Weekend roundup for 15 April
Featuring snotty gruel, sticky toffee and smeared memoirs
Hello and welcome to the weekend.
If you’re not a paying subscriber then you won’t have received Wednesday’s issue, which featured the owner of the marvellous BOOKS in Peckham answering our Where Do You Go? Q&A. There’s a generous paywall on there to make up for our absence over the bank holiday, if you want to go take a look:
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News bits
🧑⚖️ The ULEZ row reached its inevitable nadir this week after the Conservative-led councils of Hillingdon, Bexley, Bromley and Harrow (along with Surrey county council) were granted permission to challenge the expansion in the high court, “although only two of the five grounds they presented were deemed ‘arguable, and only in part’”.
🚙 The mayor gave a lengthy (paywalled) interview with the FT at the start of the week, in which it he stated pretty clearly that “he is not backing down on his plan to extend the ULEZ”. But that didn’t stop LBC running an article with the headline Sadiq Khan considers scrapping controversial scheme and replacing it with ‘pay-as-you-drive’ system (what he actually said was “Road use charging is interesting… The problem is the technology’s quite a long way off”).
🗳 Meanwhile “Tory mayoral hopeful” Samuel Kasumu spoke to The Telegraph this week, and the paper lapped up his idea to give outer London boroughs “an in/out referendum on whether to stay in” the ULEZ. Expect to hear the phrase ‘take back control of your roads’ used a lot in the coming months.
🚨 The president of the National Association of Legally Qualified Chairs (which oversees the majority of police tribunals) told the BBC this week that Met Commissioner Mark Rowley’s claims that “sacked police officers were being reinstated to their forces by lawyers” were “slightly misleading, whether deliberately or otherwise.”.
🎟 On Monday, the i reported that “a source” had told them the mayor was considering reclassifying Fridays as ‘off-peak’ as part of a “shake-up of ticketing in London”. But a TfL spokesman said that “there were no immediate plans to change the timing of off-peak tickets”.
📱 The London stat of the week was definitely the one put out by the BBC, which revealed there were “91,000 reports of phone theft in London in 2022, an average of 248 a day”. That’s one every six minutes. The inevitable conclusion is that, in a hundred years no one in London will own a phone anymore; a fate made all the more probable by the accompanying stat which shows that “just two per cent of these reported thefts concluded with the recovery of a device.” To be honest we’re surprised the number is that high.
💇A couple of weeks ago, Jerelle Jules applied for a job at The Ritz as a “dining reservations supervisor” and was sent the hotel’s ‘grooming policy’ before his final interview. It included the rule that staff should not have “unusual hairstyles such as spiky or Afro-style”. After he pulled out of the interview the Ritz told Jules that “a black hair stylist from the hotel had approved the policy phrasing”.
🔉 Coco Khan has a piece in The Guardian this week about how noise pollution “affects poorer people disproportionately, blighting lives in cheaply built homes”. She points out that “London hasn’t updated its noise pollution strategy since 2004, and lags seriously behind Paris and Barcelona, which have already rolled out sound monitoring.” (Khan also happens to live very near to where they’re planning to build the MSG Sphere.)
🚴 Over at OnLondon, Dave Hill has produced a very long and thorough analysis of London’s cycling habits over the years, to try and answer the question, “Is the capital becoming a true cycling city or has a lifestyle choice of the affluent been subsidised at others’ expense?”.
🏙 We missed this the other week, but the Channel 4 building on Horseferry Road has been given a Grade II listing by Historic England. According to the society, the building (which was designed by Richard Rogers 29 years ago) “demonstrates many of the High-Tech movement’s key principles, including the separation of services from the spaces served, the use of modular, prefabricated elements and a technological aesthetic”.
👑 In what must be the most expensive episode of ‘I’m rich, you’re poor’ ever, the Crown Jewels are going to be projected on to the Tower of London in “an immersive musical and visual show” that will form part of the coronation celebrations.
🐞 Cute animal story of the week: Thameslink has constructed a tiny railway station for bugs at Blackfriars. The floral station is “part of a living art installation which is made up of seasonal plants and flowers to promote biodiversity”.
Food and drink bits
🐌 Back in February, the legendary L'Escargot on Greek Street suddenly closed its doors. The hope was that this was just a temporary thing, and that “positive discussions” with the landlords would allow it to open within a few weeks. Well, it’s taken a bit longer than that, but this week the restaurant updated its website to say that they would be reopening on May 10.
🖼 When it reopens in June, the National Portrait Gallery will contain a new restaurant from Richard Corrigan (which we’re not all that excited about to be honest - we’ve had some crappy experiences in Corrigan restaurants and so have some of his staff ). Slightly more exciting though is the news that, at night, the ground floor cafe “will transform into a bar, open late into the evenings with cocktails and small plates accessible via a hidden entrance off Charing Cross Road”.
🎨 On a related note: The Critic has a nice article on the return of art in restaurants (now that we’re finally moving away from the ubiquitous ‘wooden tables and brick walls’ aesthetic). The article includes Mount St. Restaurant in Mayfair (which is home to an original Matisse), Clerkenwell’s Sessions Arts Club, The Gallery at Sketch and Bellamy’s on Bruton Place.
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