Weekend roundup for 22 January

Featuring stowaways, street toast and vacuous bullshit

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News bits

⚖️ Reclaim These Streets have been in court this week, bringing their legal challenge against the Met over their handling of the proposed vigil for Sarah Everard. The two-day hearing argued that the Met’s handling of the event breached human rights to freedom of speech and assembly. You can read more here. Probably the most astonishing evidence that came out during the hearing was that the main reason the Met wanted to stop the vigil was due to the perceived ‘threat’ to the Met’s reputation (or, as the Met themselves put it, they didn’t want to be seen “as the bad guys”).

🚨 Meanwhile, Alex Thomson of Channel 4 News has been trying to get to the bottom of why the Met won’t investigate the Downing Street parties. Here’s his Twitter thread on the subject.

🚇 Andy Byford, the commissioner of TfL, has been busy talking up Crossrail this week. First up he announced that passenger services on the Elizabeth Line “will commence in the first half of 2022,” then he said he was “confident” that they won’t need the £1.1bn of additional funding they thought they might need to get there (just an extra £825m).

🥷 Talking of Crossrail… Earlier this week a member of the public snuck on to one of the Crossrail trains at Abbey Wood and was able to stay on for about 30 minutes until it got to Paddington station and he was “removed by security staff”. 

😷 As you’ve likely read already, the mayor has ruled that passengers on TfL services must continue to wear masks. Cue the right wing press accusing him of ‘political posturing’ and claiming that the anxiety that mask wearing causes some people will “discourage people from getting back to normality,” and therefore “hamstring the recovery of the capital’s struggling hospitality and retail sectors.”

💸 What may actually effect London’s recovery is a lack of tourists, and according to some new analysis, it could take until at least 2025 for “domestic and international visitor overnight numbers to return to the levels seen in 2019”.

👉 Sadiq has been busy this week. He’s also called on Shaun Bailey to resign completely from the London Assembly, saying that the failed mayoral candidate and committed party-goer’s apologies were “mealy-mouthed” and only made “because he was caught out”.

💎 And he’s moved in to the new City Hall in Newham. ‘The Crystal’ building was supposed to open last year of course, but there were a few delays and by all accounts it’s still not finished. Problems with the heating this week meant that Sadiq had to put on a scarf for his first Mayor’s Question Time in the new place.

🏦 Also on the move are Lloyds of London who might be vacating the iconic Lloyd’s Building on Lime Street. There’s a break in their contract coming up in 2026 and, with so many people working from home these days, they might well take advantage of it.

🚗 Following the mayor’s announcements around a revamped road charging system to try and get us to net zero emissions by the end of the decade, there have been renewed calls to scrap the construction of the Silvertown road tunnel under the Thames.

🏨 And talking of ‘net zero’, the Guardian has profiled the room2 hotel in Chiswick which claims to be “an entirely sustainable hotel, from its rooftop wildlife to the revolutionary bins”.

🏗️ The Guardian has also taken a closer look at the proposed “apartment skyscraper” that’s being planned just a few hundred metres from Grenfell, and would only have one fire escape despite being twice the height of the Grenfell tower.

📮 London’s mail problems aren’t getting any better. Of the 56 postcodes affected by Royal Mail delivery delays on Thursday morning, 18 of them were in London. It’s got so bad in SE London that there’s now a petition to “fix the broken postal service in SE22”.

⛰️ Remember that other petition? The one to ‘save’ the Marble Arch Mound? Well it didn’t work.

Art and culture bits

The KAWS exhibition, New Fiction, opened at the Serpentine this week (above), and the reviews so far have been pretty damning. Ben Luke, writing in the Standard, gives it one measly star, and it’s the same result over in Time Out where New Fictions gets called “vacuous, pointless, empty bullshit”. The stars double over at the Telegraph but that doesn’t stop them branding the technological ‘innovations’ (which include a Fortnite tie-in) “abject failures”.