Weekend roundup for 5 November
Featuring pantographs, property porn and premium poppers
Happy bonfire night and welcome to your weekly digest of London news, food and drink updates and arts and culture stuff.
According to this document there is going to be a Million Mask March by Anonymous and Expect Us UK in Trafalgar Square tonight. In 2020, there were more than 100 arrests made during the march, but that one also included anti-lockdown protestors, so we’ll just have to wait and see what happens tonight.
As for the rest of this week, we’ve got news of Big Ben’s bongs returning, Nazi Shakespeare, more depressing restaurant closures, and the battle for George Michael’s old house.
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News bits
🌧️ It rained quite heavily on Wednesday night. Storm Claudio brought about 30 to 40mm in some areas, roughly half what we’d expect to get for the whole of November. That was enough for LBC to call the downpour ‘biblical’ and for major roads, tube lines and sections of railway to close. The big question is, has anyone checked on Brian May?
🧳 On that same night when it rained ‘biblically’ for hours and the Met office issued a yellow warning for wind, The Home Office dumped a group of asylum seekers from the Manston immigration centre at Victoria station, “without accommodation or warm clothing”. By Thursday the Home Office was blaming the migrants for the mistake and Sadiq was demanding an ‘urgent review’.
⚫ As you’ve no doubt seen already, Storm Claudio was also responsible for damaging the art installation by Mount Kimbie and Tom Shannon that was only installed in St. Giles Square on Monday. The winds dislodged the giant silver orbs (not ‘outsized baubles from a Christmas display’ as was reported across most of the press) and sent them barreling down Tottenham Court Road. No one was injured.
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🚨 It was revealed this week that there are more than 100 Met officers accused of crimes who are still on duty. The day after that report came out, the two Met officers who “shared grossly offensive messages in a WhatsApp group with Sarah Everard's killer” were both sentenced to 12 weeks in prison. They were then bailed ahead of an appeal.
👮♂️ There were two pieces of good Met news this week. The first is that Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has admitted that the gang violence matrix (the Met’s database of list of alleged gang members) “must be radically reformed” and “1,000 young men who were on the list even though they were classed as posing little or no risk of violence have been removed”. The second is that more than 30% of the force is now female for the first time ever.
🚇 We had a whole thing written here about the rail strike and its knock on effect on the Tube, and the free bike hire that Brompton was offering… And then the RMT went and suspended their strikes, not just for today but also for the 7th and 9th. Which is great news, but if, next time, they could do it before we write this newsletter, that would be even better.
🏠 Savills are predicting that the average cost of homes in the “outer prime London area” will drop by around 7% next year, “with recovery taking until 2027”.
🔋 TfL has introduced “rapid, wireless bus charging technology” at the Bexleyheath garage. We’re only telling you this because we love the word ‘pantograph’ and the article talks a lot about pantographs (RFID pantographs no less!). Now if only there was a paternoster involved as well.
🤑 Parts of Croydon are going to get a bit of a facelift in the next few years after the council received £3.7m in government funding to “transform spaces at the heart of communities”. First on the list are “public space improvements” in Thornton Heath, Selsdon, New Addington and Purley (although the council’s record when it comes to managing its finances and property is sketchy at best).
🔔 Big Ben will soon bong again for the first time since 2017. Big Ben will strike 11 times to mark the start of the Two Minutes of Silence at 11 am on Armistice Day (Friday 11th) and Remembrance Sunday.
🍂 If you have an FT subscription you can take a look at these specially commissioned photos of autumnal London. The lovely pictures do come with a warning though. The unusually warm summer and autumn means “we are seeing a staggered autumn” and we will likely see a “high tree-mortality rate” come next spring.
P.S. Next Wednesday’s issue is the next instalment of Paul Wood’s Tales from the Urban Forest column. You can read the first one here.
🚶🏽♀️Women’s Health has interviewed Gabrielle Abordo, the south east London woman who sparked the #VictoriaLineChallenge on TikTok earlier this year, and who has since “walked the entire DLR line, the whole Waterloo & City Line, and the distance from Bank to Lewisham.”
🎤 Take this with a pinch of salt because the ‘research’ behind it is flimsy at best (it’s basically a free bit of advertorial for Lucky Voice), but apparently Londoners are “staving off the Sunday Blues with karaoke nights”. You see, because we’re not commuting on Monday mornings anymore, we can go out and get pissed and belt out Dont’ Stop Believin’ until the early hours.
🪦 Property porn of the week: A £7m, four bedroom house that looks like a Bond villain’s lair and is actually in Highgate Cemetery.
🔑 Dermot O’Leary has received the Freedom of the City of London. We’re not sure there’s much more we can say about that.
Art and culture bits
👫 In a bit of news even more predictable than Liz Truss losing to the lettuce, the Icarus Theatre Collective has cancelled its planned “Romeo and Juliet-inspired Nazi-Jewish love story” after “receiving an onslaught of criticism related to the story’s premise and a botched casting call.” Have they never seen The Producers?
😴 There’s a new “AI-driven location-based entertainment experience” coming to London next January. Yeah, we have no idea either, but apparently it will put you into a “mysterious government building in Westminster” (sounds terrifying already) where you will be plugged into software that “reads the brain patterns of sleeping coma patients”. Any chance we can we just go do karaoke instead?
📷 Dazed has an interview with the photographer Alfie White, who talks about how he documents the south-east London neighbourhoods where he grew up and still lives.
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