Weekend roundup for 8 July
Featuring porny posters, pickled plum ketchup and Patrick Stewart
Welcome to your Roundup for the week when an influencer’s cat put someone in the hospital and the Wireless Festival effectively excluded influencers by banning video equipment and makeup.
In today’s issue we’ve got the latest in the fight to save the Curzon Mayfair cinema, some Only Fans outrage, and Lily Allen’s hot take on London’s restaurant scene.
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News bits
🚈 If we didn’t already realise that the project to rebuild Euston station for HS2 was a complete shitshow, then a new report from the Public Accounts Committee has confirmed it. The report calls the Department for Transport’s original £2.6bn budget “completely unrealistic” and said that the government’s decision to delay construction for two years will cost at least another £200m.
🚂 On Thursday the RMT union announced a week of Tube strikes, starting on Sunday 23 July and running until Friday 28 July. There’s no detail yet on which specific lines will be impacted, but union leader Mike Lynch said that the action will “shut down the London Underground”.
🚇 There’s going to be quite a bit of disruption on the Bakerloo line and the London Overground over the next couple of months so that TfL “can carry out multiple complex projects at once”. The closures are happening in four phases and will affect the section of Bakerloo line between Queen’s Park and Harrow & Wealdstone and the London Overground between Euston and Watford Junction.
🚗 The ULEZ row reached the High Court this week, as Bexley, Bromley, Harrow and Hillingdon councils (along with Surrey county council) sought to block the expansion of the scheme by contesting both its legal basis and the consultation that took place over the shape of the scrappage scheme. The barrister for the councils has argued that the extended ULEZ would “bypass legal safeguards” and that that information given to people during the consultation was “unintelligible” and gave a “confused picture”. A verdict isn’t expected to be delivered for several weeks yet.
😶🌫️ Earlier in the week, Newsnight spoke to an air pollution scientist to see what a difference the existing Ultra-Low Emission Zone has made to the London’s air quality (it’s pretty dramatic)…
🏟 … But there’s still a lot to be done. On Thursday, during a panel discussion about the environment at Wimbledon, Seb Coe, the World Athletics president, told Gary Lineker, “We have made a decision that in future we probably won’t take our championships into landscapes where air quality falls below a certain threshold. And, actually, if I’m being a little closer to home, that would include London.”
🪧 While their appearance at Wimbledon got most of the headlines this week, Just Stop Oil also turned up at Harrods on Wednesday, where the store’s security “assaulted a press photographer” who was covering the protestor’s slow march.
🏠 New research from LSE and Savills has shown that the number of properties available for private rent in London “has plummeted since the pandemic”. The 41% reduction in available properties has “sparked warnings that more households will be forced into temporary accommodation with numbers on track to hit new record highs by the end of the summer.”
🚩 In related news, the artist Jeremy Deller has designed a “London flag based on a diagram of the rise in rents and decrease in affordable housing in the capital” for the Somerstown festival in Camden this weekend. (Adorably, Deller misspells Somerstown in his IG caption and inadvertently link to the account of a cat called Summerstown.)
🛤 TfL has confirmed that it wants to have six Overground routes named by the end of next year and that it’s working with the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm on some themes “ahead of a public consultation on potential names”. Those names will likely (according to Sadiq) include “historic locations and forgotten stories from our city that need retelling”.
🚅 Get ready for more a much improved DLR service in the next couple of years, as TfL has put in an order for 11 more DLR trains to go alongside the 43 it ordered a few years ago. The first of the 54 new trains are expected to go into service next year with the remainder introduced by the end of 2026. The trains should “help boost overall capacity on the network by more than 60 per cent”.
👮 The City Hall Conservative leader has referred Sadiq Khan to the Greater London Assembly’s watchdog for “allegedly breaking City Hall rules”. The mayor recently wrote to the Met Commissioner to say that the police station in Uxbridge and Ruislip should remain open. Uxbridge and Ruislip, of course, just happens to be Boris Johnson’s former constituency and the site of an upcoming by-election.
🎅 The Met announced this week that it is opening a new investigation into potential lockdown breaches at the party at Conservative HQ where the campaign team from Shaun Bailey’s unsuccessful mayoral bid ‘jingled and mingled’ in the most excruciating manner possible. The deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, Daisy Cooper, has called on Rishi Sunak to stop Bailey taking his seat in the House of Lords while the investigation takes place.
🗳 The Guardian ran an editorial this week, claiming that London isn’t the “liberal, secular, leftist haven” that everyone thinks it is, and the Tories would be “in with a shout of taking back the capital” if they hadn’t made such a “disastrous start to this contest”.
🍈 There were quite a few advertising stories going around this week; from Andy Murray’s groin on a billboard, to TfL banning an ad for a play because it included a picture of a cake (more on which in our Long Read of the Week, below). But the most controversial ad campaign of the week was the one for Only Fans which popped up in Harrow, Edgware and Lambeth. More specifically, the posters are advertising the Only Fans account of “model Eliza Rose Watson” who appears on the ads “in underwear,” and has defended the poster as “simply a torso shot of a 34-year-old woman”. That hasn’t stopped people spray-painting the words “keep porn off our streets” over one of the ads, or people complaining to the ASA in their… handfuls.
🏗 Just in case you thought Peckham’s gentrification was slowing down, this week it was announced that the fifteen disused arches between Brayards Road and Consort Road, are being turned into ‘Bronze Yard’ “to preserve their heritage and create valuable opportunities for new businesses in this area, contributing to the economic growth and vibrancy of Peckham.”
🪂 If you want to see footage of Steve-O jumping off what TMZ insists on calling ‘Tower of London Bridge’, while holding a Union Jack umbrella… Then here you go.
Food and drink bits
🪩 Trisha’s update: Westminster Council’s licensing sub-committee met on Thursday and decided to suspend Trisha’s license for two weeks, “during which the management will be required to make improvements to the club”. Those improvements include “the implementation of a digital members’ list, tighter security, and more robust staff training.” The committee said it has “considered legitimate concerns raised about safety from residents, the police and city inspectors” but had also “taken into account the willingness from the owner to make changes to preserve a historic Soho venue and unique part of Westminster’s heritage”.
🏪 Going back to Peckham for a second…. Next weekend Market Place Peckham is reopening after a bit of facelift. Part of the Market Place food halls group, which also has sites in Hounslow, Vauxhall and Harrow (but shouldn’t be confused with the Market Halls in Victoria and Oxford Street… or Market Peckham down the road), the 250-capacity space will have ten new street-food vendors across “five indoor seating zones” and there’s plenty of launch parties and giveaways happening in the run up to the launch.
🥖 The big closure news of the week was that of Le Pain Quotidien, which has gone into administration and shut the doors on all of its sites... Apart from the one in St Pancras station, bizarrely.
🇫🇷 Continuing the run of bad news for Canary Wharf, the French restaurant Platea, has shut down. The restaurant, which has been at Canada Square since 2003, blamed “a drop in footfall in the area following the pandemic as well as other economic challenges”.
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