Weekend roundup for 26 November
Featuring silverback gorillas, woven crisps and shoe vodka
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Merry Christmas!
News bits
😶🌫️ Yesterday morning, the mayor announced that the plan to extend the ULEZ to cover the whole of London will go ahead from 29 August next year. The scheme means that drivers of older, more polluting vehicles will be charged £12.50 a day to drive in Greater London, although there will be a “£110 million scrappage scheme” to help with the replacement of non-compliant vehicles as well as the “biggest expansion of the outer London bus services in history”.
🚎 Talking of buses… Sadiq has ‘pulled the handbrake’ on those potential cuts to bus routes, after a public consultation prompted 20,000 replies and a “massive backlash”. All but three routes (the 11, 16 and 521) have been ‘saved’, although 15 other routes have been ‘reduced or curtailed’ including the 3, 6, 23, 26, 59, 77 and 133.
🏗️ The City of London has approved the plans for the new London Museum (aka The Museum of London), to be built on what is now the grade II-listed Victorian market at Smithfields. If you’re wondering where the market is going to go, it’s off to a purpose-built site at Dagenham Dock.
📶 According to Ross Lydall over at the Standard, some “stations and tunnels on the Northern and Central lines” could get 4G wireless by Christmas. Euston, Bank and Oxford Circus are some of the stations rumoured to be plugged in first, but don’t hold your breath - this is the same Ross Lydall who reported that Crossrail was going to be open by Christmas 2021.
🏫 While we’re talking about giant building projects and transport upgrades, we should mention that the consultation has begun on the controversial £1.5bn revamp of Liverpool Street station. We say ‘controversial’ because the plans involve “removing the 1980s roof and original station entrance, and constructing a 10-storey hotel and office block.”
🚓 On Thursday, Pc David Carrick, the Met officer, who had already been charged with 44 offences against 12 separate women, was charged with a further nine, including six counts of rape. On the same day, Met Commissioner Mark Rowley told Radio Four’s Today programme that the force has “about 100 officers in the organisation who have very restrictive conditions on them because frankly we don’t trust them to talk to members of the public, and that’s… it’s completely mad that I have to employ people like that as police officers who you can’t trust to have contact with the public. It’s ridiculous.”
🪵 If you read our issue by Harriet Thorpe a few weeks ago, then you’ll know that one of the ways of making London more sustainable is building more things out of timber. The good news is that plans have just been unveiled for The William, a six-storey, “cross-laminated timber office building” in Queensway, Bayswater.
😞 A plaque has been installed on the former site of 18 Denmark Place. On Saturday 16 August 1980, a nightclub at that spot was attacked by a man who poured petrol through the letterbox of and threw in a lit match, after “accusing a barman there of overcharging him”. 37 people were killed in the fire, but the tragedy has been largely forgotten since.
👛 Croydon Council has declared bankruptcy for the third time since 2020, thanks to a £130m ‘gap’ in its budget. As Inside Croydon points out, the borough’s first elected mayor, Jason Perry, took office just six moths ago with a government-approved budget waiting for him. but it doesn’t seem to have done any good and they are now blaming £48 million-worth of “unresolved historic accounting risks”.
P.S. Even if you don’t live in Croydon you should have a look at Inside Croydon, they’re the best. A recent example: Croydon Council tried to sue iC “for publishing documents that had already been published on the council website,” but then dropped the case. As iC has already raised thousands of pounds from supporters for a legal fighting fund, they are now donating that money to local charities.
🕯 We know you’ve been worried about the fate of Westminster’s Victorian gas lamps, so let us bring you this update from the Antiques Trade Gazette. As you’ll no doubt recall, a group called the London Gasketeers have been trying to prevent Westminster council from replacing some of its gas lamps with “like-for-like” LED lanterns (insert your own ‘gaslighting’ pun here). But now the council has said that it is going to “halt the proposed conversion of 174 gas lamps to LED [including] 138 Grade II-listed gas lamps and 36 non-listed gas lamps in prominent positions across the city.” 94 non-listed gas lamps will still be converted to LED though.
🏚️ The BBC takes a look at what’s going on over at the once great Crystal Palace Sports Stadium, (which was partially closed this week after the floodlights were deemed to be unsafe).
🦍 An 18-year-old, 193kg silverback gorilla named Kiburi has arrived at London Zoo after a DHL Express flight from Tenerife in a custom-built crate.
🛤️ There’s quite a few records being broken in London this week. First up, Waterloo station once again became ‘the busiest railway station in Britain’, (after being briefly usurped by Stratford last year). Victoria, London Bridge and Liverpool Street make up the rest of the top four.
🚇 Meanwhile, the world record for the longest ever journey on the Underground has been broken by Ali White who stayed on the Tube for two days, and visited all 272 stations on the network in the process.
🐱 And, finally, Flossie the cat who lives in Orpington, has been confirmed as the world’s oldest cat. Flossie is 26, which is about 120 years old in human years.
Art and culture bits
✍️ A statue of Virginia Woolf has been unveiled on the side of the Thames in Richmond. The £50,000 needed to fund the statue was raised mostly through individual donations over five years, and the project had to overcome objections that the location was “insensitive and reckless” given that Woolf died by drowning in a river. The Guardian spoke to the artist behind the sculpture, Laury Dizengremel, earlier this week.
💵 The National Portrait Gallery has received a £10 million gift, the most significant in its history, which will be used “to support its major development project”. The money comes from The Blavatnik Family Foundation, “a supporter of educational, scientific, cultural, and charitable institutions, [that] is headed by Sir Leonard Blavatnik, the industrialist and philanthropist.” If you’ve been reading LiB for a while you’ll know that, as well as being an industrialist and philanthropist, Sir Len is a Trump supporting friend of some “top Putin cronies” and his support of London’s cultural institutions has been viewed by some as part of a “very direct and very aggressive” effort to “push back on that framing that he is an oligarch.”
🩸 Big theatre news of the week is the announcement that the stage adaptation of A Little Life is coming to the West End. This production of the Hanya Yanagihara novel will star James Norton, Omari Douglas, Luke Thompson and Zach Wyatt and will play for 12 weeks at the Harold Pinter from 25 March. The adaptation has most recently been on at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it was called “a collage of unrelenting torment” by the New York Times.
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