Dear Londoners — great to be with you again on another, increasingly Christmassy, Monday afternoon. We’re very happy to report that more and more of you keep signing up. We’ve almost hit the five thousand mark, and we’d love to get there this week. You can help us out by telling your friends and sharing any articles you’ve enjoyed.
Speaking of this week, we’ve got some great stories in the pipeline. Andrew Kersley has been calling up an unending parade of railway policy wonks to get an inside scoop on the Lizzie line, that’s coming soon. And Hannah will be asking what happens next after Smithfield meat market decided to relocate from the spot it has been on since the 12th century. Meanwhile, Miles has been sent down into the tube tunnels at night (for work, not some kind of sinister retribution for an unpaid fare). We’ll see what he comes back with.
Before we get to the briefing, we’re refreshing our open newsroom call out. At The Londoner, we don’t just want you to read our stories, we want you to help write them too. Here are a few stories we’re working on that we could use your assistance with - please email us if you can help. We will never name you or identify you unless you request to be named/identified.
- We’re doing a story that touches on the migrant experience in London, and we’d particularly like to speak to Polish and Romanian Londoners.
- There are a few stories about the politics of major London theatres and galleries on our list so we want to build up our industry contacts — can we take you for coffee/pint?
You can get in touch with us by emailing editor@the-londoner.co.uk
Your news briefing
🚯 Thanks to a professor at the London School of Economics, there’s a new word in the London policy vernacular. Coined by Prof Tony Travers, the term ‘grotification’ refers to ‘the declining standards of cleanliness of our streets.’ Reportedly, Havering council now has a volunteer-led scheme tackling "grot spots." According to the local council leader Ray Morgon, the growth of grot stems from social care and housing taking up most of the council's cash. “If we look at the cuts to local government funding,” Prof Travers told the BBC “social care has to be protected — everything else including street cleaning, weeding, graffiti cleaning, has taken a much deeper cut, up to half in some cases.” The report also highlighted a recent YouGov poll in which “one-fifth of Londoners [chose] 'dirty' as one of their main descriptors of the capital."
🔍 All is not well at Newham Council. Over summer, the East London borough announced it was in £22m of debt and facing bankruptcy due to the spiralling cost of temporary accommodation. Things got worse in October, when inspectors found backlogs of thousands of unaddressed repairs and serious fire safety works that had gone ignored by the council’s social housing arm. And last week, it emerged that social services had seriously failed a family whose two-year-old daughter had drowned in a back garden. Mazeedat Adeoye was being cared for by family friends at the time because Newham Council had refused to give the family short term foster care.
In the latest development, the council’s own mayor Rokshana Fiaz — the first elected woman mayor in the capital — began a legal case to sue the council she leads for discrimination, racism and bullying. The Londoner’s starting to wonder if there are any parts of the council that aren’t in crisis.
🚨 Police have bailed a man arrested on suspicion of rape at Soho’s Groucho Club. The media-focused private members’ club, which was founded in 1985 and quickly became internationally famous due to its celebrity patrons, has had its license suspended for 28 days and remains closed.
🏰 Using cutting edge technology, the despairing graffiti of 16th century prisoners in the Tower of London has been deciphered for the first time. Most of the graffiti, the Observer reported, are pictorial and include crosses, while textual passages tend to be short and reference the Bible. One, written in Breton, appears to allude to a husband and may provide evidence for a woman’s voice when records of female prisoners in the Tower were incredibly rare.
🎄 As we move mercilessly towards the 25th December, it’s important to remember that there definitely is such a thing as too much Christmas spirit. The workers at Old Kent Road Tesco know this better than anyone after it emerged the company had asked customers to rate employees’ ‘festive spirit’... in November.
Got a story for us to look into? Please get in touch.
New here? Have a look at Miles Ellingham’s weekend dispatch to Romford Greyhound Stadium, the last surviving dog track within the M25. It goes in some unexpected directions: cheetahs, stolen shotguns, cocaine, mass graves and a dead man’s dentures. We’re not kidding. Have a look.
From dawn till dusk
We all know London can be unbearably huge. So every week we’ll take you through an ideal day across the city using our little black book of the best London venues. We hope it’ll be equal parts glitz to spit and Tube-dust.
Breakfast: It’s hard to put your finger on what makes a decent greasy spoon. Somewhere out there is the perfect mix of ambience and quality food. We think Mary’s Cafe on 83 Camberwell Road comes close. The meat doesn’t taste cheap but the food also hasn’t been gentrified beyond recognition with homemade beans (sinful) and expensive toast. There’s the obligatory squadron of sauces and local newspapers arranged nicely and the hash browns are crispy.
Lunch: Look, enough ink has been spilled on the subject of Quo Vadis’ smoked eel sandwich — at this point, it’s easily one of the most famous dishes in the city (your move, St John marrow toast!). The bread is shipped in from Poilâne bakery in Paris! The eel comes from the last suppliers in the country! So it’s easy to be suspicious about the enduring hype — and the £17 price tag — but it really is as good as everybody claims. Pair with a bitter green salad and prepare to start rhapsodising.
Drinks: Among a certain type of friend group, the price of a Taddy lager in a London Sam Smith’s pub is a topic of fervent — and increasingly outraged — discussion. But go a little further out of the centre to the Anerley Arms (easily accessible on the Windrush line, before anybody from Zone 2 starts moaning), and you’ll find not just the platonic ideal of a Sam Smith’s pub, but the platonic ideal of any pub. It’s all Victorian grandeur, high ceilings and dark wood panels and brass lamps and a huge, verdant, pool table. But most importantly, a pint of Taddy costs all of £3.50. Run, don’t walk.
Dinner: If you’re ever walking down the New Kent Road at night in the freezing cold, you might be surprised to find dozens of people queuing for what appears to be a very normal-looking kebab shop. The reason? Lebanese Grill (or ‘Lebo’ Grill as it’s popularly called) serves some of the best chicken in London, cooked over hot coals and served with chips or rice. Just try not to die of hypothermia in the queue.
Later: How would you like to attend an authentic goth night? This Friday, London’s shadowy inhabitants are gearing up for ‘Slimelight’ at Islington’s Electrowerkz. According to a recent dispatch from I-D, you’ve got two types of goth in attendance, each with their own designated dancefloor, ‘trad goths, with angular XXL hair and all-black outfits (some wear latex, others wear 80s band merch) [and] cybergoths, wearing cyberlox, peering through goggles and brandishing glow sticks’. Choose wisely.
Our favourite reads
Kingmakers of the album charts — Hannah Barnes, New Statesman
Hannah Barnes tells the unlikely story of Banquet, a record store in South West London which became ‘the unofficial kingmaker of the UK album chart.’ Banquet has hosted ‘forty per cent of artists who have secured the top album in 2024’. It also featured performances from Mercury Prize winners and, a little over ten years ago, Charli XCX.
How Thames Water got away with trashing our rivers — Jon Yeomans, The Sunday Times
For most Londoners today, Thames Water — the company created in 1989 after Thatcher privatised the water industry — sits somewhere between fox urine and undue parking tickets in the list of things we’re thankful for. This year Thames Water was fined a record £104 million for dumping sewage in Britain's waterways. In a well-researched article for The Sunday Times Magazine, Jon Yeomans finds out how this happened.
To Do List
This week
After its sell-out premier last December, the Globe theatre’s A Night in Sign returns to the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 8 December. Staged in collaboration with FUSE theatre collective, the show is a BSL-led combination of music, dance, comedy, and poetry devised and performed by some of the UK’s talented deaf and hard-of-hearing artists.
This Sunday you can catch Sir Richard Eyre in conversation at the BFI Southbank. Sir Eyre — a former governor of the BBC — directed the Royal National Theatre for twelve years from 1987-1999. Over the course of his career he’s received multiple Olivier awards, two Tonys and six BAFTAs. According to BFI, the conversation will focus on ‘what makes good television drama, the contrast between television and film, and the state of the UK and global film and television industry.’
Also this Sunday, if you’re more into Krampus than Christmas, you might enjoy AntiXmas, an event hosted by The Satanic Flea Market. You’ll be able to browse ‘unusual toys, occult trinkets, obscure records, bric-a-brac, hand-made comix & zines, human skulls, taxidermy and much more.’
Last chance to catch
You have until Sunday to catch The World at Our Command, the first major solo exhibition from Dutch artist Bobbi Essers, at Hanover Square’s Unit Gallery. Announced as one of Artsy’s ‘top 10 emerging painters to watch,’ Esser’s works explore the intimacy of the party, flesh and camera flash, a cross between a Wolfgang Tillmans’ photograph, your mate’s Instagram feed and Artemisia Gentileschi’s ‘Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist’. Frieze declared the show a must-see, and we’re inclined to agree.
If you’ve ever been curious about how Japanese society perfected the art of making hyperrealistic food-replicas, you can now visit a free exhibition at Japan House in Kensington. Shokuhin sampuru (meaning ‘food samples’) dates back to the 1920s, when department stores would showcase dishes to expectant customers before evolving into a competitive craft. The exhibition runs until 16 February.
At the Imperial War Museum, another free exhibition on ‘War and the Mind’ has been running since September examining the psychological effects of conflict. The exhibition explores the mental toll of drone warfare along with the ‘significance of soldiers’ dreams during the First World War.’
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