Weekend roundup for 24 April
Includes bunny hops, innovative balls and tube vampires
🗑️ We had to start with this tweet. Just that fact that L**rence F*x won’t be getting his deposit back, and that he’s trailing in the polls to a YouTuber, has just made our week.
🚴 Want to see Sadiq Khan repeatedly fail to bunny hop on an Evening Standard journalist’s bike? Of course you do!
💦 If you’re going to try and get on the Tube without paying, then attempt to report the TFL staff to the police, AND THEN SPIT ON THEM; don’t be surprised when police analyse the saliva, find you, and throw you in jail.
🌡️ Want to take a thermal tour of the city? Bloomberg sent an electrical engineer out with a thermal imaging camera to highlight the “poor materials, bad insulation, and inefficient design” that make up our city.
🗽 There used to be a statue of Ronald Reagan outside the US Embassy in Grosevnor Square. It was removed for possibly the most boring reason any statue has been removed recently: the US Embassy shifted south of the river so the developers put it into storage while they did some construction work. That hasn’t stopped some Tory MPs calling for the statue to be put in Parliament Square. Thankfully Sadiq has said it’s not going to happen, presumably as he has more important stuff to be getting on with (like learning to bunny hop).
🏊 Is it weird to post a link here and then ask you not to click on it? Would it help if we told you it was a link to the Daily Mail’s site? The article itself is the puffiest of all puff pieces on the ‘Sky Pool’, the ‘floating’ swimming pool that’s being opened at the “exclusive” Nine Elms development in Vauxhall next month. To save you clicking let us just tell you that, “The highly-anticipated opening will be held on Wednesday May 19 and feature radio and TV host Roman Kemp,” as well as, “top synchronised swimming team, Aquabatix.”
If you want to read something about the Sky Pool that doesn’t feel like a hastily written advertorial, the Guardian wrote a good, in-depth article in February about the Nine Elms development and why it’s becoming “an international investors’ playground where regular Londoners are pushed to the very edges, or cut out of the picture altogether.”
🚔 The East London Lines site has a fantastic article about policing in Croydon, especially ‘Operation Cleveland’ which was enacted after the area saw “10 separate knife attacks resulting in multiple injuries and one death,” in just one day back in February. The operation turned Croydon into the ‘stop and search capital of London’ but despite over 500 searches only, “8% of those searches uncovered a weapon… The rest of what was held up as evidence of the operation’s success consisted of small bags of cannabis.”
💇 Amazon is opening an “experimental” hair salon in Spitalfields. Along with chat about your holiday plans there will be “augmented reality hair consultations,” and, “Fire tablets at each styling station.” Shame, we kind of like reading the gossip magazines from two years ago.
🚇 It’s been known that the London Underground has its own population of mosquitoes since the 90s. But it’s taken a few decades for American YouTube channel Half As Interesting to make a video about the tiny Tube vampires, complete with slightly patronising references to ‘blokes’ and ‘birds’.
Arts and culture bits
🛌 The Museum of Youth Culture has opened a pop up venue on Carnaby Street. Launch exhibitions include a ‘Reconstructed Teenage Bedroom’ and a ‘Rusty Pin Badge Collection’. Both of which sound way more entertaining than a ‘Sky Pool’.
🚌 Fans of slightly niche museums will also be glad to know that the London Transport Museum is bringing back its Museum After Dark series from May. If you are an “adult” who wants to “explore the Museum after hours in a relaxed and safe atmosphere, enjoy a drink at the bar, and take part in a creative activity or quiz,” you can book right here.
👨🎨️ There’s an ‘unauthorised’ Banksy exhibition taking place in Covent Garden in May, with “prints, canvasses, screenprints, sculptures, unique works and limited-edition pieces,” all sourced from private collectors and on display at a dedicated space just off Seven Dials. More info here.
🤡 Want to see Joaquin Phoenix dance down those stairs again, but this time with a bloody great orchestra playing composer Hildur Guðnadóttir’s award-winning score? Then you’re in luck. The Joker Live In Concert is coming to the Apollo in Hammersmith in September.
🐈 Lucinda Coxon’s play ‘Herding Cats’ got rave reviews on it’s original outing over ten years ago, now it’s coming back at the Soho Theatre, but with a bit of a twist: “two actors perform live in London, with a third actor streamed in real-time from the USA”.
🐮 It was just a few weeks ago that Udderbelly (the comedy/circus festival that’s usually on the South Bank) announced they were opening a venue on Cavendish Square, now they’ve said they’re also taking over the former Earls Court Exhibition Centre site to host the London Wonderground festival all summer. The site will be free to enter and will feature “live shows, spectacular al fresco bars… street food, vintage rides, live music and DJs on the Wonderground bandstand and the magnificent Earls Court City Beach.”
📸 One Hundred Years: Portraits of a community aged 0-100 is a beautiful new book by photographer Jenny Lewis, in which she “compiles portraits and stories of her Hackney neighbours across life's span”. There’s a great review of the book here, and you can see more over at Hoxton Mini Press.
🚨 NICE THING ALERT: Next week we’ll have a Q&A with Jenny about her favourite London places and we’ll be giving away a copy of One Hundred Years. So keep an eye on your inbox.
Food and drink bits
⚽ Bored of playing golf inside while drinking? Already done the gastropub/cricket nets thing? How about a “football based social entertainment and dining experience”? Yes, a company called Toca Social is filling the gap nobody really wanted filling by “bringing together the worlds of social entertainment, flavoursome food, unique cocktails, and immersive football games under one roof”. At the venue in the O2 you will be able to choose “from a variety of interactive football-based games, enabled by innovative ball delivery,” before moving on to the “dessert room filled with ‘Willy Wonka’ inspired creations,” and the, “three sophisticated bars with an array of drinks options”. Kind of makes us queasy just reading about it.
🎧 If you’re looking for something a bit more chilled, The Lot in Hackney Wick has been open for a week now, just in time for the nice weather. What used to be the parking space at HWK has got an all-new, custom built sound system and they’ve put a new roof covering on. There’s an outdoor kitchen, BBQ and a great lineup of DJs programmed for the next few weeks.
🍕 There has been a plan to open an enormous (42,000 square feet!) Italian food hall next to Liverpool Street Station since 2017, and this month it’s finally happening. On 29 April, the Eataly (geddit?) food hall and outdoor dining terrace will open, and then in May two restaurants will open alongside a cooking school. There’s a “fine dining” restaurant coming in September too apparently. London Eater has all the details including mention of the Eataly theme park in Bologna, “which has its own pack of truffle-hunting dogs, which inhabit Truffle World.”
Long read of the week
Earlier this week we saw what the future of London looked like from the point of view of Chatham House. Now Dazed & Confused has had a go at predicting what’s next through a conversation with five teenage girls about topics such as “gentrification, pollution and the future of navigating the city as a young woman.”
We know which view of the future we’d put more faith in.
