Is it still 'working from home' if your home used be the office?
Plus Pret upset, Brian Rose sulks, and rave golf.
Square Mile to become bohemian party central?
Less than a month ago we wrote these words: “The City of London has green lit more than 2 million square feet of new office space so far this year…”.
Then just last week we read that: “the City of London Corporation has unveiled its ambitious post-pandemic five-year recovery plan which includes creating 1,500 homes in converted office blocks.”
Hardly anyone lives in the Square Mile. In fact, right now, there are just 8,000 people who can call themselves a resident, and half of those live in the Barbican. As for the remaining 4,000, quite a few of them are ‘senior city workers’ who only live there during the week and then disappear off to the country for the weekends.
That’s because no one in their right mind wants to actually live in The City. Despite its incredible history, proximity to genuinely interesting bits of London and being home to some of the oldest pubs in London, the area has had the heart cut out of it over the past few decades, and what was a part time ghost-town before Covid, now looks like a set from a slightly dated zombie film.
According to The Times (paywall alert), the Corporation is planning a few incentives to draw people in, including “traffic-free weekends” (not too much of a stretch for The City, let’s face it) and “all-night festivals” (a real ‘must have’ feature for every property buyer that).
Other plans include getting “tech-led businesses” to move in to the area, a “shared 5G network by the end of 2022,” and (they might have been getting desperate by this point) an e-scooter trial.
It’s going to take more than fast internet and zippy scooters to entice “artists and musicians” to move into the Square Mile, but the cultural butchering our financial district has been subjected to means there may be no quick fix.
Who knows, maybe we’ll learn an important lesson from all this.
Oh, wait, what's this…
Stitch up in a brewery
It has taken no fewer than 7,000 complaints to (temporarily) stop a shopping mall and corporate offices being built on the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane.
The building is currently home to a mix of arts businesses, independent shops, galleries and restaurants (not to mention the annual Pancake Race) but its owners have been eyeing up a bit of an extension, specifically a “five storey office building, rooftop, storage space, gym and a shopping mall”.
Thankfully, after “7,000 objections from East End heritage groups, traders and the public,” Tower Hamlets Council have put back the plans so the owners’ “assurances about protecting community interests” can be re-examined.
If you want to read more depressing examples of beautiful and historic bits of London at risk of getting amputated, then get your petition-signing pen ready and read The Critic‘s article on how London’s councils are destroying their communities.
Flexible working = fewer flat whites
Do we even want to go back to the office?
A recent poll has claimed that over half of Londoners would be comfortable going back to their cubicles right now, with 67 per cent saying that they would go back when restrictions are lifted towards the end of June.
Meanwhile the Standard asked a bunch of FTSE 100 businesses what their ‘office space’ plans were, and received back a lot of long-winded, jargony ways of saying “We’re not really sure yet” (full marks go to BP, who have decided to give their flexible working ‘model’ a name. It’s called ‘bp work/life’. Genius).
HSBC aren’t messing around though, they just announced they’re ditching “3.6 million square feet of office space this year”.
(N.B. The New York Times recently published a long feature on Google’s plans for the future of the office, in which they mention they’re building outdoor work spaces in a few locations, including London. It will be interesting to see how “open-air tents” and “teepees” translate to King’s Cross.)
But the question we’re all asking is: What does this mean for the coffee shops?
Things are looking very shaky for Pret. 340 of their 389 shops are in London and they’ve obviously “suffered from the absence of commuters and tourists”. Pret closed 74 of their purple people eateries last year and injected £185m of additional funding a few months ago. Now they’ve said they’re going to scrap their traditional “follow the skyscraper” strategy and move into the suburbs. Yes, Pret just did the coffee shop equivalent of having kids, moving out to Zone 6 and thinking about getting a dog.
Meanwhile Starbucks are seemingly having a great time. Around “98 per cent of its estate is currently operational”and apparently they can’t hire fast enough. Note though that some of those new roles will be in “drive-thru locations” and London doesn’t get a look in on the list of hiring locations. Looks like the chain’s presence outside the M25 might keep their head above water for the time being.
No news yet on Costa’s future.
And the rest
A Met police officer has been sacked after “brutalising” a seventeen year old black girl with learning difficulties. The girl was separated from a group in east London while on escorted leave from a mental health unit. She got distressed and the police were called by a member of the public. PC Benjamin Kemp handcuffed the young girl after she got out of his police car. Then he hit her with his baton. He didn’t just hit her once. He hit her 34 times. Then another officer tasered her.
The really tragic bit to this story should be that all this happened in 2019 and it’s taken this long for the Met to investigate and sack Kemp for gross misconduct. But the real kick in the teeth is the Independent Office for Police Conduct saying there was “no indication racial discrimination had been a factor”.
A man was arrested on the weekend for spraying #SPYCOPS on the outside of the MI6 building in Vauxhall. ‘Spycops’ is a reference to the infiltration of various political groups by undercover officers, some of whom duped activists into having relationships with them. More here and here.
Prospect magazine has a lengthy profile of Cressida Dick, the openly gay, vegetarian Met Commissioner who apparently prefers “Line of Duty over Life on Mars and Dixon of Dock Green over Dirty Harry.”
Via Reddit’s r/london comes this rather brilliant letter from youth politics podcast ‘Politics Relaxed’ who claim that mayoral candidate and wannabe Bond villain, Brian Rose is blocking a YouTube video of an interview they conducted with him because he didn’t like the line of questioning from the fifteen year olds.
Alan Moore may have retired from comics but that doesn’t mean he’s retired full stop, and it also looks like the man behind one of the greatest London-based graphic novels ever created isn’t bored of London yet. The Watchmen writer has just signed a publishing agreement for “a five-volume series of epic fantasy novels” called Long London, “chronicling a fictionalised version of the titular city.”
David Hockney’s new artwork, Remember you cannot look at the sun or death for very long is being projected onto the billboards at Piccadilly Circus at 8:21pm every evening in May for three minutes. Here’s a look at it if you can’t make the trip to see it ‘live’:
Staying with art: Timothy Spall’s first ever solo show of paintings is going to be arriving at the Pontone Gallery on Newman Street in June. Expect work “in the English landscape tradition … but there’s elements of the surreal in there as well.”
Or, if you prefer your art with a side order of wackiness, a reminder that there’s just a few days left to play Club Golf at Coal Drop Yards, the crazy golf course “designed by artists Baker & Borowski and inspired by the King’s Cross rave culture of the 80s and 90s”.
And don’t forget to vote! (And don’t forget, if you need to take the Central Line to vote, you might need to take another route.)