Weekend roundup for 26 June

Includes Beefeaters, blimps, baby penguins and bears

🚨 You know someone’s in trouble when they turn to dictionary definitions of words to try and wriggle out of any culpability. Case in point: The Met’s Deputy Commissioner Sir Stephen House, who, this week, told the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee:

“The National Police Chiefs’ Council defines corruption as the improper exercise of power or privilege for the purpose of achieving a personal benefit or a benefit or detriment for another person. The Metropolitan Police Service does not accept that we are institutionally corrupt in this way.”

So, not institutionally corrupt in that way. But in plenty of other ways?

🚇 It seems Crossrail is now being managed in much the same way as a game of Monopoly that has some of the pieces missing. Not got Bond Street? Don’t worry too much, we’ll just start without it. Maybe they could replace it with an egg cup or a piece from Game of Life?

💳 TfL’s plans to go cashless have also taken a backseat, after a lobbying campaign from London TravelWatch. 200 of 262 Tube stations stopped taking cash in May 2020 and the plan was to extend that to all stations. But this week City Hall announced that the “vast majority” of stations would now have one machine able to accept cash payments.

🚎 The big bus news this week was the arrival of 20 new hydrogen-powered double decker buses. The ‘hydrobuses’ are “smoother, quieter” and more environmentally friendly of course. Plus, they’ll have “free-to-use USB charging ports”. Huge if true!

💚 Also getting more environmentally friendly this week is The Square Mile, which will soon be home to a £4m low-carbon heating system that “will warm homes and offices by capturing heat from more than 650ft below the streets of the City.” Cosy.

🌁 The most upsetting news of the week might be the proposal by City of London police to install suicide prevention nets under London Bridge, Southwark Bridge, Blackfriars Bridge, Tower Bridge and Millennium Bridge. The proposal comes after a “disturbing increase” in the numbers of people attempting suicide.

⛰️ Tickets for the Marble Arch Mound went on sale this week. We told you about the £2m dirt pile last month, but this is just a reminder that, yes, Westminster Council expect you to pay them to walk up an artificial ‘hillock’. The Standard reports that “the cost of creating the mound is expected to be largely recouped from ticket sales and sponsorship.” Largely.

🇬🇧 The Beefeaters are hiring! You get £30k a year, a central London flat and a sexy (?) red uniform. One catch: “you will need to have served 22 years in the British or Commonwealth armed forces and be a former warrant officer with both the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal” (apparently when you’re not having your picture taken by tourists, you’ll be expected to “prevent thefts and help keep the complex secure”).

🎈 Later this week you might want to take a look out of your window and see if you can spot the Goodyear Blimp. The zeppelin is flying over from France today (Saturday) to hover over Brands Hatch for a bit, but it will take a jaunt over the capital on Tuesday and Wednesday. As IanVisits rightly points out, “It’s a giant floating advert for something most of us don’t really care about, and yet, it’s the sort of advert that makes people smile and point at it in delight.” (And, yes, we know that’s not a very accurate emoji, but as the Goodyear Blimp itself has pointed out, there is no blimp emoji yet).

🤑 The award for the weirdest London travel guide of the week has to go to The Kurator, the arts magazine of Gulf News (“the biggest selling English newspaper in the UAE”). They’ve published a list of London properties purchased by offshore dummy companies and dodgy oligarchs (including Putin’s former judo partner). Want to know which former Russian senator is currently “installing an Orthodox chapel, built piece by intricate piece and carried piece by piece by elevator” at the top of the Vauxhall Tower? Of course you do!

🐧 In cute animal news this week: penguin chicks! The London Aquarium is now home to the “only two gentoo penguins successfully bred in England this year”. No names as yet. Apparently “the two chicks will not be named until their sex has been established.”

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Arts and culture bits

🖼️ Last week the Royal Academy made the decision to remove the work of artist Jess de Wahls from its gift shop, following complaints that she had expressed transphobic views (specifically, a 2019 blog post in which she wrote “humans can not change sex”). After de Wahls was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme (saying, “I don’t exist to validate other people’s ideas of themselves”), The Telegraph and the Standard printed editorials claiming that “the Royal Academy has abandoned free speech to placate the mob” and had been too “easily panicked by a bit of noise on social media”. Even The Observer ran a comment by Kenan Malik, examining “the hypocrisies of too many ‘social justice’ zealots”.

Meanwhile, Peter Tatchell told The Guardian: “If an artist denied Jewish, black or gay people’s identity, most people would say that the Royal Academy would be right to remove their works from the gift shop. But when Jess denies trans people’s identity, she and other trans critics say that it’s her right to free speech and she should not be penalised. This smacks of double standards.”

In an interview with the Times de Wahls threatened to sue the RA unless they apologised, and on Wednesday they did just that, saying “we should have handled this better… We had no right to judge her views on our social media. This betrayed our most important core value – the protection of free speech.”

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🏟️ Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is opening an art gallery in its stadium. The gallery will be run by OOF (“the world's greatest art and football magazine”) and will be located in the “Grade II listed Warmington House wedged within the stadium’s walls”. The gallery opens on 23 July and the first show is titled, Balls.

⛸️ We didn’t get to rollerskating in Wednesday’s ‘extreme sports’ issue, but we’ll make up for that now by pointing you to these photos by London-based Alice Zoo who has been busy capturing “the revival of rollerskating in the big city”.

👪 The Society Of London Theatre is bringing back its Kids Week this August, which means that “a child goes free when accompanied by a full paying adult” to any of the thirty participating shows. There’s some big shows in the list, including Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, The Lion King, Les Mis, Doctor Who - Time Fracture and Mary Poppins. Full list here.

📸 The Leica store in Harrods is hosting an exhibition of photographs by Greg Williams, the official photographer for the BAFTAs, who’s “known for his relaxed and intimate portraits of Hollywood’s finest”. If you want to take home a print of Jake Gyllenhaal eating noodles then it’s yours for £600 (or you can buy all 12 prints for £6,000 - bargain!).

🐻 Mike Urban (of Brixton Buzz fame) took a trip to the Art in the Age of Now exhibition (above) at the former Fulham Town Hall this week, and declared it “one of the best things I’ve seen for some time”. Loads of photos and details on his blog post.

🎬 While we’re talking about Brixton Buzz, they let us know this week that a short film about the Brixton activist Olive Morris is going into production after a successful crowdfunding project. The Ballad of Olive Morris will “follow events based on an incident that happened in 1969, where 17 year old Olive Morris bravely stepped in at great personal risk to herself, to try and prevent a Nigerian diplomat from being arrested and assaulted under false pretences by police officers in Brixton.”

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Food and drink bits

🥩 Hawksmoor are opening a new restaurant on a floating pavilion on the Thames. The ‘Wood Wharf pavilion’ will be doing a lot of work to try and offset the environmental impact of all that red meat. So it will be made from “sustainably sourced timber decking and aluminium extracted from hydro sources,” and will have “a green roof… planted with wildflowers and grasses”. Plus the whole thing will be “primarily powered by energy from Canary Wharf’s Combined Heat and Power network.”

🐍 Staying on the green eating theme, The Magazine, the new eatery at The Serpentine Gallery, has just opened and has a bunch of ‘climavore’ credentials: “food is utilised to follow the new seasonalities resulting from the climate emergency. Fish is never farmed but line-caught, herbs are from Growing Underground in Clapham where they are grown hydroponically and seaweed features due to its high nutrition, zero irrigation properties.”

🍔 Four Legs are expanding their burger operation beyond the tiny kitchen at The Compton Arms in Islington, by buying their own pub in Finsbury Park. The Plimsoll opens in September and “will focus on food in the weekdays, while weekends will be for the drinkers and pub lovers.”

🍕 Also opening a second location: Waterloo pizza purveyors, Crust Bros. who are moving in to the Sambrook’s Brewery Tap in Wandsworth. Sambrook’s moved into the Ram Quarter earlier this year and now they’re bringing in Crust Bros. to the 160-cover taproom to serve up “a concise menu of their signature pizzas to be paired alongside beers from craft beer specialists.”

🛎️ City A.M. has gone to the Savoy for a ‘staycation’ and to “try the hotel’s new in-suite dining experience”. The cost goes unspecified, but unsurprisingly the “table set up in the window overlooking the Thames, complete with candles and a welcome glass of Louis Roederer” goes down well, not to mention the “canapes and Irish oysters [and] mains of sea bass and Welsh lamb – complete with white-gloved service.”

🛂 Meanwhile, another Michelin-starred restaurants has had to stop opening for lunch, “due to recruitment problems”. Pied à Terre has made the same “difficult decision” as Michel Roux Jr did the other week, thanks to the fact that “European interest in UK jobs has plummeted”.

🥕 Conversely, as of this weekend, Borough Market is going to be open more than usual, as “visitors will be able to shop for produce at Borough for four hours every Sunday”. Starting from the 27th, Sunday trading will run from 10am – 2pm, marking “the first time in our modern history that traders are on site seven days a week.”

🌿 The executive chef of Nobu London is launching a “plant-based restaurant brand” called Kojo, with the first location to arrive in Hampstead in December. The menu will include “miso-glazed aubergine, Thai basil rice paper rolls, vegetable sushi and miso soups” as well as “activated charcoal lattes”. As if the rest of the country didn’t resent us enough already.  

🙄 Talking of dubious menus… Los Mochis has just opened in Notting Hill, and apparently while its ‘Pan-Pacific’ menu “leans more into the Mexican side of things,” it draws inspiration from “Japanese elegance” and “the bulk of the menu is taken up by a ‘gangster taco’ selection” which includes something called ‘Trailer Park KFC’. Lol, aren’t poor people funny!

🌽 Another week, another ‘best of’ list. This time it's CNN Traveller who have picked their favourite London vegetarian restaurants. Of course Mildred’s is on there and Ottolenghi makes an appearance (with Rovi), but there’s also Temple of Seitan and ‘London’s first vegan pub’ The Spread Eagle (which Giles Coren didn’t like, but everyone else did - there is no better recommendation).

☕ One more list for you: The Sprudge Guide To Coffee In East London (Sprudge being “the world's most popular coffee publication”, obviously). The list features Born Drippy, Balcone, Milky Milky!, Mokomade, Foam on the Range, and Paradox among plenty of others (and we only made two of those names up).

👩‍🍳️ Eater London has spoken to four restaurant workers about their experience of the COVID-19 crisis “and how reopening has been for them and their colleagues”. It makes for pretty depressing and aggravating reading.

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Long read of the week

Frieze takes us back to the heady days of the early 90s for an aural history of Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas’s short-lived Bethnal Green space, ‘The Shop’. 

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Tweet of the week

Shakespeare's Globe @The_Globe

Deleting my dating apps because I want to meet someone the old fashioned way (being shipwrecked in a strange land, disguising myself as my twin brother, becoming a page for the Duke, and being entangled in a love triangle where I am irresistible AF)