Happy birthday to us
What's in store for the next year, and a special birthday subscriber offer
A slightly different issue today. As this week marks the first anniversary of this newsletter we wanted to take the opportunity to say “Hurray! We made it,” but also to let you know what our plans are for the next year, and ask you what you want to see from us in future issues.
How it’s going
If we’re honest we didn’t have any big targets or ambitions in mind when we started London in Bits. The first job was to see if we could consistently produce three newsletters a week about London (that people would want to read). In the beginning our biggest worry was that there might not be enough to write about, but those fears quickly went away.
Our next goal was to get to the point where we could turn on paid subscriptions. We did that in November of last year and, so far, around 10% of you have very kindly decided to support us. We’ll just take this opportunity to say ‘thank you’ again for that. We’re not lying when we say that every time one of those “New paid subscription” emails comes in, it puts a huge smile on our faces. We do not take any of this for granted.
Like we said at the time, the reason we introduced paid subscriptions was so we wouldn’t have to rely on sponsorship or advertising to start paying contributors. After all, the ultimate aim of London in Bits is to be an independent outlet for people who want to say something about the city they live in.
It’s the reason we don’t talk a lot about the people behind LiB (and the reason we use the editorial ‘we’ all the time). We’re trying to build a platform here, something that will allow us to publish more pieces like Stewart’s beautiful essay from a couple of months ago, and we want to be able to pay people a decent rate for work like that.
We’ve got more of that kind of thing coming up in the next few weeks and months and we’re also looking at introducing other kinds of content, including guides (not listicles!), photo essays and short fiction.
If you’re interested in contributing to London in Bits then we would love to hear from you. You can send your pitches and ideas to londoninbitsgmail.com.
Tell us what you want
As we go into the next 12 months we’d really like to hear about what you want from the newsletter. Do you want fewer issues with more in them (or vice versa)? What kind of content do you want to see more of? What could you live without?
We’ve created a survey here so you can tell us:
It’s just seven questions, and if you’re okay with giving us your email address then we’ll put it into the hat to win the entire set of ‘opinionated guides to London’ from Hoxton Mini Press. There are nine books in this bundle, covering everything from architecture, to green spaces, to pubs.
A birthday present from us
Okay, we’re nearly done talking about ourselves.
Last item of business is to let you know that we’ve created a special birthday subscription rate. If you go to londoninbits.substack.com/birthday then you can get 25% off a year’s subscription, which works out at £3.13 a month. The offer lasts until the end of April.
News bits
London Underground workers are going to get an 8.4% pay rise from next month. That means Tube drivers who are paid almost £59,000 now could be getting around £5,000 more a year. This is all part of a four-year agreement that was made in 2020 (and which was backdated to include 2019/20). For those keeping track, Tube driver salaries have gone up by 34% in the last ten years.
On Saturday it was announced that bus drivers who are members of the Unite union working for Arriva will walk out from today. The 48-hour strike is over a dispute about pay (the average London bus driver salary is about half what a Tube driver gets, and the bus drivers had initially been offered a pay increase of 1.5%).
Uber has had its London license granted for the next two-and-a-half-years. The firm said on Twitter that “TfL rightly holds our industry to the highest regulatory and safety standards and we are pleased to have met their high bar.”
At the end of last week 20-year-old Eric Boateng-Taylor was stopped by police in Croydon for… wearing a coat:
The British Museum has finally got round to removing the Sackler name from “all the galleries, rooms and endowments they had supported”. The announcement came on Twitter via the museum’s Chair, George Osborne:
The British Museum has also been busy “secretly scanning” the Parthenon Marbles. Apparently the stealthy 3D scanning has been done “with the hope of creating ‘perfect’ replicas that could one day lead to the repatriation of the originals to Greece.”
On Saturday the Telegraph (paywall alert) took a look at how the Royal Albert Docks (“east London’s answer to Venice”) went from something that was going to “deliver thousands of jobs and billions of pounds of inward investment” to a “ghost town”.
A 450-year old map showing “one of the earliest surviving contemporary images of London” will go on display next month as part of a free exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archives. Ian Visits has all the details.
… One more thing before we go. Substack has an iOS app now, so if you subscribe to a few newsletters then this might be a better option than your inbox. If you’re an Android user, you can sign up for the waiting list here.