Weekend roundup for 17 December

Featuring pee-proofing, flaccid pantos and fresh pasta

A swimmer at Charlton Lido on Tuesday. Photo by Yui Mok/PA Images via Getty Images.

Here it is, your last Weekend Roundup of 2022. There’ll still be a LiB in your inbox on Monday and Wednesday (if you’re a paying subscriber) next week, but then we’ll be on our Christmas break until January 4.

There should be enough in this week’s roundup to tide you over though. We’ve got the mayor being called ‘childish’ and ‘shoddy’, the London neighbourhood that’s the ‘coolest in the UK’, central London’s first new public space in ten years, an art gallery that’s now a pub, a fight over a marquee, and an 83-year-old man in lingerie.

Don’t forget, if you take out an annual subscription before the end of the year then we’ll donate half of the money to the charity CRISIS (a huge ‘thank you’ to everyone who has already taken us up on that offer):

If you’re already a paying subscriber then thank you very much for supporting London in Bits. May your pudding be extra figgy and your tidings be both comfy and joyful.

News bits

🚨The Met has said that the incident on Thursday night at Brixton Academy which left four people critically ill in hospital, will be examined by specialist officers as part of an investigation “which will be as thorough and as forensic as necessary”. Scotland Yard said that the force “will view all material, including body-worn video footage from the officers at the scene”.

🚒 The London Fire Brigade has been put into special measures by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (the same watchdog that put the Met into special measures back in the summer). The “enhanced level of monitoring” has been introduced following the “unacceptable behaviour within the brigade, including discrimination and bullying,” which was revealed by an independent review last month.

🚓 At a Commons Home Affairs Committee meeting on Wednesday, Diane Abbott told Met commissioner, Mark Rowley that “his officers were stopping and searching the black community disproportionately” and also called for him to scrap the Gangs Violence Matrix (the Met’s “database of gang members”). In response Rowley said that the idea behind putting “more stop and search in those areas,” is to protect young black men from being murdered and that the GVM is a way of targeting the most dangerous offenders and spotting “the men of violence”.

🚇 Maintenance and safety staff working on the Elizabeth line have voted for strike action. The staff (who are members of the Prospect Union) rejected an offer of a 4% pay rise from Rail for London Infrastructure (which is a wholly owned subsidiary of TfL). The date and duration of the strike is yet to be decided.

💷 Michael Gove has “agreed to allow” Sadiq Khan to add £20 to benchmark Band D council tax bills from next April “to help TfL balance its day-to-day budget,” but he also managed to get a dig in at the mayor in the process. The Levelling Up Secretary said that it was “disappointing that London taxpayers are having to foot the bill for the GLA’s poor governance and decision-making”. Meanwhile new figures out of City Hall this week show that “London has received £76 per person from a series of Levelling Up initiatives worth billions of pounds, which is well below the England average of £384 per person.”

🚙 It was a bit of a Khan pile-on this week. During PMQs on Wednesday Rishi Sunak said that he found it “disappointing the mayor, backed by the leader of the opposition, is choosing not to listen to the public” about whether the ULEZ should be expanded, and that he “would urge the mayor to be on the side of hard working Londoners.”

👮 On Tuesday the mayor was back at City Hall to answer questions about Cressida Dick’s departure. During the session, the briefing about Dick’s resignation released by Khan’s press team in September was described as “amateurish, shoddy and childish”, and the mayor was stopped when he tried to “read out horrific messages of racism and sexism” from Met officers.

🏠 Average London house prices dropped by about £16,000 in the last month, as the cost of living crisis and escalating mortgage rates made buyers more hesitant. The average price of a London home is now £666,500.

🧗 Three animal rights protestors were arrested on Thursday morning after they scaled the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs head office building on Marsham Street.

💦 Westminster City council has painted some walls in Soho with a water-repellent layer designed to stop people pissing on them. Apparently, “outdoor urination is on the rise post-Covid” but if anyone tries it on these walls then they will get “soaked” in their own urine, according to the council.

🥇 Walthamstow has been voted the “coolest neighbourhood” in the UK by the (paywalled) Telegraph, thanks to its “village square with resident cellist in summer and carols around the tree at Christmas, its Farrow & Ball-painted ‘Posh Spar’, independent restaurants and boutiques” (confirming that The Telegraph’s idea of ‘cool’ is exactly what you’d think it might be).

🪨 The Guardian reported this week on the teenagers who have helped restore the remnants of a 19th-century hospital building in Stratford, and how “the police often came to break up” what they assumed were fights between a bunch of kids wielding stonemasons’ tools.

🌳 The work to pedestrianise part of The Strand has finally been completed, meaning that central London has got its first new public space in a decade. The 70-metre-long area in front of Somerset House, St Clement Danes church and King’s College is now traffic free and filled with benches, landscaping and trees.

⛄ On Monday night, delayed passengers at West Ham station decided to pass the time with a snowball fight:

🛣️ In our May 14th issue our Long Read of the Week was this article from Works in Progress on London’s lost ringways. Now the Guardian have decided to get in on the act with a longish feature on London’s lost mega-motorway.

🕵 If you haven’t read the FT’s feature on the secret lives of MI6’s top female spies yet, then you should bookmark it for when you have a bit of time over Christmas. It’s excellent.

😧 Do not click this if you’re going to Winter Wonderland anytime soon (or maybe do!).

Art and culture bits

🥚 The only theatre reviews worth rounding up this week are those for Mother Goose with Ian McKellen at the Duke of York’s Theatre. WhatsOnStage awards the panto four stars, and most of them seem to be for the 83-year-old Sir Ian whose “performance is a privilege to enjoy” whether he’s “fronting a tap number with faux exhaustion or arriving in lingerie to play a surprisingly racy boudoir scene.” The Telegraph goes one better with the full five stars, calling Gandalf’s performance “bravura” and “a love-letter to what counts”. It’s just Arifa ‘Scrooge’ Akbar in The Guardian who isn’t thrilled by whole thing. She gives Mother Goose two measly stars, calling the production “ill-put together and strained in its humour” with a “flaccid” and political references that “not only lack bite but seem forgotten halfway through”.

🖼️ Tate Britain has announced that it is reopening its restaurant and that the mural entitled The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats will still be on its walls. However, the mural (which contains “derogatory and distressing imagery of a Black child being kidnapped from his mother and enslaved, and caricatures of Chinese figures”) will be accompanied by a new artwork by British artist Keith Piper “that responds to its controversy”.

🍺 Two Mayfair art galleries have been turned into a “front room of a terraced house and a typical northern pub” to give visitors “a unique insight” into the life and work of the painter Eric Tucker. The Alon Zakaim Fine Art and Connaught Brow galleries will be showing forty-six of Tucker’s Lowry-esque paintings until 23 December, with the Alon Zakaim becoming a life-size recreation of Tucker’s front room studio; and the Connaught Brown becoming a pub “complete with oak-panelled bar” and Tucker’s Palette, “an extra strong bitter brewed in honour of the artist by Twisted Wheel Brew Company.”