Weekend roundup for 15 October
Featuring wokery, hippos and Sporty Spice
The Weekend Roundup this week contains around 50 different items and 80 separate links. Each one of those things has been hand selected by us because we think it’s worth knowing. There’s no algorithm at work. No artificial intelligence. Just humans reading stuff then typing things.
To get all that in your inbox each week costs just £5 a month (or £50 a year), and for that you also get our mid-week issue and access to the full archive of paywalled back issues (like this week’s instalment of our Electric Theatre series, in which Steve Kilpatrick takes on swimming Daleks):
You can get a week’s free trial here if you want to see what you’re signing up for:
If you’re not ready to become a paying subscriber just yet then you can still support LiB by clicking the heart at the top of this email. It really helps more people to discover the newsletter.
If you are already a paying subscriber then thank you very much for supporting London in Bits. When the Daleks finally invade, you and your family will be saved in recognition of your loyalty.
News bits
👮♂️ If you are a paying subscriber then you’ll be getting next Wednesday’s issue, which contains an interview with Tom Harper about his new book Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police. We’re telling you that because this week the Met revealed that its Domestic and Sexual Offences unit (which was set up in January to investigate allegations against Met officers) was looking into 625 reports of misconduct, “ranging from ‘inappropriate behaviour’ to criminal offences”. The BBC has a long and fascinating look into what it’s like to work at the Daso unit, which it describes as like “AC-12 in the BBC drama Line of Duty, but focusing instead on abusive cops, not ‘bent cops’”.
🚓 The Met’s new commissioner, Mark Rowley has been busy this week. As well as telling the London Assembly’s police and crime committee that the force hasn’t “been as robust and determined about maintaining high standards as we should have been,” he also announced the Met is building a “city-wide data picture” to begin “forecasting and interdicting men who will commit violent crimes against women or girls, based on previous behaviour as statistically-tested risk factors.” What could go wrong?
🚨 In totally unrelated news: the Met has decided it is going to stop recording the ethnicity of drivers that they stop. According to documents obtained by Liberty Investigates (shared with the Guardian) the results of a Met pilot scheme showed “some disproportionality,” with Black drivers 56% more likely to be stopped than white British people.
🍬 Meanwhile the Met has been ‘cracking down’ on Oxford Street’s sweet shops, with a raid that seized around £200,000 worth of counterfeit products. If this report is to be believed the “Met officers said ‘playtime’s over’ as they seized the fake goods”. Seriously?
🚗 After last week’s ‘partial leak’ of TfL’s consultation on the ULEZ expansion (which seemed to show that two-thirds of respondents were in the ‘against’ camp) a new poll by YouGov (so, an actual survey this time) shows that “a majority of Londoners, 51 per cent, believe the planned expansion should go ahead, against 27 per cent who do not.”
😶🌫️ If you really want to dig into the issues surrounding London’s traffic pollution problems and the potential solutions, Bloomberg has a long and detailed examination headlined London’s Secret Fix for Air Pollution: Making Drivers Pay Up.
🌳 In related news, The Royal Parks charity announced on Tuesday that the traffic reduction measures introduced in Richmond, Bushy and Greenwich parks during lockdown have been made permanent. For details of which restrictions are sticking around there’s more here.
🚵♂️ At the same time, TfL announced that their walking and cycling schemes are restarting after being paused for the pandemic. Those projects include the eastern and western extensions of the C9 cycleway through Chiswick, a new cycle route linking Wembley and Wood Lane and more than 17 miles of roads in Camden, Islington, Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Haringey that will become 20mph by March 2023.
🙊 According to papers like the Telegraph and the Express, TfL has produced a list of “words staff shouldn’t use” (such as ‘collision’ or ‘manned’) in a fresh example of “wokery gone mad”. TfL did nothing of the sort, of course. What they did was produce an editorial style guide for those working on their digital properties, which “indicates which words should be favoured or avoided”. As for Tory MP Nigel Mills, telling the Sun that “TfL should focus on providing the best network it can” and “woke culture in this country is out of control,” you should know that Nigel is the guy the tabloids call whenever they want an MP to say that woke culture is out of control (whether the story is about university free speech, language in cricket, language in universities, or, erm, Argos delivery men).
🤖 Talking of TfL and ‘wastes of time’: City Hall has finally ruled out the idea of ‘driverless trains’ on the Tube. You might remember that TfL was forced to “develop the evidence required to make a strong case for investment in driverless trains” as part of the long-term funding deal. But on Tuesday TfL commissioner Andy Byford told the London Assembly “I don’t see any prospect of that happening in the short and medium term. For the cost and the time involved, a far better use of funds is to finish the job off and get the remaining lines properly re-signalled onto modern moving block signalling before you even begin to go down the road of driverless trains.” For more on why driverless trains are a daft fantasy, see our issue from March.
🍏 At the end of last week the ‘Save Nour’ Twitter account shared an email from Brixton market landlord, Hondo Enterprises to Phil’s Fruit and Veg stall, that threatened to start “vacant possession proceedings” this Monday. It looks like the move worked, as Monday came and went without any eviction. Save Nour have since said that “while Phil’s position in the Market is not yet permanently secure, our collective support behind him has greatly improved his position!”.
🏠 New Statesman would like you to know that London’s housing crisis is worsening, as “the number of people looking for somewhere to live in London far outstrips the number of people advertising rooms to rent.” Yes, thanks New Statesman, we are aware!
💰 Meanwhile, the chairman and chief executive of Ballymore (yep, the ones who built Embassy Gardens aka ‘the one with the sky pool’) has given an interview in which he laments the cost of property for ‘ordinary people’. “A nurse can’t afford a house. You just can’t afford to raise your family,” says the multi-millionaire developer, “I mean, it’s outrageous. Two people on £50,000… on a decent salary, they still can’t afford a house.”
🏚️ Related: The New Horizon Youth Centre charity released research this week that says, “Enough young Londoners to fill a double decker bus are becoming homeless every day,” with 27,000 young people becoming homeless in London every year.
🥇 Time Out is obsessed with ranking stuff. Streets, cities, neighbourhoods… They’ll be ranking paving stones next. The latest ‘global poll’ is The 51 coolest neighbourhoods in the world (why they don’t just round it down to 50, we have no idea), so we are duty bound to tell you that the highest ranking London ‘neighbourhood’ is Walthamstow, which comes in at number 17 (“there’s loads to do, tons of nice people call it home, and it’s an actual creative hub, a place where stuff gets made”).
🏰 Meanwhile, the FT (paywall alert) asks What is a north London town house, anyway?
🤱 A 29-year-old graphic communication design student at Central Saint Martins has been told by the school that she won’t be allowed to bring her newborn baby to campus and breastfeed her during lectures. Jasmijn Toffano has submitted a formal complaint and begun a campaign to force the university to change its policy.
🏭 Peter Watts (author of Up In Smoke: The Failed Dreams Of Battersea Power Station) was on the radio this week talking about the Power Station’s redevelopment. The interview starts at around 1h 50m.
🧨 There will be an ‘in-person New Year’s Eve fireworks display’ on the banks of the Thames this year… Probably.
Art and culture bits
🎨 There are still two days of ‘Frieze week’ left, so there’s a lot of art to see in London right now (and most of it will stick around beyond this week). If you don’t know where to start, The Art Newspaper has Eight exhibitions to see during London's Frieze Week, Artnet has The 10 must-see London gallery shows during Frieze week, and the Times (paywall alert) has 10 things to see at Frieze London.
🌀 One name that’s not on any of those lists, but who is right now in the middle of her first solo UK exhibition, is Nokukhanya Langa. Langa’s “never-ending hypnotic multi-coloured spirals and infinite gradients” are on display at Saatchi Yates gallery in Mayfair until mid-November, but if you can’t get down there you can also see her work in the windows of Burlington Arcade, at 32 Connaught Street, 11 St John’s Wood High Street, and inside Langan’s brasserie.
🌍 And if you’re out and about looking for that, then you might as well have a look at one of the four sculpture trails that have been created across London as part of The World Reimagined project (an art education project designed to transform understanding of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans). Each sculpture is a unique ‘globe’ designed by a different artist, and they’ll be there until the end of Black History Month.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to London in Bits to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.