Weekend roundup for 29 January

Featuring plyscrapers, portals and gangplanks

Welcome to your one-stop digest of everything that’s happened in London this week. The full roundup is available to paid subscribers and includes the arts and culture news as well as the latest food and drink updates

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News bits

🚇 We honestly can’t wait for Crossrail to launch so we can stop writing about it, and that moment may be getting closer. With Canary Wharf station complete, nine out of the ten stations have now been handed over to TfL, leaving just Bond Street to go. Bond Street had been consciously uncoupled decoupled from the rest of the Elizabeth Line because it was taking to so long to complete. But now it looks like it’s catching up and Crossrail has hinted they might wait for it to be ready, even if that means delaying the full opening. Again.

💺 In the meantime, the PR offensive has begun in earnest. The mayor was riding the tracks earlier this week and proclaiming that Crossrail’s “wow factor” would “entice people working from home back to the office.” Because that’s why people go into the office: so they can admire the trains. The BBC’s Tom Edwards has been down there, admiring the “huge and glistening” stations (something very homoerotic happens when you let men of a certain age on a new railway system); and the Standard’s Ross Lydall (who has a history of publishing optimistic nonsense about Crossrail) also took a trip with Sadiq and Mark Wild, Crossrail’s CEO. Sadiq actually uses the phrase “we’re on schedule” while Mark Wild says they’re being “cagey” about the opening date because they want “everything to be perfect on day one”. Well that’s jinxed it.

🏚️ After years of argument and protest, the plans to redevelop the Ridley Road Shopping Village in Dalston have been withdrawn and Hackney Council has agreed to take over the running of the market on a 15-year lease. The building will be refurbished, and the existing traders will be allowed to stay in place.

SaveRidleyRoad @SaveRidleyRoad

Last night Hackney Council agreed to take over a 15 year lease on the Basement, Ground Floor and part of the First Floor of Ridley Road Shopping Village. After years of uncertainty and so much work by so many this is HUGE victory. For traders, campaigners, the whole borough.

🍿 After the recent announcement that the Crystal Palace subway is going to be restored, another South London Victorian landmark has been saved. The Grade II listed Playtower in Ladywell originally opened in 1884 as a swimming pool but closed in 2004 and then caught fire in 2006. Now it’s going to be restored and turned into a cinema.

🚴 Want to know how many people in your borough cycle to work? Someone did a study based on 2020’s numbers and found out that almost one in five people in Hackney cycle to work three times a week or more; but if you go further out to places like Redbridge and Barking and Dagenham then the number drops to around 1%.

👮 iNews interviewed deputy chief constable Maggie Blyth this week about her role as the national police lead for violence against women and girls. In related news, Reclaim These Streets have posted a long and detailed explanation of what happened during their two days in court last week (it’s under the ‘Case Update’ tab).

🪵 There’s been a lot of headlines about ‘wooden skyscrapers’ coming to London this week. As far as we can tell, the chairman of the City of London Corporation has said somewhere (we can’t work out where and none of the newspaper reports specify) that they might look at relaxing rules to encourage ‘plyscrapers’. Although the only direct quote is about meeting fire safety requirements, and as the cladding debacle is still raging on, we can’t see any Tokyo-style wooden buildings going up in the Square Mile any time soon.

💰 Also this week: The government has awarded a £210,000 safety guidance contract to the same “fire safety expert” who wrote the guidance that was in place before Grenfell. Advice, which included the idea that it was “unrealistic” to expect landlords to draw up plans for evacuating disabled people from burning buildings.

🏗️ A report commissioned by SAVE Britain’s Heritage has concluded that the plan to demolish the M&S building on Oxford Street and replace it with a 10-storey retail and office building would result in “significantly higher carbon emissions” than would be produced by a comprehensive retrofit of the existing building.

🐻‍❄️ If you can get down to Trafalgar Square today you’ll catch the last day of the Greenpeace’ ‘portal’ to the Antarctic they’ve set up there as part of their ‘Protect the Oceans’ campaign. The four metre high portal is broadcasting live from the Antarctic all day, and includes live streams of penguin colonies and arctic sunrises.

Art and culture bits

Globe Town in the days of the Virus by Syd Shelton

🐷 Francis Bacon: Man & Beast (as previewed in our Things to look forward to in 2022 issue) opened at the Royal Academy this week and the reviewers are eating it up. Five stars from the Standard, which calls the show “overwhelming” and “demonic” (but, you know, in a good way); another five from iNews (“a great, brooding beast of a show”); four from the Guardian (“frequently grim but endlessly fascinating”); and the same from the Times (“profoundly moving”).