Weekend roundup for 12 June
Includes a ring session, salty roots and a retracting facade
⚖️ The delayed report into the unsolved murder of Daniel Morgan in Sydenham in 1987 is finally getting published. The unredacted report should appear on Tuesday (June 15).
🤖 University College London has backed Whitehall’s assessment that “theatres pose almost no Covid risk”. To discover this, UCL developed £20,000 robots that have “mannequin heads,” which “exhale droplets… to replicate the breath of audience members in theatres from a whispered ‘Hello’ to pantomime shouting.” We’re really hoping these disembodied mannequin heads aren’t really able to whisper ‘Hello’, because that is the stuff of nightmares.
🗳 The redrawing of the electoral map that could come about as a result of the 2023 Review of Parliamentary constituencies is due to effect all but two of the London’s constituencies and means we’ll gain two extra seats (thanks to population growth), so there’ll be 75 London MPs. If you want a complete breakdown of what the rejig means for your area, take a look at Lewis Baston’s comprehensive write up over at OnLondon.
📈 Those trading floors you see in films where stockbrokers stand around screaming at each other making weird hand gestures? Well they don’t really exist anymore. But there is one “open outcry trading floor” left in the City and it just got a reprieve. The London Metal Exchange closed “its iconic open outcry floor, known as the Ring,” during lockdown, and held a consultation to see if it should reopen at all. Earlier this week they announced “ring sessions… would resume on 6 September” (stop giggling at the back).
🏢 Bloomberg has been in the Square Mile, watching as things start to come back to life, and it’s slow going by all accounts. “Foot traffic levels in the main London offices of U.S. banks such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. were estimated to be about 24% of the pre-pandemic norm… The headquarters of British banks like HSBC are even quieter and this seems set to continue… NatWest Group Plc has said it expected just 13% of its staff to work mostly from the office after the pandemic.”
🛴 There have been an awful lot of e-scooter hot takes in the past few days, but probably the most opportunistic of them has to be the one offered up by the lawyer, Nick ‘Mr Loophole’ Freeman, who has launched a petition calling for “cyclists and e-scooter riders [to] display visible ID, require that cycle lanes be used where available, and introduce a licensing and penalty point system for all cyclists and licensing system for escooter [sic] riders.” Got something against cyclists Mr Freeman?
🐘🏰 Sadiq Khan has reiterated that extending the Bakerloo line beyond Elephant and Castle to to Lewisham “remains a priority for both me and Transport for London.” That statement was followed up by TfL’s director of city planning who said, “In reality we are not going to have the money for Crossrail 2 or Bakerloo for some time.”
💻 An online platform called Your Future London (above) has been developed to “present urban data in a more engaging way and allow users to envisage the city’s future.” As well as containing a quiz about “what Londoners would like to happen in the city, data about London as it is today, and future scenarios for the city,” the website has been designed to “reach a younger audience with language and content that would not bore them.” Good luck with that.
📖 Matt Haynes, the man who co-founded the much-missed ‘London fanzine’ Smoke, is back with Unchartered Streets, “a series of book-length walks around some of London’s less celebrated neighbourhoods”. The series starts with Leyton and will continue with Vauxhall and Deptford. Yours for £10 plus postage.
⚓ A few weeks ago we told you about the sad closure of the legendary Arthur Beale shop in Covent Garden. Thankfully the shop is able to live on in digital form thanks to this incredible 3D model that was created from 3,806 photos of the shop itself. Go full screen, zoom in and lose yourself in the nautical splendour.
Arts and culture bits
🏙️ As we mentioned in Wednesday’s newsletter, The London Festival of Architecture is happening across London right now, with dozens of events and installations to take in until the end of June. They include the benches we already told you about, the installation ‘A Playground for Non-Humans’ at Bedford Square (“unique ideas that make us aware of the importance of non-human inhabitation in its various and diverse forms”), a guided walk of Lincoln Inn’s Field that’s happening this afternoon, and a Rooftop Film Club at the Bussey Building, that’s showing The Royal Tenenbaums and Parasite (the latter has a Q&A with one of LiB’s favourite people, the author Will Wiles).
🤳 French artist JR (who starred alongside Agnes Varda in the rather brilliant documentary Faces Places) has created a “giant public art display” to mark the start of Euro 2020. The installation is made up of photographs of more than 3,000 Londoners pasted across five locations, beginning with Tower Bridge tomorrow (June 13) “before moving to locations in Lewisham, King’s Cross, Tottenham and the Royal Dock.”
🌺 The Dulwich Picture Gallery has a new exhibition of nature photography running until the end of August (above). Unearthed: Photography’s Roots includes work by Robert Mapplethorpe and Imogen Cunningham as well as Charles Jones, a gardener “whose striking modernist photographs of plants remained unknown until 20 years after his death, when they were discovered in a trunk at Bermondsey Market in 1981.” Brixton Blog has more details.
🎟️ The London Film Festival is going to look a bit different when it returns in October. The festival is moving out of the Odeon on Leicester Square (probably because they’ll be too busy showing the new Bond film on repeat) and moving to the Southbank where they’ll be using the BFI Southbank to screen their competitive strands (First Feature, Documentary Competition etc) and the Royal Festival Hall to host “red carpet gala premieres”. There’ll also be screenings “at a number of partner venues in the West End”. Keep an eye on their website for more details.
📸 Advance bookings are now on sale for The Picture Library at the Photographer’s Gallery in Soho. With over 200 images picked from the Guardian’s picture library, the exhibition tracks the development of photojournalism across the 20th Century, and explores how “a liberal press employs images to elaborate themes such as feminism, nationalism, post-colonialism, racism, industrial relations, immigration, class and the climate crisis.”
🕵 The latest immersive experience to come to London is Murder On The Underground. Taking place at the The Postal Museum, the murder mystery will involve a ride on the Mail Rail as you attempt to find a killer who’s haunting the 100-year-old postal railway. You can join the wait list for tickets here.
🕹️ Gravity is a “a massive three-storey immersive entertainment site” thats due to open in Wandsworth later this summer. The venue will contain (deep breath) “a 14-lane bowling alley; a multi-level high tech electric go-kart track; a golf experience with a backdrop of NYC; a digital darts zone; an e-sports gaming arena; a nostalgic arcade of games; and a fully-private, interactive digital room that’ll take you on a 60-minute gaming adventure.” Or, if you prefer, you can just sit in one of the three bars and contemplate your life.
👻 Lily Allen is coming to the West End in a ‘supernatural thriller’ written by Danny Robins, best known for his horror podcast The Battersea Poltergeist. 2:22 A Ghost Story opens on 12 August and also stars three other people, one of whom hosted The Great Canadian Baking Show and was a voice on Bojack Horseman!
🐩 A bit of dog news that didn’t make it into Wednesday’s ‘lovely things’ issue: The Pug Cafe on Devonshire Terrace in Liverpool Street is going to be hosting a series of ‘Summer of Love’ events over July and August, including a Pug Cafe, a Dachshund Cafe and a Cockapoo Cafe.
Food and drink bits
🍜 Bao is extending into Shoreditch later this month, with the launch of Bao Noodle Shop on Redchurch Street. The new spot will “take its cues from the beef noodle shops of Taiwan” with “a classic Taipei-style broth with slow-braised beef cheek and beef shortrib” as well as a “lighter Tainan-style broth with imported 400-day-aged white soy”. There will be bao buns as well, obviously. The Noodle Shop opens on 23 June.
🔥 Niklas Ekstedt, the Swedish chef known for the wood-fired cooking at his eponymous, Michelin-starred Stockholm restaurant, is going to be opening his first restaurant outside Sweden in September. Ekstedt At The Yard in Westminster's Great Scotland Yard Hotel will feature ingredients such as smoked apple, ember baked leeks, smoked roe deer, smoked celeriac, and salt baked roots. So, lots of smoke then?
🥩 The space that used to be the concert hall at the London College of Music in Soho is being transformed into a restaurant. Argentinian chef Fernando Trocca is bringing his lauded Sucre restaurant to the 310-year old building this summer, with a dining space that will be “built around a dramatic open fire pit kitchen” (so, lots of smoke then?). Meanwhile downstairs there’ll be Abajo, a “moody and cool” cocktail bar “run by Tato Giovanonni, whose current bar is ranked No.7 on the World’s 50 Best list.”
🌮 Notting Hill’s Taqueria (above) are opening their second restaurant in Exmouth Market at the end of June (just down the road from Tigre Tacos at the Gunmakers in Clerkenwell if you want to plan a taco crawl). Taqueria have been perfecting their quesadillas, margaritas and churros for sixteen years, so we doubt they’ll be messing with the formula too much.
☕ 🍦Upper St Martin’s Lane is getting two new “artisan operators” this summer. “Coffee and brunch” chain WatchHouse will be opening a 1,200sq ft venue that will span two levels (that’s a lot of flat whites and Eggs Benedict); while just down the road will be Anita a “boutique ice cream parlour and gelateria” that already has stores in Sydney, Barcelona, New York, Tel Aviv and Puerto Rico.
🍷 Hackney is getting a new brasserie and wine bar. Now, that’s not entirely surprising news, and while we’re sure the Hackney Coterie will be very nice (one of the guys behind it used to be general manager at The Wolseley) the only reason we’re pointing this out is because The Caterer’s article about it contains what must be the most Hackney sentence ever written:
“On weekends the facade of the building will retract and a brunch menu will be served, including English muffin with sausage patty, black pudding crumb, spinach, poached egg and salted egg yolk hollandaise.”
🍳 Talking of brunch… it’s time for our weekly ‘best of’ list. This week Luxury London offers up it’s selection of The best brunches in London. As you might imagine, the selection is a little ‘high end’ and includes Claridge’s and The Parlour at Sketch. Although Dishoom and Duck & Waffle do make welcome appearances. We couldn’t find any evidence of any retracting facades though. What’s brunch without a retracting facade?
Long read of the week
Last year Sarah Drinkwater filled out a form to participate in a “mystery experiment” organised by TED. Months later she received $10,000 and was told she could do anything she wanted with it, apart from put it into savings or retirement funds.
Instead of paying off her tax bill Sarah created a microgranting project focused on Walthamstow.
Now she’s finally allowed to talk about it, so you can see how she did it and who benefited.
