Weekend roundup for 1 April
Featuring skunks, bears, vultures and rotting fish.
For one reason or another, we picked up quite a few new subscribers this week. So, if you’re new here, then welcome to the Weekend Roundup, our mad dash through the week’s news headlines, cultural happenings and food and drink stuff.
If you’re not a paying subscriber then you will hit a paywall about a third of the way in. You can become a paying supporter of LiB for £5 a month or £50 a year; and if you want to a taste of what that gets you, now’s a good time to have a look, as we’ve removed the paywall on a bunch of past issues to celebrate our second birthday.
There’s over a dozen interviews, Q&As, and special contributor issues that you can read for free until Monday. Here’s a handy list, and here’s the button to press to become a paying subscriber:
Talking of contributor issues, on Monday we have a brilliant (free to read) essay to kickstart our new series highlighting London’s most treasured and potentially endangered businesses. Then, on Wednesday it’s the latest installment of our Electric Theatre column looking at London on film (clue: this one features Bob Hoskins, but zero rabbits).
If you are already a paid-up LiB supporter, then thank you very much for subscribing. Rest assured, if we ever run into you on the ski slopes then we’ll always give you the right of way.
P.S. There are no April Fool’s jokes in today’s issue. In fact, we had to leave out a story about Gemma Collins launching a cafe that encourages people to be more like cats, because it would have been too confusing.
News bits
🥪 Two biggish announcements from the mayor this week. The first was a £3.5m “emergency funding package” to provide 10m free meals during school holidays and weekends to “low-income Londoners struggling with the spiralling cost of living over the next year.”
🚌 The other was the unveiling of the “Superloop”, which might sound like a terrifying new rollercoaster, but is actually over four million kilometres of “10 limited stop, express bus routes” that will connect “outer London town centres, railway stations, hospitals and transport hubs, faster” (here’s a map of the proposed routes). This is all in aid of calming the disquiet around the expansion of the ULEZ that’s due to start in August.
🛴 This week the London Fire Brigade put out some advice on charging e-bikes and e-scooters after revealing that they had, so far, been “called to an e-bike or e-scooter fire once every two days” in 2023.
🚰 A couple of months ago we told you that Thames Water was proposing to deal with future droughts by ‘abstracting’ 150m litres of water a day straight out of the Thames and replacing it with “treated effluent”. This week the Environment Agency told Thames Water that it “needs to think again” and start fixing the 630m litres of water it leaks a day before it starts taking water out of the Thames.
✊ A memorial to the victims of the transatlantic slave trade is to be built at West India Quay in east London. The monument is expected to be unveiled by the summer of 2026, and will stand close to where the statue of slave trader Robert Milligan stood before it was removed following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
🚡 TfL data has shown that “more than 1.5 million people” used the Greenwich cable car in the last financial year. That’s up 200,000 on the previous year, a rise which TfL is attributing to people “expressing themselves” in the cable car’s cabins on social media. Which sounds filthier than it actually is.
🦠 Dubious ‘research’ of the week comes from ‘self-care brand’ Puressentiel who have have found that “1 in 3 Londoners tend to avoid commuting together due to hygiene reasons”. The survey also found that 79% of us “deliberately do not hold onto handrails when on a bus, train or tube due to hygiene reasons”.
🛤 In The Times, Richard Morrison, has written a (paywalled) screed against Euston Station, calling it “the worst station in London and possibly the whole UK” and decrying the recent felling of a nearby 200 years old tree, which was removed to make way for the (now ‘paused’) HS2.
🍦 The infamous Westminster Bridge ice cream van (which regularly endangered the lives of pretty much everyone not in a car) has finally been removed:
🏞 There is a proposal to extend the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty by almost 25,000 acres, which would mean that parts of Croydon could be designated ‘outstandingly beautiful’.
🦨 We knew there was going to be an opportunity to use the skunk emoji one day. You’ve likely already seen the footage of the skunk ‘trying to board a bus’ in Muswell Hill. In response, the RSPCA has put out a statement saying that skunks “should not be kept as pets” and that, if you see one out and about then “the most important thing to do is keep your distance”.
🪺 In other animal news: London Zoo has just welcomed the first vulture chick to hatch there in more than 40 years.
Food and drink bits
💵 A couple of week ago we told you that the owners of Hackney restaurants P. Franco and Bright (and the shop Noble Fine Liquor) had announced they were closing the doors at all three sites “for the final time.” Since then, Will Gee (who was P Franco’s manager before he was made redundant along with the rest of the staff) has set up a crowdfunder to try and raise £30k in order to buy P. Franco and reopen it.
🍝 Meanwhile, the Compton Arms in Islington, which avoided being closed down last year, has launched a new residency from chef Dara Klein who was last seen as Sager + Wilde, but also has Trullo and Brawn on her CV. The ‘rustic Italian kitchen’ is called Tiella and will serve up dishes like sage and anchovy fritti, braised hoggett shoulder and polenta and Bay leaf panna cotta and blueberries with Fernet Branca.
🍤 Apparently LiB favourites, Decatur have spent the last eight years searching “for a truly great Po’Boy style loaf here in London” and now they’ve found one, they’re transforming their site in Leyton into “London’s only legit po’boy shop” for one afternoon next Saturday. No need to book, just “show up and grab a bench”.
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