Weekend roundup for 17 April

Includes PC Penny Lancaster, pricey sandwich clobber, and lit bridges.

Your regular roundup of London bits and pieces to see you through the weekend.

📹 The Met doesn’t want you posting videos of them doing stupid stuff on social media.

The Metropolitan Police Federation has called on the government to stop the public sharing videos of their officers on social media. “Officers shouldn’t be subjected to this while simply doing their job,” said the leader of the London police union. To which anyone who has watched the news in the last few years replies: “You’re having a laugh aren’t you?”

👮 Be careful out there though, Penny Lancaster has the power to arrest you now.

Although the news headlines say the model and wife of Rod Stewart is a “fully qualified police officer,” Penny is not about to join AC-12 or anything. She has however “completed the course to become a Special Constable volunteer police officer,” which involved her having “to do this massive vetting form going through all personal details of myself.” What this means of course, is that we can’t rule out the possibility Penny is a neo-Nazi terrorist.

📢 That guy with the ‘Kill Cops’ banner at the Kill The Bill protests is not an undercover cop. He’s a journalist.

Reuters have done a pretty thorough fact check of the theory that the man holding the banner at the protests on April 3 was an undercover Met police officer. Turns out the banner was sometimes positioned to say ‘Cops Kill’ and that the man in question is journalist Barrett Brown who was part of the Anonymous group and previously “served five years in federal prison for transmitting threats, aiding hackers and obstructing authorities.”

🗳 Why Boris can’t help having a dig at Sadiq

The Guardian has an idea why Boris Johnson is set to take the “Conservative electoral humbling in London very personally.” In short: “He feels it’s his turf.” Which makes Johnson sound like Phil Mitchell, despite the fact he’s more likely to get confused for Peggy Mitchell.

🚌 Bye Bye Routemaster

The last remaining Routemaster route (the number 15 heritage service from Poplar to Charing Cross) has been officially retired due to “falling ridership … and environmental and accessibility limitations.”

🛩️ Hello six hour queues at Heathrow

“If you’re made to queue for two or three hours, it’s not something you want to do,” Heathrow’s ‘Chief Solution Officer’ has insightfully informed the Commons Transport Select Committee. Apparently the situation at Arrivals is becoming “untenable,” as wait times in recent days have typically been “well in excess of two hours and up to six hours” thanks to coronavirus checks.

🖼️ Synchronised Soho gallery opening

33 art galleries across Soho, Fitzrovia, St James’s and Marylebone will be participating, in a synchronised late night opening on Friday 23rd April. Click the link for a list of all the places that are participating.

🌉 Insert ‘bridges are lit’ joke here

Illuminated River, the project to “transform the lighting of London’s Thames bridges for a minimum of 10 years” has reached a few new sites. Blackfriars, Westminster, Waterloo, Golden Jubilee and Lambeth bridges all get switched on this month. The Guardian has a great write up on the project, and Reddit user LondonViewpoints took a nice timelapse of Westminster Bridge doing its thing.

Food and drink news buffet

🛒 After opening ‘just walk out’ stores in Ealing and Wembley Park, Amazon Fresh has announced the next one will be opening “close to White City tube station”.

🐟 Posh Notting Hill fish & chip shop Geales has been forced to close after 82 years. Worth clicking the link for the photo of Dustin Hoffman. You can’t beat a good celeb restaurant photo can you?

🔥 Cue Point have opened a drive through (thru?) barbecue (barbeque?) this week at Chiswick Pavilion. You can pre-order and book your slot in advance over on their site.

⛴️ The tweet below shows a pair of floating pavilions arriving at Wood Wharf. Apparently one of them is due to house a restaurant, bar and gin distillery by the end of the year.

PA Media @PA

Two floating pavilions have arrived in London's Canary Wharf

🍝 Italian restaurant group Cin Cin have had a pretty good lockdown, serving up handmade pasta and small plates to the people of Brighton & Hove. So good that they’re due to open a site in Fitzrovia as early as next month.

🍇 Apparently wine and charcuterie is the thing to do right now. Next month, ‘sustainable viticulture’ bar The Cellar will open in Kings Cross, featuring an “ever-changing list of low intervention wines,” alongside nibbles from, “the likes of Neal’s Yard Dairy, Saltpig Charcuterie and Brindisa”.

🍷 And what was the Urban Tea Rooms on Kingly Street is set to become Bar Crispin; a ‘natural wine bar’ from the people behind Spitalfields’ Crispin restaurant.

🏏 Fulham’s ‘cricket-based concept bar’ Sixes (yeah, we can’t believe we just wrote those words either) did a quick open-and-shut-again job between lockdowns last year. But apparently the owners are so confident that the gastropub vibe mixed with “cricket simulators styled as batting nets” is going to take off that they are opening another site in Fitzrovia, next month.

🥪 We like Max’s Sandwich Shop in Crouch End. We even bought their book. But we won’t be buying the £250 Comme des Garçons T-Shirt that features the front page of the book. Because that’s insane.

🍛 The India Club restaurant continues to fight the eviction notice from their landlord (who wants to turn it into a hotel) and says they are ‘optimsitic’ they will reopen in May.

🥦 Alexis Gauthier slowly took his Soho restaurant from ‘foie gras’ to ‘fully vegan’ and now he’s opening a vegan cafe at Fenwick’s on Bond Street. He tell the Telegraph that he understands why some “long-standing customers, who love traditional French food, will feel let down”.

🍺 One of our favourite new magazines, The Fence, asked their Twitter followers for their ‘most mediocre London pubs’ nominations and then compiled the replies. We particularly like the entry for The Trinity Arms in Brixton: “Chris Morris is a regular, but everyone else there is a prick.”

Tweet of the week

Mike Townsend @townsendyesmate

there's too many Claphams on the northern line I'm sorry. why am I arriving in Clapham three times?? what sort of purgatory have I been trapped in? might as well be called the Clapham line. pathetic. ive had enough. but otherwise I wish it all the best.