Weekend roundup for 14 May
Featuring weed, witches and a wagstaff
Hello, hope your weekend is going well and you’re enjoying the sunshine. Today we’ve got all the latest on the mayor’s trip across the Atlantic, as well as a genuinely scary scarecrow, some Cock-based controversy and a burger that comes with peanut butter and (bacon) jam.
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News bits
🇺🇸 It was already getting tricky to keep up with all the news coming out of Sadiq’s trip to the States and then he went and announced a new ‘drug tsar’ while on a visit to a California cannabis farm! The chair of London’s first ever Drugs Commission will be Lord Charlie Falconer QC (aka Baron Falconer of Thoroton) who was once a flatmate of Tony Blair’s and is a proponent of the ‘Diet Coke and apples’ diet. After Sadiq’s announcement, Priti Patel wasted no time at all in coming out with the standard response to Sadiq’s drug chat:
Other notable headlines from ‘Sadiq Stateside’ include:
🐦 His appearance at Stanford University where he said that when Donald Trump was president the mayor experienced a “significant rise in racial abuse directed at him” on social media.
🏅 The news that talks have been held about London bidding to host “the greenest Olympics and Paralympics ever,” in either 2036 or 2040. According to Sadiq, “the cost wouldn’t be humongous”.
⚾️ His announcement that Major League Baseball will come to London next year (and for at least two years after that). Two MLB teams will “play a normal game as part of their season over two days in a weekend series event at the London Stadium in Stratford”. No news on which teams will play yet but the smart money is on the St Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs as they were scheduled to play in 2020 before lockdown cancelled it.
👨💻️ And his trip to Silicon valley on Tuesday, where he “met with senior tech bosses” including Google’s Chief Financial Officer to talk about more U.S. tech firms opening offices in London
⚖️ The two Met officers who took photos of the bodies of sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry at the scene of their murder have lost their appeal against their sentences.
🚇 TfL apologised to Sky News journalist, Shingi Mararike on Wednesday, after a DLR ticket inspector stopped him at Shadwell station and told him he matched the description of someone who was a “persistent” fare dodger.
👷♂️ Bits started falling off the Houses of Parliament on Wednesday. According to Huffpost “exclusion zones” have been introduced along the north side of the Westminster Hall after stonework was found to be “degrading at a faster rate than expected”.
🏚️ In related news, developer Taylor Wimpey is preparing to tear down 148 half-built flats in Hackney Wick after “a potential structural issue” was discovered in the concrete frame.
🚓 On Tuesday the Met posted an appeal on Twitter to ask if anyone has seen Wiley. Newham police have been trying to track down the ‘Godfather of Grime’ (MBE) after he failed to turn up to court six months ago to face charges of “burglary with intent to cause damage and assault by beating”.
🚲 The details for the 2022 London edition of the World Naked Bike Ride have been … unleashed? There’s no Hyde Park start this year (because of the Jubilee) instead there’s a number of start points raging from Croydon to Clapham Junction. It’s all happening on June 11. See you there?
🎪 Zippo’s Circus is at Streatham Common right now and they had to install a circus-themed scarecrow because flocks of the birds have “caused £250,000 worth of damage”. Apparently the terrifying clown scarecrow was the idea of “Circus child Nicholas, aged 11”. And now Stephen King has the plot for his next book.
Art and culture bits
🔥 The Gunpowder Plot immersive experience opens at Tower Vaults next week. A few months ago we interviewed the writer Danny Robins (he of Battersea Poltergeist fame) and we could tell how excited he was about the project. Now The Guardian has been down to visit the team as they prepare to open a show which Robins describes as being about “a group of young activists who are being persecuted, who are seeing people that they love imprisoned, tortured, executed, and who want to change their world and want to fight against a government that feels unjust”.
🎵 The Grimeborn Festival is coming back to the Arcola Theatre for its fifteenth year. This time around there’s fourteen operas to choose from, four of them new works and eleven by female directors. Highlights include a version of Carmen in which Carmen is a supermarket check-out girl, a “radical rethinking” of H.M.S. Pinafore and Sin The Musical, which “blends jazz with contemporary pop”.
🖍️ We told you about Gallery Weekend last week, but we thought it was worth mentioning Richard Prince’s takeover of the Gagosian shop on Burlington Arcade, because even though it start this weekend, it’s going to be there until the 28th and as well as books, posters, and merchandise there’s also paintings and drawings, some of which have never been exhibited before:
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