Weekend roundup for 20 August
Featuring property prices, prawn vindaloo and piri-piri chicken
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News bits
🔋 It seems that an overheating “battery-powered rickshaw” might have been responsible for the fire in a London Bridge railway arch that temporarily shut down Southwark and London Bridge stations on Wednesday.
🏢 According to Bloomberg, if you go into the office over the winter you could save yourself up to £50 a week on heating bills. Of course you’ll also have to “walk, run or cycle to the office” to make any real difference, especially once the fares go up…
👛 …And we could be looking at a 14% hike in Tube and bus fares come January 2023. It’s assumed that fare increases are part of the current ‘discussion’ between TfL and the government around long term funding, and “inflation plus 1%,” seems to be the formula the Department for Transport are working with.
🛤️ There’s a lot of headlines flying around this week saying that TfL could be ‘nationalised’ if some kind of funding agreement isn’t reached soon. This implies that TfL is currently part of the private sector, when what they actually mean is that TfL could be taken away from the Mayor of London and put under ‘direct ministerial control’.
🚌 As for the buses, the recent consultation on removing 250 buses and 16 routes across the city “received an exceptionally high number of responses,” and they were not the positive kind. The chair of London Assembly’s transport committee, Sian Berry has said that the cuts would have a “disproportionate impact” on the poorest Londoners as well as disabled Londoners.
🚕 The price of Uber is also going up. The company has said it will increase rates by an average 5% in London fares in a move designed “to attract more drivers”.
🏠 The only thing going down in price right now is property. According to the (paywalled) Telegraph “home sellers in London cut £23,400 off their asking prices in August” thanks to the imbalance between supply and demand caused by “the largest jumps in mortgage rates on record”.
🏗️ Bill Bryson has put his weight behind the opposition to the demolition of the Oxford Street M&S building. To be precise he put £500 behind it, at least that’s what he donated to the ‘fighting fund’ set up to finance the campaign. Bryson also told Architects Journal “I have no special knowledge or insights about the matter. I just wish to help stop a bit of foolishness.” Steady on Bill!
🚨 The Portuguese sprinter Ricardo Dos Santos, posted a series of tweets last Sunday, with video footage of him being pulled over and questioned by Met officers. Two years ago Santos and his partner, the sprinter Bianca Williams were pulled over, handcuffed, searched for weapons and drugs and separated from their three-month-old son. Five Met officers are due to face a gross-misconduct hearing over that incident.
🍬 At this point we’re willing all the Oxford Street ‘candy stores’ to get closed down just so people will stop writing about them. But we have to admit reading this NBC News deep dive into the subject is quite entertaining thanks to the description of Oxford Street as “a haven for criminality perpetrated in plain sight” and the portrayal of Debenhams as a “mega brand”.
🍭 One of the stores is actually fighting back though. This (paywalled) FT article details how Kingdom of Sweets put out a statement threatening legal action against anyone suggesting the store was being probed over business rates or tax scams (although one of the companies associated with it owed nearly £1.5mn in business rates as of November last year).
🏘️ The Guardian’s Julia Kollewe has taken a look at TfL’s plans to build 20,000 new homes and speaks to some of the people who are running businesses out of TfL’s 800 railway arches (which they kept a hold of, unlike Network Rail, which sold off its railway arches to a private equity group for £1.5bn).
🏊 The crowdfunder to turn a a defunct Thames Water depot on the border of Hackney and Waltham Forest into community-owned natural swimming pond has gone past the £220,000 mark. The target is £500,000, with another half a million due to come from “corporate donations and grants”.
🥊 Marriott International’s W London hotel in Leicester Square has had its premises licence restricted after “a physical altercation involving more than 30 people,” last month “in which police officers were forced to retreat from the violence,” and “tills containing almost £2,000 were stolen from reception.” Back in April there was a similar disturbance at the same hotel “when a patron had tried to hit another with an ice bucket”.
🙄 Is this the most ridiculous ‘price of a pint’ prediction so far? Please let us know if you’ve seen worse.
Art and culture bits
🏛️ The Museum of London is changing its name… to the London Museum. That’s it, that’s the story.
🔑 This year’s Open House Festival runs from Thursday September 8th to Wednesday 21st, and tickets go on sale next Wednesday. Put that date in your diary now if you want to grab some, because the best stuff goes extremely quickly. The full programme is even bigger than usual this year as it’s the festival’s 30th birthday, but Ian Visits has a handy rundown of some of the highlights.
👨🎨️ Niall Gallagher, the artists better known as Times New Roadman, has his first public exhibition running at Browns East in Shoreditch (you can buy his stuff there too). The boutique has also interviewed Gallagher about his work and his love of hummus and prawn vindaloo.
🕺 The i has an article by Eleanor Peake about what it’s like to live next door to the Abba Voyage stadium and have Super Trooper blasted into your front room every night (and twice a day on weekends). She also speaks to someone who “lived on a back road that hosted the Notting Hill Carnival for nine years”.
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