Weekend roundup for 18 December

Includes river rewiggling, massive Morphs and Rubik’s cube cake.

A quick note on our Christmas and new year schedule. There’ll be no Weekend Roundup next Saturday or on January 1, but there will be an issue on Wednesday 29. We’ll be back to normal on January 5.

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News bits

🚇 There’s another tube strike this weekend but this time it’s a bit worse than previous weeks. As well as the Central and Victoria line Night Tubes being affected, the daytime services today (Saturday) are also likely to be affected, with “little or no service in places” on the Central, Jubilee, Northern, Piccadilly and Victoria Lines.

👛 As we write this the latest news on the TfL funding debacle is that the mayor has a “plan to raise council tax in London by around £20 a year” in order to pay for the service. Sadiq says he is being “forced down this route” because the Government is “refusing to properly fund” public transport in London. It also looks like there will be a 5% fare rise in January, a ‘Heathrow premium’ will be introduced and the threshold for free travel for those aged 60 and older will increase by six months each year for 12 years.

🧑‍🎄 TfL are also taking money from Amazon and Mariah Carey now. Every little helps we guess.

⛔ TfL have confirmed permanent changes to the Congestion Charge to “help prevent car use from rising above pre-pandemic levels”. From February 21, there will be no charges in the evenings after 6pm, whilst at weekends and on Bank Holidays it will operate from 12 midday to 6pm.

💉 In the middle of the week it was reported that around a third of Londoners are not yet vaccinated, and “the 14 areas with the country’s lowest vaccination rates are all London boroughs.”

🌉 Remember when the Millennium Bridge opened and it swayed so much they had to close it again and fix it (actually they “retrofitted 37 viscous fluid dampers” to “mitigate the oscillation”)? Well a new study has been done by Nature Communications, which says that the original reason for the swaying (“a phenomenon called synchronous lateral excitation ­– when the people on the bridge subconsciously start to walk in sync”) was wrong and the actual reason was “pedestrians trying not to fall over”. More information here or you could settle down with a glass of sherry and a mince pie and read Emergence of the London Millennium Bridge instability without synchronisation in its entirety.

🛍️ Amazon has opened three more of its Amazon Fresh Surveillance Stores (not the actual name) in London. As well as the Ealing store there are now ‘Just Walk Out’ shops in Euston, Wandsworth and Chingford.

🐛 This week the mayor released £600,000 in funding for his ambitious ‘rewilding’ project that will include “making the royal parks wilder and encouraging people to plant green rooftops.” Ben ‘brother of Zac’ Goldsmith, who is working on the project with the mayor, said the plans would involve “more wild spaces, more scrub, river rewiggling and species reintroductions”. Here’s the definition of rewiggling in case (like us) you thought Ben had just made that up.

🌼 In related news the property developer which owns Grosvenor Square has applied for planning permission to transform the square into an ‘urban garden’ complete with “a shaded garden, a central open garden, flowering entryways, waterfall canopies and wetlands.”

🏊 Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water… Here comes some more ‘sky pool’ news. Apparently residents of the Embassy Gardens development are upset that their floating swimming pool “is too cold to be used in winter, despite heating costs of £450 a day.” There are now calls for the pool to be closed during the colder months to save money and energy.

🏗️ Property company Derwent London is thought to have paid “just over £200 million” for the right to buy the 2.5-acre site of Moorfields Eye Hospital when it moves in five years’ time. Unsurprisingly the developer is looking to build “a mixture of office, retail and hospitality space.”

❤️ Famous house up for sale alert! Okay, this house is actually next door to somewhere which is mildly recognisable, but you have to give the seller full marks for timing. Originally bought in 2002 for £750,000, this “upscale 1,865-square-foot home” on a mews in Notting Hill is next door to the house where Andrew Lincoln does the cue cards thing in Love Actually. Asking price today? £3.25 million.

🚴 The latest TfL Transport In London Report shows that there’s been a huge increase in the proportion of journeys made on foot and cycle. So on that note, a bit of cycle lane news: The westbound lane on Westminster Bridge has opened, and work has started on “a protected two-way cycle track on the north side of the Hammersmith gyratory”.

🐈 It’s almost as if this cat knew it was going to be a shitty news week and thought we all deserved a distraction.

🌊 YouTuber Tom Scott has been to take a look at how the Thames Barrier works (and why it must never EVER fail):

Art and culture bits

👯 The big West End opening this week was Cabaret, Starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley. The reviews are in and they’re good. Four stars from the Guardian (“a blinder of a show”) five from the Telegraph (“dig like your life depended on it into your pockets, and Gehen, allez, go”) and another full house from the Independent (“astonishing”).