Weekend roundup for 24 September

Featuring pay disputes, pop-ups and pornopolitics

Photo by OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Image

So far, over 15,000 people have read Monday’s issue about how mentally and emotionally draining it is trying to rent somewhere in London right now. On the one hand, we’re really glad we could publish something that’s obviously effecting so many people. On the other hand, it’s a bit depressing to see how many of you are in this situation. You only have to look at the responses on Twitter to get an idea of what a nightmare it is out there.

In Monday’s issue we’ll be doing a bit of a follow up, digging into a few of the causes of the crisis and what might be done about it. But, in the meantime, we need to say hello to our new readers that came from that issue. 👋

Welcome to your weekly digest of the latest London news, plus all the latest food, drink, arts and media happenings. This week we’ve got updates on the state of the Met and details of next month’s transport strikes; as well as UFOs, soviet agents in Herne Hill, Korean time-travelling aliens, camp jewellery, kimchi supper clubs and high end chicken nuggets (plus, our Long Read of the Week, which this week is about Soho’s coolest cult bookshop).

The whole digest is only available to LiB subscribers, so if you want the full fat version (plus access to the full LiB archive) then you can start subscribing for £5 a month or £50 a year. There’s a week’s free trial available, so you can see what you’re signing up for:

If you’re already a paying subscriber then thank you very much for supporting London in Bits. We love you more than we love getting the full deposit back from our landlord.

News bits

❌ Just a few days after Mark Rowley took over as Commissioner of the Met, the HMICFRS (aka the Inspectorate of Constabulary) issued a report which says that the Met is “failing” in several areas and it has “serious concerns” over the force’s performance. You can read the full report here, but the headlines are: the way the Met responds to the public is “inadequate”, while it “requires improvement” when it comes to areas such as investigating crime (pretty high up on the agenda for a police force), protecting vulnerable people and managing offenders.

🚨 The day before the report came out two officers were found guilty of sending racist and homophobic WhatsApp messages on a group that included Wayne Couzens, while on Thursday, the family of Chris Kaba viewed bodycam footage of his death at a private meeting with Mark Rowley present. Sadiq Khan gave an interview to Sky News on Wednesday in which he said that the death of Kaba “is one of the events which has led to black Londoners having less confidence in the police”. Vice was at the protest outside New Scotland Yard last Saturday and spoke to a number of the people who were there.

👮‍♂️ Mark Rowley chose to give his first interview to the (paywalled) Times, which for some reason decided to focus the resulting article on the issue of ‘woke policing’ and whether officers should be taking the knee or not (even though Rowley doesn’t once use the phrase ‘taking the knee’ or the word ‘woke’). He does however say that he’s going to recruit more than 100 officers to the Met’s professional standards directorate (aka, the Line of Duty squad).

📱 One last bit of police news this week: Every Met officer is going to be issued with a “work smartphone” to help “crack down on misconduct and improve their access to technology” (i.e. so they will be less tempted to share racist and homophobic WhatsApp messages).

🚆 A few weeks after helping to secure the £3.6bn finance deal, TfL’s commissioner Andy Byford has resigned. He’s only been in the post for a couple of years, but with the funding deal sorted (kind of - see next item for more on that) and the Elizabeth Line open (partially), he probably felt like the only way from here was down.

💰 On Wednesday the mayor revealed how he was going to make up the shortfall in the TfL ‘rescue deal’. As Bloomberg reports, £500m will be coming straight from the Greater London Authority’s coffers “which is part-funded through council tax”. As a result “GLA will suffer a loss of interest and see its financial flexibility restricted. That could in turn push it into borrowing to fund expenditure it could otherwise have afforded.”

🚌 It looks like there will be a bus strike on 4 October, as Arriva drivers walk out over the ongoing pay dispute. In the same week RMT and ASLEF members will strike, which means that there will no Overground on 1 and 5 October.

🌏 Because Extinction Rebellion had to postpone last weekend’s Festival of Resistance in Hyde Park, it has been rescheduled for the weekend of October 14-16. The festival will begin with “a mass action on Friday Oct 14 targeting the government”.

⚖️ The Home Office wouldn’t tell Labour MP, Kate Osamor how many Windrush compensation appeals are successful, so she put in an FoI request to find out. The answer? 1%. That’s just 42 settlements from 3,479 appeals in 2021.

💀 Eighteen Saxon graves have been discovered underneath a car park in Coulsdon. Eight of the skeletons discovered were apparently “well preserved” and six were found “buried with iron knives in their left hand”.

👔 Tailors on Savile Row are worried that development plans by The Pollen Estate, (which owns most of the real estate on the road) could lead to the street losing its sense of identity, as traditional tailors are “replaced with office space, restaurants and ready-to-wear shops.”

🌻Ian Visits has been to visit (clue’s in the name) London’s newest roof garden, which is on top of an old sorting office on New Oxford Street. It’s open to the public (as long as you get through the security checks), plus it’s entirely free and the view is great.

🛸 There’s not one, but two London UFO stories this week. First up, a file has been discovered documenting London’s oldest report of an unexplained flying object. On the evening of December 16, 1742, Doctor Cromwell Mortimer saw a strange light moving slowly above St. James’s Park around 8:40 p.m. His report to the authorities states that he lost sight of the enigmatic object somewhere over Haymarket.

👽 The most recent report of a UFO sighting comes from (can you guess?)… Uri Geller, who has told his Twitter followers that a UFO flew over the jubilee celebrations a few months ago and that the aliens probably gave London another fly by on Monday to pay their respects to the Queen for a second time.

🏘️ Southwark News has been canvassing residents of Herne Hill about the possibility of Boris Johnson moving into the area. As Peter Watts pointed out on Twitter, the 83-year-old in the natty cardigan appears to be Richard Gott, the journalist who resigned from The Guardian in 1994, after claims that he had been a Soviet ‘agent of influence’. Probably won’t be getting invited to any dinner parties at the Johnson’s then.

🏠 Boy George’s £17m, Grade II listed Hampstead villa is up for sale on Rightmove. What the listing doesn’t make clear is that this isn’t the house where George handcuffed a male escort to the wall and then beat him, but it is where 27-year-old songwriter, Michael Rudetsky was found dead of a heroin overdose in 1986.

🏊 The plans for a revamp of the 84-year-old Parliament Hill Lido were revealed this week. They include “a 200 square-metre gym with 40 stations, new staff offices, a shop, new toilets and improved changing rooms.”

⛸️ London will have one more ice rink option this Christmas. Battersea Power Station was granted an entertainment and booze license this week, and one of the planned events is a skating rink which will be in place from November until January.

🎤 In case you somehow managed to miss it, here is Justin Trudeau singing Bohemian Rhapsody (or 14 seconds of it) at the Corinthia Hotel (not the Savoy, as it says in the tweet) last Saturday night. Trudeau’s team later defended the impromptu karaoke, saying “[the] prime minister joined a small gathering with members of the Canadian delegation, who have come together to pay tribute to the life and service of Her Majesty”.

Arts & culture bits

👑 With the Queen laid to rest the arguments have begun over where to put her statue. The bookies’ favourite is of course, the fourth plinth, but as artnet points out, that would mean bringing to an end the “best-known public art commission in the world”. Some politicians are lobbying for a statue in Parliament Square instead, arguing that being “one of four statues” in Trafalgar Square isn’t good enough.

🇰🇷 The Hallyu! The Korean Wave exhibition opened at the V&A this week (and picked up a five star review in the Guardian), so you might want to get ready for when tickets go on sale for the London Korean Film Festival in a couple of weeks. The 17th edition of the LKFF will run from 3 -17 November across a number of cinemas and is opening with Choi Dong-hoon’s time travel/alien invasionsl/martial arts flick Alienoid. Other strands on offer are K-Horror, Indie Talents, Women’s Voices, Documentary, Shorts and Artist Video. Tickets go on sale on 4 October.

🎈 The other big cultural happening this week was the delayed opening of the Maria Bartuszová exhibition at the Tate Modern. The Prague-born experimental sculptor (who spent most of her life in what is now Slovakia) worked mainly in plaster and started out using party balloons and condoms as moulds. The show gets four stars from The Guardian (“weirdly entrancing”) and The Telegraph (“an invitation to see feelingly”) and another four from the Standard (“human vitality meeting its fragility”).

🔨 The Art Newspaper reports that “the art and activist organisation a/political is due to open a permanent space” in Kennington next month, and its first exhibition will be Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky’s Pornopolitics and Other Precedents. In case you need reminding, Pavlensky is the guy who was recently ordered to stand trial in France over leaked sex videos “that brought down a close ally of President Emmanuel Macron two years ago”… oh, and he once nailed his scrotum to the Red Square in Moscow.