Weekend roundup for 23 April
Featuring Maradona, magnolias and more mouse droppings
Welcome to your one-stop digest of everything that’s happened in London this week. The full version of the roundup includes all the arts and culture updates as well as the latest food and drink news. You can read all that by becoming a paid subscriber right here (and get 25% off the annual price using our birthday offer):
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News bits
🌳 First we had the Marble Arch Mound, and now we are getting the ‘Tree of Trees’, the “21m tall tree sculpture” that’s going to go up outside Buckingham Palace in time for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. The sculpture will “house 350 native British trees within a spiralling steel and timber frame, with each tree planted in an aluminium pot embossed with the Queen’s cypher.” The good news is that we’re not paying for this (it’s being funded by “financial media giant Bloomberg”). The bad news is that the initial response has not been great.
🤨 Colin Davis was the chairman of the Southgate Conservative Association. We say ‘was’ because Colin is also “an enthusiast for military uniforms” and unfortunately for everyone that enthusiasm seems to extend to dressing up in German Nazi uniforms, a fact which has now seen him suspended. It’s also very unlikely that Colin will be standing for the Enfield Southgate Tories in next month’s local elections (as the Jewish Chronicle points out, the Oakwood ward where Davis was due to stand “is home to a sizeable Jewish community”).
🚇 The Unite union are holding a ballot over whether to hold more strikes in June. The union's vote comes “after they were told that the value of their pensions will be cut and a final salary scheme will end” and the ballot closes on May 26. If they vote in favour of strikes they will most likely happen in mid-June.
🚄 Ian Visits has all the details of the British Library’s planned extension which includes a huge underground section that has been safeguarded for the Crossrail 2 Euston/St Pancras station, and which will just sit there empty until CR2 is eventually commissioned.
🚘 Adam Tyndall, the ‘programme director for connectivity’ at the campaign group London First has written an editorial for City AM about how an Oyster Card-esque “single integrated zonal road charging scheme” could revolutionise London’s roads.
💰 The FT has produced a video examining how London “cleans dirty money from Russia and across the globe” and why it took the invasion of Ukraine to put the issue in the spotlight:
👮 The acting head of the Met, Sir Stephen House, has ‘admitted’ what everyone else already knew, i.e. that the ‘cultural problems’ in the force are not down to just “a few bad apples”. In his first appearance before the home affairs select committee, House said that “there is a wider issue within the organisation” and that a “significant campaign” has been launched to root out “subcultures” of racism and sexism.
😢 Residents of Landmark Pinnacle, the ’luxury tower block’ in Canary Wharf, are not happy that the ‘state of the art’ amenities they were promised (private cinema, indoor garden, private dining rooms…) haven’t opened yet. Instead they’ve had to put up with a broken cooling system, leaks, mould and damp in return for their “extortionate” rent.
🏠 On Thursday representatives from the London Renters Union went to Eaton Green estate agents in Camberwell to accuse the firm of “harassing tenants and serving an invalid no-fault eviction notice”. As you’ll see from the video below, the confrontation got out of hand after one of the agents was called a “wanker”. The Big Issue has the full story.
☕️ Sadiq Khan has spoken to the Huffington Post for their My Ramadan Routine series which “spotlights the life of a Muslim person celebrating the holiest month in the Islamic calendar.” Turns out the thing the mayor craves most when fasting is his coffee fix.
🎸 There are a couple of cultural artefacts coming to London to be auctioned off over the next few weeks. The first is the guitar that Kurt Cobain played in the video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. If you want to see the “1969 Fender Mustang, in a Lake Placid Blue” before it goes up for sale then it will be on display at the Hard Rock Cafe in Piccadilly Circus from April 28th until May 3rd.
⚽ The second is Diego Maradona's ‘hand of god’ shirt that he wore during the 1986 World Cup quarter-final against England. The shirt went on display at Sotheby’s on Wednesday when the auction began. At the time of writing the minimum bid is £4,000,000 (and that’s despite the controversy about whether it’s the right shirt or not).
🇮🇳 As part of his visit to India this week, Boris Johnson visited Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram in Gujarat where he was gifted with the ‘Guide to London’ which Gandhi wrote in 1893 for Indian students intending to study in the UK. Apparently the guide urged students to sleep with their windows open and embrace the city’s ‘invigorating’ weather. But, ironically for the PM, it does warn of partaking in ‘poisons’ like alcohol.
🏛️ In what might be the most niche article we’ve ever linked to, two journalists at the Architect’s Journal have compared the energy profile of the Baths of Caracalla (built in ancient Rome, circa 212) to that of the proposed new M&S on Oxford Street.
Art and culture bits
📷 The Guardian has a selection of the 365 photographs (and the stories of the people in them) taken by Rory Langdon-Down throughout 2021. Some great images in here, and the majority are taken in London.
🎞️ Behind the Shop Facade - The Life of Maurice Dorfman is a brilliant exhibition that’s currently on at Clapham Library. We know it’s brilliant because we’ve been to see it and we’ve spoken to the creator, Jim Grover about how it came about. You can read about that in Monday’s issue, but in the meantime you should consider going to take a look, as it’s only there until the end of the month.
🇫🇷 Francis Bacon’s friend and former handyman Barry Joule was going to donate a collection of Bacon’s work to the Tate. But, after falling out with the gallery because they failed to exhibit an earlier set of works he had gifted it, Joule has decided to gift the 100 drawings, 10 paintings, and 12 hours of taped conversations to the French National Archives instead. What’s French for ouch?
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