Weekend roundup for 3 September
Featuring Nimbys, Nigerian afrobeats and sad noodles
Welcome to our weekly dash through all the news, cultural happenings and food and drink updates coming out of London this week.
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News bits
🚇 We’ve been writing about TfL’s funding nightmare ever since we started this newsletter, so it was a relief to finally see a long-term deal agreed this week. But… The £3.6m ‘bail out’ (a third of which is ‘upfront funding’) does not come without its caveats and complications. As the mayor said in his statement, although a ‘managed decline’ of the transport system has been averted, there is still “a significant funding gap, meaning we will likely have to increase fares in the future and still proceed with some cuts to bus services.” The other big red flag is the demand for a “reform of TfL’s pension scheme at pace,” which means the threat of strikes has not gone away. If you want to dig into the details of the deal, Ian Visits has a great rundown.
👮 The other long-running story that reached some sort of conclusion this week was the row over Cressida Dick’s resignation. Yesterday the chief inspector of constabulary Sir Tom Winsor published his review of the whole affair, and the headline was that Dick “felt intimidated” into stepping down “after an ultimatum from Sadiq Khan”. The mayor’s response to the report was, “Londoners elected me to hold the Met commissioner to account and that's exactly what I have done.” While Cressida Dick said in her statement that she hopes “this report is an opportunity for others to reflect on how City Hall functions and is held to account.”
🧒 Also coming out of the mayor’s office this week was a call for free school meals for all children in London along with an interview with City AM in which he branded the Boris Johnson administration the “most anti-London government in modern times” and pledged to work “constructively with any Prime Minister who is committed to doing right by London and our incredible country.”
👨🚒️ Oh, and we have new fire boats now:
✊ For the past three years Homegrown has been running a food bank, Saturday school and advocacy service out of a community space in Tottenham Hale. Earlier this week the group was evicted from the space by “property developers preparing to build on the site.” In response, the group are now squatting in an adjacent building in “an attempt to pressure Notting Hill Genesis and Haringey Council into providing them an interim space”. You can sign a petition in support of the group here.
📈 In the week that Alan Sugar branded Whitehall Staff as “lazy gits watching golf and tennis at home while they supposed to be working,” The Telegraph reported that civil servants are “terrified of being deployed to London because they cannot afford high rents” and that Government departments “including the Home Office are already putting contingency plans in place to keep running if staff walk out in the autumn.”
🚓 Long-time readers will know that we don’t have a lot of love for MyLondon, but we certainly wouldn’t go as far as locking up one of their reporters for seven hours just for covering a ‘Just Stop Oil’ protest in Hammersmith.
⚖️ As well as detaining members of the press, the Met has also been paying compensation to the families of the three men killed by Stephen Port. The payouts were made after civil claims over the force’s “investigatory failings”. The Independent Office for Police Conduct is currently reinvestigating the Met over its handling of the cases.
🏭 Battersea Power Station will open to the public for the first time ever on October 14. From that weekend you’ll be able to explore the “lavish Art Deco glamour” of the 1930s Turbine Hall A, and the “brutalist, industrial” Turbine Hall B (via the retail outlets obviously) as well as the Chimney Lift experience. The Arcade Food Hall doesn’t arrive until next year though.
☁️ The cable car formerly knows as the Emirates Air Line has a new sponsor. From October it will be known as the IFS Cloud Cable Car, because IFS is a cloud software company and… there are clouds in the sky. Did we need to explain that?
🚳 It’s been a weird week to be a BBC journalist. First Jeremy Vine was slapped on the wrist after his support for low-traffic neighbourhoods” in Chiswick was deemed to breach impartiality rules…
🐀 And then the Beeb’s International Editor, Jeremy Bowen posted a video of some rats in Camberwell Park, and somehow the Standard thought that deserved a whole article. We’re not linking to it, but you can have this gif instead.
Art and culture bits
✏️ The 20th London Design Festival starts on 17 September and runs for a week. There are a huge amount of activities and events in the programme, and some of it can feel a bit intimidating if you’re not a designer (Designs for the Pluriverse anyone?), but there are some more ‘accessible’ things in there if you’re willing to dig around. Stuff like The Sound of Nature in The Urban Jungle, a Shakespeare art walk, a street art trail around Walthamstow, a pug called Monty, and Sony’s Into Sight installation which “plays on sensorial effects that transform simple boundary surfaces into an infinite vista through shifting light, colour and sound.” Trippy.
🎨 To coincide with the Design Festival, the Design Museum is showing the work of London-based artist/designer Yinka Ilori, whose work you might have seen on pedestrian crossings recently. You don’t have to rush to catch this one though, the exhibition runs until June next year.
🪖 Another free exhibition starting this month, is War Games at the Imperial War Museum, which looks at how games like Sniper Elite 5 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (as well as more serious software used in military training simulators) portray conflict, challenge perceptions of war and and interpret real events.
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