moment of transformation and reflect on the many nuances of gender.”
🍾 As we write this there are still some tables left for Bank Holiday Monday lunch at the Somerset House Terrace with San Miguel. It’s sheltered, it’s got heaters, there’s beer (obviously) and cocktails (made with beer, obviously), all designed to accompany “a delicious menu of small plates, inspired by San Miguel’s Iberian roots.”
🍹 Bank holiday freebie number one: The Little Orange Door in Clapham Common is giving away a hundred frozen Margaritas from their takeaway bar on Sunday. You just have to get there on time and say 'Cointreau Margarita for me’. More details on their Instagram post:
🍕 Bank holiday freebie number two: Apparently Papa John’s is giving away free pizza on Saturday. We say ‘apparently’ because the only mention we can find of this is on Wales Online, but they are adamant that “The Papa John’s pizza button will mysteriously meander its way through some of East London’s most popular parks giving out free delicious pizza to those who push it.” So if you’re in Victoria Park, London Fields Park, Hackney Marshes, or Clissold Park on Saturday and see a big pizza-themed button, it’s worth a shot.
Food and drink bits
🌮 Street Feast is back. This time it’s a festival. It's in East London. And it’s called… Eastival. It’s on 7 August on Three Mills Island and there’ll be masses of food stalls obviously, including El Pollote's, Fundi’s Pizza, No Bonez Vegan Wings, White Men Can't Jerk, Burger and Beyond and BOB's Lobster. While Horse Meat Disco are headlining the main stage (that could get confusing). Limited £15 pre-sale tickets will be available on Tuesday from 11am, you can sign up for access here.
🏆 The restaurants around Kings Cross are now so busy that they’ve taken to giving away dinner reservations as competition prizes. The promotion is called Hot Ticket, and it’s basically a lottery that involves keeping an eye on their Instagram page. and doing the usual tag, follow, share dance. The next one is due on Tuesday and there’s table-for-2 reservations at hicce, Plaza Pastor, Morty & Bobs and German Gymnasium up for grabs if you fancy your chances.
🌻 The Garden Bar has been cashing in on the outside drinking necessities as part of the giant Mercato Metropolitano ‘piazza’ in Elephant Castle, and yesterday they opened their second location in Bromley. It also sounds massive. There’s a 400 seater terrace plus a rooftop bar, and space for street food stalls. They also have arguably the most Instagrammable entrance of any bar in London:
🗒️ Our love/hate relationship with ‘best of’ lists continues. Here’s a few you can get angry at but read anyway: London’s best Mexican restaurants according to Elle (a pretty handy list considering you’d have been hard pressed to find ten contenders a few years ago); National Geographic’s best ceviche restaurants features two London spots (and yes, one of them is Ceviche); and the Guardian asked their readers for their favourite UK restaurants with overseas flavours and they’re almost all in London (which says more about the Guardian’s readership than the quality of restaurants outside the M25).
🐓 Tickets are now on sale for Wing Jam (that’s London's three day chicken wing festival, as if you didn’t know). There will be around fifty varieties of wings to try, including the usuals like ‘hot’ and ‘Korean’, but also more… unusual flavours like Pot-noodle and Doughnut. It’s happening from 2-4 July outside the Museum of the Home,
on Kingsland Road, and tickets are about £16 each.
🌾 Outstanding in the Field is an American supper club with a slightly over-thought name, that bills itself as a “roving restaurant without walls”. They’ve been teasing a London event for a long time, and they’ve finally confirmed that they’ll be coming here on July 16. The location is a secret but they have announced that the food will be provided by Honey & Co. Tickets are available now, but at £219 a head it’s not cheap.
🇮🇳 The JKS group, which owns restaurants like Gymkhana, Trishna and Brigadiers, is leading the UK arm of the charity initiative 1 Billion Breaths, “bringing together Indian restaurants from across the globe to raise funds to help the devastating situation in the country.” They’re aiming to raise £200,000 for the Give India Oxygen charity, and to do that they’ve created a series of special dine-in events and ‘charity feast boxes’ available via Deliveroo. All the details are on their site.
🏆 We are unabashed fans of Dishoom anyway (mmm… bacon naan breakfast roll) but now we can enjoy their food even more because they just got voted the fourth best large company to work for in the UK. Also on the list: Hawksmoor at number 27, and Flat Iron who ranked 48th.
Long read of the week
Bloomberg has all the juicy details of “the largest money fight that London’s divorce courts have ever known” and the 115-meter nine-deck luxury yacht that is at the very heart of it.
