Weekend roundup for 22 April

Featuring blue velvet, Red Arrows and Screen on the Green

The fence outside Westminster Abbey gets a lick of paint ahead of the Coronation. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

To quote Eminem: Guess who’s back? Back again.

Yep, it’s us, and we have somewhere between 30 and 40 stories for you this week, covering politics, transport, the environment, frozen custard, Shakespeare, sausage rolls and graffiti.

If you want to make it to the frozen custard and Shakespeare then you’ll need to vault over that paywall with a LiB subscription. It costs £5 a month or £50 a year (or somewhere around 33p an issue) and for that you get the whole Roundup every Saturday (so many tasty links!), our Wednesday issue, which only goes out to paying subscribers (this week it was all about ‘folk horror’ pioneer Arthur Machen) and full access to our extensive back catalogue which (unlike Eminem’s) is of a consistently high quality:

If you are already a LiB supporter, then thank you very much for subscribing. We know you probably hear this every day, but we’re your biggest fan.

News bits

🛃 On Monday, 28-year-old French publisher Ernest Moret was questioned for six hours by counter-terrorism police at St Pancras station while on his way to the London book fair. The publisher was then arrested for “alleged obstruction in refusing to disclose the passcodes to his phone and computer”. A joint statement from Éditions La Fabrique (who Moret works for) and Verso Books claimed that Moret was detained because he had participated in the recent demonstrations in France.

🚙 The GMB union this week announced that civil enforcement officers based in Westminster will walk-out on the 2, 4 and 6 May. That’s huge, because civil enforcement officers are also known as ‘parking wardens’ and 6 May is the day of the Coronation, quite a bit of which is happening around Westminster.

🚊 The mayor announced this week that a West London Orbital Overground link connecting Hounslow with Hendon and West Hampstead, will launch in “the early 2030s”. Ominously, the same engineering consultants that advised on the Elizabeth line have been chosen to work on this project.

🚉 It looks likely that the DLR will be extended across the river to Thamesmead via a new station at Beckton Riverside, also sometime in the early 2030s. However, the funding needed to build the extension is not yet in place and the cost has been estimated at around £800 million.

🌳 Also coming out of the mayor’s office this week was an announcement that £3.8million is to be invested into a fund that will plant 100,000 trees. That money has been split across sixteen projects, including a Garden Network Catalyst Project in Lewisham, North Paddington Canalside in Westminster, West Kensington and Gibbs Green Area Assessment and the Lancaster West Estate landscape in North Kensington.

🏺 London has an over-abundance of historical artifacts right now. There’s so much building work going on across the city that new old stuff keeps being uncovered and there’s no room left in the museums. Recently, Labour MP Leonie Cooper asked the mayor if he’d “thought about displaying some of [the artifacts] in the many tube stops and transport hubs?” The mayor’s answer: Nope. Or more specifically, “There are no plans to display artefacts found in construction sites in London in Tube stations” because, “given the environmental conditions required for Museum objects and the Underground storage licence requirements under Section 12, any plans to display Museum objects would take considerate planning and investment.”

🥐 In sausage roll news, Greggs is appealing against Westminster City Council’s blocking of a ‘late license’ for their Leicester Square location. Greggs wants to stay open 24 hours, but the Met, Environmental Health and Westminster Council say that the plan would “undermine the licensing objectives in relation to the prevention of crime and disorder”.

🗳 The Minister for London, Paul Scully confirmed this week that he is “considering” running against Sadiq Khan to be the next London mayor. The MP for Sutton and Cheam said his top priorities would be a “focus on safety and policing issues, improving public transport and building more homes”.

🔆 Waterloo station is getting a roof refurb. It’s going to take around two years to overhaul the 100-year-old, 12,000 square metre roof, but once the 10,000 new glazed panels are installed the station should be a little brighter.

🚰 Stat of the week: There were three times more water fountains in Ancient Rome than London local government provides today. That tidbit comes from “social impact brand Ocean Bottle” who found that there are 471 free water fountains and refill stations in London, whereas there were 1423 in Ancient Rome (how do they know?!). They study also revealed that “affluent Western borough councils together provide nearly twice as many free drinking water spots for residents than the more deprived boroughs.”

🏢 Speaking to the Sunday Telegraph last week, Sir Stuart Lipton (the developer behind 22 Bishopsgate, and the Broadgate Circle estate) said that people want to work from home now because the desks in their offices are too close together (“When I was a kid you would at least have six foot desks and there was much more space” is something he actually said) and that East Oxford Street is a ‘slumsville’ (“Where’s the civilization, the sculptures, the trees? Where do the boys meet the girls?” is also something he actually said).

🚌 TfL has had to scrap its huge, wraparound bus adverts promoting their environmentally-friendly bus fleet, after the campaign was called ‘misleading’. The posters read “All our buses are low or zero-emission at the tailpipe” but the words ‘zero emission’ were about ten times bigger than all the other words. TfL have now “made the decision to update the wording of the advertising for greener buses” so all the words are in the same font size.

🥇 Resonance Consultancy have published their annual ranking of Europe’s “greatest cities to live, visit and invest” (that’s their nonsensical sentence, not ours) and London has come in at number one. We beat Paris into second place thanks to the launch of the Elizabeth Line and Battersea Power Station, TikTok opening an office here, and wealthy people like Instagram chief Adam Mosseri choosing to live here (oops). It also probably helps that Paris is largely on fire right now.

👮 City Monitor (which is part of the New Statesman Group) has a look at whether or not it’s time for the Metropolitan Police to discontinue stop and search. The piece points out that, even though stop and search is apparently a “vital tool” for curbing knife crime, of the 174,800 stop and searches performed between from March 2022 and March 2023, only 2% resulted in a weapon of some kind being found (71% ended with no further action being taken).

🪧 Extinction Rebellion’s four-day event, The Big One, began yesterday with a People’s Picket outside Westminsterr, while Just Stop Oil’s “multiple days” of slow marching is due to begin on Monday. Earlier in the week, XR agreed with the organisers of the London Marathon to ask “all their participants to help guard the London Marathon” but Just Stop Oil has so far “refused to rule out London Marathon disruption”.

🌾 After more than living up to its name and completely tearing up Finsbury Park last weekend, Tough Mudder has been banned by Haringey Council. The Friends of Finsbury Park have lodged a formal complaint with the Council over the event, which “caused several weeks’ worth of damage”.

😴 The Guardian has published some great images by the photographer Sarah Lee that are part of her ongoing ‘Tender Are the Nighthawks’ series “about the city’s liminal zones and its weary travellers, taken between the hours of 2am and 4am.”

Food and drink bits

🫒 If you’re doing the Bermondsey Beer Mile this summer and you fancy a break from craft ale, then you can always opt for a Venetian Spritz (a mix of peach, honey and white wine) and some Neal’s Yard Dairy cheese from the These Days Aperitivo Bar, which is opening “just behind Maltby Street, in a currently quite empty arch” on May 11th.

🇮🇹 The Big Mamma group is unstoppable at the moment. Having just opened the doors of Jacuzzi in Kensington (and launching their Hamburg restaurant Edmondo with a ‘Daniel Craig inspired’ film), they’ve moved straight on to announcing a new “more intimate, loungey kind of space” in Marylebone. It's called Carlotta and will serve up “Neapolitan and Sicilian classics with an Americano twist” and have an “80s midnight blue velvet paradise” in the basement. Opening day is 12 May.

🦅 Passyunk Avenue, the slightly-tricky-to-pronounce Philadelphia-themed dive bar is one of the better places to head to if you’re around Waterloo or Fitzrovia and enjoy fried things with orange cheese on them (which we do). They obviously know their audience as well, because they’re about to open a third location in Nine Elms, pretty much next door to the American Embassy. For the new spot, the rumour is they’re looking to add a burger to the menu along with a Pastrami Reuben and an all-you-can-eat-and-drink Sunday Brunch.