Weekend roundup for 3 December

Featuring heritage crimes, tiny artworks and mince pie donuts

Cabaret at the Playhouse Theatre

Welcome to your weekly roundup of London news. If it happened in London this week, then it’s probably in here somewhere. The full version of the Weekend Roundup is available to paid subscribers and includes the arts and culture update as well as all the food and drink titbits, the Long Read of the Week and Tweet of the Week.

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News bits

🚇 As you’ve probably noticed by now, the next round of Tube strikes are going ahead this weekend after talks between TfL and the RMT broke down.

🍾 And, as expected, there’ll be no free underground service on New Year’s Eve this year, thanks to the “catastrophic” impact Covid-19 has had on TfL’s finances.

😷 Between Tuesday, when masks became mandatory on public transport again, and Friday, more than 150 commuters had been “ordered to pay a £200 fine” according to the Mirror.

🤒 Last week we told you that Richmond was London’s happiest place to live. This week it’s the area with the highest Covid infection rate in the city.

🎅 Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that the omicron variant is “prompting firms to cancel or scale back their end-of-year celebrations in London.”

🎧 While all this has been going on, the mayor found time to go on a walk “to his old stomping ground of Tooting” with Politico’s Jack Blanchard. In the audio interview Sadiq “visits his old secondary school… the Islamic Centre where he prays today [and] one of his favourite curry houses for chai masala, pakoras and an in-depth conversation about how cities like London will need to change in a post-pandemic world.”

🏚️ “Heritage crime scene” would be a great name for a band, but it’s also what residents of Lewisham fear might become of “historic South London pub” the Catford Constitutional Club if a proposed multi-million pound refurbishment and extension goes ahead.

💰 More good news: London is more expensive than ever. According to the The Economist Intelligence Unit, “London has climbed the rankings of the world’s most expensive cities to hit its highest point in years” (we’re now the 17th costliest city in the world). Meanwhile Paris has been knocked off the ‘expensive cities’ top spot by Tel Aviv.

🏬 It looks like Selfridges might be being sold by its owners, the Weston family (who have owned it for around 18 years), The family are said to be selling up to Thailand’s Central Group for around £4 billion.

🔥 On December 1st 85 years ago, the Crystal Palace burned to the ground. To mark the date The Guardian reprinted their report of the night from their archives. They really knew how to write an article back then:

“It was a curiously silent crowd which gathered at the low-level railway station within a quarter of a mile from where the pagoda-like south tower tilted against a background of deep orange flames, like some monstrous steamer in a giant’s kitchen. Clouds of steam poured from the ventilator. Sparks of a deeper orange blew out from it now and again, sending a thrill through the crowds as they watched them flicker in the sharp night air and die.”

🔩 Mary Shelley’s old flat on Marchmont Street in Bloomsbury is up for sale. For just over a million quid you can grab the two bedroom apartment where Mary and Percy Shelley lived in the early 1800s before they left for Switzerland (where Mary started writing Frankenstein).

Art and culture bits

🎪 The International Mime Festival is coming back to London at the end of January next year. Don’t be fooled by the name though, it’s not all people pretending to be trapped in glass boxes. The festival (which features 14 productions staged at venues across the city) includes puppetry, theatre, dance and film, as well as the utterly unclassifiable, like Charmaine Childs’ Power: