Weekend roundup for 13 May
Featuring coriander milkshakes, characterless constructions and carriage karaoke
Before we get into this week’s roundup, we have to thank the people who messaged us with their ‘worst restaurant name’ suggestions (prompted by last week’s news that a steak house called Meet Bros was opening in Paddington). Top of the list were Tom Sellers’ ‘Restaurant Ours’ in Kensington, which is - somewhat inevitably - known as Restaurant Arse (especially by those who’ve eaten there - thanks Jess for reminding us of that); and “any of the Scoff & Banters” as suggested by James. Let us know if you can beat those.
You won’t find too much on the Met’s coronation nightmares in today’s issue, just because such a torturous set of cock ups requires more space to dig into, so we’re saving all that for Monday’s edition. Instead, we have Tube fluffers, fried brioche sandwiches, duck wrangling and erotic ecology.
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News bits
🚨 One bit of coronation cock up news: As well as arresting actual protestors for no reason last Saturday, the Met also managed to arrest and detain a 36-year-old Australian architect and self-proclaimed “royal superfan” who was unlucky enough to be stood next to some people from Just Stop Oil. Alice Chambers was handcuffed by police on the morning of the coronation and then spent the next 13 hours being “repeatedly questioned, subjected to physical searches, held in a cell and had her DNA, fingerprints and mugshot taken before the Met finally realised she was an innocent bystander.”
🚇 The BBC has an in-depth report on what happened at Clapham Common Tube station last week when passengers saw what they thought was smoke and “smelled burning” inside a packed carriage.
🏘 The Guardian spoke to the Somalian families who claim they have been “systemically removed from housing waiting lists” by Tower Hamlets council, and are preparing to take the council to court for “corruption and racism”.
🪫 At the beginning of this year TfL introduced a new regulation that requires all new cabs to be “zero-emissions capable”, i.e. hybrid or electric. But, as the (paywalled) Times reports, despite the fact that, “more than 40% of private hire cars and black cabs in the city are now electric,” drivers are still finding it hard to charge them because London only has an average of 131 public charging points per 100,000 people.
🔌 In related news, TfL has just signed a deal to install 39 new ‘rapid and ultra-rapid’ charging points in 24 locations across south and south west London by the end of next year. The charging bays will be created by “unlocking” land that’s currently owned by TfL.
🧱 Artnet has an update on the “three extensive stretches” of the Roman wall that surrounded London 2,000 years ago, which have recently been uncovered near the Thames by archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology.
🏗 Stephen Fry and Tracey Emin have joined the list of people urging Michael Gove to prevent the development at Liverpool Street station. In an open letter to the Times, Fry and Emin - along with names from the Royal Academy of Arts and RIBA - called on Gove to ‘call in’ the scheme, saying that to “plonk 15 storeys of insensitively designed tower” on top of the building that used to be the Great Eastern Hotel, would be “grossly opportunistic and wrong”.
👙 The Sun sees things differently of course. Their reporting on the development led with the headline ‘The huge new rooftop swimming pool set to open in London – and it’s heated all year round’.
🏠 Meanwhile Attitude has a report on the objections to the plans to “tear down the Omega Works warehouses on Hermitage Road in Haringey”. The old piano factory is currently a mixture of residential and commercial spaces, and protestors claim that replacing it with “characterless constructions” would make around 100 people homeless.
🇫🇷 In the (paywalled) Telegraph this week, Hannah Meltzer asks if Paris’ preparations for the 2024 Olympics (making the Seine River swimmable, extending public transport systems, creating ‘world-beating’ bike paths, etc) will “leave polluted, overcrowded London lagging far behind?”.
🤢 The BBC has been gone on a bit of a ‘old London jobs’ binge this week. First Tom Edwards went to meet the ‘Tube Fluffers’ (now actually called ‘track cleaning teams’) who go into the tunnels at night and “remove the rubbish which is a fire hazard” as well as “huge clumps of human hair, skin and metal from the tracks”.
💡 And then they produced a five-minute film about the last remaining lamplighters of London (there are five of them, which is more than we would have guessed).
🏰 Property porn of the week is the “grand mews house” in Streatham, that once belonged to Sir Henry Tate. The house went on the market two year ago for £1.8million, but now it’s gone down to ‘just’ £1.7million.
Food and drink bits
🍽 If you keep reading about all these new restaurant openings and then find yourself unable to get a table at any of them (unless there’s just one of you dining at 11:30pm on a Wednesday) then you might want to sign up to the Resy newsletter before next week. Between May 15th and 19th Resy will be offering bookings “at some of London’s most sought-after restaurants” (including Rambutan, Black Axe Mangal and Ikoyi) as part of their Great Resy Drop. The bookings will be for between 4 June and 18 June and will be for “special, one-of-a-kind evenings” the details of which start getting announced on Monday.
😂 Hunger magazine has an interview with best friends, Rhiannon Butler and Maria K Georgiou (aka comedy duo Mam Sham) to see how they’re “bringing high-concept dining to the next-gen of London’s passionate foodies”.
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