Weekend roundup for 4 February
Featuring magic mushrooms, mechanical hands and Cycling Mikey
Well done everyone, we made it through January. To celebrate, why not spend a few luxurious minutes immersing ourself in our (almost) exhaustive rundown of everything that’s happened in London this week. We’ve got motorists some serious property porn in St Pancras, anti-Instagram restaurants, banana milk... and Piers Morgan just being a dick.
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News bits
👀 The big loser of the week has to be Tate Modern, which unexpectedly lost its court battle with the residents of the “luxury Neo Bankside flats”, and that’s awkward because they live right next door to each other. The court decided that the Tate’s viewing gallery “invades the privacy of residents and prevents them from enjoying their homes”. On Wednesday, The Guardian’s architecture critic wrote a piece saying that this “iniquitous precedent,” could provide “an unbridled Nimby’s charter that could unleash a wave of unfounded nuisance claims.” Right on cue, residents of Park Street in Mayfair, “blasted plans” for a six-star a boutique, eight-bedroom hotel “over fears it will disturb their quiet neighbourhood”.
💩 Going back to our recent Thames issue for a second, Environment Secretary Therese Coffey was at Camley Street Natural Park in north London this week to launch the ‘environmental improvement plan’ for safeguarding England’s rivers. She was quoted as saying, “Actually, I really do give a shit about water quality,” and that she would “hold industry to account” and had set “clear expectations” for how much they will be allowed to spill from overflows. No new money was announced to deliver any of these pledges.
😶🌫️ Warning: this next item contains traces of Piers Morgan… The racist and disgraced, former journalist has been complaining that the pollution in Kensington and Chelsea (where he lives) is making him ‘feel rough’. This is the same Piers Morgan who told Extinction Rebellion protestors to put their bras back on because they were “damaging the environment” around his eyes, and who called cyclists “dickheads” and “cretinous busy bodies”. Three years ago, he was complaining that he was feeling bad because there wasn’t enough pollution.
📚 Camden Council has approved the £500m, 12-storey extension for the British Library. The “exciting and distinctive” development will add two new entrances, better access to St Pancras, as well as “extra galleries, commercial space and shops.” We have reached out to The Guardian to see how much more ‘smug and middle class’ this will make London, but they have not responded to our enquiries.
🏠 Talking of St Pancras: A 6000 sq ft, penthouse apartment in St Pancras Chambers has gone on the market for a smidge under £10 million. There are a lot of low hanging beams though, so maybe not ideal for those taller, incredibly wealthy people.
🏚️ In other property news, a landlord who had “shoehorned three tiny flats into one basement” of his property in Camberwell (without planning permission) has been fined £52k.
👮 The Met has announced that, from next month, it will be putting a “senior police officer of Superintendent rank” into each of London’s 32 boroughs as part of its “overhaul of the current neighbourhood policing model”. The Met did this ON THE SAME DAY it was revealed that the “3,200 ex-officers” it had written to “asking them to consider rejoining the police force,” included around 250 who had previously been “disciplined at misconduct hearings”.
💰 Only a couple of days beforehand, documents came to light detailing messages between Cressida Dick’s senior aide and advisers for the mayor, which showed that the former commissioner wanted nearly £500,000 in “severance pay” to stand down (Dick was on £240,000 a year, and she had 26 months remaining on her contract). Her severance was eventually settled at £170,000.
🍄 Completing the hat trick of senior Met officer stories is the misconduct hearing of Met commander, Julian Bennett, which began this week. Bennett, who wrote the force’s current drug strategy, is facing accusations of taking magic mushrooms, LSD and cannabis “while on holiday in France”. As the hearing opened, Bennet’s lawyer called for the members of the hearing panel “to remove themselves from the case due to alleged bias,” which meant the whole thing had to be adjourned so a date can be set “for the panel to give its ruling on the recusal application”.
⛽ In the week that Shell announced record annual profits of £32.2bn, protestors projected slogans onto the company’s Waterloo headquarters, reading ‘Shell’s Profits = Our Poverty’ and ‘Shell: Burning Our Planet’.
🛤️ Wandsworth council has a “masterplan,” and it includes the Northern line being extended to Clapham Junction. A report from the council that came out at the end of January says that the extension would ease overcrowding, while the Wandsworth Draft Local Plan talks about the “significant new and improved journey opportunities” that would be created. But before we all get too excited, the council is stressing that the plan (which would require 2.6km of tunnels from Battersea Power Station ‘as the crow flies’) would be “extremely complex” and is not anywhere near TfL’s list of current priorities.
🚕 What do the Leopard tanks Germany is giving to Ukraine, have in common with the London black cab? Bloomberg has the answer.
🕳️ The BBC has been for a tour of one of London’s “hidden power tunnels”. This one is 20 miles long and has been ‘hidden’ under south London.
🚲 Usually ‘Cycling Mikey’ catches people using their phones while driving. This guy was doing something else:
Food and drink bits
🐓 We mentioned Humble Chicken back in our New Restaurant Review Roundup of 2021, mainly because everyone seemed to love Angelo Sato’s Frith Street yakitori bar. So it seems a bit strange that they’ve gone and rebooted the place and started serving “an eight-course tasting menu… where everything is designed to provide a Kitchen-Theater like experience”. Or maybe it’s not that surprising, considering we read this week that “the upper end of the [hospitality] sector in London is facing less pressure than the mid-range casual dining market.” For those mourning the loss of the grilled offal on a stick, Sato says he “intends to do something similar in another location” soon.
🥘 There’s a weird dearth of good places to eat on the Southbank. It’s either Skylon or Las Iguanas, and nothing in-between. Thankfully, the trio of brothers behind Borough Market’s Applebee’s Fish restaurant are opening La Gamba in the Royal Festival Hall later this month, selling tapas alongside “vermouth-based cocktails”.
P.S. Thanks to our friends at Soft Launch, we just found out that La Gamba is offering half off all food from Wednesday 8th to Friday 10th. You can sign up to Soft Launch’s newsletter here if you want updates on more deals like that one.
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