Dear Londoners – it’s been a cold, foggy week, the kind that makes you despair by the time March rolls around, but feels delightfully wintery midway through November. The Met office is teasing us with a "snow possible" verdict for tomorrow, but we're struggling to see any actual snow symbols on the forecast.
Today's briefing gives you some great things to do and book this week – including haunting photos of mafia killings in the 1970s and a new staging of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex – and recommends some restaurants and bars you should have you on your booking list. We also bring you the latest Euston drama and some analysis of ministerial envoys being sent in to oversee Tower Hamlets Council.
In our weekend read, Sophie Smith wrote about a massive, illegal landfill site on the eastern edge of London that's repeatedly on fire. The effects on the surrounding community have been disastrous, with toxic smoke billowing into homes, playgrounds, allotments and nurseries. “Thank you so much for this kind of journalism. Ludicrous that something like this has been allowed to go on for so long,” wrote reader Kishan.
Sophie Smith
Get in touch: We'd love to hear from some of you early Londoner readers about what you think we should be covering, especially if there are stories you think are under-reported by the media. One of the huge joys of running a newsletter like this is that we get to speak to our readers on a regular basis and pursue the tips and the stories that you send us. Please get in touch if you'd like to speak to one of us about a story or just pass on a bit of news.
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To Do List
Last chance to catch: To celebrate one hundred years of Surrealist art, Piccadilly’s Mayor Gallery has staged a retrospective, Homage to Surrealism: 1924 – Forever (All Media), which is “culled from the combined worlds of art, writing (poetry and prose, political and cultural manifestoes, etc.), and ephemeral material of every sort.” It features artists such as Dalí, Magritte, Miró, Matta, Duchamp, Man Ray and Leonora Carrington – not a bad line-up for a weekday evening. Hurry, though: it ends on Friday.
This week: Best known for her portraits of mafia killings during the 1970s, Letzia Battaglia’s photography is unflinching without perversity and dramatic without sensationalism. You can see Battaglia’s work at the Photographers’ Gallery (just off Oxford Street). It’s a full bodied retrospective, dedicated to Battaglia’s intrepid reporting but also her almost painterly vignettes of everyday life and love in Sicily.
And Beyond: The Garden Cinema is currently celebrating Al Pacino until 9th December having selected 18 titles they believe ‘encapsulate Pacino’s intensity, range, and charisma.’ The Londoner was disappointed that one of our favourite cinemas declined to include his entrancingly bizarre ‘no one asked for this’ 2013 portrayal of Phil Spector. Luckily, some of his more out-there work (Cruising, Carlito’s Way, Insomnia) has made the cut.
Plus: One of the buzziest theatre openings of recent times, Robert Icke’s staging of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex at Wyndham’s Theatre reimagines the court of Thebes as an election-night campaign room. Played by Mark Strong, the eponymous role is now a politician on the precipice of a landslide victory, who has promised to reveal his birth certificate and investigate the death of the previous ruler, Laius. But anybody weary of contemporary political references needn’t be concerned: this show works flawlessly – particularly Strong and his co-stars, including the ever-brilliant Lesley Manville as his wife, Jocasta.
Your news briefing
🚌 Why are more Londoners getting injured by buses in the past few years? An interesting column in the FT this weekend asked whether London's franchised bus model prioritises speed over safety, quoting a former McKinsey consultant and TfL board member who believes the bus network's model is “institutionally unsafe”. The piece points out that 86 people were either killed or badly injured by bus collisions in London between 10 December 2023 and 31 March 2024. The FT's Camilla Cavendish thinks there might be an unreported scandal here, which is partly being hidden by TfL's inadequate response to these incidents and the fact that victims are rarely named, meaning that the families can't find each other and compare notes. Know more about this? Please get in touch.
🚂 On the subject of safety and London transport, you may have noticed the news last week that UK rail minister Lord Peter Hendy admitted Euston station was “no longer in fit condition” and parts of the station have deteriorated to the point where its marble pillars are held together by bands. It’s something of a damascene conversion for the former Network Rail chief, who got Gareth Dennis, a prominent rail engineer fired from his job back in August for raising safety concerns about the station. Hendy threatened engineering consultant SYSTRA, Dennis’ employer, with the withholding of government contracts and asked officials to “deal with him”.
🐔 Those of you that enjoyed our latest feature on the future of Oxford Street (go read it if you haven’t yet), may have had a sense of déjà vu when you saw the name of Westminster Councillor Paul Dimoldenberg in the piece. The Londoner can confirm that Paul is actually the father of Amelia Dimoldenberg of Chicken Shop Date fame. Talk about range.
Got a story for us to look into? Please get in touch.
New here? Last week we published this great piece by David Aaronovitch about the mythologised communities of London's past. He writes that a highly influential postwar study that influenced how the city saw its history may have misled readers about how people felt about leaving the slums of East London. Give it a read.
David Aaronovitch
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: There are few ills that a good Turkish breakfast cannot fix. Hanimeli, on the stretch of Dalston that heads into Stoke Newington, offers one of the best. We’re partial to a homemade gözleme or the köy kahvaltısı: two eggs, honey, yoghurt, jam, tomatoes, homemade butter and cheeses, olives, fried peppers and tahini with grape molasses. Translated, delightfully, as the ‘village breakfast,’ it’s a feast delicious enough to make you start believing you could do good for your local community – like chopping wood, for example, or erecting a maypole.
Lunch: Just off Rye Lane, sits Guacamoles, a Rye Lane Market pop-up turned permanent taqueria, headed by an exuberant Mexican known locally as ‘Taco Manny’. Come within earshot of Guacamoles and you’ll no doubt hear Manny shouting ‘best tacos in London!’ He’s not far wrong. Manny fled Velacruz with his family in 2022 after being threatened by the local cartel. Having established himself in South London, he’s set about bucking the trend of London’s tacos — in that his are actually tasty and not heinously overpriced. He also runs the occasional techno night at Peckham Audio.
Drinks: Ok, so a Sam Smiths’ pub in central London isn’t a revolutionary choice. But the Yorkshire Grey on Langham Street, in Fitzrovia, is pretty much the platonic ideal of a London pub come winter – open fire, dark wood, leather banquettes (and a rare-in-central off-street smoking area, for the members of The Londoner team who like to chain-smoke in the freezing cold). Perhaps best of all, it’s never busy, despite being a five minute walk from Oxford Street.
Dinner: One of our writers distinctly remembers someone describing the Portuguese as ‘the Brits of Iberia’, and we think there’s a grain of truth to that – one perfectly demonstrated in the innumerable pints and plates of chips served daily at The Three Lions restaurant on South Lambeth Road. For a genuine Portuguese atmosphere, inexplicably cheap, delicious wine and large servings of fish and/or meat flanked by companies of carbohydrates, this is the one.
Later: Without dipping our toes into London nightlife discourse, anybody who complains that London’s club scene is tired simply hasn’t been to FOLD enough. Look, we don’t always want to traipse through the backstreets of Canning Town, either but the 24-hour club is always worth it – especially this weekend, which sees famed Berlin DJ Objekt take the pre-10pm slot, before underground party/record label Cartilus’ 15th birthday kicks off.
Our favourite reads
‘You tried to tell yourself I wasn’t real’: what happens when people with acute psychosis meet the voices in their heads? – Jenny Kleeman
South London's Denmark Hill has played an outsized roll in the treatment of mental illness. The Maudsley, the famous psychiatric hospital, has been operating there since 1915. During that time a procession of different therapies have been pioneered and practiced, some more effective than others. Now, a new approach to schizophrenia is being developed, one that takes a radically different attitude to the voices in peoples’ heads. 'Avatar therapy' takes the patient’s hallucinations and transforms them into a moving, three dimensional persona. It teaches sufferers not only to confront their demons but to cultivate longstanding, healthy relationships with them.
A London start-up tried to solve Sheffield's housing crisis. So far, they've made it worse – Victoria Munro
As a nascent London start-up, we’re aware that the phrase ‘nascent London start-up’ doesn’t exactly inspire confidence around the rest of the country. But there’s a reason for this, and it’s companies like Roost Rent, who arrived in Sheffield at the start of this year, hoping to alleviate the housing crisis by bringing co-operatives and venture capital funding together. As our sister paper, The Tribune, reports, it hasn’t worked out, with one tenant describing themselves as living in “a bit of a hostage situation”.
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