Weekend roundup for 23 October
Includes mounds of money, spicy scents, de facto drugs, and super-heated beef fat
Quick note: Thanks to everyone who got in touch after Wednesday’s issue. It’s lovely to hear all your support and feedback for what we have in store. Comments are still open on that issue if you want to chip in. Or you can email us: londoninbits@gmail.com.
🏔️ The Marble Arch Mound mess continues to rumble on. This week it was revealed that top council staff ignored “clear and repeated warnings” about the project going over budget, gave “overly optimistic financial updates to senior leaders” and made decisions about financing “informally [and] without proper documentation”. There’s a Westminster City Council meeting next week where “the report will be discussed”.
🗞️ Emily Sheffield has ‘stepped down’ as editor of the Evening Standard after just fifteen months in the job. The sister-in-law of former Prime Minister David Cameron took over as editor when the post was vacated by the former chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne, but it seems like the job of trying to revive the fortunes of the paper in the midst of a pandemic was just too much. Former deputy editor, Charlotte Ross is going to stand in as acting editor, presumably until they can find someone who is related to a member of the Tory cabinet.
(N.B. for more on the trials of the Standard you can read our issue ‘How the Standard went from bad to dead’ from July of this year).
💉Way back in April, as we were gearing up for the mayoral election, we took a look at Sadiq’s pledge to establish a London Drugs Commission to “pull together the latest evidence on the effectiveness of our drugs laws.” That allowed the mayor to mention the words ‘cannabis’ and ‘decriminalisation’ a lot in the run up to the election, (even though he has no real powers to make that happen) but since his reelection Sadiq hasn’t done too much about it, and this week he got accused of ‘dragging his feet’ by experts from the “leading drug charities and drug policy research groups” at at a meeting of London Assembly’s health committee. The Standard has a write up of what was said, and the most interesting bit comes from Professor Alex Stevens, professor of criminal justice at the University of Kent, who claimed it is possible for the mayor “to introduce de facto decriminalisation in London by instructing officers not to punish those found in possession of small quantities of drugs.”
💷 What Sadiq has managed to achieve this week is to launch a £1 million fund “that will be shared out among community groups” with some grants of up to £25,000 for those “wishing to campaign to alter potentially offensive road names.” The Telegraph points out that London “street names linked to the transatlantic slave trade include Milligan Street in Tower Hamlets, named for the slave trader Robert Milligan, whose nearby statue was removed from its plinth in 2020.”
👷 Guido Fawkes has a ‘photo exclusive’ from the site of the London Assembly’s new building, The Crystal in Newham. Sadiq and co were supposed to be moving in around now, but the move was delayed and these pictures show why. Guido describes it as “an unfinished warehouse, filled with equipment, no floor and – particularly noticeable – no builders.”
🗽 A study by the charity Art UK has shown that London has “more statues of animals than it does of women or people of colour”. Apparently 8% of our public sculptures depict animals, but just 4% depict women. While “people of colour represent just 1% of the city's sculptures, with women of colour accounting for 0.2%.” Unsurprisingly, when it comes to “statues dedicated to named people,” 79% of them are men.
🏳🌈 Leading members of the LGBTQ+ community have sent an open letter to the mayor demanding the reform of Pride in London, and claiming that it “is no longer abiding by its contract and has lost the trust and confidence of much of the LGBTIQ community.” The demands include an inquiry into the allegations of racism and bullying made by members of Pride’s advisory board earlier this year.
🚲 New data published by TfL has shown “that Londoners from Black, Asian and minority ethnic communities were not significantly less likely to have cycled over the past 12 months than white Londoners.” 27 per cent of Londoners had cycled over the past year, compared to 24 per cent of Black people, 25 per cent of Asian people and 31 per cent of people from mixed backgrounds. However the research found that disabled Londoners who want to cycle more were put off because “they didn’t see anybody like them cycling [or] had concerns that they weren’t fit enough.”
🌽 If you’re on the waiting list for an allotment, you might want to explore other options, especially if you live in Camden. Somebody went to the trouble of crunching the data from local councils across the country and found that “London gardeners are among those who wait the longest,” and Camden beats everyone, “with an average waiting time of 17 and a half years.”
💂 Foxtons managed to send one of those “An agency representatives will be in your area next week, would you like us to value your house” letters to the Legal Owner of the Tower of London.
Art and culture bits
👃 The reviews have been coming in for Anicka Yi’s Turbine Hall installation In Love With The World, and by and large they’re pretty good. The Guardian gave the flying robots four stars and called them ‘electrifying’ and ‘mesmerising’ but complained that nobody could smell the promised ‘scentscape’ of “spices thought to counteract the Black Death in the 14th century, or the stench of Cretaceous vegetation, or the coal once used to fire the Turbine Hall in the 20th century,” because they were all wearing masks. It’s four stars in the Telegraph too (“delightfully imaginative installation, suffused with a wondrous sense of poetry”) but they couldn’t smell much either. The installation drops a star in the Independent even though they were able to “detect just the faintest tinge of something piney and vaguely vegetable”. And it’s three stars also from Time Out, who also got a whiff of the scentscape, but were just reminded of “wandering around an enormous branch of Aesop.”
👬 Meanwhile Tim Adams has been wandering around the East End with Gilbert and George for the Guardian; getting a bite to eat at “a Turkish cafe called Nilly’s on the far side of the gentrified Spitalfields market” and remembering the days when Brick Lane “was only us and Bangladeshi men, who hadn’t yet brought their families over, and the police, who’d come in for a takeaway. It was so rough that tramps would grab food off your plates and run out.”
👧 Back in May we told you about Little Amal, the 12-foot puppet of a Syrian girl who was going to ’walk’ 5,000 miles from the Syria-Turkey border to the UK. Well, Amal is due to reach St Paul’s this morning and then on Sunday, there’s a celebration of Amal in Trafalgar Square featuring some “high energy” dance performances. Also on Sunday it’s up to Camden, to the Roundhouse for a “raucous birthday party and concert”.
🚗 Creative Review features the work of photographer Ray Knox who takes nighttime photos of the capital’s “soon-to-be-scrapped cars” inspired by the decision to sell his own beloved Fiat Punto.
👯 Koko is going to reopen next Spring after three years and a very expensive refurb. The £70m revamp has merged three buildings, added a four-storey extension, restored the dome of the old theatre building and installed “piano and vinyl rooms, a library, dome cocktail bar, penthouse and a hidden speakeasy.”
🖼️ Art magazine Elephant has an excellent Frieze diary, the first instalment of which is written by Zarina Muhammad of The White Pube. Sample quote: “On my way to the exit, a friend texts me about an Evening Standard afterparty at a fancy West End Club, but my social battery is on 0% and the idea of running into George Osborne in my current state isn’t tempting. If I ever do meet him, I want to be on top fighting form, ready for the bareknuckle brawl of the century.”
Food and drink bits
🔥 In June we told you about the new restaurant on the way from the Swedish chef Niklas Ekstedt, who is known for the wood-fired cooking at his eponymous, Michelin-starred Stockholm restaurant. Ekstedt At The Yard (which uses no gas or electricity in the kitchen) is now open at the Great Scotland Yard Hotel and the reviews are coming in. Grace Dent opted for the seven-course tasting menu and, despite comparing the kitchen to the Jorvik Viking Centre, she declares it the “perfect date-night restaurant for diners who like being entertained by tales of venison hearts and vendace roe,” summing it up as “odd, a little challenging, but never, ever boring, and, as evenings go when you’re held captive by a tasting menu, this is about as good as it gets.” Big Hospitality notes the “fair amount of theatre involved,” including “venison hearts cooked at table in a heated metal bowl and the oysters semi-cooked with aged beef fat super-heated in a medieval-looking cast iron cone.” While the Standard summarises the experience as “exquisitely skilled, culturally fascinating and also, maybe, just a little bit frustratingly onepaced”. If you’re an FT subscriber you can read their interview with Ekstedt here.
👨🍳️ The Standard also interviewed Marco Pierre White about that enormous pizza and steak restaurant he’s opening in Leicester Square, and he all but admitted that he’s only doing it for the money.
🍸 El Tab is a new app with an interesting business model. You pay a monthly membership of £12.99, and then every night they put a “£750 - £1000 tab behind a different London bar”. Each night, between 6-9pm, they reveal the location of the tab and if you get there before it runs out you can claim four free drinks. Or you could just go to your local pub.
🍷 Shaftesbury Avenue is getting a new dive bar. Below Stone Nest is a new venue from Frank and Jackson Boxer, the brothers probably best known for Brunswick House and for bringing Frank’s Cafe to Peckham. The new place will be literally below Stone Nest (the arts organisation situated just next to Cambridge Circus).
🦪 The Seafood Bar in Soho (which got a favourable mention in last week’s roundup) has launched a “£1 Oyster Happy Hour” to celebrate the start of native oyster season. Every day between 3-5pm you can get some of London’s best oysters for a quid each.
🐟 If you like your raw fish and you’re anywhere near Richmond next week, you might want to poke (sorry) your head into the new Island Poké on George Street. They’re offering 500 of their signature bowls for £1 on Wednesday, to publicise the new location.
🐓 Every week we challenge ourselves to find the most niche or ridiculous ‘best of..’ list. This week’s comes from The Spectator and their guide to getting the best out of game season. Unsurprisingly the list eschews KFC and instead goes instead for Kitchen W8’s Celebration of Game tasting menu which features “wild duck sausage, hare bresaola and fillet of fallow deer”. Or if that's not regal enough for you, there’s the Balmoral Estate venison at the Cinnamon Club.
Long read of the week
Sociologist, archivist and documentary filmmaker Colin Prescod takes a tour of the “diasporic sites of meeting, organising and belonging across London, with particular focus on West London and Carnival” for the Serpentine.
Tweet of the week
From the timeline of Monday’s LiB interviewee:
