Who's behind the anti-Musk tube ads?

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Keep reading for your Monday briefing, a collection of London’s biggest stories and the best spots to eat, drink and hang out.

Big story: Who’s behind the protest adverts taking over the tube?

Topline: A series of satirical adverts criticising Elon Musk and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have appeared at bus stations and on tube trains across the capital. 

Context: While they use the same tactics, the guerrilla political adverts are actually the work of two different campaigns. The first has posted a series of adverts criticising US billionaire and close Trump ally Elon Musk, after he made a series of high-profile interventions in British politics including calling for the release of far-right extremist Tommy Robinson, accusing Labour MP Jess Phillips of being a “genocide rape apologist” and trying to force a new election in the UK. 

Meanwhile, on Wednesday last week, some 200 faux-Labour-Party adverts appeared at bus stations and Jubilee line trains accusing the government of “doing deals with war criminals”, featuring pictures of foreign secretary David Lammy and Israeli prime minister Netanyahu. Many were still on the network over the weekend.  

Who's behind it?: A group named Everyone Hates Elon has taken responsibility for the series of anti-Musk ads, saying “he’s a gruesome man, and we all need to come together to stop him having this incredible influence over all of our lives”. Its members have all stayed anonymous, but claim they’re a collective from across the country who are angry at the American tech billionaire’s increasing interventions in British politics to advocate for extreme right wing causes. They’re using the campaign and its newfound virality to raise thousands of pounds for a range of charities that they feel the billionaire would dislike, including Everyday Racism and Rainbow Migration. 

Byline Times spoke to an anonymous member of the group behind the anti-Netanyahu ads, who argued that “trade relations are one of the few sources of leverage that the UK holds over Israel that could put pressure on it to end its genocidal violence in Gaza”. 

Are they sanctioned by TfL?: No. The adverts weren’t paid for — they’d likely break TfL’s rules on political advertising anyway — but were illegally papered over pre-existing adverts. The transport network says it removes all such fake adverts as soon as they are notified of their presence, but campaigners seem to be putting new ones up as quickly as the network is taking them down. 

How are they doing it?: The campaigns are relatively easy to pull off, given how reliant on printed adverts the capital’s transport network is. On the bus network, TfL manages nearly ten thousand different advertising boards, over 90% of which are print, according to the network. It’s a similar case on the tube, where the almost all ads are still printed too. Those kinds of adverts can be slotted over by your own new artwork; just a few years ago a network of guerrilla ad campaigners actually put up posters explaining the process to anyone who fancied joining their ranks.

A long history?: It’s far from the first time this sort of campaign has happened. There was a series of anti-Israel posters put up in 2018, and multiple rounds of satirical anti-Conservative party campaigns in the build-up to past elections. 

Your news briefing

🏝️Residents of Eel Pie Island — the secretive, star-studded island near Twickenham accessible only by footbridge — fear that a planning report by Richmond council will destroy their community. Due to be released today, the document may reclassify the island as a flood zone, meaning locals won’t be able to insure or remortgage their homes.

🍺 Another one bites the dust… The Gun, the beloved Homerton pub and club space, has shuttered due to “unsustainable” trading conditions, says co-founder Nick Stephens. Opened in 2014, the space quickly became an East London fixture for DJs and buzzy food pop-ups. Stephens and fellow landlord Hanna Sinclair-Stephens will now focus on their other pub, the Compton Arms in Canonbury (interestingly, that venue has also faced much-publicised challenges to stay open in the past few years).

📱Phone thefts are increasingly common in the capital — one every eight minutes, according to recent figures — but it’s difficult to find out what actually happens next. The Sunday Times found out, by tracking the end locations of thousands of stolen phones and found that 80% end up abroad. The most common end points were Algeria (28% of cases), China (20% of cases) and Hong Kong (7%).  

If you missed it, over the weekend we published Andrew Kersley’s heartwrenching long-read telling the life and death of Dr Jagdip Sidhu, an NHS doctor from Harrow who took their own life after years of working in an underfunded, broken healthcare system. One NHS doctor takes their own life every three weeks. 

Readers called it “heartbreaking” and “one of the most moving and powerful pieces I’ve read”. Make sure to read the full story here.

Wining and dining

With endless offerings and non-stop openings, we all know that deciding where to eat and drink in the capital can be fraught. We want to make it easy — so every week we’ll give you our insider guide to the city’s best spots. 

One perfect meal: 

Camberwell’s Church Street has become increasingly buzzy in the last couple of years. Hello JoJo, a new “bakery, brunch and dinner” spot is replacing the recently departed Forza Win; while the Camberwell Arms continues to serve up the most in-demand roast in the entirety of South London. But that doesn’t mean some of the road’s excellent old-timers should be neglected, either — and Van Hing, an unpretentious Vietnamese cafe and restaurant, is one of them. The exterior is perfect, unchanged for years: shades of verdant green with flamboyant, 70s-style yellow lettering announcing its name. Inside, it’s charmingly old-school, with paper tablecloths and Vietnamese pastoral scenes and faux-ivy climbing up the pillars. 

As for the food, Van Hing is wonderful alone or as a couple, but it really comes into its own in a group — it has one of those hundred-piece menus, so buy to share. We recommend the Nhân Chay, a traditional fried vietnamese crispy pancake filled with vegetables, the summer rolls, the sizzling aubergine and the salt and pepper squid, with a phở to follow.

One perfect drink:

The photos are always the same: a hot dog, daubed in giallo-red ketchup and lurid yellow mustard, posed next to an elegant, olive-laden martini. Once you’ve noticed the mismatch turning up in your social media feed, you won’t be able to stop — this weekend, The Londoner counted five appearances of the phenomenon. The cause? Rasputin’s, a new(ish) bar from the wildly successful team behind Dom’s Subs, which has quickly become the place to see, be seen and, most importantly, have a good time. 

Although the hot dogs are only part of the appeal, they encapsulate the bar’s wider promise, which is something cheap and a little silly and nevertheless extremely good — a marriage of kitsch and quality that’s easy to love. The five-olive martinis are £7, the lagers are a fiver, the margaritas are a tenner, thrillingly well-priced for this area of post-gentrification Hackney (and for London as a whole).

Bathed in red light, Rasputin’s has the stagey sleaziness, the camp sexiness of a winking neon sign. It makes you “feel like you’re in the Roadhouse from Twin Peaks”, as food and drink writer Lauren O’Neill wrote. Put more simply: It’s fun. So slurp the ketchup off your fingers, buy another round and promise not to get home before midnight.

Ins and outs

Ins: Cheap daffodils, the £12.50 three-oysters-and-wine deal at 80-20 Wines in Peckham, Taste of Peshawar in Stonebridge Park, Murphy’s stout, karaoke at Viet Quan, pre-stretching your shoes at the cobbler, cigars at the Piccadilly Hippodrome, the Cock Tavern, rewatching Attack the Block (2011), small plates (they went out, and now they’re back in again — sorry!), FM Mangal flatbreads. 

Outs: False starts to spring, cover charges, suitcases on the Tube, TikToks on public transport, the Cow in Notting Hill, bars decorated to look like someone’s flat (House Party, the Little Yellow Door et al.), moaning about Clapham, pre-booking systems for lidos, £7 plates of padron peppers. 

Our favourite reads

‘The ghosts are everywhere’: can the British Museum survive its omni-crisis? — Charlotte Higgins, Guardian

Earlier this year, the Guardian published a deep dive into the state of the British Museum. After a spate of high profile thefts, controversies over its funding from oil giants like BP and growing demands for objects taken by colonisers to be returned to the countries they came from, what does the future look like for the country’s namesake museum? 

Róisín Lanigan: ‘I moved to London and got bedbugs’ — Ellen Peirson-Hagger, Observer

The Observer interviewed Northern Irish writer Róisín Lanigan about all things London and renting, ahead of the release of her new novel, I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There, that “remakes the haunted house genre for the rental age”.

To Do List

🎞️ This Friday, the Prince Charles Cinema is screening potentially the most controversial movie of all time: Caligula: The Ultimate Cut. If you fancy enjoying a movie that upset the BBFC so much that the original print “was seized and impounded by Customs and Excise as indecent and potentially obscene”, then make sure you nab a ticket,

📚If you’re a fan of architecture, the Barbican is hosting a discussion between renowned Swiss architects Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan this coming Friday. The duo will be discussing recent projects as diverse as the residence of the Swiss Ambassador in Algiers and the Unterfeld substation. 

From the archive

The Great Smog: in December 1952, an enormous cloud of air pollution enveloped London. This persisted for four days until the weather changed and the cloud dissipated. By the time it had cleared, roughly 4,000 people were estimated to have died — although more recent research suggests the real number may have been three times higher. 

Last but not least… our parent company Mill Media is hiring experienced freelance editors. Find out more about the role here.

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