Weekend roundup for 26 March
Featuring architectural trifles, concrete skies and floral flip offs
One week we will begin this roundup without a long list of Met police bad news stories. Unfortunately this is not that week. Fortunately there are plenty of less depressing things happening to accompany this week’s nice weather. Things like giant potato spills, mayoral hedgehog rescues, Hollywood celebrities popping up in Greenwich and hot cross tasting menus.
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News bits
👮 This week Sadiq Khan pledged to “restore trust in the police” with his new Police and Crime Plan. We would say that this was a bad week to do that, but to be honest every week is a bad week to do that. At the beginning of the week the Met’s watchdog released a “damning” report into the force’s handling of the Daniel Morgan murder investigation, which called their efforts to tackle corruption “fundamentally flawed” and “dire”, and said their failings could be put down to “arrogance, secrecy and lethargy”. On Thursday The Guardian published an editorial saying that “the Met must be rebuilt” because “Londoners are entitled to a better service from their police force”.
On Wednesday evening more than 250 people attended a community meeting in Hackney about the school girl who was strip-searched by two Met officers. The police panel at that meeting (which was made up of three white, male officers) admitted that the Met “has a problem with officers viewing inner London children as ‘adults’” and said that the two officers involved had “been removed from frontline duties” (but not fired).
Amongst all that, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that another watchdog report on the Met came to light this week, this time looking into the investigation of serial killer Stephen Port. That report said that the officers involved had “made assumptions about gay men which ‘cannot be ignored’”.
🎓 On Monday students at City and Islington sixth form college walked out in protest at new security checks that had been introduced. The college has cited the rise in knife crime in their defence of the new policy. There is another walk out planned for next week.
🔪 On the subject of knife crime, The Face has a great interview with Ciaran Thapar, the author of Cut Short - Youth Violence, Loss and Hope in the City on what exactly “two pandemic years have done to young people whose lives were already precarious.”
😶🌫️ As the weather got warmer this week and the winds died down there was another high air pollution warning issued for London on Wednesday and Thursday, with Imperial College London predicting “further sustained import of particles”. For more on this you can read our issue from January, which asked Are we heading for another 'killer smog'?
🌊 Bloomberg has taken an in-depth look at the dozens of “opportunity areas” designated for development by the mayor, because it seems many of those areas where much-needed houses are going to be built are also very flood-prone, “with some projects approved despite dire warnings of risks from more extreme weather”.
🔊 National Geographic has been to visit the Greenwich Peninsula to find out how it “became London's newest creative hub”. Also this week it was announced that a 500-capacity, open-air venue called Morden Wharf Terrace is to be built on the southwestern fringe of the Peninsula. The venue “will primarily host electronic music” and will be powered by a “Funktion One sound system installed by RSH Audio, with a shipping container used as the DJ booth”.
🏢 The London Assembly has finally moved into its new home in the the Crystal building in the Royal Docks. The move was due to happen in October, but the building works were delayed. The relocation should save the GLA “more than £60m over the next five years”.
🌉 The government has agreed to pay £2.93m towards the £8.8m Hammersmith Bridge ‘stabilisation project,’ which means that it can remain open to cyclists and pedestrians. The work to reopen the bridge to traffic is expected to take place next year. The cost of that is going to be around £141m. For the full background on London’s bridge woes see our issue from November:
⚫ After a marathon five hour meeting the London Legacy Development Corporation has granted planning permission for the MSG Sphere to be built in Stratford (why it’s not being called the Strat-O-Sphere is beyond us). Although, as Construction News points out, “the scheme is shrouded in controversy and has many hurdles to overcome before shovels hit the ground.”
🥔 This week was not a good week for people driving things. First a Lamborghini smashed into the side of a car wash in Shoreditch; and then a lorry carrying 45,000 kilograms of potatoes crashed off the A40 and took out a Mercedes. “There were potatoes everywhere,” said one witness.
🦔 It’s a good week for hedgehogs (and other animals), because the mayor has shared out £600,000 from his Rewild London Fund to 19 projects that will do things like “restore wildlife habitats such as rivers,” and “enable the monitoring of species such as hedgehogs to inform projects to reverse their decline”.
🌼 The FT (paywall alert) has chosen six of London’s loveliest spring gardens. If you don’t have a subscription then we can tell you that the list includes the Isabella Plantation in Richmond Park, the Chelsea Physic Garden and Stephens House and Gardens in Finchley.
Art and culture bits
🖕 That floral flip off in our banner image this week is a “living installation” that’s been created in order to celebrate the arrival of spring and “brighter days ahead”. You can see it in the window of the Jealous Gallery in Shoreditch (while it lasts).
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