Weekend roundup for 18 March
Featuring snacking foxes, jazz emus and a robot shark.
After last weekend’s break, we’re back with a hefty dose of headlines and hot takes from across the capital. We’ve got Formula 1 rumours and counter rumours, the Prime Minister getting up to no good in Hyde Park, a new show that’s getting five stars across the board, and exciting news from the world of Wetherspoon’s carpets.
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News bits
🪧 The Ultra Low Emission Zone is due to expand to cover the whole of London from the end of August, which means we have at least another five months of apoplectic editorials and conspiratorial hot takes to endure. This week the BBC ran a long piece trying to address some of the ‘contested claims’ around the project, such as “The legal challenge against ULEZ can succeed” and “Over 1m people outside London will be affected and there is no support for them”. Meanwhile, over at Novara Media, Diyora Shadijanova has also been assessing some of the claims made about ULEZ, although these arguments are the slightly more unhinged ones made be people like Piers Corbyn, Laurence Fox and Right Said Fred. if you need cheering up after all that (and if you don’t mind clicking on a Daily Mail link) here’s a video of Piers Corbyn accidentally reversing his car into a van, during a protest outside the St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel.
👛 Following Wednesday’s Budget, the Chief Executive of the Centre for London think tank, Nick Bowes wrote a piece for City AM on how Jeremy Hunt seems to be taking “London’s continual growth for granted,” and why “the lack of attention to the city in the Budget should be a cause of worry”.
🔎 Following a call from the Labour MP for Vauxhall in the Commons, the Culture minister Julia Lopez has agreed to look “very carefully” at whether the fatal crush at Brixton Academy at the end of last year “highlights issues that the government needs to look at itself.”
🚂 The layout of London Bridge station has been changed to try and avoid some of the overcrowding problems that have happened over the past few weeks. As this SE1 thread points out, the ‘solution’ seems to involve “closing off the main gates linking the concourse with the shops, loos and tube, a key part of the £££ station rebuild just a few years ago.”
🛤️ New figures put out by the Office of Rail and Road have shown that one in six of all rail journeys made in the UK are made on the Elizabeth line. Between October and December of last year the line carried 62.2m passengers, that’s up from 44.1m in the previous three months. There’s already been complaints about overcrowding on the Elizabeth Line, and the situation could get a lot worse if HS2 ends up not reaching all the way to Euston.
🏗️ Planners have recommended that the a 32-storey office tower at 85 Gracehurch Street in the City should be approved despite objections from Historic England. The site is on what was London’s original Roman forum, and while developers are promising the “new space will offer opportunity to celebrate the historical significance of the site” (including something called a “heritage garden”) Historic England say the plans “would harm highly significant archaeology at the heart of the Roman City”.
📃 The Times reports this week that that Met is “planning to spend £440,000 on mounting certificates and picture frames” in an effort to maintain morale by recognising officers’ “bravery in the line of duty, innovative instigations, long service, and for those retiring”.
👮 Meanwhile, an official report due to be published next Tuesday (commissioned in 2021 after the murder of Sarah Everard) will say that the Met is “riddled with deep-seated racism, sexism and homophobia and has failed to change despite numerous official reviews urging it to do so”.
🏎️ London is finally going to get an F1 race. It could all happen as early as 2026, on a 3.6 mile ‘Montreal-style’ circuit around Royal Docks with the first floor of the ExCeL Centre acting as the pit-lane and crowds looking on from ‘floating grandstands’. And if all that sounds too good to be true, then that’s because it is. Almost immediately after the plans for the track were released news outlets reported that “these plans have not been discussed with F1”and “a race anywhere in London at this stage still seems far-fetched”. Meanwhile City AM reported that F1 would only consider a London race that “involved some of the city’s great landmarks”.
💼 The ONS released its local and regional employment statistics from the 2021 Census this week. The numbers are a bit skewed because the census was taken at the end of the last Covid 19 lockdown, but there’s some interesting patterns in there around things like employment gaps for women and disabled Londoners. OnLondon has a useful breakdown.
🦈 The WasteShark is a battery-powered ‘marine robot’ which has been introduced into the canals round Canary Wharf this week to mark Global Recycling Day (which is today). The ‘shark’ can munch up to 500 kg of plastic and pollutants a day as well as collect water quality data. It would be better if it looked more like an actual shark though.
🏠 Property porn of the week is a five-bedroom, three-bathroom house that sits in a Victorian water tower in Woolwich. It’s on for £2.25m, but you will have to have a tolerance for stairs (the 3,635 sq ft of space is split over nine floors).
👑 In the first change to the Tower of London’s Crown Jewels display in over a decade, a new exhibition looking at “the origins of some of the precious objects for the first time, including the controversial Koh-i-noor diamond” will open from 26 May.
🌉 The BBC has a pretty in-depth look at the years-long, £15m ‘routine maintenance’ of Blackfriars Bridge that is going on right now.
🦊 Cute animal video of the week (depending on your attitude towards foxes):
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🐕 Also from TikTok: This person filmed Rishi Sunak letting his two-year-old Labrador retriever, Nova, off the lead in Hyde Park in an area where signs state that dogs must be kept on leads. According to the Met, “An officer, who was present at the time, spoke to a woman [Sunak’s wife] and reminded her of the rules”. No further action was taken.
Food and drink bits
😢 On Friday afternoon, the owners of the influential Hackney restaurants P. Franco and Bright, and the shop Noble Fine Liquor, announced via an Instagram post that they have “closed the doors” at all three sites “for the final time.” They didn’t go into detail about the reasons behind the closure, just that “there are many complex ins-and-outs that have resulted in the position that we’re in [and] our focus at this stage is to try to do right by our staff and suppliers whilst we try to navigate our way down a path we never thought we’d have to walk.”
🍺 We know you’ve been waiting to hear what design will feature on the carpet of the ‘landmark’ new Wetherspoons pub that’s opening soon in Greenwich. Well, thanks to The Drinks Business website we can tell you that the £3 million Stargazer pub will have a “bespoke carpet, fitted throughout the pub” that will “draw inspiration from orbiting stars and planets and the equipment used by astrologers and astronomers.” Quick, someone let Kit Caless know.
🍖 The words ‘innovation’ and ‘döner’ aren’t natural bedfellows, but if you go to Baker Street later this month you should find a brand new ‘innovation kitchen’ from German street food concept Döner Shack. The first London outpost for the chain will not only house “a state-of-the-art kitchen with robotic kebab cutters” but also “a custom-designed travelator that will transport the food to customers.”
🌯 In other ‘meat in bread’ news, street-food stall Souvlaki Street (most recently found at Pop Brixton) is opening its first bricks-and-mortar restaurant on North Cross Road in East Dulwich. If you go, try the loaded fries and a bottle of the Loux Greek Cola.
🥚 Highbury wine shop Top Cuvée is hosting its Clissold Park egg hunt again this Easter Sunday. There’s more than chocolate on offer if you take part, with goody bags packed with stuff from places like Yard Sale, Patty & Bun, and Dusty Knuckle, plus a prize draw to win an Ooni pizza oven. Sign up here.
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