Weekend roundup for 4 March

Featuring hungry pigeons, stylish poets and prize-winning kebabs

A protest outside the Russian embassy last week. Photo by Stefan Rousseau/PA Images via Getty Images.

A quick note before we get into this week’s news: There won’t be a Weekend Roundup next Saturday because we’re on holiday next week. We’ve lined up issues for Monday and Wednesday, but as we have yet to develop the ability to predict the news there’ll be a gap before Monday’s issue.

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News bits

🚈 Workers in the RMT union have voted to join those from Aslef in a 24-hour strike on 15 March. Mick Lynch’s message to the union also says that union reps “will also be attending a meeting later this week to consider further industrial action beyond the 15th March.”

🛤️ On Tuesday evening London Bridge went into rush hour meltdown again with passengers reporting “ridiculous and dangerous” overcrowding. Southeastern Railway responded by saying that “a fault with the signalling system at London Cannon Street is causing disruption to journeys”.

🚇 Bank station’s new £700m entrance on Cannon Street opened earlier this week, and Ian Visits went for a look. There’s still work to be done above the station where a large office block is going to be built (and where TfL will try and recoup some of that £700 million).

🚕 Black cab fares are going up by 7.6% next month, and the reason being given is “to ensure there are enough cabs available to help women get home safely”. Night time cab fares were actually frozen back in 2016 so they’d be affordable for women who didn’t want to (or couldn’t) use public transport at night. But the argument goes that if cabbies stand to make less money at night, then fewer of them will work those hours, which means there’s fewer options for women looking to get home after dark. The initial request from the cab trade was for a 11.6% increase in fare prices, but TfL rejected that.

🚊 In other transport news, Inside Croydon reports that TfL needs to replace around two-thirds of its trams as they’re getting on a bit now. The 24 trams were the first to run on the Croydon Tramlink when it opened in 2000, but the cost of replacing them is about £2m per tram and TfL is struggling to finance the £50m upgrade scheme.

💰 And while we’re in Croydon… After a three-and-a-half-hour budget meeting and a huge demonstration outside the Town Hall, Croydon’s councillors voted to reject the budget proposal that would see council tax in the borough go up by 15%. The council must legally set its budget by March 11, so another meeting has been scheduled for Wednesday.

🚲 Bicycles are now the most popular way of travelling around the City (i.e. the Square Mile). According to new data from the City of London Corporation, cyclists make up 27% of daytime traffic and 40% of traffic during the morning and evening peaks.

🚑 The London Ambulance Service has been told to improve its ethnic diversity as “only one in five LAS employees come from a Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic background, despite almost half of all Londoners having a non-white background.”

👨‍🚒️ It was also reported this week that 163 disciplinary cases were heard against London Fire Brigade workers between 2020 and 2022. The cases spanned a “wide range of categories, from fraud and financial irregularity, to lateness and pornography”.

🙏 You know the ULEZ wars are getting out of hand when vicars in Dartford start talking to the BBC about “a tax on friendship” and claiming the expansion would stop mourners attending funerals (although we don’t think this is who Sadiq was referring to when he claimed that there is a “far-right” element among ULEZ protesters).

🛏️ The number of rough sleepers in London rose by 34% last year according to new government figures. That’s the biggest rise of any region in the country. Zooming in, Westminster saw the biggest increase with 250 rough sleepers (up by 63), and Camden was the second highest, with 90 rough sleepers. The ‘rough sleeping snapshot’ also shows that 47% of all people sleeping rough on a single night in autumn 2022 were in London and the South East.

🦅 It wasn’t only our diet that changed during lockdown, the falcons of London also had to adapt (although it’s unlikely they were stocking up on bags of pasta). According to King’s College London, “pigeons left urban areas during the Covid pandemic” because they weren’t being fed by passers-by anymore (fickle bloody pigeons), which meant that peregrines had to find alternative food in the form of parakeets and starlings.

😶‍🌫️ The BBC’s Tom Edwards has been on “smoke patrol” in north London with researchers from Imperial College to “see how widespread the impact of wood burners is on our air”.

🏗️ The Guardian has taken a look at some of the new homes that have just gone up for sale in the £5.6bn Canada Water ‘neighbourhood’ currently being built in Rotherhithe. The 53-acre site will eventually contain 3,000 new homes (35% of which are described as affordable) and office buildings with space for 20,000 workers.

🍬 Westminster Council’s Oxford Street ‘raids’ are becoming almost a weekly occurrence now. On Wednesday “3,000 illegal vapes which were found to have excessive nicotine” were seized, along with “fake Apple and Gucci products thought to be worth £140,000”.

🏹 Last week we ran an article by paleontoligst Alessio Checconi in which he wrote about his passion for mudlarking. A few days later Alessio popped up all over the news because an item he’d found on the banks of the Thames was confirmed to be “an archer’s leather wrist guard, thought to date back to Tudor times”.

Food and drink bits

👨‍🍳️ We knew that Adejoké Bakare was going to be relocating her much-loved Brixton restaurant Chishuru sometime this year, but what we didn’t expect was for the new location to be “five minutes’ walk from Oxford Circus tube”. That information comes from the crowdfunder Joké has set up to help finance the move, and which includes perks ranging from dinner for two, to Joké cooking a dinner party at your home.

🇱🇰 In other long-awaited opening news: It’s finally been announced that Cynthia Shanmugalingam’s Sri Lankan restaurant, Rambutan will open its doors in Borough Market on March 17.

🍣 We’ve almost stopped linking to ‘best of’ lists, mainly because they’re largely rubbish (Eater’s were the only dependable ones, and they’re only going to be updated intermittently from now on). But this week, Joshua Ogawa wrote about his five favourite Japanese restaurants in London for the FT (no paywall as yet) and it’s a great selection (although it doesn’t include Jugemu, which Tim Hayward named ‘the best Japanese food in London’ a few weeks ago - also in the FT).

🚴 We might as well do another list while we’re in the mood. In the wake of Look Mum No Hands! closing, Pedalsure (the cycling insurance people) have compiled a list of their favourite remaining cycling cafes and there’s some great picks in there, including Kaffeine in Fitzrovia, Four Boroughs in Crystal Palace and The Dynamo in Putney.