Weekend roundup for 1 July
Featuring mayor heckles, Macca snaps and mermaids
Welcome to your Roundup for the week when everyone was delighted to see a barn owl return to Hampstead Heath and no one was happy to see a swan get on the Elizabeth Line.
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News bits
🗳 On Monday, The Times published a piece by the writer Daisy Goodwin, naming Tory mayoral candidate Daniel Korski as the man who groped her during a meeting at No 10 a decade ago. On Tuesday, Korski went on TalkTV to deny the accusations and promised that he wouldn’t be backing out of the race for City Hall. The next day, he did exactly that, claiming that “the news agenda is becoming a distraction from the race,” a news agenda that happened to include Goodwin’s claim that she had been “contacted by other women with some very interesting stories”. On Friday the government announced that it will not be investigating the allegations.
🏠 The latest figures from the Combined Homelessness and Information Network (Chain) show that the number of rough sleepers in London has risen by more than 20% in the past year, while “people sleeping rough for the first time also rose by more than a quarter.” In total, 10,053 people were recorded on the streets of London between April 2022 and March 2023.
📱 This week, Met officers returned the iPhone and laptop seized from the radical French publisher Ernest Moret, who was arrested on his way to the London book fair in April. Moret’s lawyer, confirmed that officers had told him (deep breath) “the information on the devices had not been downloaded, but that the sim card on the phone had been downloaded, although the information on it had not been reviewed by counter-terrorism police.”
🏅 Sadiq Khan has been awarded an honorary fellowship by the Faculty of Public Health. The award was given to the mayor for “his willingness to take on major challenges for London to improve the health, wellbeing and economic productivity of all Londoners”.
😶🌫️ On Thursday night the mayor attended LBC’s ‘State of London’ debate, where a heckler in the audience shouted “No-one has died [of air pollution], stop lying!”. Evidence shows that 4,000 people die prematurely in London every year, because of air pollution.
🏳🌈 At the start of the week, the mayor announced a fleet of Pride-themed buses and trains “to help spread the message that in London, you are free to be whoever you want to be, and love whoever you want to love.” The responses on Twitter and Instagram were almost universally hateful and homophobic, so it was good to see Sadiq follow that up with the announcement that five new rainbow-coloured plaques are being installed in Greenwich, Peckham, Westminster, Ladbroke Grove and Haringey “to celebrate significant people, places and moments in LGBTQI+ history.”
🚽 The CEO of Tideway, the company behind the ‘super sewer’, has said that Thames Water’s financial woes will not derail the project and he has “no doubt” the project will “fulfil its objective of cleaning up the River Thames and that the city’s water supplies will continue uninterrupted.”
🚫 The Guardian has been to Hatcham Gardens in Lewisham to find out why a park that was boarded up in 2018 while new homes were built, is still boarded up, even though the homes in the development were finished in 2020.
🪩 Former House of Commons official, Eliot Smith has written a piece for City AM saying that London has a Soho problem, and we need to fix it now. Remarkably he manages to write over 500 words without explaining how we might fix it, and instead makes weird jokes about ‘dogging’.
🧳 This week, people living in Kensington and Chelsea were “encouraged to prepare an emergency grab bag” in case of flash flooding. Residents were told the bag should include things like “personal documents, such as a passport and insurance papers, a torch, blanket, power banks, batteries, medication, waterproof layers, welly boots and water,” which sounds less like a grab bag and more like a ‘grab suitcase’.
🌊 Talking of flooding… Not content with one Thames-related crisis this week, The Guardian asked How much longer will the Thames Barrier protect London?
🤑 Somehow The Telegraph is still making the claim that the reason ‘youngsters’ can’t afford to buy a house is because they won’t stop “paying for subscriptions services like Netflix and Spotify”. The headline for the article? No one has a God-given right to live in Notting Hill.
Food and drink bits
🍺 Oisín Rogers (previously of The Guinea Grill in Mayfair and The Ship in Wandsworth) and Charlie Carroll (founder of Flat Iron) will be opening a new pub in Soho in October. The Devonshire will be at 17 Denman Street (where Jamie’s Italian use to be) and will have an in-house butchery and bakery as well as a “wood-ember grill” in the restaurant upstairs.
🌮 Also coming this autumn is Ixchel, a “modern Mexican restaurant and tequila bar” that will open on the Kings Road in September. Continuing the very welcome trend of places finally serving good Mexican food in London, Ixchel will have an ex-Brat chef heading up the kitchen and all the artisanal tequila and mezcal you can handle.
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