Weekend roundup for 10 July
Includes beavers, spicy inner thighs and vampire squids
⚖️ The family of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, the sisters who were murdered at Fryent Country Park in June of last year, are considering suing the Met. The girls’ mother said that legal action would revolve around “neglect … what should have been done and wasn’t done” over the period when the sisters first went missing.
🚨 The Met constable Wayne Couzens, who yesterday pleaded guilty to murdering Sarah Everard, was “the subject of a claim of indecent exposure against a woman” six years ago when he worked for the Civil Nuclear constabulary (he transferred to the Met in 2018). Meanwhile, at least 12 serving police officers are being investigated over their conduct “in relation to policing and the murder” of Everard.
Related: The Guardian has a detailed breakdown of how Couzens was identified and captured.
🚘 The Healthy Streets Coalition have released their Healthy Streets Scorecard for 2021. If you want to see how your borough ranks for things like road collision casualties and “proportion of trips made by ‘sustainable mode of transport’” then click on the map on this page. (Spoiler: in Inner London, Islington and Hackney score well, Lewisham not so much).
💼 City A.M. warns of the impending talent time-bomb that’s “putting London’s economic recovery in peril” thanks to the city being “either too difficult to get into or too expensive to live in if you can.”
🏢 The Times (paywall alert) takes a tour of the controversial Nine Elms development and asks “does it symbolise everything that’s wrong with London’s housing market?”
🏡 Talking of the housing market: Back in April we looked at Foxtons and the fact that they’d decided to give their chief exec £1m in bonuses instead of paying back the £4.4m they’d received from the Government in furlough money. This week it was announced that their chairman is going to stand down after the company’s share price slumped to 60p, partly due to “Dexters and other agents having eaten into what used to be a strong London market share for Foxtons.” N.B. For more on how Foxtons and others have used the furlough scheme “to fund million-pound bonuses” here’s Stefan Stern in The Guardian.
🚇 Your weekly Crossrail update: The Liverpool Street upgrade has been finished and handed over to TfL. The work includes a refurbished station entrance for Moorgate which is already open for people using the Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines. Meanwhile The Telegraph reports that a new National Audit Office study shows that “the Elizabeth Line will now cost taxpayers £19bn,” which makes it “low value for money”. You don’t say.
🏗️ Southwark Council’s planning committee has approved some amendments to the Elephant & Castle shopping centre site, including the “introduction of new office space and a reduction in the space intended for a cinema”.
🏨 Meanwhile work on a new five-storey Hilton Hotel has begun in Whitechapel. The hotel will have “278 bedrooms and a small cinema and function suite” and is due to open in July 2023. It will be located near Aldgate East, on Osborn Street; a street that “Tower Hamlets Council is thinking of renaming Lower Brick Lane”.
🖕 According to the Telegraph, Bill Cosby wants to perform at some London venues during his “international comeback tour”. Cosby’s publicist is quoted as saying “The world wants to see Mr Cosby,” to which we would add the words “…thrown back in prison”.
🚋 The London Transport Museum is reopening the Kingsway Tram Subway near Holborn as part of its Hidden London tour. The station opened in 1906 but was boarded up in 1952 to make way for diesel buses. In 1998 it made a brief comeback in the Avengers movie, but now you can go “explore the remaining tunnel and the former tram station” until 26 September.
🦫 Conservationists are planning on ‘translocating’ Scottish beavers to Tottenham (as an alternative to shooting them). Expect to see Priti Patel patrolling the streets of Tottenham very soon, rounding up all the immigrant beavers.
Arts and culture bits
🏎️ Formula 1 might not have an official London Grand Prix yet, but Formula E’s E-Prix will be held at the ExCel Centre later this month. 2,720 spectators will be allowed in to watch two days of electric motor racing on a course, which “will feature ramps in and out of the venue that has seen it likened to a Scalextric track.”
🕹️ Four Quarters (the ‘arcade bar’ that already has venues in Peckham and Hackney Wick) is opening a 3,000 square foot flagship site in Elephant and Castle’s Elephant Park, later this year. According to the press release the “vintage gaming paradise” will contain “over 30 original arcade machines, 8 vintage console booths, 2 large screen projection gaming areas and have more than 16 craft beers on draught”.
🚉 July sees a new set of Poems on the Underground released across the Tube. The new batch of verses all have a summer theme and include Remembering Summer by W.S. Merwin, Black Ink by the Iraqi poet Fawzi Karim and Her Glasses by Pascale Petit:
🦑 Performance Exchange is “a new dispersed platform for performance art in commercial galleries, hosted in venues across London,” and it’s happening this weekend. There are eleven artists performing in ten different venues and while you have to reserve a space for some of the performances, others you can just drop into. Some things to look out for include As felt as if “a text developed from Vilém Flusser's Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (vampire squid), through human readings and computer transcriptions,” and Joel Kyack who “brings together unlikely components purchased from hardware stores, health care industries and Hollywood prop-houses to create surreal, darkly humorous objects.”
🍏 Apple’s Creative Studios program is coming to London next month. The free program runs from August 2 to August 29, and is designed to help young artists “explore the music and radio industry”. Mentors across the Radio and Music tracks include Charlie Sloth, Ashley Verse, Rebecca Judd, Melle Brown, and Razor.
📼 Netflix has opened a pop-up 'video store' in Shoreditch as a publicity stunt for it’s horror trilogy Fear Street. You can’t actually rent any videos, but you can get your “picture taken in the retro photobooth (with a twist) and get your hands on limited edition merchandise.”
🎥 Just last week we devoted an entire issue to the number of TV and film crews busy across London at the moment. Now Screen Daily have spoken to Film London about the areas across the capital that are reinventing themselves as filming locations, including Enfield’s soon-to-open OMA:X Film Studios, the major expansion at Warner Bros Studios Leavesden, and the planned creation of two new studios in Barking and Dagenham.
🪜 These ‘best of’ lists are getting more and more niche. This week Luxury London gives us a list of London’s best staircases. Let the arguments commence!
Food and drink bits
🍽️ London is “the flakiest city in the UK for ghosting restaurant bookings,” according to restaurant booking platform TheFork. Apparently the problem has been exacerbated by the so-called ‘spread booking’ phenomenon, where “customers book a table at more than one venue for the same time slot, so to avoid disappointment if the booking gets cancelled.”
🍦 If you’re heading to Taste of London this weekend then Forbes has a quick guide to some of the best dishes, desserts and drinks available to you.
🍗 Jay Rayner visited Humble Chicken, the new yakitori joint on Frith Street, for his latest Guardian review. Jay seemed to love the “fluent intensity, furrowed brow and pathological attention to detail” as well as the various bits of chicken biology he sampled: “Inner thigh [with] a glaze of spicy miso and a sprinkling of sesame seeds… Crisp seared outers … Triangular parson’s noses grilled to a fatty crisp, but still running with juices…[and] concertinaed folds of darkly glazed and crunchy chicken skin.”
🍷 Bar Crispin opens on Kingly Street next Thursday. Coming from the same people who own the Crispin restaurant in Spitalfields, the West End bar will have a wine list containing 150 varieties “with a focus on independent producers and old-world and indigenous grape varietals,” to go along with bar snacks, cheese and charcuterie and… erm, “black-garlic ice cream”.
🍞 We’re not sure how we feel about Crome, the new ‘french toast only’ restaurant that’s just opened in Marylebone. We love french toast as much as the next person, but if you refer to it as ‘a concept’ and start serving it with salt beef brisket or “black truffle cheese sauce” we start getting wary. Add the fact that the coffee is advertised as being ‘Insta-worthy’ and our eyes start rolling so much we’re in danger of pulling a muscle. We’re willing to be proved wrong, so if you pay Crome a visit, please let us know what you thought.
🍝 Manteca, the “nose-to-tail British-Italian restaurant” in Soho looks like it could be getting a Shoreditch opening, as owners “Chris Leach — formerly of Sager and Wilde — and Smokestak’s David Carter are expected to take over the former Pizza Express at 49-51 Curtain Road”.
🥂 The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford is going to be getting “an all-day dining brasserie, restaurant, deli and rooftop bar” called Haugen. Designed by the firm who helped create Dishoom and Heston Blumenthal’s restaurants, Haugen is set to open in September, and will bring “Alpine dining” to Stratford, inside a huge wooden structure that will “create an atmosphere reminiscent of Alpine chalets.”
🍔 Meatliquor have opened their first pub. The Dartmouth Arms in Forest Hill has ten different pints on tap and a full Meatliquor menu, plus they’re offering fish and chips on Fridays from the end of this month, and Sunday roasts from August.
Long read of the week
The Guardian visits London’s Little Italy (aka Clerkenwell) ahead of Sunday’s big game.
Tweet of the week
So, this happened:
