Dear Londoners — as we struggled out of our beds on this icy morning, we noticed some amazing news. Last week, we asked for your help in hitting 7,000 subscribers — and you delivered in spades, helping us shoot past our target. We really do appreciate all the support you’ve given since we launched less than three months ago.
As an independent outlet, we aren’t funded by clickbait ads or millionaire owners, but by people like you — our amazing readers. And so we find ourselves in the position of asking for another favour. Tomorrow, as we’ve been teasing for a while, we’ll be launching a new paywall for (some) of our reporting. We’ll keep you posted about just what a subscription entails, but if you’re able to spare the cost of a Pret sandwich each month to put towards our world-class journalism, then you’ll be doing more than just keeping us afloat — you’ll be driving a London media revolution.
But first, it’s your Monday briefing, where we bring you the biggest news, the best food and the most exciting things to do across the capital this week.
Big Story: The overcrowding crisis at The Whittington
Top line: The Whittington Hospital near Archway in North London posted multiple job adverts last week for registered nurses who will be expected to manage “corridor care” in the hospital, The Sunday Times reported.
Context: Patients and staff at the hospital’s overwhelmed A&E painted a hellish picture of the situation at the Whittington, including elderly patients treated in corridors and forced to go to the toilet in bottles. A nurse at the hospital reported that nurses couldn’t properly monitor patients as the corridors did not have access to power sockets for their equipment. They added that an elderly patient receiving end of life care passed away in the corridor: “I think that was one of the saddest moments.”
The data: The hospital saw 9,300 patients in A&E last month, with almost a third waiting longer than four hours to be seen. 4% waited 12 hours for a ward bed, often in a corridor — the A&E only has less than 30 spaces in total, split between rooms for those awaiting decisions and scans, in need of emergency resuscitation, having a mental health crisis and more.
Why this matters: The Whittington Hospital is far from an exception — other hospitals in London have recorded worse waits or bed shortages. It shows that the once-extraordinary emergency practice of treating patients in corridors is becoming more common across the NHS, but more alarmingly, its choice to recruit nurses specifically for corridor care suggests that this is becoming so normalised as to be part of planned, day-to-day operations. And future signs don’t bode well: the Health Foundation think tank predicts the NHS will need 21,000 extra beds by 2030 just to keep up with demand.
The response: Royal College of Emergency Medicine president Adrian Boyle called the revelation a sign of the “total acceptance of failure” by the NHS and government. The head of the Royal College of Nursing said that the once “extraordinary escalation measure is now commonplace across our NHS”, but said there was “no scenario in which it constitutes good or safe care”.
What the hospital says: “Our hospital has been experiencing very significant pressure in urgent and emergency care. In these circumstances we may have to provide care in corridors, as an absolute last resort. In common with other hospitals, where this is necessary, we bring in additional staff on a temporary basis to ensure that care can be delivered as safely and compassionately as possible to patients.”
Your news briefing
🚆 Sadiq Khan’s £16.5 million subsidy for cheaper Tube fares on Fridays seems to have made “no noticeable difference” to Tube ridership, an official analysis has found. The scheme ran between March and May last year to try and coax more workers into offices (and thus the economic powerhouse of central London) on Fridays. Now, as our friends at London Spy have reported, City Hall is said to be considering offering free coffees to commuters who clock up a lot of journeys. If at first you don’t succeed…
🍖 Could Smithfield market be brought back from the dead? The historic wholesale meat market looked set to close for good after news broke in November that the City of London Corporation had dropped plans to move traders to a site in Dagenham and would be ending its support for traders when the current site closes in 2028. But the Corporation and the Smithfield Market Tenants' Association (SMTA) have now agreed to move to an as yet undisclosed site “within the M25”.
🏗️ Ever since the Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre was demolished in December 2014, the space opposite Earl’s Court Tube station has been vacant. A mere 10+ years later, we’ve finally been given an early, preliminary, first-stage vision of what the new site may look like. Glossy depictions of the £10 billion proposed project were published over the weekend, depicting 4,000 homes, offices, shops, a park and an unhelpfully vague set of ‘cultural venues’. In typical British fashion, though, the project isn’t expected to be finished until the early 2040s, almost three decades after the demolition.
🎒 Embattled Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman has announced plans to offer payments of up to £150 to help local families with combined incomes below £50,350 afford the cost of school uniforms. It would make the borough, one of the poorest in the country, the first in Britain to run such a scheme.
New here? Make sure to get your teeth into Andrew Kersley’s weekend long read on the UCKG, an evangelical church that’s spreading across London that former members call a “cult”. The UCKG has been accused of conducting conversion therapy, coercing people to donate their life savings and showing congregants photos of the dead bodies of ex-members to try and dissuade them from leaving. So why does the church have links to a senior Labour councillor, and even a minister in the Starmer government?
Readers called the piece “excellent” and “important” — and it’s already led to calls by politicians for an inquiry into the church and its political links.
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: If Paris has croissants and Lisbon has pastéis de nata, then Rome’s submission for ‘most delicious baked goods’ must be maritozzi: brioche buns split open and filled with sweetened cream. Historically, maritozzi were a symbol of affection given by Italian men to their lovers during Lent — take a leaf out of their book, and buy your sweetheart one from Bethnal Green’s FORNO bakery. Infused with lemon and olive oil, they’re easily the best in the city.
Lunch: Everybody has their dim sum restaurant of choice; a matter of preference dictated by strict loyalties and even stricter rivalries. For The Londoner’s money, the best is Dumplings’ Legend on Gerrard Street, right in the heart of Chinatown. The neighbourhood’s website claims that the restaurant has “done for soup dumplings what Pelé did for football” and, while we’re a little unsure what that means, it’s undeniable that their xiao long bao are some of the best in the city.
Drinks: Harringay’s Bonne Route wine bar has only been open for two months, but it’s already amassed a committed fan-club. Launched by the team behind beloved north London deli Middle Lane Market, the bar sells both natural and traditional-process wine by the glass and the bottle — and will be hosting upcoming events as diverse as a water-kefir workshop and Georgian wine tasting night (the oenology trend of 2025).
Dinner: Buzzy, loud and beautifully hectic, Soho’s Speedboat Bar is a riot. With its egg-yolk yellow walls, electric blue chairs and canteen-style metal tables, it’s hard not to feel the joy — and even harder once you’ve cracked open an ice-cold Singha and tasted the ‘Suki sauce’ cellophane noodles. Our advice: get together with a group of your silliest, funniest friends and order the sharing set menu — at £35 per head, it’s one of the best deals in central.
Later: Tucked into the intersection of Blackheath Road and Greenwich South Street, The Graduate might be a near-perfect pub. Home to both drag cabaret nights and live-sports screenings, it also has two massive pool tables and a dartboard — and did we mention it’s open until 1.30am? But the best part of it is the atmosphere: Andrew, the landlord, is one of the most welcoming patrons in the city (and pours one of the best pints of Guinness), a fact made clear in the genuinely friendly vibe of the place and its punters.
Our favourite reads
The utterly plausible case that climate change makes London much colder — Henry Mance, The Financial Times
The FT’s Henry Mance meets the scientists trying to study the risk of a worrying climate-change driven future: an iced over London. The fears centre around the potential collapse of part of the Gulf Stream that, if it happens, could push the UK to become “fundamentally less habitable”. Mance brings a painful humanity to what may be otherwise an inaccessibly technical story.
PM urged to sack Tulip Siddiq after Bangladesh leader’s rebuke — The Sunday Times
Anti-corruption minister and Labour MP Tulip Siddiq is in hot water after The Sunday Times revealed worrying links between Siddiq and her aunt Sheikh Hasina, the now-deposed leader of Bangladesh who has been accused of corruption and crimes against humanity. The full investigation is well worth a read, as is their follow-up with exclusive access to Hasina’s ransacked palace, where reporters found multiple Labour Party campaign pamphlets for Siddiq.
To do list
After embarking on a mammoth two-year run of Guys & Dolls, the Bridge Theatre is once again showing new productions — and the first is the much-anticipated Richard II. Directed by Bridge co-founder, Nicholas Hytner, and featuring a fresh-off-the-Wicked-publicity-junket Jonathan Bailey, it’s guaranteed to be a knock-out.
It might exacerbate your January melancholy, but for a good dose of the weird, the eerie and the downright depressing, head to the Garden Cinema for its Visions in Ruins: British Cinema 1970 – 1980 season. An ode to the crumbling British film industry of the 70s and 80s, you’ll find cult favourites like Penda’s Fen playing alongside classics such as Don’t Look Now and The Wicker Man.
Tomorrow (14 January), there will be a presentation of the Gaza Biennale outside the ICA on Pall Mall. Featuring 60 artists from in and around Gaza, the biennale, which began in April 2024, documents the work artists have still been creating amid the destruction of their city.
Editorial note 14/01: This story has been updated to include a post publication comment from The Whittington Hospital and an amendment to the headline to reflect that the nurse positions recruited for were short-term rather than permanent roles.
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