Weekend roundup for 7 May

Featuring freedom passes, stinky fish and TV flops

There is a lot going on in London this week. With the elections, Crossrail and the PM lying about bus passes, there’s barely room for the huge art fairs, new exhibitions, cheese toasties and Eurovision-themed brunches.

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Let’s get on with it…

News bits

🗳 In last Wednesday’s newsletter we said that it would ”a big shock” if Labour managed to take Westminster from the Tories in this week’s elections. Well, consider us shocked. On Friday morning the news came that Westminster City Council (a Tory council since it was created in 1964) had turned red, along with the slightly more predictable Wandsworth, and Barnet. As we’re writing this results are still coming in, so we might return to election stuff next week when all the dust has settled.

🚇 The other big news of the week is the story we’ve all been waiting forty two months for, and that’s the opening of Crossrail. On Wednesday, Sadiq announced that the Elizabeth line would be opening on 24 May, nearly £4bn over budget and more than three years past the original deadline of December 2018.

Almost immediately, Grant Shapps accused the mayor of breaking election rules, by making a “major political announcement in the weeks before an election”. We’re not sure who exactly was going to read this announcement as a ringing endorsement for Labour’s fiscal acumen and organisational ability; but that didn’t stop Shapps calling it “an act of breathtaking political cynicism” and referring Sadiq to the Electoral Commission.

P.S. Someone who works on the Elizabeth line did an ‘Ask Me Anything’ on Reddit the other day.

🗽 This afternoon there is a peaceful protest taking place at the US Embassy to oppose the latest attack on reproductive rights in the US. The protest begins at 2pm, but if that’s too short notice for you, then there will be another protest next Saturday (14 May) at noon.

📺 On Thursday Channel 4 offered to sell its £100m London HQ and “almost double the number of staff working outside the capital” if that would create a better alternative to the government’s plan to privatise the broadcaster.

🚗 The Centre for London published a new survey this week which showed that people’s “top choice” for filling TfL’s coffers “was increasing charges to drive in parts of London”. 42% of the people they spoke to said “they would support the introduction of pay-per-mile road user charging” to replace the Congestion Charge and ULEZ

👮‍♂️ The latest news from the ongoing Met Commissioner saga is that frontrunner Lynne Owens has removed herself from the running and it’s now very likely that we’re going to get a white male heading up the Met (and that white male could be a “top cop turned thriller-writer”).

🏗️ Plans to build “hundreds of homes, a new hotel, shops and art galleries” next to Shoreditch High Street station were given the green light this week. Some of the buildings will be up to 29 storeys tall, and there will be a park in the middle that will be “one of the biggest new parks in central London”.

🏙️ Sky News has been crunching some numbers and found that “Manchester and London are the most popular places to move to,” suggesting that “people are now choosing city life again”.

🎓 In other ‘post-Covid’ news, King’s College London has become the first Russell Group university to abandon online-only classes. After what the Telegraph called “a student revolt,” (a strongly-worded petition) Zoom lessons are out and on-campus classes are in.

🪧 Another University, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, suspended four of its outsourced cleaners this week, after they “protested a racist pay gap.” The university has claimed that the protesters were violent, but video of the protests doesn’t seem to show any evidence of threatening behaviour or pushing that the university claims happened.

🚌 “The 24-hour freedom bus pass was actually something that I introduced.” So said Boris Johnson during a “bruising” interview with Susannah Reid this week. Except, as the i explained in their subsequent fact check, “free travel for pensioners was introduced by the Greater London Council in 1973” and then rebranded as the ‘Freedom Pass’ in the 90s. All Boris did when he was mayor was introduce “a bridging pass that allowed someone who turned 60 to gain the free travel privileges as a pensioner up until they receive a Freedom Pass”.

🚐 The Tyre Extinguishers activist group have said that they are escalating their campaign that they say will “make it impossible” to own an SUV in an urban area. According to the group, 120 SUVs were targeted in the most recent campaign, which covered areas like Kensington, Paddington, Hempstead and Primrose Hill.

💚 In related news, Billie Eilish this week announced Overheated, a “six-day climate summit” that will take place at the O2 in June and will feature appearances by Eilish, Yungblud, Vivienne Westwood, Emily Eavis and Sigrid, as well as a “special keynote speaker”.

🚖 The Adam Smith Institute think tank published a report this week entitled A Fare Shake: Reforming Taxis for the 21st Century. In the report they argue that the Knowledge should be scrapped and that minicabs should also be able to use bus lanes and pick up passengers from the street. As you can imagine, this has not gone down well with black cab drivers.

Art and culture bits

📷 The full programme for Photo London 2022 has been released, and it contains over 100 exhibitors from 18 countries showing at Somerset House from next Thursday to Sunday 15th. Amateur Photographer has a good rundown of some of the highlights to look out for (including previously unpublished photographs of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the surrealist work of Lee Miller, and Peter Fetterman’s The Power of Photography which showcases 120 masterworks by the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and David Bailey).

🎨 Also coming next weekend is London Gallery Weekend, at which over 150 of London’s commercial galleries come together to put on special exhibitions, events, talks and late night openings - all for free. The best thing about Gallery Weekend is that all those slightly intimidating contemporary galleries that you normally have to book to visit (and which look as though they might turn you away for not having at least three haircuts) all become a lot more accessible. Which is great, because they contain some remarkable stuff like the first solo show of American minimalist Rosemarie Castoro, and Cynthia Daignault’s interpretations of digital images. There’s a good list of highlights here and here.