Weekend roundup for 11 December

Includes tiny tube stations, abandoned bassoons and 'buffet cats'

Welcome to your weekly digest of all the interesting, tasty, fun and daft things happening in London this week. The full version of the Weekend Roundup is available to paid subscribers. That gets you all the Arts & Culture news, the latest restaurant and bar updates, as well as the Long Read and Tweet of the Week. If you’re receiving the full issue then thank you very much for supporting independent writing about London. You’re the best!

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News bits

💷 As we write this there’s no news on a new TfL funding agreement (the current funding runs out this weekend). Sadiq Khan has been accused of being “melodramatic” and of conducting negotiations through “spin and press releases” by the minister for London, Paul Scully. Ironically Paul wrote that accusation in an article for the Evening Standard. He also wrote that, “there is, and will be, more than enough money to keep services running at their current levels… In the next deal we will commit, as we have before, to making up TfL’s loss of fare revenue from Covid. TfL’s main source of income is therefore guaranteed by the State - at a cost so far to national taxpayers of more than £4bn” (passive aggressive much?). Hopefully, by the time you read this, there will be some more definite news.

🚇 It looks like the night tube strikes for this weekend are going to go ahead. That means there’ll be no service on the Victoria and Central lines on Saturday from 7pm. More night tube strikes are planned for next weekend (Friday 17th and Saturday 18th) and there’s a 24-hour strike planned on the Central, Jubilee, Northern, Piccadilly and Victoria lines from 4:30am on the 18th until 04:29 the next day.

🛴 From next week e-scooters are banned from the bus and tube networks because they keep catching fire. More specifically their “lithium-ion batteries rupture without warning” causing “intense fires and considerable smoke and damage”.

⚖️ The latest episode of the Sky News StoryCast '21 podcast (“telling 21 personal stories from some of the biggest news events of the century”) looks at the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent man who was shot dead by armed police at Stockwell station 16 years ago.

🏗️ There is now a petition to try and stop the M&S from demolishing its HQ and to save the “handsome landmark building has characterised Oxford Street for almost 100 years, helping shape one of London's most famous and historic streets.”

💊 Shaun Bailey has written a piece for the The Telegraph (paywall alert) arguing that the “gentrification of London” has contributed to the rise of “gang warfare [and] weapons flooding the streets of this capital” because there’s more “rebellious middle class kids” buying drugs. He also claims our “hospitals have become war zones with thugs trying to finish their injured opponents off while doctors and nurses attempt to defend wards.”

🎄 Trafalgar Square is not getting a new tree. There was talk that Norway would be sending a new one “after the first was criticised” but it was announced this week that officials in Oslo have “voted against sending funds for a new Christmas tree”.

🕺 In Wednesday’s issue we wrote about the various challenges London faces as it tries to recover (link below). On the same day, a City Hall report into London’s night time economy was published revealing that one-in-five bouncers have quit during the pandemic and that those staff shortages, along with “safety fears and the loss of the Night Tube, were holding back night trade.”

London: Not dead, but definitely under the weather

🚲 Also on Wednesday we told you how research blaming London’s position as the most congested city in the world on cycle lanes had been shoddily reported pretty much everywhere, from the Standard to the BBC. Shortly afterwards the company who conducted the research admitted that the headline didn’t accurately reflect their findings and that one journalist had admitted they would go with the cycle lanes angle because it would “get more readers”.

⬆️ Andrew Adonis has written a piece for Prospect which argues that the problem with the ‘levelling up agenda’ “lies in the implicit view that London has got too big for its boots and needs containing, and that what matters is narrowing the gap between London and the rest.” For more on this read our issue from November: Did London get 'levelled down' in last week's budget?

💰 The FT (paywall alert) has taken a look at Richmond-on-Thames, after it was voted the happiest place in London for the seventh consecutive year, but where the average cost of a property sold so far this year is £803,700 (the London average is £523,300).

Art and culture bits

🎟️ The Official London Theatre’s New Year’s sale kicked off on Tuesday. Tickets for around 60 theatre productions in January and February are available for between £10 and £50. 2:22 A Ghost Story (written by Monday’s interviewee, Danny Robins) is on the list and so is Caryl Churchill’s well-reviewed A Number and Alice Childress’s “stinging satire” Trouble In Mind (or you cold just buy your mum tickets to Magic Mike Live for Christmas).