Weekend roundup for 8 October
Featuring shopping lists, stolen signs and suspicious stats
We’ll be quick this week as there’s loads to get through, including sightings of Kanye in the wild, Marble Arch Mound updates and tentacles coming out of windows.
The full roundup includes an extensive rundown of all the arts and culture stuff going on this week, as well as a pretty comprehensive list of the latest food and drink goings on. If you’re not a paying subscriber then you will be rudely turned away a few inches into the Arts & Culture section, so if you want the full roundup experience then you can subscribe for £5 a month or £50 a year and there’s a week’s free trial if you want to see what you’re signing up for.
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News bits
⚖️ The inquest into the death of Chris Kaba began this week. You can read the opening statement from the IOPC here. Outside the coroner's court, Kaba’s cousin said that “An urgent decision on criminal charges is critical for this family and many others to have faith in a system that is supposed to bring them justice.”
🚓 Also this week Liz Truss was telling LBC radio that London's streets aren’t “safe enough,” that Sadiq Khan should be doing more to tackle crime and that cutting taxes will generate “economic growth [which] will help us afford more police officers. It will help us make sure we are properly able to protect our streets”.
💷 On Monday of this week, Lee Elliot Major, Professor of Social Mobility at the University of Exeter, gave a talk at the Guildhall which asked if London was still a city of opportunity or if it was becoming an “exclusive enclave for elites”. In a follow up interview with the Standard, Major says that “the best jobs and prospects [are being] retained by those from more privileged backgrounds” and problems like high rents mean that “young people… are struggling to live at the moment”.
🏗️ A residents groups has claimed that the plans to demolish parts of the Barbican Estate are based on “misinformed and misleading data” about carbon emissions and that warnings that it could collapse were “unfounded and factually incorrect”.
🏙️ And in related news, there’s a row brewing over the planned £1.5m revamp of Liverpool Street station, with conservationists worried that building a 16-storey tower above the station would “risk the glass roof of the Grade II listed station — which dates back to 1874 — and neighbouring Andaz hotel, formerly known as Great Eastern railway hotel.”
😡 After the Telegraph mistakenly reported that Sadiq Khan had blocked the idea of a statue of the Queen in Trafalgar Square, the mayor received “a wave of social media abuse, some of it racist” (N.B. At the Labour conference last month Khan said that 230,000 racist tweets had been posted about him since he became mayor in 2016).
📰 That hasn’t stopped the Telegraph attacking Khan with deliberately misleading reporting though. At the end of last week the paper ran an article claiming that two-thirds of Londoners (the headline was later changed to just ‘two-thirds’) “voted” to oppose the expansion of the ULEZ. If you’re wondering how you missed the ULEZ expansion referendum, don’t worry, there wasn’t one. The article is referring to responses received by a TfL consultation. This week’s LDN newsletter from the London Communications Agency (definitely worth a subscription) has more on the Telegraph’s dodgy reporting.
😶🌫️ Unfortunately, on Thursday the mayor posted (and then deleted) a tweet claiming that London had been “ranked the 18th most polluted city in the world.” If that’s true then that’s a very big story, which is presumably why Time Out published an entire article repeating the mayor’s claims (which is still online as we write this). But seeing as nobody seems to be able to say what the source of that stat is, then we’re going to have to stick with IQAir’s ranking of 3739 (even this ranking which counts air, light, and noise pollution has London at no. 67 in the world).
🪧 After initially refusing to close roads and police the ‘March of the Mummies’ event at the end of October, the Met has now confirmed they will support the protest over the cost of childcare.
⛰️ The Marble Arch Mound is finally good for something. Materials and trees taken from the dismantled hillock are to “be repurposed into gardens and a play area” at the redeveloped Ebury housing complex in Pimlico.
🦢 There’s a worry that swans and geese found dead in the the Regent’s and Grand Union canals near Little Venice, may have died from bird flu. A London Waterbus operator told the BBC that “All up the canals heading north from Camden, there are just loads of dead birds everywhere.”
☀️ Earlier in the week the mayor’s office released figures showing that the July heatwave had real economic impact, with the number of visitors and workers in central London down 74% on the previous month. A couple of days layer Khan said that London would need an “estimated £75bn of private sector investment” to hit its target of being carbon neutral by 2030.
🐌 The good news is that Amazon just granted £750,000 from its Right Now Climate Fund to the mayor’s Rewild London Fund. The money will go to help “owners and managers of London’s local wildlife sites – to plan, deliver and manage programmes which seek to address wildlife decline.”
🧾 Deliveroo has opened a “bricks-and-mortar grocery store” (aka food shop) on New Oxford Street. The ‘Deliveroo Hop’ is basically a white-labelled Morrisons, but the press release did reveal that “a quarter of Londoners now use rapid grocery services once a week to get their groceries.” See our previous issue on dark stores and dark kitchens here.
🥐 Last week it was Drake in London Fields. This week it’s Kanye in Bermondsey.
Art and culture bits
💊 The big news in the art world this week was that the V&A has finally decided that it will “no longer carry the Sackler name”. The Art Newspaper reports that the signs for the ‘Sackler Centre for Arts Education’ and the ‘Sackler Courtyard’ have been removed but there are “no current plans to rename the spaces”.
🎨 Do we need to tell you that the Cezanne show at Tate Modern is being well-reviewed? Okay, we’ll be quick. Guardian: five stars, “one of the most heightened and extraordinary experiences you can have in a gallery”. Independent: five stars, “the gold standard for what the artist can and should be”. Times: five stars, “a revelatory must-see exhibition”. The i: five stars, “a dizzyingly good study of sex, death and fruit bowls”. Mind you, it should be good, tickets cost £22.
🛸 The Science Museum’s Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination has also been picking up great reviews this week. The Times says it has “a delightfully retro feel, reminiscent of the 1960s when Star Trek and Doctor Who brought science fiction into our living rooms” (four stars) and the Telegraph says it’s”whizzy” and “lovingly curated” (another four stars). The Guardian hasn’t reviewed the exhibition yet, but they do have an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, whose book New York 2140 is featured in it.
🚀 In other space news: the starship HMS Alice Liddell has now landed in King’s Cross Station. Here’s an explanation. And a full-size replica of the rocket that’s due to to launch the first ever orbital satellite launch out of the UK is going on display in South Kensington next weekend.
P.S. If you’re a fan of retro sci-fi, then you’re definitely going to enjoy next Wednesday’s edition of LiB…
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