Weekend roundup for 25 September
Includes sexual health tips, malfunctioning lifts and reverse cheeseburgers.
⚖️ By the time you read this the vigil for Sabina Nessa (the 28-year-old primary school teacher who was murdered in Cater Park last Friday) will be over (hopefully without incident). You can listen to an interview with the vigil’s organiser Annie Gibbs from this week’s Woman's Hour here. Meanwhile, over at Novara Media Aviah Day has written about “why pitting Sarah Everard against Sabina Nessa through the analysis of white privilege, visibility and representation politics is a dead end;” and below is Our Streets Now’s Jess Leigh talking to the BBC about tackling violence against women and girls:
🏛️ As the lease on City Hall runs out at the end of November and the London government’s new home in in Docklands won’t be ready until 2022, it looks like Sadiq and his colleagues are going to be ‘officeless’ for a few weeks (note to Susan Hall, leader of the GLA Conservatives: you’re not “homeless” just because your new office isn’t ready yet, get over yourself).
👫 On Tuesday, Jennifer Arcuri gave evidence to the GLA oversight committee, which is trying to determine if Boris Johnson provided Arcuri with “preferential access or treatment”. For her part, Arcuri says that “My relationship with the mayor had really no bearing on my complete pursuit of London.” We have no idea what that sentence means either.
🏳🌈 Even though the pride march had to be cancelled this year, ten pride roundels have been designed by TfL staff and prominent figures in the LGBTQ+ community. The roundels will be on display “in tube stations chosen for their significance to the designer” for at least the next month.
🦼 In amongst all the hype surrounding the opening of the Battersea Power Station and Nine Elms stations this week, one of the most insightful bits of reporting came from Alan Benson’s twitter feed as he navigated between the two stations in his wheelchair:|
🚰 It’s been a busy week for Charlie Mullin, the man behind Pimlico Plumbers. He just sold the business for £125 million and has announced plans to “focus on the music industry” and run for mayor of London.
🍆 The London Dungeon has an Only Fans account now. The account “features some of London's most famous historic characters” who will be promoting sexual awareness for Sexual Health Week. Can we stop writing about this now?
Art and culture bits
🗼London got a new online community radio station this week. Loose.fm is promising “eclectic vibes” from a diverse range of DJs and they’re looking for more. If you like to keep it loose then you can send show proposals and mixes via their IG.
🛗 For one week we’d like to write this roundup without mentioning the word ‘immersive’. Alas, this week is not that week, as “highly limited tickets” for Swamp Motel’s latest immersive production went on sale yesterday. The Drop involves a malfunctioning lift, a centuries-old secret, a bejewelled book and an “unassuming London building”.
👑 In other ‘immersive’ news, Queen are opening an “experiential pop-up shop” on Carnaby Street later this month. Queen The Greatest will have “limited edition music releases as well as fashion items and lifestyle products.” Lifestyle products?
📸 Creative Review has been to see I Belong to This (above) the new exhibition at the Huxley-Parlour Gallery, which features “the work of 17 artists, whose practice examines the relationship between who we are in private versus who we are in public.”
🖼️ The National Gallery’s new chairman is entrepreneur, philanthropist and Conservative party donor, John Booth. The Guardian notes that the news “will set off alarm bells for some who accuse Boris Johnson’s government of trying to stack the boards of cultural institutions with supporters.”
🍑 Camden’s Vagina Museum is going online only, after their landlord refused to extend the lease and the owners were unable to find a “lease anywhere else that is also accessible, affordable and in a commercial or cultural area.”
🎨Laura Cumming has reviewed Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty at the Dulwich Picture Gallery for the Guardian, and declared it “the show of the season, if not the year” (the Standard also gave it five stars recently, and Brixton Blog gave it a rave review too).
🤓 Dezeen has taken a look at one of the standout installations at the London Design Festival, architect Sou Fujimoto’s Medusa at the V&A. The “virtual structure… changes and evolves based on the movement” of its visitors, who “use mixed-reality glasses to manipulate their walk” through the ‘dynamic structure’.
🎭 The National Theatre has just announced three new shows for October. One (the adaptation of Andrea Levy's novel Small Island) is actually a return because the original run was delayed due to Covid. Then there’s Emma Rice’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights (“shot through with music and dance”) and Trouble in Mind (“widely considered the masterpiece of actress and playwright Alice Childress”).
🎼 Charity Music for All is holding its Learn to Play event again this weekend, which means if you visit the Music Room on Denmark Street or Yamaha Music on Wardour Street today or tomorrow, you can get a free 10-15 minute music lesson.
Food and drink bits
🇮🇹 Italian deli legend Lina Stores is coming to Clapham. They’ve taken over 15-16 The Pavement (where The Dairy and Counter Culture used to be) and are planning to install a retail space and a restaurant (that will be restaurant number three for Lina, the others are in Soho and King’s Cross).
🍹This weekend sees the last ever Model Market. After “seven years, over 30 of London’s finest food traders, 100,000 juiced limes and one million visitors,” the Lewisham market will be shutting up shop after one final party today. As well as the food and drink offering, they’re promising 12 hours of back-to-back DJs, plus it’s free entry and there’s space for walk-ins.
🐄 Steak specialists Flat Iron have opened a restaurant on Clink Street in London Bridge, and to mark the occasion they’ve put an exclusive special on the menu: an “ex-dairy short rib chilli cheeseburger, made using beef from ex-dairy cows from a farm in Northumberland”.
🌮 London Fields taqueria Sonora is reopening after six-weeks off, and this time they’re armed with a machine that should allow them to make a thousand “gossamer-thin, then grill-puffed tortillas” an hour. Eater London has spoken to the owners about their mission to recreate the regional Mexican speciality and their plans to open a separate taqueria and tortilleria.
🍔 Dirty Bones is coming back to Kingly Court (they moved out temporarily last year) and to mark the comeback, the American comfort food specialists have created an exclusive dish just for the Carnaby Street menu. The ‘Reverse Cheeseburger’ (above) is “a burger served alongside a truffled hot cheese sauce designed to be poured over tableside”. How on earth you’re supposed to eat that, we’re not sure.
🌱 A completely vegan PizzaExpress has opened on the Strand. The menu is “exclusively plant-based items,” and that includes all the ‘cheese’ and the “exclusive vegan Pepperoni,” developed in partnership with Jack & Bry.
⭐️ Salt Bae’s restaurant finally opened this week, but that wasn’t the most exciting celeb opening of the week. That prize goes to Idris Elba who announced he’s opening a wine bar in King’s Cross next month (in Coals Drop Yard, obviously). Named Porte Noire (after “his established wine and champagne brand”) the bar will have around “800 different wine bins… a range of different cocktails” and a “full French brasserie-style menu”.
🍸 ‘Best of’ list time. The FT have produced a list of London’s top 10 pubs by the river Thames (good to see The Prospect of Whitby on there), but if you don’t have an FT subscription then maybe take a look at the The Resident’s pick of London Cocktail Week highlights (as the week now, confusingly, runs for the entire month of October).
Long read of the week
The River Cafe’s Ruth Rogers launched her podcast this week, in which she interviews “her famous patrons about food and their lives” (the first guest is someone called Jake Gyllenhaal). The New York Times spoke to Rogers about why she chose to start a podcast and why she decided to start each episode “with the guest reading the recipe for one of the restaurant’s dishes.”
