Weekend roundup for 8 January

Includes nightmarish puddings, cult dumplings and a sloth named Terry

Welcome to your one-stop digest of everything that’s happened in London this week. The full version of this roundup is available to paid subscribers and includes all the arts and culture updates as well as the latest food and drink news.

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News bits

🦠 Let’s start with a few Covid-related stats. The Guardian was out and about on Tuesday interviewing the few people who’d made the trip into the office and reporting that TfL’s numbers for that morning showed around 770,000 taps on buses and about 710,000 on the tube. That’s way down on the numbers from January 2020 when there were around 6m trips made daily by bus, and 4m by tube. Data from TomTom says that traffic levels are still about half at what they were in Jan 2020. The big question is: will the annual No Trousers Tube Ride go ahead this month?

😷 Earlier this week the Office for National Statistics reported that one in 10 people in London had Covid at the end of 2021. There were also more than 4,000 Covid patients in London hospitals by Wednesday, the highest number since February 11 last year. The ‘good news’ is that the number of new cases has fallen by about a fifth. As of Monday TfL had fined 1,450 people for “refusing to wear a face covering on TfL services” (536 of them came between Nov 30 and Dec 21).

🪖 Yesterday it was announced that two hundred military personnel have been deployed to hospitals across London to try and plug the gap left by “crippling staff shortages”. They’re also talking about “bringing medical students on to the wards” to help out.

👛 Sadiq’s chief of staff said this week that the loss of spending by overseas visitors has cost businesses around £7.4bn (whereas missing commuters have cost London about £1.4bn). The mayor is now talking about “a global advertising campaign to attract foreign tourists back to the capital”.

🚇 As we write this the six months of weekend strikes on the Victoria and Central lines seems to be going ahead. That means there’ll be ‘severe disruption’ from around 7pm every Friday and Saturday night until 8am the following morning, right through until June 19. Although TfL have said they want to keep the Night Tube and Night Overground running, “this will depend on staffing levels on the day”.

🏅 Two names that were missing from the end of year honours list were Joaquin Garcia and Folajimi “Jimi” Olubunmi-Adewole. They were the two men who jumped into the Thames to try and save a woman in April of last year. Olubunmi-Adewole died during the attempt. City of London police nominated both men for bravery awards at the time but, as the Times reports, nothing has been given to either man yet.

🚨 On Tuesday the Met police recovered a body from the Thames and on Thursday it was confirmed that it was Harvey Parker, the 20-year-old student who disappeared in December after leaving Heaven nightclub.

🌳 It looks like a NHS Covid memorial will be installed in Postman’s Park (just near St Paul’s Cathedral). A proposal for the memorial was “agreed in principle by the City of London Corporation’s Open Spaces and City Gardens Committee” this week and they’re planning a competition for young artists and sculptors to design it.

👮 According to Met Police data obtained by Time Out, reports of sexual assaults in London’s clubs, bars, pubs and music venues were at their highest in six years in 2021 (despite the fact that many of the venues were closed for months). In related news, The Week published an article headlined How can London’s streets be made safer for women?

💰 You’ll be happy to know that one group that’s benefited from the pandemic is the super rich. Apparently multi-millionaire and billionaire property buyers have been able to buy more luxury London properties during Covid “due to the huge accumulation of wealth that billionaires have enjoyed over the last 12 months combined with the availability of highly advantageous interest-only ‘billionaire mortgages’”. Good for them.

🚲 Remember that ‘study’ from last year that claimed London was the most congested city in the world (we covered it in this issue)? A lot of places (including the BBC) reported the findings with misleading headlines that suggested cycle lanes were to blame. This week the BBC admitted that their article “focused too heavily on cycle lanes and the impact they may have on congestion” and changed their headline to remove the reference to cycle lanes.

🚳 In related news, the Guardian has a great interview with Mike van Erp (aka CyclingMikey) who “has reported more than 1,000 motorists to the police” via his helmet-mounted camera.

🦥 Cute animal story of the week comes courtesy of London Zoo, which did its annual animal tally this week. New additions for 2022 include a baby sloth called Terry, Arya the Asiatic lioness and a newborn tiger.

💞 This guy has taken out billboards in Southall and Bethnal Green (and Birmingham) to try and find himself a wife. Apparently he did it because dating apps make him feel “awkward”.

Art and culture bits

🎞️ The BFI’s London Short Film Festival kicks off next week. Among the offerings are a horror-themed programme that includes everything from “screaming calves and eerie premonitions to nightmarish mirrors and puddings”, a gaming programme which takes in Red Dead and Grand Theft Auto, and the Colouring Outside the Lines programme which explores “sexual liberation via many different platforms and eyes.”