Weekend roundup for 14 January
Featuring dog cafes, big dong energy and dumplings
Welcome to the week that the Tube celebrated its 160th birthday and precisely one person queued up at Waterstones Piccadilly to get Prince Harry’s book. We don’t have any royal family news for you today, instead we’ve got some much more appealing raw sewage, some Grade-I listed property porn, the ‘best restaurant in London’… and dinosaurs.
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News bits
💚 On Monday Sadiq announced that “mayors from around the world” are due to meet in London on March 15, for the inaugural Partnership for Healthy Cities summit. The collection (flock? murder?) of mayors will be discussing strategies to combat noncommunicable diseases and injuries. Top of Khan’s list is fighting the “toxic air” that causes “asthma and stunted lung growth in the young and dementia in the elderly”.
🎟️ Talking of toxic air, Guido Fawkes has gleefully reported that Sadiq has only sold 576 of the 1974 seats available for his show at the Southbank Centre to promote his book, Breathe: Tackling The Climate Emergency. The show is not until May though, so maybe give the guy a break.
🚗 In other related news, London has topped the global congestion ranking for the second year in a row. The study, which looked at more than 1,000 cities across 50 countries, showed that London’s drivers spent an average of 156 hours sitting in traffic in 2022, and that the amount of time lost to traffic jams is 5% above pre-coronavirus levels.
😶🌫️ Also this week, the Clean Cities campaign took a look at TfL’s annual travel in London report and found that the number of cars driven in central London increased by almost 60% after February last year, when the mayor stopped enforcing the congestion charge at night.
👶 One thing that might ease the congestion problem is London’s falling birthrate. On Thursday, the Guardian reported that some primary schools in London might have to merge or close, because “there has been a 17% decrease in the city’s birthrate, accounting for 23,000 fewer babies”.
💩 Thames Water has launched an interactive map, so now you can see which bodies of water near you are having raw sewage dumped into them via storm overflows. And all in real time!
🗞️ In further proof that no one goes into the office on a Friday any more, City A.M. has stopped publishing its Friday print edition.
🍃 Bloomberg has a report on the “one London suburb that’s booming” because all those work-from-homers are looking for ‘leafier climes’. (Spoiler: they’re talking about Chiswick).
🛵 If you had to guess, what would you say is the most common foreign nationality in the capital? Well, according to recent ONS data, it’s Italians. Apparently there were 280,000 Italian-born people living in the UK in 2021 and half of them are living in London, putting them ahead of those from India and Poland for the first time. According to Bloomberg, Italians are drawn to London “by better job opportunities and higher salaries, as well as a cosmopolitan culture,” but also because of the “high unemployment, stagnating wages, tough business climate and limited growth back home”.
🐶 A survey by Lords & Labradors (we have no idea and we’re not looking it up) has ‘revealed’ that London is the most dog friendly city in the UK, thanks to things like the number of dog-friendly restaurants, and number of green spaces and parks (although it looks like they didn’t count those things per-capita, which skews things in London’s favour a little bit).
🐾 And if you want further proof of our dog friendliness, look no further than Pawsitive, the new dog cafe that’s opened in Notting Hill where your dog can participate in doggy yoga sessions and “be served afternoon tea with fruit and sandwiches as well as doggy ice cream and ‘pupcakes’”.
🏠 Property porn of the week: A one bedroom flat in the iconic Isokon Building II (aka “the most historically important Modernist buildings in the country”) has gone up for sale for £595,000.
⛴️ This week, a woman on TikTok accidentally discovered the Woolwich Ferry exists:
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Food and drink bits
🍷 Noble Rot is opening a third location in Shepherd Market later this year. On Instagram, owners Ian Keeling and Mark Andrew said that they were now “the new custodians of 5 Trebeck Street – formerly longstanding French brasserie Le Boudin Blanc which will re-open as Noble Rot Mayfair in spring 2023”.
🍇 Noble Rot popped up in The New York Times this week as part of wine critic Eric Asimov’s article Why London Is One of the Best Places in the World to Drink Wine. As well as Noble Rot, Asmiov’s list of “a dozen places to find an excellent glass” includes The Drapers Arms in Islington, Medlar on the King’s Road, Trivet in Bermondsey, alongside usual suspects like Brawn, 40 Maltby Street and Brat.
P.S. Talking of the NY Times - they just put London at the very top of their 52 Places to Go in 2023 list.
🍺 The Ship, the 200-year-old pub on Borough Road in Southwark, has closed. The pub posted a message on its Facebook page last week, saying that the closure was “due to circumstances beyond our control”. Since then, a spokesperson for Fuller’s has told The Drinks Business that “It was a leasehold site and, for a number of reasons, we have decided not to renew the lease…any plans for the future would be down to the freeholder.”
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