Weekend roundup for 3 June
Featuring Alpine chalets, Asteroid City and asbestos
It’s been a strangely quiet week for London news. Both Parliament and City Hall are on their half term breaks, but we can still rely on the Met to do something wilfully stupid and there’s no stopping the tsunami of ULEZ arguments. Plus, there’s more than enough cultural and culinary updates to get through.
The full Roundup is only available to paying subscribers, so if you’d like to join that club then the entry fee is just £5 a month or £50 a year. That also gets you access to our ever-growing archive, and you’ll also start receiving our Wednesday issues, which this week was all about flying cars and space travel:
Sign up using this button and you get a week free:
If you’re already a LiB supporter, then thank you very much for subscribing. We appreciate you very much, and we have the WhatsApp messages to prove it.
News bits
🚨 The Met is currently investigating half-a-dozen officers who pointed a taser at a 91-year-old woman in Peckham last month. The “distressed” woman was handcuffed and had a mesh hood placed over her head after allegedly spitting at officers, but was not arrested. One of the officers has been suspended and the other five “have been placed on restricted duties and will have no contact with the public,” while the Independent Office for Police Conduct investigates what happened.
👮 The other big Met news of the week is that officers are to stop attending “non-urgent mental health care calls” from this September. The Met will continue to attend incidents where there is a threat to life but they won’t be doing things like finding people who have gone missing from mental health facilities or transporting people in distress to hospital if an ambulance isn’t available. The chief executive of the mental health charity Mind told The Guardian that “I am not persuaded we have got enough in the system to tolerate a shift to this new approach.”
🚔 On Thursday morning the Autonomous Winter homeless shelter in Shadwell posted footage of around 100 police officers in riot gear getting ready to “raid” the former Sisters of Mercy convent. Back in April the occupants of the building received a letter from the Met saying they’d had information from the owners that the building was residential (UK law only permits squatting in non-residential buildings).
🚗 The mayor has increased the ULEZ scrappage scheme so that care workers and families on child benefits can now get support, as well as small businesses with less than 50 employees.
🤪 And, talking of ULEZ… Lionel ‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’ Shriver has written a typically unhinged rant about ULEZ for the Spectator this week. Here’s an indirect link to it just to avoid giving the Spectator any more page views. Be warned it contains sentences bemoaning both “Britons’ blind, bovine compliance with an economically self-destructive, socially disastrous, politically despotic and medically idiotic regime” (aka ‘lockdown’) and the “‘15-minute cities’ that would imprison urbanites in their own tiny neighbourhoods”.
💔 If you came across a headline in the past few weeks claiming that Sadiq Khan was left “barely conscious” after suffering a “cardiac arrest” at at COP26 last year, then you should know that’s not strictly accurate. Also, the ‘journalists’ at places like GBNews should really know the difference between a heart attack and a cardiac arrest.
📻 The mayor seemed in good health when he took questions from callers to Eddie Nestor’s BBC London Radio show earlier this week. There was a lot of ULEZ chat of course, as well as questions on the housing shortage and the Met.
🚑 LBC’s Iain Dale has extended his heartfelt gratitude (via his paywalled Telegraph column) to the “superb Underground workers” who looked after him after he broke his hip in a fall in Charing Cross station last weekend. Maybe they should have taken the opportunity to ask Iain why he called their union a national disgrace last year. Dale also praised the staff at St Thomas’s hospital whose “wonderful” care was, to him, nothing more than a sign that the NHS is obviously “less stretched than we’re told”. A reminder that Dale once wrote an entire book (okay, ebook) on the NHS, which called on it to “embrace the private sector”.
🌻 TfL is adding an extra 74,000m² of wildflower verges around London’s roads. That pretty much doubles the amount already dedicated to wildflowers, taking it to 130,000m² (or “18 football pitches” to use the strictly scientific metric). If you’re wondering how TfL do this, they “reduce mowing frequency” and ensure “coordinated and monitored” litter picking.
🏊 Tooting Bec lido was due to reopen this summer after its £4m refurbishment, but that’s not going to happen now as they’ve found asbestos buried at the site. The reopening has now been scheduled for “later this year”.
Food and drink bits
🍺 We got a slight scare this week, when news cropped up on Twitter (via a Fortean Times forum) that the Wheatsheaf pub on Rathbone Place was about to close. Fortunately, it looks like the threat is (for now) confined the upstairs function room, which may be turned into three flats. The planning application has come from landowners Shaftesbury Capital, who are looking to do the same thing to the Duke of York on Rathbone Street.
😢 Somewhere which is definitely closing though, is the Crouch End restaurant Banners, which has been serving jerk chicken and curry to customers (including mega fan Simon Pegg) since 1992, when it was opened by Juliette Banner and her then-husband Andy Kershaw. Juliette posted to Instagram this week to say Banners would be closing in September after “31 years of darn hard work for everyone, innumerable laughs and lifetime friendships formed”.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to London in Bits to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.