Weekend roundup for 15 July
Featuring geothermal boreholes, conspiratorial jesters and tiny martinis
Welcome to your weekly roundup of all the London news, gossip and rumour from the past seven days. In today’s issue we’ve got the latest on July’s Tube strikes, which areas are topping the ‘healthy streets’ league table, the Islington restaurant that’s just raised the largest crowdfund ever, and the reviews are in for that new Mark Rylance play
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News bits
🚇 The RMT strikes planned for the end of this month were already due to “shut down the London Underground” according to Mick Lynch, but now that the drivers of the ASLEF union have said they’ll also walk out on Wednesday 26th and Friday 28th, it looks like getting anywhere in London from Sunday 23rd is going to be pretty much impossible.
🏠 Sadiq Khan has put an additional £20.2m into his Life off the Streets Programme, which is designed to tackle homelessness. Three-quarters of that is going towards the No Second Night Out service which “supports people who are seen sleeping rough for the first time”. At the end of last month GLA data showed that there were 1,700 more people on the streets than last year – a 21% rise.
🚲 A new survey from the City of London Corporation has shown that, in 2022, “cycles made up a greater proportion of traffic than cars” in the Square Mile. Compared to pre-pandemic 2019 there was a 20% decrease in motor vehicles and a a 2% increase in bikes.
😶🌫️ In related news, the 2023 Healthy Streets scorecard has been published and it has the City, Islington and Hackney at the top of the list, while Hillingdon, Bexley and Havering score the worst (Bexley and Hillingdon are two of the boroughs involved in the legal challenge against the ULEZ expansion).
👮 Meanwhile, new data from TfL has shown that crime on the Tube has gone up by almost 40% above pre-Covid levels. There were a total of 10,420 crimes recorded on the Underground between last December and May, fuelled by a four-fold increase in robbery, and a 66% rise in thefts. Fare dodging has also hit record highs, with TfL losing £130m and one in 25 passengers not paying to travel.
🚰 During an environment committee meeting about the resilience of London’s water supply on Tuesday, the chief executive of River Action warned that many of the chalk streams that feed the water supply to north London are permanently dry and London could face water rationing “imminently”. Thames Water said it had no plans to ration usage.
🛣 As the boring has almost been completed on the Silvertown Tunnel (“London's first road tunnel in over 30 years”) the BBC has taken a look at the “very controversial” scheme, which campaigners say will “increase carbon emissions and worsen air quality”.
🚂 Waterloo station turned 175 years old this week. To celebrate, Ian Visits has been for a look at the “vast hidden world underneath the station” including one room that used to contain a boxing ring, and another that once held “a rifle range for railway workers”.
🔥 The Salisbury Square Development in the Square Mile, has completed the first of 60 geothermal boreholes which run 240 metres deep (three-quarters of the height of the Shard). The geothermal borehole system will form part of a “closed-loop cooling and heating system” that will provide “an energy-efficient way to heat and cool the development using all-electric solutions powered by renewable sources”.
🛌 Following the story of the American tourist who found out that his AirBnB was just “a large-ish bathroom that the host put a bed in” (we’re linking to an LBC article because the tourist has since locked down his Twitter account), City AM has compiled ‘Five Rightmove ads that show how screwed the London rental market is’…Which is hilarious, until you realise that people will pay for these places because they are desperate.
👀 Did you see the headlines last week about Maybelline putting eyelashes on London Tube trains? You wouldn’t have seen the made-up trains themselves, because it turns out they didn’t actually exist.
Food and drink bits
🤴 The big news in the restaurant world this week was the return of Jeremy King, one half of the Corbin & King Group, which was behind legendary restaurants like the Wolseley and Brasserie Zedel. At the start of this week King put out an announcement saying he is going to be opening a restaurant called The Park next spring. The name comes from the fact that it will be located in the new Park Modern building near Kensington Palace Gardens, and we’re told it will be in the ‘grand cafés and brasseries’ style that King has made his name with.
🌮 Despite what you might have seen on Ted Lasso, it’s not easy for footballers to open successful restaurants in London. But that hasn’t stopped Chelsea’s Hakim Ziyech opening a taco restaurant in Shoreditch at the end of this month. Called Taco Taco, (“Food so nice we named it twice!”) this is an ‘intimate’, first-come-first-served type of place that looks like the very antithesis of the cliche premiership star bling palace. Although the tacos are not exactly traditional, with ‘roasted banana, sweet mascarpone and nutella’ on the menu alongside a ‘scrambled egg, bacon and hash brown’ option.
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