Weekend roundup for 30 April
Featuring super sewers, fly towers and beer miles
A reminder that there will be no LiB next Monday as it’s a Bank Holiday. We’ll be back on Wednesday (also, did you notice, we put the right month in the title this week?).
This weekly digest of news, stuff to see and do and places to eat and drink is available to paid subscribers. If you’re one of those subscribers then thank you! If you’re not and you want the ‘full fat’ version of this issue, then you have one more chance to take advantage of our special birthday offer, before it ends tomorrow:
News bits
🍸 At a select committee hearing this week, Tory minister Mark Harper was asked why Priti Patel attended the premier of No Time To Die last September (courtesy of the the Jamaican Tourist Board). Harper answered that “she was invited as the home secretary,” before Cabinet Office minister Michael Ellis interjected to argue that “The nature of the film […] is connected to executive functions.” When it was pointed out that foreign secretary Liz Truss had also been invited along, committee chair Chris Bryant asked, “What, because Bond travels abroad?”.
💷 Catherine McGuinness, the leader of the City of London Corporation has said that London isn’t “the laundromat that it is painted to be,” even though a recent study showed that “2,189 companies registered in Britain and its overseas territories were linked to 48 Russian money laundering and corruption cases, involving funds worth 82 billion pounds.”
👮 On Friday, Met officer PC Ireland Murdock was charged with raping a woman “in Lambeth while he was off duty on 25 September last year”. Meanwhile, the five Met officers who handcuffed Olympic sprinter Bianca Williams and her partner before searching her car (while their three-month-old son was in the back) are to face gross misconduct charges. The disciplinary panel “will also consider whether racial discrimination played any part in the actions of some of the officers.”
🚨 It was also revealed this week that there has been a 400% rise in stalking offences in London in the past year, “with more than 1,000 cases per month, compared with 200 cases per month prior to April 2020”. The Met also said that in 2020-21, “100% of the 22,676 victims who contacted The National Stalking Helpline reported the presence of a cyber-element by stalkers.”
🚔 The Met has come second in the list of UK forces who have closed the most police stations (36) since 2015. The force has made more than £1 billion through the sale of property in the last few years.
🛺 In a move that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that there’s some local elections next week, Grant Shapps has announced that the government is to “bring in new laws to control the ‘wild west’ of unlicensed rickshaws in central London.”
🚚 HS2 Ltd had previously said they were going to remove debris from the Euston station development by rail, but this week they went back on those assurances and said they were going to use HGVs instead, a plan which would result in 25,863 additional lorry journeys to and from the site over the next two years.
⚖️ The problem with arresting climate activists for glueing themselves to things, is that once they get into a court room there’s a really good chance they’ll glue themselves to it.
🏗️ When we interviewed Jenna Goldberg from the London Communications Agency a few months ago she talked about how it will be interesting to watch Canada Water change over the next few years, as the person who’s in charge of its redevelopment is Roger Madelin, the man behind the transformation of King’s Cross. This week The Standard interviewed Madelin about his “15-year masterplan” for the area (including the fate of Printworks).
🚽 There’s been a lot of talk this week about the £800 million plan that would see a tram linking Kent and Essex running under the Thames by 2030. But something that’s actually happening right now is the Thames Tideway tunnel, the vast 25km ‘super sewer’ that runs all the way from Acton to the Abbey Mills pumping station in West Ham, and which completed its tunnelling phase this week. To celebrate, a live music performance was staged 70m underground “in what is described as a symphony of percussion instruments, cello harmonics and piano.”
🚲 Brixton Blog has interviewed “a reformed bike thief” to ask how and why he stole bikes, how he sold them, and his top tips for stopping your ride getting nicked.
🏩 Dubious PR ‘study’ of the week comes from an online booze platform who have ‘discovered’ that London is the “the world’s horniest city” by counting the amount of “one-hour hotels, strip clubs, ‘sex events’ and aphrodisiacs served in restaurants”.
🍭 Veteran London blogger Diamond Geezer has ‘reviewed’ all eleven of the American candy stores that now line Oxford Street. As for whether they’re part of some strange money laundering operation, DG can only say that “in certain stores the stooge by the door did seem more interested in watching the street than any potential shoplifting within”.
😤 There was an article in The Spectator this week about the London property market possibly ‘faltering’, but we’re not linking to The Spectator (now or ever again) because it also publishes dross like this:
P.S. We messed up the link to the BBC’s London elections 2022: Where does your money go? article in Wednesday’s issue. That one should work.
Art and culture bits
🧷 On 9 June, author, journalist (and previous LiB interviewee) Helen Barrett is hosting an event entitled ‘Be Reasonable Demand The Impossible - Malcolm McLaren's London Life’ for the London Society. Helen is going to be talking to Paul Gorman, who wrote McLaren’s biography and created the map 'Situation Vacant: Sex Pistols & Malcolm McLaren in London’.
🎬 The V&A has gone all out with its new film, Creativity, It’s What makes Us, which is definitely not an ad’, but a “piece of art that celebrates creativity and humanity.”
🔊 Bloomberg have been to take a look at what Koko looks like after its “$100 million revamp,” including the late-night pizzeria and tap bar, the “intimate” 200 capacity space housed in the old Victorian Fly Tower, and the members-only roof terrace bar (membership will be £1,500 a year if you’re over 35). The FT have also been to have a look, has have Wallpaper and City AM.
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.