Weekend roundup for 21 August
Includes bubbling trees, bing-bonging birds and banging Beaujolais
⛰️ Westminster council’s deputy leader, and the man behind the Marble Arch Mound, Melvyn Caplan, resigned last week after it emerged that the cost of the project was actually £6m (the initial amount given was £2m, but it turns out that this was just the build cost).
⚖️ In June, a group of anonymous employees of colour at the Barbican published Barbican Stories, in which they detailed “firsthand and witnessed accounts of discrimination at the Barbican Centre”. Last week it was announced that the Barbican’s managing director, Nicholas Kenyon, is to step down later this year as a direct result of the accusations. Meanwhile The City of London Corporation has retained a law firm to “conduct an external review into the incidents”.
🚲 Kensington and Chelsea council has written to Grant Shapps to say that it is definitely not in breach of its duty by failing to provide for the “expeditious and safe movement of all traffic, including pedestrians and cyclists”…. even though it definitely is. Kensington and Chelsea has zero segregated cycle routes, it “ripped out temporary cycle lanes on either side of Kensington High Street after just seven weeks last December” and they have no LTNs.
🚴 Meanwhile the London Cycling Campaign is organising a protest ride to call for safer junctions following the tragic and very preventable death of Marta Krawiec in Holborn earlier this month. The ride is on Wednesday September 8, and if you want to get involved you can sign the LCC’s petition here and they’ll email you with the details.
🛴 The Met have been targeting Black electric scooter-riders at a disproportionately higher rate than white people. According to Vice, “Black people accounted for 30 percent of traffic offence reports (TORs) involving e-scooters issued by police between January and May this year, even though they make up 13 percent of the capital’s population”. Black people were also twice as likely to face prosecution after being handed a TOR than white people.
💼 The number of central London workers who have returned to their offices is sitting at around 15% according to the Centre for Cities think tank. They also say that London’s nighttime footfall is “still only half of what it was pre-pandemic in the same period”.
🏗️ The iconic Lloyd’s of London building is getting a major redesign “to better accommodate the firm’s flexible working practices following the coronavirus pandemic.” The redesign will focus on the building’s Underwriting Room (above), the 60-metre-high atrium that sits at the heart of the building. Giant ball pool maybe?
🏢 An analysis of London offices has shown that around 10% of them, are not going to be compliant with new energy efficiency rules that are due to be introduced in 2023. The same study found that only 20% of central London offices have an energy classification of ‘A’ and ‘B’ (that’s the level that might be required for non-domestic buildings by 2030).
🛒 Tesco are set to open their first ‘just walk out’ store at the Tesco Express in High Holborn. Apparently the branch has been kitted out with the necessary “computer-vision powered technology” but the full “checkout-free retail experience” hasn’t been switched on yet.
🏊 ITV News has been down to the Crystal Palace athletics stadium to see the empty swimming and diving pools. They’ve been closed since March last year after a leak was discovered. Diving success at the Olympics has boosted interest and 30,000 people have signed a petition calling on the mayor to foot the repair bill of £1.3m.
👨⚖️ More than 300 senior lawyers (including Cherie Blair) have signed a petition urging the Garrick ‘gentlemen’s club’ to start admitting women. Obviously there is a matter of principle to be addressed here, but why anyone would want to join a club that has Michael Gove as a member is beyond us.
🐦 Cute animal story of the week: A two-year-old African Grey parrot that escaped from its home in Surrey has been found by British Transport Police “after he made friends with a homeless man at Waterloo Station”. The parrot is now safely back home where he has apparently started making “the ‘bing bong’ sound from the train announcements”.
🎸 The mega basements have driven Brian May out of London! The “iconic Queen guitarist” told the Mirror that he and Anita are planning on getting out soon, as the city is too “brutal” to live in.
🚕 YouTuber Tom the Taxi Driver has made a video to try and answer the question ‘Could the London Taxi be consistently cheaper than an Uber?’. Obviously Tom is a little biased on this issue, but it’s interesting to see what happens when it starts drizzling and Uber’s surge pricing kicks in.
Art and culture bits
🔵 Superblue is an “experiential art centre” based in Miami, but in October they’ll be bringing their “phantasmagoric environments” to London. Superblue will be temporarily taking over Pace gallery in Mayfair where they’ll be installing the “multi-sensory experience called Silent Fall… that will feature trees emitting mist bubbles”. (above).
🎙️ The Horniman museum in Forest Hill has a new exhibition celebrating south London’s black music spaces. Dance Can’t Nice looks at key players in British Bashment, Garage, Lovers Rock, Grime, Gospel, Jazz and Soul, as well as the places where that music flourished including bedrooms, barber shops, churches and living rooms.
🎸 Jack White’s Third Man Records is opening a record shop in Soho next month. According to The Quietus when the shop opens on September 25, there’ll be “a two-level retail space, as well as a live music venue named The Blue Basement” .
🏳🌈 Nicholas Huzan didn’t come out as gay until he was 30. In his 40s, after a years of depression he went to G-A-Y. He loved it so much that he went back… 1,000 nights in a row.
😳 Marina Abramović is opening not one, but two shows in London later this year. The first, Seven Deaths is an “immersive cinematic experience” based on “seven untimely demises she undergoes on screen, set to the moving soundtrack of seven Maria Callas solos”. The second features “seven alabaster sculptures relating to these lethal vignettes, which are also self-portraits of the artist inhabiting different personae”.
👻 If the presence of Cush Jumbo wasn’t enough to make you buy tickets for the Young Vic production of Hamlet then how about Supt Ted Hastings? Adrian Dunbar has signed on to play “the dual role of Claudius and the Ghost” alongside Jumbo and (maybe more excitingly) Joseph Marcell, aka Geoffrey the butler from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
🖼️ The Inside Out Festival is an outdoor exhibition “of over 20 life-sized replicas of some of the most famous and treasured paintings” from the National Gallery’s collection (including Botticelli’s Venus and Mars and van Gogh’s Sunflowers). The installation is in Trafalgar Square right now and will be there until September 2. There’s also thirty easels in the square to “allow people to create their own masterpieces as part of the program”.
⛰️ Ian Visits has visited the Mound and… he actually quite enjoyed it. In fact he calls it “bloody good fun”. Probably not £6m worth of fun though.
🖌️ You’ve got until the end of the month to see Prismatic Minds at the Flowers Gallery in Mayfair (below). The exhibition (which is co-curated by actor and art podcaster Russell Tovey) brings together “six mainly self-taught international artists, each with intensely personal and imaginative styles,” and it looks pretty great.
Food and drink bits
💵 The guy who founded Pret (and is now CEO of Itsu) has “warned that restaurant prices are set to rise by more than a fifth” as hospitality wages go up in response to the “significant food price and wage inflation” that’s been caused by Covid and Brexit.
🍔 The Telegraph has interviewed Sohail Ahmad, who fled Afghanistan aged 12 and has just opened Eggoland,in Fitzrovia (which, for some reason, The Telegraph call a ‘burger joint’ in their headline).
🇵🇹 Nuno Mendes, the Portuguese chef behind The Chiltern Firehouse and Viajante, will be opening a new Portuguese restaurant in London next year. Not loads of details yet, but given Mendes’ pedigree we imagine it will be worth watching.
🦫 Beavertown Brewery is opening its first pub. The Corner Pin (above) will be in Tottenham (where the brewery’s taproom is), in the building that used to house the Spurs ground’s ticket office. The pub will be spread over three floors and there’ll be 12 of the brewery’s beers on tap.
🍝 Last year, chef Stevie Parle opened Joy, his “outdoor restaurant and retail space” at Portobello Dock, but it closed this June when the landlord refused an extension. Now Parle has announced that he’s moved “his floral restaurant concept” (it’s a plant shop as well as a restaurant) to Marylebone Village. The new spot will also host a weekly supper club for 30 guests every Thursday.
🏅 The U.K.’s Best 100 Restaurants were announced this week and, for the first time, half of the restaurants on the list are located outside of London (although half the top ten are London places, so not all bad). The highest ranking London restaurant was Core by Clare Smyth in Notting Hill.
🧑🦰 Staying in Notting Hill: Ed Sheeran’s restaurant, Bertie Blossoms “is struggling to survive” apparently. Opening any restaurant two months before a global pandemic is never going to be easy, but the fact that the food has been described as “an unappetising, claggy puddle” and “demented” probably hasn’t helped either.
🥩 Jodie Comer did an interview this week in which she said “I have not found one good roast dinner in London…A lot of places give you a big plate you pick off and put on your own plate – I don’t like the sharing thing.” Which pubs is Jodie Comer going to where the Sunday roast comes on a sharing platter?! Jodie, if you’re reading this, we get it - nothing beats a home-cooked roast - but please get get yourself to The Canton Arms in Stockwell. Or the Carpenter’s Arms in Bethnal Green. Or the Quality Chop House in Farringdon… We could go on.
🍷 ‘Best of’ list of the week is the very specific ‘Best Soho restaurants for wine’ from Decanter magazine. This is a good one, it goes way beyond the usual listicle format and there’s some really nice places in there. The French House? Tick. Noble Rot? Tick. We didn’t expect to see Bob Bob Ricard on there (but maybe we’ve always been too distracted by the Champagne buttons), and they do cheat a bit by including Maison François which is in Piccadilly. We’d argue that, if you’re going to go beyond the Soho borders, then you have to mention the legendary Le Beaujolais on the other side of Shaftesbury Avenue, non?
Long read of the week
Time magazine has a long profile of Sadiq Khan and his plans for a “greener, fairer London”. There’s a look at the ULEZ extension and the controversial Silvertown tunnel, some sidestepping of the ‘do you wan to lead the Labour party?’ question, and quite a few boxing analogies (Sadiq loves his boxing).
Tweet of the week
London Bus: 1. Gull-wing Tesla: 0.
