Weekend roundup for 19 November

Featuring swingers, strippers and psychedelic cat leggings

Photo by James Colomina.

Welcome once more to your regular digest of London rumours, celebrations, cancellations, openings, closures, pop ups and put downs.

If you’re a fully paid-up member of the LiB community then you’ll get all the news headlines and arts and culture updates, plus the latest on the food scene (and a ‘long read of the week’ to keep you going through the weekend).

If you’re not a subscriber and you’d like to get full access to the roundup as well as our archive of back issues, then you can sign up for a free trial here:

If you’re already a paying subscriber then thank you very much for supporting London in Bits. Knowing you’re there is like remembering you packed an umbrella just as it starts to tip it down.

News bits

🏠 The mayor is planning to hold an emergency summit on the rental crisis. The summit will “bring together private renters, charities, advocacy groups and politicians” to “stand up for renters in our city and find common ground on the action that needs to be taken to support them through the cost-of-living crisis, pay their rent and keep their homes.” Rents in inner London reached a new record high of £2,863pcm in October.

🗳 After the rumours of Boris Johnson becoming editor of the Evening Standard, now we’ve got rumours of Jeremy Corbyn running for mayor of London. Even though he wouldn’t be able to stand as a Labour candidate, Corbyn could ‘do a Ken Livingstone’ and stand as an independent.

👮 Talking of mayors, this week Sadiq was at the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee to answer questions over the resignation of Cressida Dick. At the committee the mayor said the investigation into the commissioner’s departure was “biased” and “ignored facts”. The man who wrote the report, Tom Winsor, then reminded Sadiq that he’d been a Labour member “on and off for 30 years”.

🚨 New analysis of police data by London’s Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) has shown that undiagnosed mental health issues, drugs and social media usage are some of the biggest factors driving homicides in London.

🚲 The London Cycling Campaign has named the most dangerous junction systems in London. They are in King’s Cross, the Shoreditch Triangle and Holborn. This week, the LCC held an event at the House of Commons on Wednesday where they announced plans to publish “a full list of more than 20 dangerous junctions via an interactive map covering all of London in early 2023”.

🌳 The environmental group The Campaign to Protect Rural England, has said it will fight the planned construction of the £5.3bn data centre complex on green belt land in Havering. The group said it is “astonished and appalled the council has agreed to sink valuable time into developing a proposal which will cause massive environmental damage and is highly unlikely to gain permission.”

🍭 The number of ‘candy shops’ on Oxford Street has apparently dropped by a third since Westminster council started their anti-candy crusade a few months ago. At the start of this week the council said that the number of sweet and souvenir shops had gone from 30 to 21 and they had managed to collect £250,000 in business rates arrears. No word yet on who is taking over the spaces… If anyone.

🚂 Parts of the Bakerloo line and London Overground are going to close for a few days in the run up to Christmas. The Bakerloo line between Queen's Park and Harrow and Wealdstone and the London Overground between Euston and Watford Junction will be closed between December 17th and 23rd “so that Network Rail can carry out work to improve their track and infrastructure”.

🛤️ There are plans to build an additional station on the newly opened Barking Riverside extension of the London Overground. The new station would be at Castle Green, just before Barking Riverside, and it “would sit on Renwick Road, just before the London Overground extension rises up onto the viaduct”.

🇷🇺 A life-sized, bright red, plastic statue of Vladimir Putin driving a tiny tank popped up in Regent’s Park last weekend. According to Reuters, it’s “part of a travelling exhibition of pop-up art by French street artist James Colomina”.

👨‍🎨️ The Guardian has taken a look at the current efforts to recreate the Branch Hill pond on Hampstead Heath, a favourite spot of John Constable’s.

Art and culture bits

💪 You know what it’s like when you’re walking through Battersea Park, minding your own business, and all of a sudden a bunch of male strippers appear from nowhere and start doing backflips? Or when you’re on the top deck of the bus and it’s your stop except you can’t get off because a bunch of male strippers have appeared from nowhere and started doing a choreographed dance routine? No? Well you obviously haven’t watched the trailer for the next Magic Mike film yet. Yep, they’re coming to London.

📚 Did you know that the London Library had a president? Well it does, and as of this week that post belongs to Helena Bonham Carter. Apparently her responsibilities will include fundraising, advocacy work… and hosting the Christmas party.

🍆 The big theatre launch this week was Sex Party at the newly refurbished Menier Chocolate Factory in London Bridge. The Islington-based comedy (directed and written by Terry Johnson and starring Timothy Hutton, aka the kid out of Ordinary People) hasn’t gone down well at all with the critics. Arifa Akbar gives it two stars in The Guardian, calling the characters “flimsy” and declaring the attempts to address some of today’s thorniest debates “like a dramatised version of Twitter”. Over at London Theatre it’s another two stars from Matt Wolf (“a limp and confusing play suffers from questionable stereotyping”) and the same again from Andrzej Lukowski at Time Out (“at least three drafts away from knowing what it wants to be, let alone actually being any cop”). The Standard can’t muster more than two stars either (“when it comes to examining the male gaze, Johnson likes to have his scantily-clad female cake and eat it too”), and The Times completes the set (“There’s an interesting play lurking somewhere here…What we get is closer to Carry On Swinging”).