Image courtesy of Trowbridge Estate, taken from the Londonist Flickr pool

There is a school of thought in politics that the best way of stopping people doing something is to make doing it as unpleasant as possible. If smokers have to stand in the rain to have a quick fag, they’re more likely to quit; if signing on is about as pleasant as having a molar pulled out with some pliers, you’re less likely to claim benefits; and so on.

The reason we mention this is because, over in Redbridge, the local police have decided to apply this philosophy to homelessness.

A shocking story in this week’s Ilford Recorder tells of police swooping in on a group of men sleeping rough, and confiscating what few material possessions they had.

“They were just taking the sleeping bags and chucking out everything,” the paper quotes one of the men, Adam Jaskowiak, as saying. “I asked to keep it and the food, but they said no.”

The food parcels, incidentally, had been donated by the public.

The intention seems to have been to move them on, though where to is not exactly clear (some other police force’s patch, we suppose). After all, as Rita Chadha, chief executive of the local Refugee and Migrant Forum, told the paper, “There’s no logic in this. It’s not as though if they take someone’s sleeping bag they will automatically walk into a house.”

For what it’s worth, the local chief inspector John Fish claims the policy was intended to “reduce the negative impact of rough sleepers. This includes the need for us to assist in the removal of temporary structures, tents, and bedding from public spaces and other inappropriate locations.”

Because obviously, these men were just having a laugh being homeless. Now the police have made sure it isn’t fun any more they’ll go off and buy a nice semi, and eat in restaurants like normal people.

You can read the Ilford Recorder’s full story here.

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Photo by Mark Wood from the Londonist Flickr pool

At Wednesday’s Mayor’s Question Time, Boris Johnson confirmed the Metropolitan Police are looking into software called Track My Crime, used by other forces in the UK. Avon and Somerset piloted it a few years ago and got 95% positive feedback.

The idea is that victims of crime can get an update on the status of the investigation – maybe interviewing a suspect or an arrest – without waiting around for a call from the police. (From the opposite point of view, it can also cut down on police time spent trying to get hold of victims to provide an update.) Conservative Assembly Member Tony Arbour has been campaigning for it, and yesterday at City Hall the Mayor was able to give him the good news:

Track my Crime is indeed being taken up by MOPAC. We are actively looking at how to implement it and give Londoners exactly that confidence and opportunity to see what’s happening.

Earlier this year the Met came bottom of a national survey of victim satisfaction rates, scoring an average of 74% across all boroughs. It’s clearly hoping that keeping people in the loop will keep them happier – and we can see why, though that transparency will need to be matched by action. After all, nothing’s more frustrating than logging on to find out where your parcel is only to see it stuck at the depot for two weeks.

Photo by psyxjaw from the Londonist Flickr pool

Original article

The victim of yesterday’s attack in Woolwich will be named later today.

The attack took place at 2.20pm yesterday in John Wilson Street, Woolwich, near the Royal Artillery Barracks. From eye-witness accounts, it appears that the men deliberately ran their car into the victim, before attacking him with knives and a cleaver. The pair remained on the scene, talking to witnesses, while waiting for police to arrive. One of the attackers was filmed making political statements, saying he wanted to start a war in London:

We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reasons we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day. This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth. We must fight them. I apologise that women have had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government, they don’t care about you.

Several witnesses acted with great courage. Ingrid Loyau-Kennett confronted both of the attackers in turn, while they were still clutching bloodied weapons.

I said ‘right now it is only you versus many people, you are going to lose, what would you like to do?’ and he said I would like to stay and fight.

Other bystanders stood around the body while the attackers were still on the scene. This extraordinary Telegraph account is worth reading in full.

Boris Johnson paid tribute to the people who intervened:

I think it’s very important that…the people of London should take their cue from the behaviour of the people of Woolwich yesterday, who showed such astonishing natural courage in dealing with an appalling event, and who stood up to those killers. And I think that that’s the spirit of London, and that’s what I would call on people to do today – go about their lives in the normal way.

The two suspects, both shot by police, spent the evening under armed guard in hospital. One is thought to be in a serious condition.

The Prime Minister earlier chaired a session of security committee COBRA, attended by senior politicians, police, the Mayor of London and MI5. London-based armed forces are on a higher state of alert. Military personnel have been told not to wear uniforms until further notice, according to Sky News.

In other developments:

Minor confrontations occurred in Woolwich last night between EDL protesters and police.

The Muslim Council of Britain described the murder as “a truly barbaric act that has no basis in Islam and we condemn this unreservedly”.

In February, the cost had reached £2m and back in December last year, Westminster was just one of several London councils breaking a six-week limit for families to be kept in temporary accommodation. Housing minister Mark Prisk said:

“It cannot make sense to pay more for housing a family in one room than it would cost to house them in suitable self-contained accommodation.”

At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, if the suitable self-contained accommodation was available then it’s hardly likely Westminster would be forking out for hotel rooms in one of the capital’s most expensive boroughs.

Of course it makes more sense to provide affordable and decent accommodation for people on benefits or low incomes. But if we’re going to cap benefits, have a property boom which only wealthy foreign investors can participate in, stop building social housing while selling off our existing stock and revel in the highest rents ever anywhere then something has to give. And that something is Westminster giving money to local hotels while its residents go into arrears and become homeless.

According to figures from Shelter, the number of homeless families in London increased by 23% from 2011 to 2012. With the new benefits caps being rolled out later this year, we won’t be surprised to see the numbers rising.

Photo by LondonSLR in the Londonist Flickr pool.

Shot of the scene from above

Evening Summary: A man has been killed, and two others injured, in an incident in Woolwich this afternoon, in what appears to be a terrorist attack. It’s believed that the two injured people, who are now both in hospital, killed the victim with a meat cleaver. Read below for the latest updates, or follow the BBC’s live coverage.

21.30 update: The attack has been condemned by political leaders from across the country, with David Cameron vowing that the country will “never buckle” in the fact of what is now being treated as a terrorist attack. The prime minister will also cut short his visit to France and return to Britain. The Ministry of Defence has also stepped up security at all military locations.

19.00 update: A video has emerged, apparently showing one of the attackers (warning: contains disturbing material). The man is covered in blood and speaks to the camera, at one point apparently saying “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you” (although the line isn’t audible in this clip).

17.30 update: A meeting of Cobra, the UK’s emergency response committee, has been called by Home Secretary Theresa May to look into the attack. Earlier reports had suggested the Met weren’t treating it as a terrorist incident.

17.00 update: LBC interviewed an eyewitness named James who tells a harrowing story of two men, in their mid-twenties, using meat cleavers to attack the victim, who was wearing a Help for Heroes T-shirt.

The police have also reported finding a number of weapons near the scene, including several knives and at least one firearm.

16.10 update: Speaking to BBC London, Local MP Nick Rainsford says that one person has been killed and two are seriously injured. He also said that the victim was a soldier serving in the Army. Here’s the BBC’s live coverage.

15.50 update: On Twitter, @BOYADEE claims to have witnessed the incident. His timeline has a pretty colourful description of what happened…  thought we’ve no idea whether it is accurate.

Original:

According to various reports on Twitter there has been a fatal attack in Woolwich. Early suggestions are that one person has been decapitated, possibly in or around an army base, while armed police are also reportedly involved. There is some speculation that the victim was an army cadet. The air ambulance is also on the scene.

It’s important to stress that nothing has been confirmed yet; the Metropolitan Police’s Twitter has only this:

Officers respond to reports of an assault on John Wilson St, Greenwich. Updates to follow

— Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) May 22, 2013

Here’s a photo purportedly from the scene. More news as it develops.

The child’s mother is Helen Macintyre, who has been involved in a privacy battle with the Daily Mail since the paper revealed the mayor’s supposed paternity of her daughter in 2010. Unfortunately, Macintyre’s case was somewhat undermined by her own efforts — clue; if you want to keep a really big secret, don’t blab about it to magazine publishers or take part in Tatler photoshoots. It’s been possibly one of the worst-kept secrets in history, readers of Sonia Purnell’s biography of the mayor (which we read prior to the 2012 mayoral elections) will have come across it and the appeal court noted that it’s been widely published online.

As with other cases where someone in the public eye tries to use the legal system to prevent their cupboard skeletons from becoming the nation’s breakfast reading matter, it boils down to whether or not it’s in the public interest. And, as political blogger Zelo Street points out, which side has got the deepest pockets. We suspect that the Daily Mail might no longer be completely behind the mayor in any future career moves.

The Mail’s lawyers said that it was in the public interest to name Johnson because it “went to the issue of recklessness and whether he was fit for public office”. On that score, the difference between Macintyre and, say, Petronella Wyatt (one of the mayor’s other amours) is partly that Macintyre was employed (albeit unpaid) by City Hall. Her partner at the time, Pierre Rolin, stumped up £80,000 for one of Johnson’s pet projects, the Orbit tower. Master of the Rolls Lord Justice Dyson said:

“The core information in this story, namely that the father had an adulterous affair with the mother, deceiving both his wife and the mother’s partner and that the claimant, born about 9 months later, was likely to be the father’s child, was a public interest matter which the electorate was entitled to know when considering his fitness for high public office.”

Well, ouch. The appeal court judges highlighted too that in fact Johnson is known to have fathered two children as a result of extra-marital affairs as part of their ruling. In common with an earlier high court ruling, the judges agreed that fathering two children in this way ‘goes to the issue of recklessness…relevant to both his private and professional character’.

But there is also the question of how much the public really cares. An Independent poll on whether or not people are all that bothered about BoJo’s indiscretions suggests that the news would put 33% off voting for him again while 12% would be more likely to vote for him. The majority (so far) of 55% say it hasn’t changed their opinion. While people may enjoy the odd media-fuelled fit of prurience about the private lives of the famous, it generally doesn’t seem to have much long-term impact on the career of the individual. After all, former England captain John Terry’s downfall came about over allegations of racism rather than the failed injunction to keep secret his extra-marital affair.

As an official spokesman for the mayor declined to comment on ‘matters pertaining to the mayor’s private life’ and prising an answer out of Johnson is difficult at the best of times, it’s unlikely we’ll ever hear anything from him on the subject. Even THAT Eddie Mair interview failed to get much out of Johnson on the subject of his marital indiscretions so don’t expect to see a headline of ‘Boris: My Side of the Story’ any time soon. Or ever, probably.

Photo by Dean Nicholas in the Londonist Flickr pool.

It's tumblr time: Bald eagles that look like Arsene Wenger

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• Thoughts on how devolution could benefit London
• Tom Edwards on the shifting story behind the New Bus 4 London
• Intricate book sculptures at the British Academy Literature Festival
• Elton John fans living in Westminster can get July gig tickets in a special pre-sale tomorrow
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This is what poverty looks like. Image by cs_smith, taken from the Londonist Flickr Pool

Remember that time you took the Gatwick Express into town, only there weren’t any seats left, so you had to sit on the roof? Or the time you were delayed for two hours because a farmer was herding his cows across the line at East Croydon, and all the local traders popped up to sell you trinkets?

No, of course you don’t, because these things don’t happen on the Gatwick Express. (We’re not entirely sure they happen anywhere, in fact: we’ve shamelessly nicked them from various Michael Palin travelogues dating from the early 1990s.)

That, though, hasn’t stopped Sir Roy McNulty from slating the Victoria-Gatwick rail link as “veering towards Third World Conditions”. “In the short to medium term, our main priority is improvement in the road and rail infrastructure that serves the airport,” he tells today’s Evening Standard, “and above all improvement in the Gatwick Express… It certainly does not present to the visitor the image that we would wish they see.”

Now it’s not that we can’t see his point — when does any aspect of London’s transport infrastructure ever feel up to the job required of it? But his choice of metaphor nonetheless strikes us as just a tad on the hyperbolic side. It’s a slightly rubbish train service: that’s not the same as ‘third world’ anything, and hearing a rich white man describing “forcing business travellers to stand up for half an hour” in the same kind of language you’d use to talk about a famine borders on the offensive.

More to the point, though, there are a lot of things wrong with Sir Roy’s airport that have bugger all to do with its links to London proper. It’s dirty, it’s crowded, the amenities are either dingy or non-existent, and the whole place looks like it hasn’t seen a lick of paint since some time around 1975.

These things also present a poor image of London to the international traveller. What’s more, unlike the Gatwick Express, they’re Sir Roy’s personal responsibility. Funny he doesn’t seem quite so exercised about them, isn’t it?

Average asking prices in London have gone past the £500,000 mark for the first time, and Camden has joined Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea as a borough where average prices are over £1m. We’ve also noticed a little flurry of articles pointing out the extent of foreign interest in high-end property. The New Statesman points out today that only 45% of buyers in central London are UK nationals; Russians and Middle Eastern citizens are those who seem to find the posh bits of the capital most tempting. The New York Times recently looked at the effect on local businesses of increasing numbers of owners using their London homes as temporary stop-off points. This phenomenon is exemplified in One Hyde Park, where Vanity Fair found that just 17 of the 76 apartments sold are registered as primary residences, and seems to be practically empty.

When we first read the Vanity Fair article we had a brief, utopian vision of a country where land prices were immaterial and the space had been turned into affordable housing instead of a crashpad for gazillionaires. London is in the middle of a housing crisis – the idea of fancy buildings standing empty while other Londoners feel the blunt end of supply and demand problems is obscene.

We recently had a chat with London Assembly Member Andrew Boff about housing, and he told us about an idea that turns the wealthy desire for status into funding for homes for the likes of us. You take one housing development and aim it at money; ramp up the eco-credentials, whatever will persuade people to pay a premium. Then you take the extra you’ve made and pump that into affordable housing. It’s a kind of redistribution of wealth, where the rich subsidise homes for the rest of us. We think we wouldn’t mind places like One Hyde Park if that’s what they were there for (they’re not, of course; they’re there to make eyewatering profits for private developers).

Photo by violinconcertono3 from the Londonist Flickr pool

Boris Johnson started work on bringing parts of the rail network into the Overground family – which, in practice, meant starting with Southeastern and Greater Anglia as both franchises were due to expire in 2014 – back in February 2012 and it was looking promising. Boris Johnson told Caroline Pidgeon on 30 January this year that he was “expecting a result in the nearish future”, and TfL was looking towards April 2013 for some kind of devolution proposal. That, clearly, hasn’t happened. Instead, at the end of March the franchises were extended: Greater Anglia to 2016, Southeastern to 2018.

TfL is still hopeful but it seems the Department for Transport, and Minister Patrick McLoughlin who took over last September, is increasingly lukewarm. Whether this has anything to do with the Conservative-led Kent Council calling any proposal that might reduce services from the county “totally unacceptable“, we wouldn’t like to speculate. But last Friday City A.M. was saying the Mayor is losing the argument. This comes at the same time the DfT is considering cutting TfL’s budget by 30%, and that London is likely to miss out on getting anything from the government’s £3bn infrastructure fund. We’ll keep you posted.

Photo by clogsilk from the Londonist Flickr pool

• Thousands turned out for yesterday’s Save Our NHS march.
• Police wanted 1: this man following three sexual assaults on SW London buses.
• Police wanted 2: this teenage gang following building society raid on Friday.
• Report on London’s berthing techniques indicates our waterways are just a tad too busy.
• Fatal fire in Fulham Saturday afternoon.
• New at the Chelsea Flower Show this year: Will and Kate gnomes…
• ..whilst Harry gets in there with a garden for Diana.

Planted phone box by McTumshie via the ever verdant Londonist Flickr pool. The image was taken at the launch of the Edible Bus Stop pocket park opening yesterday in Lambeth.

• The first Chief Social Worker is appointed
• Couple found dead in a Bloomsbury flat
• The Mayor plans to privatise London electric vehicle charging point network
• Two more skyscrapers are planned for City Road
• A protest march defending London’s NHS takes place on Saturday
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Photo by Crew Richmond via Londonist Flickrpool.

• 4,500 jobs will be created as iCITY gets to run the the Olympic Park’s Press and Broadcast Centre.
• Doubts over economic benefits of HS2.
• There’ll be a big reading festival (as opposed to Reading Festival) in Trafalgar Square this summer.
• Cuts to London’s fire service will hit Camden hardest.
• Pinewood Studios won’t be expanding any time soon.
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• Shaftesbury Avenue is getting a new temporary performance space.
• Freed in Hackney still make pointe shoes for the world’s leading ballerinas.
• Worries that 4G would scramble the capital’s Freeview boxes are unfounded.
• UK Uncut has lost its legal challenge over Goldman Sachs.
• Newham and Havering won’t be getting free wifi.
• The Guardian has a couple of housing articles: on raising money to build and renting on low incomes.
• Kensington Roof Gardens now belongs to the Germans says the ES, in apparent 1939 flashback.

Photo by unslugged from the Londonist Flickr pool

The cuts range from 3% in Barking & Dagenham to 22% in Lambeth, or 13% across all boroughs. Followers of Boris Johnson’s electoral campaign may remember point four of his nine-point plan — ‘Making our streets and homes safer with 1,000 more police on the beat’. But with a failure to keep police numbers at around 32,000 and recent cuts, it’s been pointed out that there are actually 1500 fewer officers since his election last year while crime in some boroughs remains high.

The mayor’s office was also asked by the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) to clarify the figures they were using during the police consultations after confusion over their interpretation of data.

All of which makes the Met’s recent announcement that they’re considering splashing out on two water cannon at a cost of £1.3m each even more baffling. London Assembly Labour Police and Crime spokesperson, Joanne McCartney said:

“Instead of cutting the police budget by 20% and buying water cannons the government and Mayor should be properly resourcing the police. Some boroughs have lost significant numbers of officers, in Camden 160 police officers have been lost, in Southwark it’s 159, Lambeth 230 and Westminster have lost 259 officers.

The use of water cannons is extremely controversial and the evidence for their effectiveness is very unclear. We clearly need more police officers, and we need them to be riot trained. Water cannons are no replacement for a properly resourced and functioning police service.”

We are also frankly mystified as to why the Met would use funds much needed elsewhere for such a controversial and dubiously-effective purchase. The Met itself said back in 2011 that water cannon were ‘not the answer to combat future rioting’ and Boris Johnson has previously opposed the use of water cannon. It appears to be just the latest in the Met’s inexorable push to increase their powers without public consultation.

Home secretary Theresa May (who appears to be on a mission to woo the police this week) has said that she is considering the case for water cannon on the basis that she wanted officers to have “the tools they need” to do their job. Which is all very well but cutting the officers using the tools doesn’t appear to be a particularly useful strategy unless the long-term plan is to replace them with robocops.

Photo by Sven Loach in the Londonist Flickr pool.

A report in today’s Evening Standard claims that Tube chiefs are considering the possibility of converting 55 Broadway into flats.

The distinctive Art Deco building in St James dates from the late 1920s and was designed by Charles Holden, also responsible for many of the classic modernist Tube stations. Controversial at the time, partly due to the explicit sculptures carved into the side, it has been the home of London Underground for nearly nine decades, but its lack of suitability for modern office needs, alongside Transport for London’s chronic cash shortage, has led Tube bigwigs to consider the dramatic step of offering it up for residential space.

The grade 1 listed tower was improbably called Britain’s first skyscraper upon completion despite its modest height of 55m. It is occasionally open to members of the public during Open House; here’s a report by Ian Visits.

Photo / Owen Blacker

Westminster council are selling off 362 signposts, including ones for Abbey Road, Downing Street and Buckingham Palace. The prices range from a snip at £20 to the rather more exclusive £1,000.

Perhaps, one day, the City of London will follow suit and Londonist can finally become the proud owners of Cock Lane and Back Passage.

If you want to buy your very own London road sign, the auction takes place at Summers Places Auctions in Billingshurst, West Sussex, on 21 May.

Photo by joncockley in the Londonist Flickr pool.

Summer at Frank's Campari Bar

In what might be seen as a symbol of SE15′s wider changes, the multi-storey car park on Peckham Rye, best known for Frank’s Campari Bar (which we named one of London’s best rooftop drinking holes)  and the annual Bold Tendencies exhibition, is to be converted into a full-fledged art centre.

According to the project’s backers:

The reinvention of the site will be home to visual art, dance, music and film, creating a destination to stimulate the high street, inspiring social cohesion and producing a unifying focal point for the area.

The work will cost a projected £10m. Further details are available on this website, although at time of writing the site is yet to launch. There’s more over at the Evening Standard, which has an interview with Hannah Barry, one of the key people behind the project.

Photo / katsommers

The temporary closure of the Hammersmith Flyover late in 2011 left major traffic problems throughout west London and the lingering sensation that Something Must Be Done. One of the proposals discussed, a tunnel, has now been backed by Lord Rogers, who has endorsed the Hammersmith ‘Flyunder’ plan drawn up by local architects. You can see further sketches of the proposal here (PDF).

Backed by the West London Design Link, the tunnel would stretch from Earls Court to Chiswick roundabout, entirely replacing the dilapidated flyover. Should it go ahead, it would be London’s first road tunnel in 20 years. It would also mean the opportunity to get rid of the flyover, regularly described as an ‘eyesore’ and a concrete barrier that severs Hammersmith’s connection with the Thames. It could also be turned into London’s equivalent of New York’s High Line.

Quixotic schemes in Hammersmith seem to come along quite frequently — in the 1970s Norman Foster planned to demolish the Broadway and replace it with a giant transport interchange and helicopter station — but the tunnel scheme seems to have broad backing among politicians, residents and engineers, while the rest of London would see the benefit of an easier trip along the A4. Over to Transport for London, who’ll be deciding what to do about the capital’s ageing flyovers later in the year.

See also

Will somebody please explain what’s wrong with the Hammersmith Flyover?

We don't like no bridges round 'ere. Photo courtesy of Flamenco Sun, taken from the Londonist Flickr pool.

Why, we’ve sometimes wondered, is it so difficult to get anything built in this town? Every time we visit one of the great European cities, it seems, they’ve just completed some new grand-projet or another, a new chunk of RER or S-Bahn to bring the transport network one step closer to perfection. In London, by contrast, we can still remember the first leaflets appearing at our local station bringing the exciting news that Crossrail was coming. That was 20 years ago; we’re still changing at Stratford.

Two bits of news today highlight one of the reasons these things are sometimes a tad on the slow side. First up the HS2 Action Alliance – a pressure group that, when it comes to building high speed rail links, remains firmly committed to inaction – has released figures showing that the government has rejected the vast majority of compensation claims relating to the new rail link to the north.

To win payment from the ‘hardship fund’, applicants need to demonstrate that the project creates a pressing need to move. This, a correspondent points out, doesn’t necessarily mean demolition, but can refer to a range of personal circumstances, including health reasons or a particularly dire financial situation.

Nonetheless, many of these claims, we’d guess, are from people who don’t need to move: they’re just annoyed to find tens of thousands of pounds knocked off their house price. It’s a form of nimbyism, sure – but imagine it happening to you and you can see why they’re getting grumpy about it.

The other relevant story is the continuing row over whether to build another Thames road crossing. The near impossibility of crossing the river anywhere between Blackwall and Dartford means that the idea is very popular: a recent TfL consultation found that 71% of respondents backed the idea of a fixed crossing somewhere in East London.

But that support is for a theoretical bridge: people are rather less enthused when it becomes a more concrete proposal, and they realise they might have to deal with the downside of noisy construction or increased traffic. Consider Gareth Bacon, a Tory AM and councillor in Bexley, who said he simply adores the idea of a new bridge – just so long as it doesn’t send more cars into his borough. Since that’s pretty much the point of the bloody thing, it’s hard to see what solution might satisfy him.

The lesson here is that everyone loves the idea of new transport infrastructure – in the abstract. But when it comes to specific proposals, there are losers as well as winners. The latter may be more numerous, but the former tend to shout louder.

And, as annoying as those of us who actually want to get somewhere might find it, this may be no bad thing. Consider the alternative, in which a perennially cash-strapped government found it easy to punch a railway line through your house whenever it felt like it, without worrying about compensating you.

Anyway, if anyone needs us, we’ll be in the queue for the Woolwich ferry.

Information obtained by the London Assembly Conservatives showed that of 117,942 solved crimes (from a total of 842,447 recorded crimes, which is depressing in itself), 28,998 resulted in a caution being issued. The government’s website says that cautions

are given to adults aged 18 or over for minor crimes – eg writing graffiti on a bus shelter. You have to admit an offence and agree to be cautioned. If you don’t agree, you can be arrested and charged. Young people aged 10 to 17 can get cautions called ‘reprimands’ or ‘warnings’ for minor offences. The police will usually tell you off, and give you a ‘reprimand’, for a first offence.

Yet between 1 April 2012 and 31 March 2013, five people were cautioned for rape, 160 for other sexual offences, 318 for drug trafficking, 180 for wounding / GBH and a staggering 5,843 for assault with injury. (You can see the full data on the GLA Conservatives website.) We can see the point in not clogging up the court system with people who have already admitted their guilt for some minor crimes, but rape? GBH? Violent assault?

London Assembly Member Tony Arbour said

The whole point of the British legal system is that justice should be seen to be done. However, a quarter of all solved crimes in the capital escape punishment. The CPS is not doing Londoners a service by allowing people who admit their guilt not to go to court.

On another note, it seems that the Met is in the process of buying three water cannons at a cost of £1.3m each. The only other police force in the UK that possesses water cannon is Northern Ireland. Labour Assembly Member Joanne McCartney said

A monumental decision like this cannot be snuck through under the public’s nose. The evidence for the effectiveness of water cannons is very unclear. Against the widespread rioting we saw in London water cannons would have been of very limited, if any, use. We clearly need more police officers, and we need them to be riot trained. Water cannons are no replacement for a properly resourced and functioning police service.

Photo by HartwellPhotography.co.uk from the Londonist Flickr pool

• Banksy’s Slave Labour is up for auction again.
• The Chinese want to build a business park in the Royal Docks.
• A 15 year old boy has been arrested over an acid attack in Romford.
• The Jewish Museum will host an exhibition about Amy Winehouse from July.
• Quinoa ahoy: Gwyneth Paltrow wants to open a restaurant in London.
• The Guardian says some house prices in London are rising by £27 an hour, as the Standard predicts the extinction of the under-£100k home.

Photo of The Kemistry, playing as part of Sound Tracks on the Overground, by McTumshie from the Londonist Flickr pool

• Transport Committee says “Boris Island” plan should be rejected in favour of Heathrow expansion
• Boris says it would be cheaper to move London slightly to the east
• London Fire Brigade look at plans to recoup cost of false alarm calls
• Met must review handling of mentally ill people
• Would you notice if you were drinking chemically treated sewage from the tap?
• ZSL London Zoo needs a mate for an endangered tropical fish
• Muriel Street, N1 renamed backwards
• This weekend, prepare for one of England’s bitterest football rivalries as Palace take on Brighton in the Championship play-offs
• Not planned your weekend yet? Get inspiration here

Image: The heritage buildings at King’s Cross, Granary Square, are brought to life for a new Felice Varini art installation, “Across the Buildings”. Photo by John Sturrock. 

While the Southbank Centre and V&A missed out on the latest round of lottery-funded munificence, Alexandra Palace has secured more than £16.8m towards its proposed £24m revamp.

The Terry Farrell-designed brief, images of which can be seen in the gallery above, is ambitious. It proposes to construct a hotel in the building, restore the old theatre into an event space and install shops and cafes in the terrace. The architect also wants to spruce up the entrances to the palace. There’s a comprehensive guide on the Alexandra Palace website which gives additional information on how things may develop.

An initial £800k of the Lottery money will fund further, more detailed plans, with the remaining money released toward the end of the year. Planners are eyeing a competition date of 2017.

This isn’t the first attempt to revitalise the dilapidated Grade II-listed building, which first opened in 1875 as a north London rival to the Crystal Palace. This article from the Independent in 1994 tells the story of Ally Pally’s blighted history and various rescue attempts. It’s a strange tale, one that takes in a mysterious American benefactor, several fires and a gypsy curse. Hopefully the new plan won’t be quite so surreal.

On her way to dinner? The Queen gets a new chef

Today is the last day that those who can handle the heat in the kitchen can apply to be the new sous chef at Buckingham Palace. The job description is fascinating.

The wage is £23,000 per year and the successful applicant must have a good knowledge of ‘kitchen French’ (does this mean swearing en francais a la Gordon Ramsey?)

The chefs are as likely to deal with events ranging from banquets for 200 to lunches for two (cosy!). Although the role is based in the Queen’s central London residence, the job actually requires around three months to be spent away from London in the Queen’s other homes such as Balmoral and Sandringham.

We wondered whether a new chef might bring some new food experiences; cue the Londonist Right Royal Menu:

Breakfast: Ma’amalade on toast

Lunch: Sandering-HAM sandwich

Dinner: A choice of: Spaghetti Boleynaise or The Madras of King George

Dessert: The King’s Peach

All served by the Household Carvery. The new chef would also need to deal with complaints (‘Waiter, waiter, there’s an heir in my soup…’).

What other pun-laden items could the Queen expect to see on her menu — add yours below.

Barely a week seems to go by without the seemingly ever-present rumble of discontent from the transport unions and this latest announcement is actually a Pandora’s box of industrial action. Accompanying the Piccadilly line drivers in their strike, drivers on the Metropolitan, Hammersmith & City and Circle lines have also voted for industrial action. And it doesn’t end there.

Cleaners on the underground who are employed by ISS have voted overwhelmingly for strike action in a dispute over pay and conditions. The RMT says LU has failed to pay the London Living Wage, abuse sickness and attendance procedures and have extended unpaid breaks. Meanwhile, electricians and engineers working for tube contractor Mitie have voted for strike action in a separate dispute over redundancies and working conditions. RMT general secretary Bob Crow said:

“Drivers across a whole swathe of the underground network have voted by massive majorities for industrial action in separate disputes which represent unilateral attacks by the company on working conditions, agreements and procedures.

“The outcome of these separate ballots will now be considered by RMT’s executive but the message could not be clearer – RMT is stepping up the fight to protect agreements, jobs and working conditions across the whole of London and to eliminate the scourge of poverty pay on cleaning contracts.”

No doubt this news will again fuel the debate over banning of tube strikes, which occupied the London Assembly Conservatives in April. A Jubilee line strike planned in March was called off a couple of days before it was due to go ahead. Just like the story, the last thing in the box is hope. Piccadilly Line manager Phil O’Hare said:

“We urge both parties to work together to resolve this matter through constructive discussions and without the threat of industrial action.”

Photo by msc photodesign in the Londonist Flickr pool.

If you live in Clapham Town, you may be interested to hear that your current first engine response time is reckoned to be 3 mins 56 secs; after the changes, it’s likely to be 7 mins 53 secs. Other wards where response times will increase by more than three minutes are Belsize (Camden), De Beauvoir (Hackney), Royal Docks (Newham) and Bow East (Tower Hamlets). Labour London Assembly Member Navin Shah said:

This might not sound a lot but a fire can quadruple in intensity every two minutes. These increases are truly scandalous, no wonder they didn’t release this information sooner.

Camden would see six wards taken over the first engine response target; Lewisham and Westminster five; Tower Hamlets, Hackney and the City of London four. But here’s another bit of information we’d never realised: 267 of London’s 624 wards already don’t meet the target. Add in this extra 41 and that’s nearly half of them. Rather makes a mockery of the whole idea of targets at all… Yet deaths and injuries from fire in London have been steadily falling. Do these changes even matter?

We ask because public response to the consultation was underwhelming to start with. Mayorwatch got figures on the first four meetings and found that just 73 people turned up in total – though to be fair, the first couple were held almost straight after the dates had been announced, hardly giving people time to rearrange diaries. Or even find they were happening at all. But just one person went to the meeting for Brent and Harrow on 16 April, though “dozens” turned out in Waltham Forest the day before. Do Londoners not give a tinker’s fart about the plans, or are public meetings becoming more outdated in a world of online questionnaires?

If you’re interested, you can find the list of remaining public meetings and plans on the London Fire Brigade website.

Photo by Uncle Ebenezer from the Londonist Flickr pool

While there doesn’t appear to be much doubt (at least among respondents to the consultation) that a new crossing is needed, the thorny issue is what form it would take. A proposed Gallions Reach crossing won 71% of the votes, 76% favouring the controversial Silvertown tunnel option and 51% backed a ferry service at Gallions Reach. Perhaps unsurprisingly, not very many of those in favour of a fixed crossing wanted to stump up the cash via tolls to pay for it.

Despite getting backing from the Transport Secretary last year, and the numerous plans and consultations which have taken place in the last 13 years at a cost of £43m to TfL, an option which pleases more people than it upsets has yet to be found. London Assembly Green Party member Darren Johnson said that a “truly staggering amount of public money” was being used for links which the public “do not support” — an assertion not quite supported by the response to TfL’s consultation as far as we can see.

The Silvertown tunnel has been the subject of fierce opposition and with a recent Supreme Court ruling that London’s levels of air pollution are illegal, the pressure to reject further road crossings will probably only increase. But the strain on the current crossings remains constant — the Dartford crossing is gridlocked on a near-daily basis while the Blackwall and Rotherhithe tunnels are plagued by frequent closures.

The thing is, unless the mayor makes a decision on a new crossing (however unpopular it may be), it’s likely that we’ll still be writing variations on this article in 10 years time. And none of us wants that.

Read more about the consultation here.

Photo by O.F.E. in the Londonist Flickr pool.

Walking along the South Bank just underneath Hungerford Bridge, the Undercroft can be heard before it’s seen: the tinny rumble of plastic wheels on an uneven concrete floor, multiplied manifold, the crackles and snaps of failed jumps and broken bones. Then you see it: a ramshackle collage of graffiti in a sea of blocky grey. It’s a weird spectacle, and totally out of place so close to the BFI and the National Theatre. Invariably, on the weekends, it draws a crowd, every person in that crowd armed with a digital camera or at least a camera phone, most of whom will go home, upload the pictures to Facebook, and never think about it again.

Pretty soon the South Bank will undergo a redevelopment; the Southbank Centre wants to expand its Festival Wing. With a couple of exceptions from the more liberal media, the popular reaction to the news has been overwhelmingly positive, essentially: rejoice, Londoners — when the proposed “Festival Way” opens, that Brutalist graffiti’d undercroft will be gone at last and we’re going to be able to enjoy another Yo! Sushi and Paperchase and Parisian-style pavement cafes and uuugggghhhh.

But over the Bank Holiday weekend, Long Live Southbank channelled its ongoing efforts to save the skater’s paradise into a weekend-long festival of counterculture: BMX demonstrations, music, free skateboarding lessons, a miniature film festival, the works — all managed by a crowd of devoted volunteers in bright orange shirts. These volunteers, spectators, would-be skaters and general festival-goers are, collectively, the people who stand to lose something in the redevelopment.

Of course, the skaters of London won’t be shunted out entirely: there’s a purpose-built park not far away from the Undercroft. It seems a viable alternative to those of us who aren’t a part of the subculture, but for the people who will use it there are two essential problems with the new site: 1. it’s known colloquially as “birdshit island”; and 2. it just isn’t the same.

This, again, to outsiders doesn’t seem like much of an argument. From what Dan, one of the volunteers, tells us, there’s a difference between “transition” skating — which is best learned in specially built parks — and “street” skating — for which the last place to train in London is right here in the Undercroft. If someone is asked to move along, they will be told to go to the South Bank. Careers have been built here, not to mention the general sense of community that brought the old crowd from at least as far afield as Sweden in support of the cause. Dan has been skating here for about 12 years, he reckons. It might be 13.

“You didn’t need social media back then,” says Luke, who used to skate here 20-30 years ago and who today brought his tiny son on his even tinier skateboard. When we ask him what makes the Undercroft special to this subculture, he goes quiet for a full two minutes. “This is more raw,” he says, eventually. “You don’t want something that’s too perfect.” He says this with the faraway, amused look of a man who’s sustained more injuries in his immediate surroundings than he cares to remember.

There’s a sense of hopelessness to the proceedings. Yes, the atmosphere is charged with positivity, and yes, everybody’s having fun, but the proposals are just the latest in a long line of encroachments by the city into what might be the last organic gathering place in London. Dan explains that the back of the Undercroft, the relatively pristine white walls, aren’t really the back: twenty years ago, it stretched out underneath the Southbank Centre. But officially speaking the Centre owns the space; it’s just on lease to the skaters. Unofficially, that is.

Long Live Southbank are counting on a piece of legislation to save them: specifically, the Commons Act 2006, which preserves public spaces for the people who use them. If they can attract enough Londoners to their cause, the Undercroft might survive, and we can enjoy this dark, grimy, incongruous, but beautiful space for a little while longer.

If not, well, at least we won’t have to walk so far for a panini.

You can sign up for updates from Long Live Southbank and sign their petition to save the Undercroft here. Otherwise, to celebrate the past of the Undercroft and make suggestions to the Southbank Centre about the future, see here.

PopUp Britain, the retail arm of StartUp Britain, is opening a flagship store, with the aim of helping online businesses who want to test their products on the high street.

A former electronics showroom (which has been empty for three months) will host up to 12 start-ups at a time, each paying £200 for a two-week trial, to cover costs. It’s hoped that the scheme will give small enterprises and start-up retailers the chance to experiment with physical retail space, test the market and gain vital face-to-face customer feedback without burdening them with the usual long-term contracts and high rents of setting up a shop.

Some of the first brands to pop into the new shop include Clicloc watches by Londoners Obi Nwosu and Brian Downer; rain-proof ponchos by Muswell Hill mums Rain-Wave; chocolates from The Cocoa Mistress; and sustainable, hand-crafted shoes by Pinucci London.

The King’s Road opening is part of an initiative to match online retail start-ups with empty high street stores. This latest shop follows a pilot scheme in Richmond last year. There, a former estate agent which had been empty for a year, housed more than 60 start-ups in five months, with 91% reporting that the experience was good for business.

StartUp Britain co-founder Emma Jones says, “Most online retail start-ups realise that in order to build a solid brand, they need to be offline in bricks and mortar as well as creating a good online presence. Our shop in King’s Road is designed to give start-ups a low-cost opportunity to test their products in an area that has famously played a key role in supporting independent British brands for decades.”

Below is a taster what went on in the PopUp Britain shop in Richmond during London Fashion Week last year.

Barratt London was chosen by London mayor Boris Johnson to take on the project of turning the 4.7 hectare site into 589 properties, 113 of which would be for affordable rent and 60 for shared ownership with the remaining 416 under private ownership.

After the epic battle over Walthamstow Stadium, the mayor (and Barratt for that matter) will presumably be hoping their plans don’t meet with local objection. Johnson said:

“The transformation of Catford Dogs, which for the last decade has been left empty and unused, will not only bring hundreds of new homes to the heart of London, but will feed into the wider regeneration of Catford town centre.”

It will also be interesting to see if the affordable allocation on the development remains at the advertised level. 853 blog noted earlier this year that Greenwich’s Peninsula Quays development had its proportion of affordable housing cut and shifted towards City Peninsula and Greenwich Millennium Village with no prior consultation. Although building of affordable homes is increasing, it’s still a long way behind what London needs.

Meanwhile, although the Catford track closed 10 years ago, anyone who still wants to go to the dogs can visit one of London’s three remaining tracks at Crayford, Wimbledon and Romford, though Wimbledon’s future was looking doubtful last year too.

Work at Catford is expected to begin by early 2014 and the project is expected to be complete by 2017.

• Helen Mirren, in full Queen garb, tells noisy drummers outside Gielgud Theatre to ‘shut the fuck up’.
• A man has been stabbed to death in Clapton.
• Notting Hill Gate will close to traffic after Thames Water found a ‘cavern‘ underneath.
• Revised census figures reveal Newham has 68,000 more residents than expected.
• London’s first cat cafe is getting closer to reality: founder Lauren Pears is about to sign a lease.
• A tiny wooden house in Leyton is to be pulled down, on orders from the council.
• You might not think the tube is quiet, but this New Yorker begs to differ.
• Have you seen Lidia Efrem?

Photo from Canalway Cavalcade 2013 by The Davoser from the Londonist Flickr pool

• Introducing the Hammersmith underpass. Now there’s a thing.
• Saturday: merry hell unleashed on the Essex stretch of the M25 following chemical spill.
• ‘Plebgate’ bike fetches over £10,000 for charity.
• To Kings Cross a roller rink. Well, maybe.
• Another week, another strange survey. Hackney revealed as 3rd least peaceful place to live in the UK.
• Party poopers Network Rail compel club to close.
• Fatal fires in Tooting and Hackney.

Southwark Cathedral – image by tonybill via the ever-sunny Londonist Flickr pool.

Each bus carries an average price tag of £354,500 over its lifetime (around 14 years), or £326,000 at current prices. Mayorwatch has dug up previous exchanges between the Mayor and Assembly; in 2009, Boris Johnson assured Jenny Jones that

If you look at the current cost of a bus, £250,000, roughly speaking, buys you a new bendy bus. We think that we can get a wonderful new bus for London which will be considerably cleaner, greener, lighter and exactly what this city needs for much less than that.

In October 2012, Caroline Pidgeon pointed out that standard hybrids cost around £300,000 each, and how there were rumours swirling in the industry of a (now proved to be rather accurate) £330,000 NB4L cost. The Mayor responded

The deal that we are able to do with Wrightbus will actually be considerably cheaper and better value for Londoners, because instead of paying under some private finance initiative scheme for the rental cost of the fleet (which is basically what happens at the moment) we will be able to own the buses direct.

And these figures don’t include the salaries of the second operator (not a conductor) needed when the bus’s back door is open, estimated to be around £62,000 per bus per year.

TfL says the NB4L produces four times less particulate matter and nitrogen oxides and 20% less carbon dioxide than a standard hybrid; but there are questions over the particulate emissions and fuel consumption about which TfL hasn’t yet (to our knowledge) produced concrete figures. The buses will also need to be retrofitted to meet Euro 6 regulations by 2014, which makes us wonder why they aren’t rolling off production already in line with the new standards. (Anyone know?)

The higher cost is, apparently, down to the “higher specification” of the bus – in other words, its design: the three door and two staircase layout. It is stunning to look at, but is it worth paying for? Boris seems to think so:

We will ensure these buses more than earn their keep over the next few years. By keeping them in harness in the Capital for the entirety of their useful life, we will be extracting every last drop of value out of them. Aside from its Hollywood blockbuster good looks, this bus offers an unparalleled passenger experience and is helping to improve the Capital’s air quality.

Green Assembly Member Darren Johnson disagrees:

The New Bus for London is an expensive vanity project which the next Mayor will abandon as an outdated and polluting waste of money. The reason why these buses will spend their entire life in London is because no one else wants them. That is also the reason why TfL have had to buy the buses themselves, at a premium rate, rather than let the operators have all the upfront costs and risks.

Photo by HoosierSands from the Londonist Flickr pool

See also:

• In Pictures: The New Bus for London
• New Bus for London To Serve 24 Route

• Rugby World Cup games will be held at the Olympic Stadium, Twickenham and Wembley.
• Metropolitan police puts details of misconduct hearings online.
• Do Haringey traffic wardens have ticket targets?
• Viva Forever! to close, despite its optimistic name.
• Malcolm Blackman found not guilty of rape at Occupy camp.
• The Indy wonders if Silicon Roundabout’s success is driving start-ups out of London.
• Developers want to turn Deptford into a south-of-the-river Shoreditch.
• London’s 12 best indie bookshops? Or which other bookshops did they miss out?
• Boris Johnson’s latest photo op: souffle making.

Convoys Wharf by Andy Worthington from the Londonist Flickr pool

The London Helicopter company will run up to 15 flights a day from Battersea heliport at £199 per person for a 20 minute flight (or from Redhill if you find yourself £70 short). It’s a price that makes the Shard look reasonable, but we suppose you’re not paying for the view as for the experience. The BBC’s Tom Edwards went up yesterday and tweeted some photos of the South Bank, Greenwich and Hyde Park.

Helicopter tourist flights have been common in New York for years and it’s perhaps surprising that London’s taken so long to join in; though coming so soon after the crash at Battersea, we wonder if passengers will be put off. Another dissenting voice has come from the Globe Theatre, where helicopter noise regularly disrupts the open air performances. We were there yesterday and heard about an incident Tuesday night where a – what is the collective noun for helicopters? A fleet? A Budgie? – flew over and the poor actors could barely be heard. (The rumour is it was Beyonce on her way to the O2.) The London Helicopter company promises it’ll avoid the Globe during performances, but its route is restricted to the river. Basically, Shakespeare never had to put up with this shit.

In any event, this is as good a time as any to dig up our old post about views of London cheaper than the Shard (which we may now retitle with something about helicopters).

A very different helicopter, by IanVisits from the Londonist Flickr pool

The Marquis of Lansdowne pub on Google Earth

At a meeting last night, Hackney’s planning committee rejected a controversial proposal to extend the Geffrye Museum in Hoxton, with councillors voting six to two against the scheme, arguing that there was a “risk of harm” to the Museum’s existing buildings.

The design, by David Chipperfield, was for a new extension toward the south. However, the proposal called for the demolition of the Marquis of Lansdowne, a 19th-century pub on the corner of Cremer Street and Geffrye Street that has been derelict for 20 years. Conservationists argued that the pub could be re-opened and turned into a successful business, and that the Geffrye Museum, with its focus on the history of domestic life, should be supporting its redevelopment instead of bulldozing it.

Things became heated when the Geffrye’s director, David Dewing, was quoted as saying that he “had no interest in the culture of the labouring classes” (something Dewing refers to as “nonsense” in a letter published in this week’s Private Eye).

The decision to reject the proposal will come as great news to the many campaigners who have fought to save the Lansdowne, including the Spitalfields Trust, which has drawn up an alternative proposal for the pub’s renovation.

Spitalfields Life has a wonderful story about a man who was born in the pub and whose family used to run it.

You can see a video on the London Cycling Campaign website on how the roundabouts would work.

Roundabouts are inherently dangerous places to be, with traffic attempting to negotiate often poorly-marked lanes while keeping an eye on all the other traffic around them. Even more so for cyclists — two people recently lost their lives on the Bow roundabout, prompting TfL to make improvements to the junction. But simultaneously trying to appease an increasingly vocal cycling community while avoiding impeding traffic flow led to criticism that the changes were ‘overcomplicated’ and some cyclists were ignoring them anyway.

Eye level signals (like the ones at Bow) are also under trial to help cyclists at junctions and, according to BikeBiz, make it clearer to the irksome red light jumpers that the same rules apply to cyclists as to motorists.

In March, London mayor Boris Johnson announced a £900m ‘cycling revolution’ for the capital which would see some segregated lanes as well as inviting outer-London boroughs to become ‘mini-Hollands’ to promote cycling for shorter trips. With £100m of that budget earmarked for improving junctions, we will hopefully see a sharp reduction in roundabout accidents. The announcement comes on the same day as three cyclists were hospitalised following accidents on London’s roads.

IanVisits has also helpfully pointed out that TfL have offered cyclists the opportunity to take part in the trials. Simply fill in this form.

Photo by Simon-K in the Londonist Flickr pool.

Transport for London is investigating after a 333 bus hit a woman on Kennington Park Road. One of Londonist’s writers was in the area at the time and among a number of passers-by who tried to help. The cyclist has now been taken to hospital with leg injuries. Recent figures showed that buses are involved in, on average, two collisions a day with cyclists and pedestrians.

The Richmond and Twickenham Times reports a man taken to West Middlesex Hospital after colliding with a car in St Margaret’s Road (luckily, emergency services were already on the scene dealing with a house fire in the same street).

And the Kingston Guardian says a man in his 30s was taken to St George’s Hospital with head and chest injuries following a crash with a van near Norbiton station.

Three in one morning; and that’s without even considering all the minor scrapes and scares that will go unreported. For all the talk of a few ‘mini Hollands‘ in outer boroughs, redesigned roundabouts and council-backed bike loan schemes, it’s clear we still have a long way to go before cyclists are safe on London’s roads.

Photo by snowpine from the Londonist Flickr pool

• A plaque commemorating victims of the Admiral Duncan bombing has gone missing ahead of tomorrow’s anniversary.
• Lifts at the Shard stopped working yesterday, stranding 200 people.
• There are possible new witnesses in the Stephen Lawrence case.
• High Court rejects legal challenge to Barnet ‘easyCouncil’.
• Got a traffic fine on Drayton Park? You could get your money back.
• Entry for the 2014 London marathon closed after 11 hours.
• Edmonton gets improved flood defences.
• Great animated film about one woman’s fight against the Met’s problem with people filming police.
• Diamond Geezer travels London’s newest Sunday bus service.

Careful, you’ve got your franchises crossed: photo from yesterday’s Sci Fi London Costume Parade by Paul Rowson from the Londonist Flickr pool