Weekend roundup for 6 May

Featuring gnawable extremities, release raves and dairy art

The Elizabeth Tower, decorated in national flowers of the UK. Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.

It’s hard to believe, but there is stuff going on in London right now other than the c-word. This week we’ve got the lowdown on Sadiq’s popularity rating, an update of the cost of fish and chips, and an entire art exhibition dedicated to milk.

As there’s no Monday issue next week (don’t blame us, blame the monarch) we’ve nudged the paywall down a bit further than normal. But if you like what you see then please do think about becoming a LiB supporter. For £5 a month (or £50 a year) you’ll receive the full Weekend Roundup every week, access to our years-long back catalogue and you’ll get our supporter-only, midweek issues too.

Sign up using this button and you get a week free:

If you are already a LiB supporter, then thank you very much for subscribing. We appreciate you so much we’re going to spend tomorrow pledging our allegiance to you and not the other guy.

News bits

🗳 Half of Londoners feel Sadiq Khan ‘doing badly’ read the Standard’s headline earlier this week; and if you look at the YouGov poll that prompted that headline you can see that it is, technically speaking, true. Of the 1,107 Londoners that YouGov spoke to last month, exactly half said the mayor was doing either fairly badly (18%) or very badly (32%). While 35% said he’s either doing fairly (27%) or very (8%) well. But, compared to the start of the year, Khan’s standing has only gone down three points in the ‘well column’ and up two points in the ‘badly column’. That’s a pretty resilient score for a mayor that’s presided over multiple Tube strikes and Met scandals and who is about to usher in the ULEZ (Khan’s scores were also better than either Rishi Sunak’s and Kier Starmer). The big question is, does this make him vulnerable at next year’s mayoral elections? Going by these numbers, we don’t imagine he’ll be too worried.

🏠 One thing Khan will be talking about a lot in the run up to those election, is council houses. On Wednesday the mayor announced that City Hall has funded 10,000 new council houses across London in the last year. Thar’s almost double than the number that were built across the rest of England in 2021/22. In 2018 the mayor set himself a target of building 10,000 council homes in four years. He reached that target in March of last year and pledged to double it by 2024, and he now claims to have reached that figure a year early, as “more than 23,000 new City Hall-funded council homes have been started since 2018”.

⚖️ At the High Court this week, lawyers acting for survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire said that £150m in compensation had been awarded across 900 cases as part of a civil damages claim settlement. It was also confirmed that the Grenfell Inquiry report probably won’t be published until next year.

📹 One small bit of ‘man in hat’-related news: On Wednesday, the Met revealed that they’re intending to use live facial recognition during the policing of the coronation. Despite the force claiming that the technology wouldn’t be used “to identify people who are linked to, or have been convicted of, being involved in protest activity,” Liberty called the decision a “human rights disaster” and Big Brother Watch said it would have a “serious chilling effect on the right to free speech”. We wrote about LFR back in February of last year:

Who watches the watchmen?

🪧 If you are planning on protesting today, then Dazed has an excellent guide on how to stay safe while you’re doing it. Meanwhile, the BBC reports that an attempt to steal a “giant commemorative crown” from the top of a bus stop on Oxford Street has been '“thwarted”; while one of Prince Andrew’s former girlfriends, Lady Victoria Hervey, has been advising the police to throw all the protestors “in jail” for the duration of the coronation “and then release them after”.

👮‍♂️ In other Met news, the force has been accused of trying to silence whistleblowers after they decided to pursue legal costs from a Kam Sodhi, a homicide detective who claimed she was “harassed on grounds of her race and sex and that she had been victimised by the Met”. Sodhi’s complaint was “successfully defended” by the Met at an employment tribunal last year, and now they’ve said they want £20,000 in costs from her (she still works for the force).

🎫 The Change.org petition to save Brixton Academy is on its way to 100,000 signatures. The petition is calling for Lambeth Council to “bring in new security procedures including crowd control” instead of revoking the venue’s licence so it can be turned “into soulless flats”. As we write this more than 80,000 people have added their signatures.

🏗 The plans for the controversial £1.5bn overhaul of Liverpool Street Station were officially submitted this week. They include a 16-storey office and hotel building in the “air space” above the station (designed by the by same architects who designed the 2016 Tate Modern extension), a doubling in size of the concourse, more lifts, and more escalators more ticket-barrier gates.

Food and drink bits

🐀 McDonald’s has pleaded guilty to three charges of hygiene breaches and been ordered to pay £475,000 plus £22,000 in costs at Thames Magistrates’ Court, after a customer at their Leytonstone drive through found mouse droppings in their order “half-way through eating their meal”.

🐟 This week, a new breakdown of inflation data from the Office for National Statistics showed that the average cost of a fish and chips takeaway is £9 on average, up from £7.56 a year ago. That’s the national average of course. Here in London you might regard £9 as a bit of a bargain. A couple of weeks ago Bloomberg ran an article on how London diners “are getting used to paying higher prices for the dish” including at Kerridge’s Fish and Chips in Harrods Dining Hall, where “the dish goes for a minimum £35”; Catch Me in Westfield, where fish and chips will cost you £12.50; and the legendary Fryer’s Delight in Holborn, where you’ll pay around £11.

🍕 Mamma Dough, the pizza chain with branches in Brixton, Peckham, Ladywell, Sydenham, South Norwood, Tooting and Whitechapel, went into administration at the end of last year. This week they announced they’ve sold the business to London Dough Co, “a newly created firm owned by the directors of Balham’s Exhibit Bar”. The deal will keep all but the Tooting and Whitechapel restaurants open.

👨‍🍳️ Jamie Oliver is opening a new restaurant in London; his first since 2019, when all 22 of his sites closed, causing the loss of around 1,000 jobs. The new place will be in the recently refurbed Theatre Royal on Drury Lane and will open towards the end of this year.

🍛 Katsu & Buns has been delivering its “new and exciting twist on Japanese cuisine” in north London for a while now, but sometime later this month they’re setting up shop in a pop-up space in Islington at The Chapel Bar Terrace. As well as the… erm, katsu curry and bao buns there’ll also be Japanese cocktails and the apparently mandatory bottomless brunch on the weekends.

🥟 While we’re in Islington… Neighbourhood is bringing in another US chef to follow Ivan Orkin. This time it’s chef Eddie Huang who is importing his NYC restaurant Baohaus from 26 May. You can book tables here.

🥩 There’s a new Malaysian-owned steakhouse opening in Paddington this month. Apparently, it’s going to be a ‘semi-fine dining experience’, but we’ll never know if it’s any good or not, because we could never willingly set foot inside a restaurant called Meet Bros. Is that the worst restaurant name in London? Please tell us if you know of a worse one.

🍸 Joia, the Iberian restaurant that sits on the 15th floor of the Art’otel in Battersea Power Station (and which got a decidedly middling review from the Standard a few weeks ago) has opened its rooftop bar for the summer. Open every Thursday to Monday throughout May, the “al fresco terrace” offers Portugese snacks and tapas as well as cocktails and boozy slushies.

🌮 It was Cinco de Mayo yesterday, and to mark the occasion Harper’s Bazaar published their list of ‘the best Mexican restaurants in London’. There’s not loads of surprises on there (nice to see Stoke Newington’s Doña included though), but just the fact we can pull together a list of half-a-dozen decent Mexican places shows how far London has come in the last 7-8 years.

👍 In restaurant reviews this week: Jimi Famurewa tried out Story Cellar, Tom Sellers’ new rotisserie chicken place in Soho, and went a bit wobbly for the “disassembled poultry parts with a luscious, deep savour, glassy crisp gnawable extremities and the sort of nuanced, profoundly flavoursome jus that induces a body shudder” as well as the bread-and-butter pudding, which he declared the “most abominably pleasurable thing I’ve experienced at a dining table in months”. Tim Hayward was also in Soho for the FT to review Nessa, which he seemed to enjoy (especially the “Black pudding brioche brown butter noisette”), although he was slightly distracted by the wobbly dinner plates that “rattle loudly every time you fork something and rotate freely when you cut food, unless you steady it with a second hand”). Hot Dinners was also in Soho, this time on Greek Sreet, right opposite the Coach & Horses, to ‘test drive’ the Korean barbecue and “Pyeonbaek steam boxes”offered by Chungdam. Even though they didn’t “belt out K-Pop hits in the basement private karaoke room” they liked the three-tiered steam boxes which have “stock at the bottom which is used to steam the top two boxes containing mixed seafood and beef brisket” and reckon “it's clearly going to be a big hit for Soho.”

Art and culture bits

🙅‍♂️ Photographer Mia Evans has a new book out called Reality And Very Existence [R.A.V.E], which captures her “friends, strangers, lovers and clubbers out and about at warehouse takeovers”. To launch the book Evans is putting on a ‘release rave’ tonight at a secret location (join the Telegram to find out where). Tickets are £5 here or on the door.