Weekend roundup for 3 July

Includes pods, police boxes and pitchforks

Jul 03, 2021

🚓 According to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Democracy and the Constitution (APPGDC), the Met breached “fundamental rights” in their handling of the Sarah Everard vigil. The parliamentary inquiry found that the force “wrongly applied coronavirus lockdown laws and failed to understand their legal duties in respect of protest”. The inquiry has proposed amendments to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, including abandoning some of the new powers and “a special code on how to police protests”.

🛁 Meanwhile, the Met has raided the premises of the Antepavilion, the site at Columbia and Brunswick Wharf where experimental structures are erected every year. One of this year’s winning structures was designed by “a collective born from the environmental campaign group, Extinction Rebellion,” so the Met raided the site where they arrested three people, “smashed in doors” and “took equipment, bizarrely even taking a pink bathtub.”

Antepavilion @antepavilion

When the owner of docks came to complain about the raid on our premises, he was promptly arrested and charged with "attempted assault" and "dangerous driving". He was not be released till 5am the next morning! #PoliceBrutality #art #hackneycanal #canalart

🪴 Sadiq Khan has announced the Grow Back Greener fund, a £6 million investment “in improving green spaces across London.” The fund will offer grants to projects like “community gardens, food growing projects, pocket parks and cleaner waterways,” with a focus “on the most disadvantaged areas”. If you want to apply for the fund there’s more details here.

🛖 On Monday a ‘Solohaus’ (a fully equipped modular home that costs about £47,000 to build and £5 a week to run) was unveiled in the grounds of Westminster Abbey by the SHC Partnership (a group made up of developers Hill Group, The Salvation Army and Citizens UK). They’re embarking on a £12m project to gift 200 of these ‘pods’ over the next five years “to organisations supporting people experiencing homelessness.” To do that they’re calling on the Government, local authorities, and landowners to “back the programme, provide funding and help identify small pockets of land as sites for the homes.”

👮 Well done to Ian Visits for writing an entire post about the new City of London police boxes, without once using the words ‘Dr Who’ or ‘TARDIS’. The designs are pretty futuristic though, with “space for digital information screens, communication technology and first-aid equipment,” as well as carved stone exteriors that can be used for “pollution monitoring and planting projects to encourage biodiversity and invite forgotten species back into the City once again.”

🗳 Drag Race UK star, Bimini Bon Boulash has announced their intention to run for London Mayor… kind of. During a podcast interview Bimini talked about “taking a top job in parliament,” and when asked if that meant running for PM, they replied: “Maybe Bimini for mayor first… Sadiq can pass on the baton. Sadiq’s my mate, we had lunch.”

💉 You can get your jab at Tate Modern now, in case you’ve been holding out for a cool enough venue to become available.

📷 Street photographer, Christian Cross was at both the Save Our Scene protest and Trans + Pride last week and captured some amazing images. More over on his Instagram.

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A post shared by @christian_cross_uk

Arts and culture bits

🎸 On Wednesday Pitchfork revealed the details of the first-ever Pitchfork Music Festival London. It runs from November 10-14 and acts announced so far include Stereolab, Moses Boyd, black midi, Anna Meredith, Bobby Gillespie & Jenny Beth, Tirzah, Mykki Blanco and Girl Band. The festival is taking place over multiple locations including the Southbank Centre, the Roundhouse, Oval Space and fabric. Tickets went on sale yesterday.

🤴 The Donmar has announced its reopening season, and they’re not messing around. The theatre has mashed up Shakespeare and Game of Thrones by enlisting Kit Harrington to play Henry V in “an exciting modern production… exploring what it means to be English and our relationship to Europe.” Meanwhile they’ve also got Rory Kinnear starring in Force Majeure, an adaptation of Ruben Ostlund’s award-winning film.

👨‍🎨️ The Affordable Art Fair is returning to Battersea Park next week, for “a one-off summer edition”. From 8-11 July you can browse offerings from “a hand-picked selection of galleries showcasing original contemporary artworks, priced between £100 to £6,000”. Tickets start at £11.

✍️ Theatre 503 is a a 63-seat theatre based in Battersea, which has a specific mission of supporting and championing new writers. They’ve just announced that they’ve secured a deal to build The 503Studio at Nine Elms “a new 320 square metre, state-of-the art studio space… which will open its doors by 2023.” The theatre is hoping the space will become “a centre of international playwriting excellence” as well as “an open space for anyone in the local community who wants to tell their story and explore their creativity.”

🪟 Dezeen has taken a look at the work of photographer Andy Billman, whose Daylight Robbery series at the London Festival of Architecture “captures bricked-up windows of homes throughout the capital”.

👗 Fashion United has an interview with the founders of the Wearers Festival “a permanent celebration of dress and the people who get dressed.” They are very keen to stress that this is not a fashion festival, and is more “about the political, social, cultural and environmental meanings of dress, and the role of dress in identity building among different communities in London, the UK and the world.” They have aspirations to become “an integral part of the cultural offer of London” so if you are one of those people who ‘gets dressed’, go take a look.

📹 fabric is going to be banning all photography and videos inside the club when it reopens on July 23. Co-founder Cameron Leslie told Mixmag, “fabric has always had a no camera policy but as camera phones proliferated that became harder to enforce and we got a bit lax about it. Going forward we want to re-emphasise the policy so that we encourage people to stay in the moment, protect the dancefloor experience, and avoid social media stress or anxiety.”

fabriclondon @fabriclondon

fabric is London's home for underground music, always aiming to create a feeling of self-expression on the dance-floor. We are introducing a strict no photo, and no video policy at the club. Stay in the moment and put away your phone, enjoy the night...

📖 The Guardian has reviewed Keith Ridgway’s new novel, A Shock, which they call a “shattered series of surreal and sinisterly comic south London scenes, peopled by a shadowy cast of characters who wander haphazardly in and out of view.”

📕 Over in the New York Times there’s an interview with Gabriel Krauze, “a novelist whose life and work is steeped in a side of London that many writers don’t know about or acknowledge.” Krauze grew up in South Kilburn and his novel Who They Was is “a barely fictionalised, first-person account of his late teens and early 20s”.

⛏️ Honestly, we’re surprised it’s taken this long for axe throwing to reach the West End, but here comes the Boom Battle Bar franchise and their “£2m, 15,200 square feet axe-throwing bar,” which is set to open on Oxford Street this autumn. Just in time for the staff Christmas party. What could go wrong?

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A post shared by @gerard_don_daniel

🖍️ Orbital Comics in Covent Garden has opened its own gallery space to show the “work of both emerging and established artists, offering art at affordable to more expensive prices.” Initial artists on display include Gerard Don-Daniel (above). There’s more info on who else you can see over at Bleeding Cool.

🖼️ The Art Newspaper asked London’s museums to provide figures around the four-week period from 17 May so as to find out how many people are actually returning to museums post-lockdown. The National Gallery had the lowest attendance compared to the same time in 2019 (13% of the visitors), while The Science Museum recorded the highest number with visitor levels at 40% of 2019.

🚇 Somewhat ironically (considering what happened in Elephant and Castle on Monday), today is ‘Arch Day’, the day on which The Arch Co. and Network Rail encourage you to #loveyourlocalarches and “support to the diverse and brilliant businesses who call our railway arches home. TfL has a list of some of the arch-dwelling businesses that “help make the environment cleaner and greener, make us healthier and happier, and help local communities prosper.”

🥣 The Guardian has taken a look at the Charles Dickens Museum’s new walking tour that allows you to follow in Dickens’s footsteps “around the places that inspired Oliver Twist. From Saffron Hill, formerly a notorious slum and the home of Fagin’s den of thieves, to Clerkenwell Green, where Oliver is pursued by a mob.” More about the tour here.

Food and drink bits

🍖 ‘Posh kebab’ purveyors Le Bab are celebrating Matt Hancocks’ resignation by giving away a thousand free kebabs at their Old Street location. Between 2 and 4pm today (and next Saturday) you can nab a free ‘bab, but you will be asked “for some small donations to @maggiescentres to help cancer patients” in return. Sounds fair to us. More details here:

eatlebab

A post shared by @eatlebab

🍸 The team behind the ‘modern Indian’ restaurant group, Kricket, are opening a bar right next door to their Soho space. What used to be the basement karaoke bar at 12-14 Denman Street is going to turn into Soma, a “23-cover nine-metre bar” serving cocktails such as “Gooseberry Chaat Margarita with tequila, triple sec, gooseberry cordial and a touch of chaat masala; and a Pickled Mooli Martini with vodka, dry vermouth, lightly pickled mooli and fennel oil.”

🛻 There’s a tiny truck going around London offering free wine tastings. It’s called the ‘Little Wine Truck’ (obviously) and it’s part of the Loire Bucket List, a series of “collaborative events offering further opportunities to explore Loire Wines”. The truck will be parked up at the Southbank and at Taste of London starting from 10 July. Details of the full schedule are here.

🌮 for so long there’s been a dearth of choice when it comes to really good Mexican restaurants in London. Now, finally, things seem to be looking up. The latest promising arrival is Cavita, a new venue from Mexican chef Adriana Cavita, which will open in Marylebone Village in November. According to the press release the menu will feature “a range of tacos including baja fish, ‘Pastor’ presa ibérica and cochinita pibil” and there’ll be “a hidden mezcaleria on the lower floor, which will have its own entrance.” Sounds amazing.

🦪 This might be the most ridiculous sentence we’ve ever had to type but here goes: This weekend, chef Whyte Rushen (not his given name) held a pop-up at Dalston Roof Park at which he served Monster Munch on oysters (more details on the post itself).

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