Weekend roundup for 9 April

A bumper edition featuring bitchcoin, cheeseburger tacos and mouse droppings

Brick Lane Mural ‘The Land is Calling’ by Mohammed Ali

We are away for our Easter holidays next week, but there will still be issues on Monday and Wednesday (they just won’t have any news headlines). In fact, Monday’s issue features an exclusive piece of short fiction from one of our favourite London authors.

We will be taking a break over the Bank Holiday weekend though, so there will be no issue on Saturday 16th or Monday 18th. We’ll be back on Wednesday 20th.

Because there will be no Roundup next weekend we have stuffed as much food, drink, arts and culture into this one as we can. Plus, we’ve shoved the paywall a little further down the page.

If you don’t want to see any paywall at all (and start receiving our midweek issue as well), then you can subscribe now using our ‘first birthday’ discount:

News bits

🙉 The number of complaints about Tube noise is going up, with more than 1,000 made in the past three years according to City Hall, most of them coming from the Northern and Victoria lines. Much of the noise is caused by “corrugated rails” and there has been an awful lot of rail grinding going on to try and fix it (15,000m of grinding in six months, to be exact), but that hasn’t stopped the number of complaints going up from 243 in 2020 to 301 in 2021.

🚉 Some good transport news: The Night Tube is coming back to the Jubilee line at weekends from May 21.

🌳 Yesterday morning Extinction Rebellion closed down Tower Bridge by abseiling down it and hanging a huge banner over the side demanding: “End fossil fuels now.” The group has promised there will be back from today, to “create the most roadblocks we ever have”.

😶‍🌫️ At the end of 2019 the City of London Corporation started an 18 month experiment to see if banning petrol and diesel cars on the road that runs past the Barbican centre would reduce air pollution. Sure enough, pollution levels “plummeted” during that 18 months. But since the experiment ended in September levels of nitrogen dioxide, “which damages the respiratory tracts of people and animals and causes lung disease,” are back above legal limits.

🚗 On a related note, the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone has raised less money than expected in its first month. Although the ULEZ brought in £16m in revenue in the first month (from 45,800 ‘non-compliant vehicles’), that’s still “lower than anticipated” according to TfL.

🚇 Which means that the money made by the TfL in a whole month of the ULEZ, only just covered the £13m they lost in those two strikes at the beginning of March.

💊 Inigo Philbrick, the art dealer who is currently facing 20 years in prison for defrauding buyers out of more than $86 million, has blamed his crimes on the fact that the London art scene is “fuelled by alcohol and illegal drugs”.

🧵 Enid Marx, the artist and textile designer who created the Underground seat fabric has been given her own blue plaque. It’s gone up at 39 Thornhill Road in Islington, where she lived and worked for more than 30 years

💼 It will come as a shock to precisely no one that London’s investment banks are “struggling to shrink the gender pay gap,” with female bankers “making up less than a fifth of top earners” according to the latest data.

🖼️ Back in February we told you that Tate Britain had decided it was going to keep the Rex Whistler mural that currently adorns the walls of its café, but it was going to add “a new commission that will critically engage the work’s racist imagery”. Now, thanks to Eater London, we have a few more details about that. According to a Tate spokesperson, the room will be reopened as a “display space,” that will feature “a new site-specific installation by a contemporary artist exhibited alongside and in dialogue with the mural, as well as a new display of interpretative material which will critically engage with the mural’s history and content”.

🧼 Staying with controversial art: The Independent has a piece on ‘artwashing’ inspired by the art mural that went up on Brick Lane recently “to honour 50 years of Bangladesh” (that’s it in our banner image, above). The article points out that councillors who proposed the mural are the same councillors who voted in favour of “effectively selling off Brick Lane to corporate developers”.

🥇 Crystal Palace has been “named best place to live in London” by the Times. Let the arguing commence.

Art and culture bits

🎲 The “festival of experimental games” known as ‘Now Play This’ is back at Somerset House this weekend. This year the theme is “the relationship between democracy and game design,” and the programme includes everything from “a 360° interactive documentary exploring the mundanity and struggles of gig economy workers in rapidly urbanising Beijing,” to a narrative game based on George Orwell’s ‘1984’, and a historical comedy game called ‘We Should Totally Stab Caesar!’.

🕹️ And if that’s not enough joy for your stick, then the Science Museum has got some more gaming delights for you in the form of ‘Power UP’, its “fully interactive gaming event,” which “features the very best video games and consoles from the past five decades”. It’s there until 19 April.

🐻 Thom Yorke announced this week that an art exhibition showcasing works by him and his collaborator Stanley Donwood will open in London next month at 8 Duke Street. The show, called ‘Test Specimens’, will “bring together 60 pieces of artwork that the pair created between 1999 and 2001, while they were also working on Radiohead records ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’.”

⏺️ And if you’re after more music-based art, then the wonderful Photographer’s Gallery, just of Oxford Street, has got its For the Record: Photography & the Art of the Album Cover exhibition running until June. There’s over 200 album covers to take in, and it’s not just the usual suspects either, as “the exhibition illuminates the often overlooked and multifaceted contributions of photographers and other visual artists to the identity of the ‘stars’ and the labels themselves.”

👖 Sustainability and Fashion in 2022 is a free panel discussion that’s happening at Boxpark Shoreditch on the evening of Wednesday 20th, which is going to try and get to “the true meaning of sustainable production in 2022”.

📱 If you want to see someone off the telly read out your most embarrassing text exchanges, then you need to go and have a look at the upcoming ‘one night only’ show, ‘The Joy of Text’ at the Savoy Theatre. The producers are asking “members of the public to send in their funniest and most cherished text messages” which will then be read out by a cast that includes Catherine Tate, Denise Gough, Dougray Scott, Indira Varma and Tamsin Greig.

👨‍🎨️ The “approachable and affordable” Roy’s Art Fair is back at the Truman Brewery this weekend with over 80 handpicked artists to discover alongside a ‘Great Art Doodle Area’, a cocktail bar and something called ‘The Misfortuneteller’.

🛶 Slightly pricier art can be found at ‘Canaletto’s Venice Revisited’ which opened at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich a few days ago. The exhibition brings together 24 of Canaletto’s paintings of the city, “from festive scenes to busy market squares,” and promises visitors will “discover more about the life and work of the influential painter”. 

🕺 Another exhibition starting later this month is ‘Last Dance’ at the Glitterbox gallery on Curtain Road. It features “uplifting candids and portraits that illustrate the essence of disco’s euphoric spirit” taken in the late-70s by New York photographer Bill Bernstein at legendary venues like Paradise Garage and Studio 54.