Weekend roundup for 27 August
Featuring bondage, biscuit tins and Ben Affleck
We’re going to get this out of the way right up front… We’ve seen headlines this week that include the phrase ‘Pumpkin Spice Latte’. This is not okay. We’ve still got a whole Bank Holiday left! Which reminds us, there will be no Monday edition of LiB next week because of that Bank Holiday. But we will be back on Wednesday for a ‘Where Do You Go?’ edition that features the line “London has no time for your melancholic ennui”.
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News bits
👮 The Met has denied that racial bias played a part in their bungled investigation into the disappearance of Owami Davies. In a statement posted on Twitter, the force’s Commander Paul Brogden said, “Any commentary […] that suggests our response to Owami Davies’ disappearance was insufficient or motivated by racial bias is unsubstantiated and based on speculation. It does a disservice to the tireless work, over many weeks, of the officers involved.”
🏙️ Westminster Council has ‘officially’ canceled the piazza plans that have been in development limbo since last year. Geoff Barraclough (cabinet member for planning and economic development) ‘announced’ the cancellation during a video Q&A with 3Fox (“a marketing agency for councils” which currently has 60 subscribers to its YouTube channel) by saying “We are not going to block Oxford Street. We are not going to pedestrianise Oxford Street. That is not the right thing to do at the moment.”
🍬 Staying on Oxford Street for a second: Nickie Aiken (who’s the Tory MP representing the Cities of London and Westminster) has told landlords that they should “actively turf out tenants” of the 30 stores currently under investigation by the council for failing to pay £7.9m in taxes. Somehow we don’t think that’s going to do the trick.
🚅 Some positive transport news this week: TfL announced that, from 6 November, the sections of the Elizabeth Line will join up and Bond Street will open.
💰 As for the ongoing TfL budget saga, TfL’s Board is now set to meet next Tuesday to make a decision on the Department for Transport’s current offer.
🗑️ From today Newham’s bin collection workers will be on strike for a week. The Unite union says it is demanding a 10% pay rise. Newham Council has said it has offered workers a pay increase between 7.8% and 9.9%.
🚲 TfL are adding e-bikes to the Santander Cycle hire scheme. Sometime “later this year” new docking stations will be installed in Southwark, specifically at Burgess Park Albany Road, South Bermondsey station, Clements Road, Harris Academy, Brandon Street, Crimscott Street and The Blue.
🏢 It was announced this week that ‘office availability’ in central London is at its highest level in more than 15 years, which is just a nice way of saying that there is currently 60 Gherkins worth of empty buildings eating up energy and space. A reminder that, in April, the Tall Buildings Survey told us that there were 583 buildings of 20 or more storeys either planned or in construction across the city.
🏗️ One of those buildings is 72 Upper Ground, the 109 metre high “grotesque monstrosity” that has attracted hundreds of objections, mainly because the “brute of a building” would “block out light from neighbouring homes and public spaces”. But on Tuesday the mayor said he wouldn’t stand in the way of the development “and he is “happy for Lambeth council to determine the case itself.”
🏘️ Meanwhile Kensington and Chelsea council is working with Airbnb to try and “stop social housing tenants illegally subletting” their homes. The council have said that stopping tenants “renting their properties to tourists for a profit” would “free up homes for those in need of housing”. Of course, this will do very little to stop the rising numbers of (completely legal) ‘entire home listings’ in London (45,000 at the last count) that are directly contributing to the current ‘rent frenzy’.
🏠 New homes are being built in London of course, the problem is they all look “like beige, banal biscuit tins” according to India Block’s column in Wednesday’s Guardian. She’s talking about the ‘New London Vernacular’ style, which has “emerged as the hegemonic default for housing developments” in the city. For more on this, see our interview with John Grindrod from March, especially his comments about ‘austerity flats’.
🚰 A few weeks ago we told you how west London’s electricity grid has been drained by all the new data centres that had cropped up there. Well, it looks like the internet pipes might be draining London of its water too. As this week’s London hosepipe ban came into effect Thames Water announced it had “launched a probe into the impact of data centres on water supplies in and around London”. Apparently, centres “particularly in the Slough area,” can use 25 litres per second of ‘drinking quality water’ to cool their fans.
👨🎤️ Bromley council has submitted plans for a £250,000 restoration of the ‘Bowie Bandstand’ in Croydon Road Recreation Ground in Beckenham.
🏆 The ‘Croydon Business Excellence Awards’ managed to shortlist a local Waitrose for its ‘Best Employer’ award, apparently unaware that the store was about to make 70 of its staff redundant.
💻 We would have made this our ‘long read of the week’ if it wasn’t on the paywalled Telegraph: Writer, Ed Cummings got his laptop stolen out of his bag while in a “central London pub” and tracked it all the way to Algiers.
🎬 It seems people just can’t stop making cringe videos of Brixton. Here’s Brixton Buzz on the latest abomination from the developers of the ‘Brixtoncentric’ site (formerly Olive Morris House).
Arts and culture bits
🏛️ As mentioned last week, tickets for the Open House festival went on sale this week. You can browse the full programme here (on a much improved website!). A lot of the guided tours will be full already but there are plenty of ‘drop in’ events happening.
🍌 The Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury is going to be hosting a pop up version of the Museum of Sex Objects through September. The exhibition will allow you to “trace the subjugation and resurgence of female sexual sovereignty,” as well as “delight in accounts of Flagellomania” and “giggle and goggle at the lovingly curated selection of golden era ‘straight and fladge’ porn”.
🚋 Paul ‘Normal People’ Mescal is taking that whole broody, moody thing to its natural conclusion by taking on the part of Stanley Kowalski in the production of A Streetcar Named Desire that’s set to run at the Almeida from 10 December to 4 February. No news yet on whether yet he’ll be wearing a chain or not.
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