Weekend roundup for 5 February
Featuring roundabouts, dopamine and bonzai kittens
January is finally behind us. The nights are getting (a bit) brighter and we can reward ourselves for not drinking/going vegan/whatever else we’ve inflicted on ourselves these past few weeks. Plus, it’s the Lunar New Year, so there’s a lot to talk about.
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News bits
🚨 There were three big stories in London this week. The first was the fall out of the report into police behaviour at Charing Cross station. On Wednesday a spokesperson for the mayor said that a “furious” Sadiq Kahn had “a very frank discussion” with Cressida Dick, “which lasted for well over 90 minutes,” and that the commissioner had been “put on notice”. Meanwhile “a source close to Khan” said that if Dick proved incapable of restoring trust in the Met then the mayor would have to “consider whether she is the right person to lead the change needed”.
🚂 The second story was the release of the latest TfL budget update, just ahead of the expiration of the funding bailout (which was due yesterday). As a reminder, that means that at the time of writing the government hasn’t committed to giving TfL any more funding. According to their calculations, that funding gap could be as big as £1.5bn by 2024-25.
🚇 Related to that of course is the news that the RMT union has announced a tube strike for Tuesday 1 March and Thursday 3 March, over “London Underground’s continuing refusal to give assurances on jobs, pensions and working conditions in the midst of an on-going financial crisis driven by central Government”.
🚶 One of the headlines that came out of the budget update was that TfL might consider “killing off walking and cycling projects” to save themselves around £500m. TfL have also proposed that that they could end the Direct Vision scheme that’s designed to protect vulnerable road users from lorries.
🚗 The other headline to come out of the budget plan was that the mayor is looking to raise around £300 million in the next three years from that ‘war on motorists’ he mooted a couple of weeks ago. That money would likely come from extending the ULEZ over the whole of Greater London and the introduction of a Greater London Boundary Charge for people driving into London.
🦺 The worst case scenario for the ‘managed decline’ of the transport network is also laid out in the budget. That includes the possibility that “major asset reliability issues on the Tube that could cause multi-day closures” as well as the closure of major roads and bridges like Vauxhall Bridge, the Rotherhithe Tunnel and Brent Cross flyover, because they can’t be properly maintained.
📈 And, finally, the third big story this week was the release of the ‘levelling up’ paper and the response from London. The mayor pointed out that some of the poorest boroughs in London are “some of the most deprived” in the the country, and therefore need just as much funding as some areas in the North. While Nick Bowes, the chief executive of the Centre for London, wrote a piece for the Standard listing the four things that need to be done to ‘level up’ London, because “a poorer London means a poorer UK” (we interviewed Nick last year about all this - you can read that issue here). In the Guardian this week Aditya Chakrabortty noted that “as many Londoners live in poverty as would make up the entire population of the north-east” and called Gove’s rhetoric about ‘London elites’ “poisonous”.
💰 There is some money going into London this week. Westminster Council has set aside a £190 million “support fund” to give the West End a post-pandemic leg up. Most of the money will be “invested in redesigning Oxford Street and Strand Aldwych, to make the area more pedestrian friendly.”
🛣️ According to a ‘study’ by the car warranty company MotorEasy, the 10 most dangerous roundabouts “are in London and the South East of England” (in fact, the top 5 are all in London). In first place is the roundabout that surrounds Hammersmith tube station (287 crashes from 2010 to 2020), and that’s followed by Redbridge Roundabout, The Crooked Billet in Walthamstow, Staples Corner off the North Circular and Hyde Park Corner.
🍰 The strangest story of the week has to be the one about the rock photographer who has shot album covers for the likes of David Bowie and Rod Stewart being convicted of harassing the owners of the Jewish bakery, Rinkoffs in Whitechapel. Apparently the harassment case sprung out of his attempts to make a documentary called ‘Bagels and Cyanide’ and “an autobiography he was working on called ‘John Lennon Made Me Toast’”.
🛩️ There were a few hairy moments for planes flying into Heathrow on Tuesday thanks to the high winds:
Art and culture bits
🍿 Tickets for Dopamine Land go on sale next Tuesday. What is Dopamine Land and why would you want to go there? Well, it’s a “unique and interactive exhibition that combines traditional mediums with innovative technology to indulge all your senses”… obviously. There will be “an interactive museum where you will experience happiness and relaxation” and the opportunity to “burst bubbles” and go “inside of a popcorn machine”. We might have to go and review this just for the hell of it.
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