Weekend roundup for 5 August

Featuring magic mushrooms, Marmite éclairs and more Miyazaki

Freddie Mercury’s 1941 Wurlitzer jukebox is put on display at Sotheby’s. Photo by Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for Sotheby’s.

Happy weekend! Here’s you regular download of nuggets and tidbits from the last seven days. This week we have news of Jay-Z’s Spurs bid, a Morley’s branch with a difference, a bridge covered in fruit stickers, and Llama Del Rey.

If you’re not a paying subscriber you will have missed our mid-week issue, which was a fantastic chat with the manager of the legendary French House, Hilary Heath. There’s a rather low paywall on this one if you want to go take a read:

Where Do You Go? with Hilary Heath

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News bits

🛏 Some pretty miserable stats emerged this week. First, the cross-party group London Councils said that nearly 170,000 people in London are homeless, i.e. they’re living in hostels, bedsits, or other temporary accommodation. That’s an increase of about 17,000 on last year and means that one in 50 people in the city are now classed as homeless. Most depressingly, “the organisation estimates that this includes more than 83,000 children”.

🏠 Following on the heels of that, City Hall published its analysis of future London rents, which predicted that “private rents in London could soar to upwards of £2,700 pcm next year”. Off the back of those calculations the mayor has (again) called on the Government “to urgently introduce rent controls in the capital”.

💊 The tribunal panel looking into allegations that the senior officer who wrote the Met’s anti-drugs strategy himself took LSD and magic mushrooms, has said that it “can't conclude, on the balance of probabilities” that Commander Julian Bennett took “magic mushrooms on holiday in France and LSD at a party” because the evidence is “hearsay”. Bennett still faces allegation of “regularly smoking cannabis before work” and “failing to provide a sample for testing and lying about why he would not do so.”

🚈 The first of the 94 new Piccadilly Line trains have been for a test drive Germany, so we can now see what those walk-through, air-conditioned carriages look like (from the outside at least).

🚙 The big ULEZ story of the week was that the £2000 scrappage scheme has now been extended to everyone in London; but it wouldn’t be a week in London without a few, more bizarre, ULEZ-related stories. First of all, the mayor’s office “expressed concern” over tweets that falsely claimed Khan was planning “to exempt Muslims and other ‘minority religions’ from the charge”. And then social media disinformation consultancy Valent published their investigation detailing how "hundreds of thousands of pounds” has been spent undermining ULEZ via 3,700 fake Twitter accounts.

💼 According to new figures compiled by Rightmove, demand for office space is higher than it was pre-Covid in pretty much every city other than London. In Leeds demand is up 46% compared to 2019, in Glasgow it’s up 26%, and Liverpool has 17% more demand. In London it’s down 1%.

👮 The Guardian’s Science Editor, Ian Sample, has taken a closer look at the Met’s data-driven ‘Precision policing’ approach to removing “the most serious criminals” from the streets. A pilot trial of ‘precision stop and search’ is currently under way in Lambeth and Barking and Dagenham.

⚽ According to Daily Express US, Jay-Z is preparing “an audacious bid” to buy Tottenham Hotspur if current owner Joe Lewis is convicted of fraud and insider trading.

🎤️ Here’s a lovely interview with 74-year-old Roger Mairlot from south-west London, who started going to gigs in his 60s to combat depression and now tries to go to at least one gig every night.

🚇 Last Sunday, an eastbound Jubilee line service travelling between Green Park and Westminster managed to make a diversion to the Jubilee branch of Charing Cross station. A station which which hasn’t been in use for 25 years.

Food and drink bits

🧑‍🍳️ Live by the social media, die by the social media - or at least get badly burned by it. That’s what happened to ‘chef bro’ Thomas Straker this week, when he posted a photo of his restaurant’s kitchen team on Instagram… A team that consisted solely of eight white men. And did we mention that the restaurant is in Notting Hill (the real one, not the Richard Curtis version)? Straker’s first reaction to people’s criticism of the lack of diversity was ‘Honestly people need to calm down’. That was swiftly followed up by a more contrite ‘apology’ and an admission that he needed to “improve”.

🐔 Morley’s has teamed up with Heinz to launch a month-long pop-up at the Double Standard bar (in the Standard hotel). The menu will contain “playful and nostalgic takes on icon chicken shop favourites.” alongside “boozy floats” and live music from “emerging London artists”.

🦙 Llama Inn is a ‘modern Peruvian’ restaurant that opened in Brooklyn in 2015 and quickly gained ‘must go’ status, with Grub Street calling their Rabbit Potpie “a triumph of fusion comfort food” and the New York Times giving the spot a place in their Top 100 Restaurants list earlier this year. This September, founders Juan Correa and chef Erik Ramirez are bringing “the spirit of the Brooklyn original” to the rooftop of The Hoxton, with the opening of Llama Inn London. For us, the main reason to go will be for the ‘Llama Del Rey’ cocktail (pisco quebranta, dark rum, red wine, chicha morada and pineapple).