Some people want lots of election coverage and some… don’t. So the top half of today’s newsletter consists of a series of quick stories from around the city that will hopefully intrigue – and the second half is pure politics.

Scroll down until you find something that piques your interest.

The abandoned luxury cars in a Knightsbridge garage facing the crusher

When the ultra-rich buy property in central London, there’s no guarantee it’ll come with sufficient car parking.

That’s where the Knightsbridge Public Car Park underneath Cadogan Place comes in. It can charge £48 for four hours of parking and its bays are lined with Bentleys and Ferraris tucked away under dust covers, racking up fees.

Euro Car Parks recently closed the basement level of the car park in order to carry out renovations. But before any work can begin, there’s a problem: abandoned luxury cars.

Tipped off by London Centric reader and podcast supremo Andrew Harrison, we headed down to find that more than a dozen expensive abandoned cars, including a Jaguar, a Range Rover and a Porsche that have been given two weeks to find another spot to park before they’re “scrapped immediately” by Euro Car Parks. Many more expensive cars were sitting there, gathering dust, under sheets.

London Centric ran the different cars’ plates through the DVLA website. Some had MOTs that expired all the way back in March 2023, suggesting the pricey vehicles may have been abandoned here for several years.

Tucked behind the windshield wiper of each car is an A4 piece of paper, explaining that the “vehicle has been left on this site with neither leave nor licence of the Landowner, the Managing Agent or Tenant.”

While London Centric is no Autotrader, we’ve tried to estimate the price of the different vehicles set to be scrapped. A new Porsche Macan could set you back £56,000, with extras costing tens of thousands of pounds, and a new Range Rover Sport could be somewhere between £78,915 and £132,960.

Euro Car Parks is also threatening to “recharge all costs and expenses” for the vehicles’ removal. Sadly, they didn’t respond to a request for comment on whether we could come and watch them being removed.

If any of our readers have abandoned a Porsche in a Knightsbridge car park for three years, do get in touch and tell us your reasoning – and let us know if you still have the keys.

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Putting the pain in pain au chocolat at Pophams

London croissant lovers were disappointed this week when one of Instagram’s favourite cafes, Pophams Bakery, stopped serving pastries following the sudden closure of its cafe in London Fields.

What’s not been reported is why: a dispute with its landlord. A notice on the door of the Hackney venue stated that Pophams had forfeited its lease. It stated that “any attempt to reenter the premises without the Landlord’s authority may be a criminal offence and result in prosecution.”

Ollie Gold, Pophams founder, told London Centric that the notice was not for repossession but they are in dispute with their landlord over “a 1,300% increase in service charge”.

The building is owned by landlord Hazlewood Apartments, based in the offshore tax haven of the British Virgin Islands and overseen by property management company Citidwell. Residents of the building above Pophams are also understood to be fighting substantial rises in their service charges.

London Centric asked both Gold and Citidwell what was behind the increase in service charges and why they had taken control of the bakery, but received no response. Gold wanted to reassure staff and customers and said he is optimistic the dispute can be resolved and Pophams will reopen soon: “We’ll be back on premises in the next couple days.”

Got a story London Centric should look into? Send a WhatsApp or get in touch at hello@londoncentric.media.

Which Way, Waymo?

Earlier this year, when Waymo first announced its plan to launch self-driving taxis in the capital, London Centric met with a representative of the company. We said there would come a moment when we would end up reporting on viral videos of the company’s cars doing silly things on the capital’s roads. They acknowledged that such videos are an inevitable part of the growing process and argued their cars were still substantially safer than human drivers.

And lo, it appeared to have come to pass. On Wednesday night one of the company’s cars drove straight towards a police cordon in Harlesden protecting the site of a double stabbing. Footage of the incident in west London has quickly gone around the world as an example of the risks of self-driving cars.

Except, well, is that what happened? According to Waymo, the car was being manually driven by its human operator at the time, who has since been suspended pending an investigation. More intriguingly, the spokesperson definitively states that the incident would not have happened if the car’s self-driving computer had been in control, as it would have recognised the risk. Waymo is currently in the process of switching the 100 test vehicles it has roaming on London’s streets to full automation (with a human present, for now, as a back-up) ahead of a planned public launch later this year.

The Battle of Brockwell Park is back yet again, in the latest bid by campaigners to limit Mighty Hoopla and other festivals set to take place in the area next month. The locals who won two legal victories against Lambeth council last year, which we reported on at length, are back for a third crowdfunded legal challenge. Their previous legal successes forced the festivals to apply for planning permission for future events. This time, they’re arguing that even though planning permission was granted by Lambeth council, the process was flawed as it didn’t take the environmental impact of the festivals into account.

Tube strikes: Where does the RMT go from here?

Now that this week’s tube strikes are over, is there any sign of a negotiating off-ramp that will enable the dispute to come to a close?

As a reminder (full explainer here), just over half of the tube’s drivers are represented by Aslef, a union which backs Transport for London’s proposal to shift drivers to a 35-hour, four-day working week. They have not been on strike.

The rest of the tube’s drivers are represented by the RMT union. They object to the ‘voluntary’ transition to the Aslef-backed model, arguing it could become the default without the consent of its members. They want drivers to hold out for a 32-hour, four-day working week.

This week’s disruption has been patchy, aided by the popularity of the Elizabeth line, rental e-bikes, and work from home options. While some tube lines have only been partly disrupted, others have been shut down. Much depends on whether you were trying to use a line where the majority of drivers belong to the RMT union or one where Aslef drivers have still been turning up to work.

RMT drivers don’t get paid while they’re on strike, meaning some drivers will have lost hundreds of pounds of pay this week. What’s unknown is for how long members are willing to keep giving up their pay, with a further four 24-hour strikes scheduled for the coming months.

We’ve been trying to work out where there could be room for negotiation. Although the RMT won’t discuss negotiations with the media, a new proposal by TfL would likely look at the RMT’s demands for shorter shifts, more flexible working patterns, and ways to mitigate the safety impact of fatigue.

An RMT spokesperson told London Centric there have been no further talks between the union and TfL this week: “If we are invited back to talks we will of course attend.” With the next strike due on 19 May, the spokesperson said that now there is a “window of opportunity for TfL to come forward with a decent proposal so we can reach a negotiated settlement.”

PS - Thanks to reader Richard Smith for spotting a mistake in our piece earlier this week on the dispute. The current tube driver shift lasts seven hours and 42 minutes including a 30-minute unpaid lunch break, not excluding it as we said. We strive, as ever, for accuracy.

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Editor’s note: Housing lawyer Giles Peaker died last week following a short illness. While I never met Giles in person, I spent hours on the phone with him over the last 18 months as he patiently translated, for free, housing law into something a journalist could understand. He helped with our coverage of Criterion Capital’s mass evictions and is quoted in our investigation into the East End property developer James Gold.

Giles’ greatest professional legacy was helping to draft the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act, which set minimum standards for rental properties. He was a kind man who cared about the living conditions of others. A full tribute to him can be read here.

The election section: two weeks to go.

There was a massive response to Sam Freedman’s London election predictions piece, as part of our collaboration with his Comment is Freed newsletter.

Among the many reader responses there were a few things that kept coming up:

• A lack of certainty about whether the Greens have the campaign infrastructure and election experience to turn verbal support into votes, especially in areas with historically strong Labour support.

• People judging the strength of a party in a local area by the number of leaflets they received through the door.

• A handful of particularly contentious borderline calls – such as whether Labour really would lose Barking and Dagenham to Reform UK, or whether the Conservatives really will take back Wandsworth from Labour.

Sam says: “While I won’t be right about every prediction I hope the article gave London Centric readers a good sense of the type of contest that will be taking place in different parts of the capital and what to look out for.”

London Centric deals in reporting, Sam deals in analysis. If you want to read more of his writing at Comment is Freed then there’s a special 25% discount offer here.

Did Newham’s pro-LTN Greens accidentally pick an anti-LTN candidate?

By Conrad Quilty-Harper

Green Party members in Newham are asking why the party’s candidate for Forest Gate North was selected despite her public campaign against the rollout of low traffic neighbourhoods, a key policy of the party’s manifesto.

Shofa Miah wrote a now-deleted Instagram post last year denouncing plans for a low traffic neighbourhood around Woodgrange and Capel Road. She described LTN supporters as “new settler residents” acting against “working class and Global Majority communities.” Her husband runs a local anti-LTN campaign group that has urged people to vote for Labour candidate Forhad Hussain, who has pledged to introduce more car-friendly policies if he wins next month.

Newham Greens insist Miah no longer opposes low traffic neighbourhoods and now supports the party’s manifesto pledge to back them.

James Dow, a Forest Gate resident and Green member, told London Centric: “We have a right to know if we’re being asked to vote for a councillor who has actively campaigned against one of the manifesto pledges.”

Dow suspects his party has been lax in its vetting of candidates due to its rapid explosion in popularity under new leader Zack Polanski: “I want [the Greens] to win in the area… I don’t want that type of thing,” he said. “My theory is that they’ve overreached,” he said, pointing to the Greens’ push to field candidates across all of Newham’s wards. He was told by a local party official that Miah has “been on a journey” and was chosen through a competitive hustings and member vote. He says it would be “wonderful” if Miah really has “done an incredible personal 180” over the last year.

A Green spokesperson said of Miah’s past opposition to LTNs: “These views do not reflect the views of the party. After discussions with the candidate, the social media posts have been deleted. Our commitment to low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) is clear and unchanged, as set out in the Newham 2026 manifesto.”

Talking of Newham…

We’ve previously reported on the purchase of an empty council flat by Newham’s Labour mayoral candidate Forhad Hussain. The transaction was registered – in what Hussain says was a legal mistake from which he derived no benefit – as a Right to Buy transaction, which we said meant the price paid was not made public.

While this did keep the price off easily accessible public systems, we now understand it is possible to obtain the cost of the lease by sending a paper form to the Land Registry along with an £11 fee.

As a result we are now able to state that, as a serving council cabinet member, Hussain bought 70% of the empty council flat at a valuation of £190,000 in March 2016. A year-and-a-half later Newham council had the flat revalued at £250,000 and Hussain bought the final 30% share at that price.

We’ve published that clarification, along with Hussain’s full statement from his lawyers, here.

After we updated our piece, Newham Labour put out a statement saying London Centric has withdrawn our articles. We haven’t. You can tell this because they’re still available to read. We’ve asked Newham Labour to delete that false statement.

You can tell everybody this is Your Party

Months of incessant and bitter infighting within Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party mean the organisation has spent more time dealing with internal battles than preparing for May’s local elections.

As a result the party is only formally running candidates in seven London wards, compared to more than 1,500 for the Greens. Instead, it’s decided to give its support to a group of independent candidates and community groups across the capital.

Its key targets are in east London, where it hopes the Muslim population that is already turning away from Starmer will vote instead for existing independent campaign groups, such as the Redbridge Independents, Newham Independents Party, and Lutfur Rahman’s Aspire in Tower Hamlets.

Corbyn, the MP for Islington North, has appeared at Rahman’s events and described his campaign as “one flank of a wider rebellion against the Labour machine”.

A Your Party source said the decision to stand so few candidates was not a legacy of the previous chaos, but instead the implementation of its members’ wishes based on votes at its founding conference last November.

Support will also be given to Ealing Community Independents, the Haringey Socialist Alliance, the Enfield Independents and Arise in Harrow, alongside individual independent candidates across the city. If you want to vote directly for Your Party itself, you have to live in a select corner of Croydon, Greenwich, Lewisham, or Waltham Forest.

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PS… There are two stories published this week by friends of London Centric that we loved and wished we’d written.

First, this curious tale on IanVisits about someone who has been selling tickets to unauthorised tours of Abbey Road studios, failing to turn up, then making excuses about why they haven’t been able to refund the money.

“What annoyed me the most was the emotional letdown for the people who had travelled there,” Mansfield told us. “For people who are into music it’s the holy grail of tours.”

Secondly, Diamond Geezer, the Samuel Pepys of 21st century London blogging, has this gratuitously in-depth post on why, as of this month, you will now hear more “this train is being held at a red signal” announcements.

Scroll right down to the end of this post to find out who Sam believes will be running your local council after the capital’s voters go to the polls…

But first we’ve been reporting on what’s really behind this week’s tube strike, in a bid to cut through the political bluster and media pontificating. At its heart there is a knotty row about trade union rivalries and different visions of what it means to work a four-day week.

There was a massive reaction to Saturday’s piece reporting the reality of shoplifting at branches of Greggs – do check out the comments section for a fascinating and considered discussion.

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Your definitive guide to what’s really going on with the tube strike

By Polly Smythe

Why are some tube drivers going on strike this week?
London’s tube drivers currently work 38.5 hours a week, plus unpaid lunch breaks, spread over five days. Last year Transport for London bosses offered to reduce this to a 35-hour working week across four days – and include lunch breaks in the paid hours.

To understand why this would lead to strike action, you have to understand trade union politics.

London’s tube drivers are represented by two separate unions, the RMT and Aslef.

Aslef, which represents just over half of the capital’s tube drivers, welcomed TfL’s proposal, calling it “exactly the sort of deal every trade union should be trying to achieve.”

But the RMT has opposed TfL’s proposal, arguing that the new arrangement amounts to five days’ work crammed into four rather than a meaningful reduction in hours worked. Its members are going on strike to demand a maximum of 32 hours work spread across four days.

Is the shift to four days optional or not?
TfL has said it will begin to implement the Aslef-backed 35-hour week proposal on a voluntary basis.

This is soon to be tested among drivers on the Bakerloo line, with new rotas being drawn up and other reforms such as tablet computers being issued to drivers as part of a move away from paper-based systems.

The RMT says that it has had no guarantee that members can stay on the old five-day week rota without accepting other changes to terms and conditions, and that the four-day week was not “designed to fit alongside the old shift patterns, but is designed to replace it”.

Essentially, the fear at the RMT is that the Aslef-backed version of a four-day working week will quickly become the default, without the support of RMT members who want to hold out for a shorter version of the four-day working week.

Inter-union rivalry
While Aslef represents only drivers, the RMT represents many different kinds of transport workers on the underground. The two compete for tube drivers who are willing to pay membership fees.

There are lots of reasons why drivers might choose one union over the other, including the popularity of different unions in different depots, and the RMT having a reputation for being more radical.

Aslef told London Centric it was “surprised that the RMT has decided to take this action” and strike this week.

Finn Brennan, an Aslef organiser on the London Underground, said that drivers won’t be forced to work a four-day week if they don’t want to: “Anyone who wants to keep working a five-day week will be able to. Most people will regard that as a pretty good deal!”

Will tube drivers cross a picket line?
Even when the two rival unions have adopted different approaches in the past they’ve usually refrained from making direct public criticisms of each other. This time it’s different. Aslef previously dismissed the RMT strike action as “the first strike in the history of the trade union movement designed to stop people having a shorter working week and more time off”.

Because Aslef members aren’t on strike, they’ll be rostered to drive trains as normal, raising the difficult question of what will happen if Aslef members encounter an RMT picket line – and whether some tube drivers turning up for work will walk past striking colleagues.

Although the two unions have disagreed before, this is a severe and unusually public split. It’s been a long time since one union has taken strike action and the other has not.

Hang on, how long do tube drivers actually spend working?
This is often summarised vaguely by media outlets, TfL, and the unions themselves. After countless phone calls London Centric thinks we’ve finally got the answer.

At the moment, TfL schedules tube drivers to work 36 hours a week and pays them for 35. They’re not expected to actually work that extra hour, and instead are allowed to bank it and take it as leave. Their shifts last seven hours and 42 minutes per day, including an unpaid 30-minute lunch break.

The new proposal is that TfL schedules drivers to work 34 hours a week but pays them for 35 hours. The new shifts will last eight hours and 30 minutes every day and include a paid lunch break. At some point, TfL will claim back the missing hours and will instruct the driver to use them for non-driving tasks, such as attending a safety course.

Correction: This article originally said shifts currently last seven hours and 42 minutes per day, excluding an unpaid 30-minute lunch break. They actually last that long including an unpaid 30-minute lunch break.

How bad will this week’s disruption be?
The 24-hour strikes have been arranged to run from midday-to-midday in order to maximise disruption over two days, as the system takes time to recover.

But travel chaos won’t be as bad as last September, when almost the entire underground came to a halt, as that action saw both Aslef and the RMT strike at the same time. The Elizabeth line, DLR, London Overground and Trams will be running although they will be busier than normal. The lines that will be worst affected are ones where the RMT is stronger, such as the Central, Piccadilly, Metropolitan and Circle lines.

The political response is largely as expected, with Conservatives condemning the unions, the Lib Dems bemoaning the impact of the strikes, Reform calling for driverless trains, Labour’s Sadiq Khan staying out of the fray while briefing that he is disappointed that a deal could not be reached, and the Greens’ Zack Polanski backing the RMT.

A modest Lime proposal

The days when London Underground unions had a stranglehold on London’s transport system have been undermined by the Elizabeth line and the strike-busting rental e-bike. Lime, Forest, and Voi are gearing up for some of their busiest days ever during the strike, with the potential to win thousands of new customers who need an alternative way to get to work. One London Centric reader has pre-emptively been in touch with a proposal that the operators reserve e-bikes for existing regular customers, in the hope that Lime’s bosses read this. “I can’t be the only regular user getting pissed off at daytrippers on strike days,” they said, complaining about being overtaken by a “fat besuited banker looking like he’s riding a bucking bronco while you have to walk two miles to get a bike.”

Elsewhere in the in the news

London Centric was this week quoted on Radio 4’s News Quiz, a French media outlet, and — most intriguingly — east London’s ReviveFM. Following our reporting on the purchase of a council house by Newham’s Labour mayoral candidate Farhad Hussain, the issue was raised in Revive’s online leadership hustings. Hussain said the coverage is “libellous” and “gutter politics”. You can watch his response here. One of the obstacles to Hussain clarifying the record about his transaction is that the solicitors he used for the purchase are no longer trading.

London election predictions: Who will win in your area?

Sam Freedman is the co-author of the Comment is Freed newsletter, which covers everything from UK politics to the war in Iran. He’s a former government adviser whose work is read widely by Westminster politicians and the civil service. Sam’s been a supporter of London Centric since the start – so we asked if he’d be willing to collaborate on his predictions for London’s elections.

For those who aren’t in the weeds on London local politics, this is what’s happening: every council seat in the capital’s 32 local boroughs is up for election at the same time on Thursday 7 May.

The last time this happened was in 2022, when Labour was surging in the polls and Boris Johnson’s government was reeling from a series of self-inflicted scandals. Back then Labour dominated the capital and won every seat on some inner London councils. The Tories and Lib Dems clung on to their strongholds, the Greens made a tiny number of strategic gains, and Reform UK barely stood any candidates.

This time around, those five parties are standing in almost every ward and will be competitive in many of them. Due to the first-past-the-post voting system, this means voters on the left and right of politics are struggling to work out which party is best placed to win in their particular local area. Polls suggest there’s going to be a great deal of change. The Greens and Reform UK are hoping to take their first London councils (London Centric readers can learn about Reform’s leaked campaign tactics here) but there could also be a large number of local boroughs with “no overall control”. This is where rival parties have to form coalition deals with each other in order to secure enough councillors to form a working administration – or try to govern as a minority.

What follows are not London Centric’s predictions – they’re the work of Sam, an informed analyst who is willing to put his money where his mouth is. Do get stuck into the comments and let us know if you agree, or not.

This is how he predicts every corner of London will vote next month:

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Louis begins his shift at the Greggs on Brixton’s Electric Avenue at 6am every day, putting food on the shelves. Half an hour later, the shutters on the window are lifted and people come in off the street, take the stock from the shelves, and walk out without paying.

He says it is often the same shoplifters targeting his branch on a daily basis: “Sometimes they’re waiting outside for the shop to open.”

Over the course of four hours on a quiet Tuesday morning on Electric Avenue, London Centric witnessed more than a dozen shoplifters steal from this one branch of Greggs. In one instance, a woman stopped mid-theft to complain that there was not enough stock on display.

“No pastries?” she called out to the staff as she cleared the shelves.

The drinks shelves at Brixton’s Greggs were regularly targeted, seemingly regarded by some regulars as a free vending machine. One woman walked in and filled a large bag with bottles of Lucozade in full view of the staff, before leaving without paying. We followed as she walked down to the end of Electric Avenue and handed the bag straight over to a group of young men.

We asked one individual who returned to steal from the Brixton store on multiple occasions what he was doing with all the food he was taking.

“I’ll sell this stuff to my social worker,” he said.

Got a story for London Centric? Get in touch with us via email or WhatsApp.

London Centric has written a lot about the damage being done by online videos that overstate the level of disorder in the capital. We’ve also covered the Met Police’s very real struggles to deal with so-called ‘petty’ crime, whether it’s mobile phone snatching or bike theft.

These two issues collide when it comes to shoplifting. Footage of thieves taking goods from the shelves of London shops regularly goes viral around the world. Little has been done to verify whether the narrative that has grown up around rampant retail theft in London is correct – or whether isolated incidents caught on camera are giving a false impression of the reality on the ground.

Branches of Greggs across the capital regularly appear in online shoplifting videos. The bakery chain has risen to the status of a British institution over the last decade, serving pastries and snacks to tens of thousands of Londoners, from office workers to students and builders. London Centric spent three days standing outside branches of Greggs in four different areas of London, with an open mind, in an effort to establish the reality behind the viral footage. We encountered a culture of systematic theft that is so established that staff have given up trying to stop it.

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If you’re new around here, sometimes we spend months conducting lengthy investigations that hold landlords and politicians to account. And… sometimes we break stories about pickles. Our story about a cornichon shortage taking out the Pret A Manger Jambon Beurre sandwich has been in every national newspaper from The Times to The Guardian. It won’t win a Pulitzer, but you read it here first.

Today we have another packed edition, ranging from the east London mayoral candidate who made a tidy profit after buying a council house from his own council, Nike co-opting public spaces, why Austin Powers and Oliver Cromwell are running for election in London, and a chance to buy your own red phone box in west London – if you’re quick.

Scroll down for all this…

Just Don’t Do It?

Runners who turned up to Peckham Rye in south London for their local parkrun last weekend were met with a surprise, after Nike filled the public park with ambush marketing material, including a billboard dangling from a cherry picker featuring the slogan “You didn’t come all this way for a walk in the park.”

The company’s presence at an event known for being free and volunteer-organised got some runners’ pulses racing in all the wrong ways, especially since there was no advance warning by Nike and seemingly no payment to the local organisers of the runs.

As a result the company is facing accusations that it’s trying to muscle in on a community-led get-together and that its slogan goes against parkrun’s inclusive ethos, where runs have no last place or time limit.

The expensively-produced branding hasn’t just appeared on the Rye, but has also been reportedly spotted at recent events in Brockwell Park and Crystal Palace Park, to the surprise of local runners.

A London Centric-reading parent in attendance at one parkrun told London Centric that he had spoken to the team putting up the branding for Nike, who confirmed that there was no Nike-specific event taking place that day and it was to capitalise on the parkrun audience.

He said that the branding had “appeared out of nowhere”, there was “no precedent for it” and organisers hadn’t been informed.

“What next?” he asked. “Wednesdays in Green Park, sponsored by Aquafresh?”

Kirsty Woodbridge, global head of communications for the parkrun organisation, accused Nike of “trying to shame” people unable to run “just for a bit of brand awareness.”

Writing on LinkedIn, she said: “Imagine turning up at parkrun events, circumventing the charity and volunteers that provide them, putting up these billboards, riding round on Rickshaws literally pedalling this message [...] using this kind of language, putting incredible and totally unnecessary pressure on the local people, who are giving their time for free to provide something safe and welcoming for their communities.”

“People DO come for a walk in the park. And they come a VERY long way. And they are SO welcome. They come all this way for a walk in the park from perhaps never taking a step out of the front door.

“They come all this way for a walk in the park via a social prescription from their GP. They come all this way for a walk in the park perhaps battling a long term health condition. They come all this way for a walk in the park from some of the lowest socio-economic groups across the UK.”

The row is the latest instalment in an ongoing saga over who London’s parks belong to and how they should be used, as cash-strapped councils try to balance the books by leasing public space for commercial purposes. What’s not clear in these cases is how much, if anything, Nike paid to be there. The sportswear company didn’t respond to our request for comment.

We also asked the relevant park custodians, Lambeth and Southwark councils, as well as the Crystal Palace Park Trust, whether they’d been paid for the advertising activation. We haven’t heard anything back.

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Which way, Waymo?

Google’s self-driving car company Waymo has announced it is switching to fully automated driving on London’s streets this week. If you spend any time in the centre of the city you’ll have seen their distinctive sensor-covered vehicles, which still have a human behind the wheel as the cars are trained up and data is collected.

Until now, the human has still been doing the actual driving and showing the car how to cope with London traffic. Now, the company is moving to the next stage, with the human only there to keep an eye on the technology if it malfunctions while the car does the driving. Waymo told London Centric it now has 100 cars in test mode on London’s roads and is still on track to launch its self-driving taxi service on the capital’s streets by the end of this year.

From Austin Powers to Marvel actors: Who’s standing for election?

In local election news, nominations have closed for May’s elections, which will see all 32 London boroughs elect a full slate of councillors – as well as the odd local mayor. You’ve only got a few days left to register to vote if you haven’t already done so. We’ve lots more coverage due in the coming weeks, including subscriber-only predictions from Sam Freedman on how each part of London will vote.

We’ve been going through the nominations and trying to total it up – we’ve got to 8,988 candidates standing. We make it the Conservatives and Labour both running a slate of 1,816 candidates. Reform UK, the Lib Dems, and the Greens also managed to stand candidates in almost every ward, albeit not with the full number of candidates, following sometimes frantic rushes to get people to stand well outside their local areas.

Here are some of the interesting little nuggets we’ve noticed while browsing the nomination papers….

A man called Austin Powers is standing for Reform UK in Abbey Wood in Greenwich… Hugh O’Leary, husband of former PM Liz Truss, is standing in Woolwich Arsenal ward in Greenwich for the Conservatives... Topo Wresniwiro, who is standing for Reform UK in Blackheath Westcombe, is possibly the only candidate to have appeared in a Marvel film… Kezia Noble, the author of “The Noble Art of Seducing Women – My Foolproof Guide to Pulling Any Woman You Want”, who claims to have taught over 100,000 men to date, is standing for Reform UK in Kensington and Chelsea’s Queen’s Gate… Bailey Nash-Gardener, founder of the widely-followed social media news aggregation account Politics UK, is standing for Reform UK in Havering… Former Shrewsbury MP Daniel Kawczynski, last seen asking for Saudi money to pay his school fees, is standing for the Conservatives in Westminster… a substantial number of Kawczynski’s former Conservative MP colleagues are standing for Reform UK… Former Labour cabinet minister Kitty Ussher is standing for the party in Lambeth…. Sir David Roche, an Irish-born baronet, is standing for Reform UK in Westminster’s Lancaster Gate ward…. Some people can’t stick to one party such as Andrew Pelling, the former Conservative MP for Croydon Central, who then became a Labour member and is now standing for the Lib Dems in Croydon… A man called Oliver Cromwell Khan is standing for Nigel Farage’s Reform party in Lambeth’s Brixton Windrush ward... Green Party candidates in Richmond won’t have the party’s name on the ballot after a failure to fill in the forms correctly (h/t Josiah Mortimer)…. Angus Dalgleish, the oncology doctor who suggested COVID vaccines were “a significant factor in the cancers in the royal family”, is standing for Reform UK in the Sutton ward of North Cheam… And one very confused failed candidate is Umesh Kumar, who has been disqualified from running for election in Hounslow after adopting the novel strategy of trying to stand for Reform UK in Heston West ward and the Liberal Democrats in the neighbouring Heston East ward.

Preposterous property of the week

Going once, going twice: this Grade II listed telephone box near Earl’s Court is up for auction on Thursday at midday. The property listing describes potential alternative uses as “advertising, coffee shop, ice cream, library, florist, vending machine, storage, miniature art gallery and defibrillator.”

One thing that’s not on the property listing is something we noticed while double-checking its location. The phone box is situated at the junction that inspired the lyrics to The Beatles’ song A Day in the Life, as it’s where “a crowd of people stood and stared” at a fatal car crash involving the aristocratic heir to the Guinness fortune. Bids start at £7,500 and it might make a perfect first property for the right person.

The Labour mayoral candidate and the well-timed council house purchase

On Sunday we published an investigation looking into how Forhad Hussain, Labour’s candidate to be mayor of Newham, had used a council-backed mortgage to buy a council house in Canning Town, before selling it three years later for £255,000.

Back in 2016, Hussain was a leading member of Labour-run Newham Council, where he served as cabinet member for crime and anti-social behaviour. He was also one of the first people approved by Newham Council to buy an empty council house through the local authority’s ‘NewShare’ scheme, which was designed to help low earners in the borough get on the housing ladder.

More confusingly, as we looked into it, it appeared Hussain’s purchase had been wrongly declared by the council as a Right to Buy transaction. This meant the headline amount Hussain paid for the council flat was not publicly declared at the Land Registry – which in turn kept the value off sites such as Rightmove.

Still with us? Good.

We hadn’t intended to revisit this incredibly knotty story so soon. But then London Centric reader and Newham resident Richard Burns got in touch.

Burns had also attempted to buy a home in Newham through the same scheme at the same time as Hussain. Yet unlike the prominent councillor, Burns’ application for financial support was rejected by council officials.

Out of curiosity, Burns filed a Freedom of Information request to obtain Newham’s internal valuation list for the hundreds of properties the council was selling for the scheme, stretching across the borough from Stratford to Beckton.

The resulting spreadsheet has sat untouched in his inbox for almost a decade – until he read London Centric’s story and thought it might be of interest to our readers.

It definitely was.

The council data said the one-bedroom council flat sold to Hussain had been valued internally by the council at just £155,000 in 2016, even though the councillor was able to sell it for £255,000 just three years later. Newham had a legal obligation to obtain the full market value when it sold off the council asset.

Burns said he is a Labour supporter who intends to vote for Hussain next month in what is expected to be a tight mayoral race between a local independent candidate and the Greens – but he wants the Labour candidate to give clearer answers on the council house purchase.

When we put all this to Hussain, he said he had not received any special treatment from council officials. He also said the council’s internal valuation data was wrong and the flat had really been valued at £190,000 for the flat in 2016.

This would still mean Hussain sold the flat three years later for an extra £65,000 – a 34% increase in just three years.

During this period the average Newham property increased in value by 9%, meaning Hussain made one of the best property investments in the area.

As for why other identical flats in the block were valued at far more than his on the internal council database, Hussain said: “There are different types of flats in the block/area, varying from 1-2-3 beds, hence the different valuations.”

To check this out, London Centric visited both the property Hussain says he purchased for £190,000 and another that was valued at £240,000 by the council at the same time, according to their internal records. Rather than being a different type or size, we found both flats were one-bedroom properties with an identical layout.

We took this story to a leading housing lawyer with expertise in Right to Buy transactions. They asked not to be named due to their work with local authorities but said the apparent use of Right to Buy powers to sell the flat to Hussain was unusual and needed explaining: “There is a question to be answered. It might not have had a material effect. Legal draughtsmen make mistakes. But in terms of ‘Is there a question to be answered?’, yes there is.”

We asked Hussain once again whether he wanted council officers to investigate whether they made a legal mistake when they sold him the council house.

The man running to lead Newham Council, which has the worst rating of any housing provider in the country and is facing a crisis due to its lack of available housing, declined to do so. Labour’s mayoral candidate said of the potential legal mistake: “This is a council matter”.

On Wednesday 22 April, we received the following statement from Forhad Hussain, issued through his lawyers at Mischon de Reya.

While some of the statement refers to London Centric’s reporting, other aspects of it are aimed at other media outlets and claims made by rival politicians that have not been made or endorsed by this outlet:

It is disappointing that claims relating to this issue have been repeated without proper scrutiny.

The facts are straightforward. The property referenced, 28 Sycamore Close, was not a Right to Buy purchase. It was an empty council property offered on the open market through the Newham New Share scheme. My wife and I were registered for that scheme, expressed interest in the property, and were successful through the same process available to other eligible Newham residents.

The property was independently valued by the council at £190,000 and we paid our agreed share of that full market price. There was no negotiation and no discount of the kind associated with Right to Buy. Comparable properties in the same location were sold at similar values at the time, which underlines that this was a standard market transaction. When we eventually paid off the council’s share in the property – as was envisaged by the scheme – we did so at the uplifted market rate of the property at that time.

Any suggestion that I benefited from my position is categorically untrue. I did not receive preferential treatment at any stage.

Claims that there is a current or “fresh” investigation are also incorrect. I have been informed that no new investigation is taking place, and any previous enquiries into this matter have already been concluded.

It is also worth noting that earlier reporting on separate allegations was withdrawn after inaccuracies were identified. Novara Media removed an article on this basis, which should give pause to anyone repeating unverified claims.

References to wording on the Land Registry have been used to imply wrongdoing, but that implication is unfounded. There is no evidence this had any bearing on the purchase and no benefit was derived from it.

These are serious allegations about my personal integrity and they risk causing real damage, particularly in the context of an election. I have asked for the posts containing these claims to be removed and for a correction and apology to be issued.

Newham residents deserve an honest campaign focused on the issues that matter, not the spread of misinformation.

One aspect of the statement that does refer to London Centric is our previous understanding that the value of the original purchase was not made public at the Land Registry. That is because the lease was registered – in what Hussain states was a legal error from which he derived no benefit – as a Right to Buy transaction.

While this meant the sale price was not visible on the publicly available Land Registry website or on other sites as RightMove, we now understand that it is possible for individuals to request a copy of the original lease from the Land Registry by sending a paper form with an additional fee of £11. This lease clearly states the amount Hussain paid for the property. We’re happy to correct the record on this.

As a result, we’re able to confirm that Newham sold 70% of the empty council flat to Hussain and his wife at a valuation of £190,000 in March 2016.

A year and a half later the council had the property revalued at £250,000. Newham sold the final 30% of the flat to the couple at this value in October 2017.

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PS. At the other end of the London housing market we were very jealous that the FT’s Julie Steinberg, Robert Smith, Euan Healy and Cynthia O’Murchu found the owner of the capital’s most expensive house. The outlet says the man who paid a reported £275m for the Chelsea mansion is Suneil Setiya, the founder of “publicity-shy” hedge fund Quadrature Capital. (Buying the capital’s most expensive house is possibly not the best way to avoid publicity.) Setiya has donated £4m to the Labour Party and runs a foundation that gives substantial funding to fighting climate change. His new home is Providence House, located next to the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, which was previously owned by the property developer Nick Candy – meaning one of Labour’s biggest donors has just given an enormous slug of cash to the treasurer of Reform UK.

This week, for the first time, one of those door knocks resulted in a smiling elderly lady waving a (hopefully fake) vintage shotgun, warning me to behave myself, before inviting me in for a cup of tea and telling me her life story. London truly is a city where you’re always rewarded for persevering with people.

Today, we’ve got stories on Pret A Manger’s pickle crisis, an investigation into a confusing property transaction involving the Labour candidate for mayor of Newham, a leaked report on a councillor who breached rules by parking his Lamborghini in a disabled spot, how Amazon’s Whole Foods is behind the eviction of dozens of independent traders in Westminster, and why Sadiq Khan is reading out chunks of London Centric’s reporting at a Cambridge college.

Any of these could have been this edition’s top story. Some of them are more important to the functioning of a democratic society than others. But there’s only one place to start...

Pret’s in a little pickle

We received a tip from a member of the public that a crisis is brewing in London commuter sandwich favourite Pret A Manger. Their buttery ham and pickle sandwich – or, to adopt its official name, the Jambon Beurre – has vanished from chilled cabinets across the city.

After visiting eleven of their branches across London, we were met with apologies and various bizarre excuses.

Now, we’ve been able to get the truth: a previously unreported pickle shortage has hit the capital’s leading sandwich chain.

A Pret spokesperson confirmed to London Centric that they’d had to stop producing the sandwich until further notice due to the ongoing supply issue: “Customers may have noticed that our Jambon Beurre is currently missing from shelves. This is due to a temporary shortage of cornichons. We’re sorry for any disappointment caused and are working hard to get this Pret favourite back in shops as soon as possible.”

Pret did not elaborate any further on what has caused this ongoing crisis. If any readers in the pickled vegetable industry have any insight, get in touch. In the name of campaigning journalism, we’ll stay on the case.

Whole Foods gobbles up Queensway Market

Traders in west London’s Queensway Market, next to Bayswater tube station on the northern edge of Hyde Park, learned in recent weeks that they are being evicted to make way for a new branch of Whole Foods.

The sprawling market consists of small stalls inside a large unit on the ground floor of a 1930s residential block. Walk around its narrow corridors, and you’ll find Uzbek, Brazilian, and Russian cuisine, iPhone fixers, barber shops, palm readers, as well as the critic-favourite Malaysian restaurant Normah’s.

The building was bought in 2007 by a company controlled by property investor Bourne Capital for £38m. A planning application was made by the landlord to Westminster council in July 2025 to remove planning restrictions so that a large new branch of Whole Foods could replace the existing collection of small units.

The independent traders were only made aware that they were being evicted in recent weeks, giving them four weeks to find new locations, prompting them to launch a petition to save their businesses.

Even though the planning documents have been public for anyone to read for almost a year, none of the shop owners were made aware of the proposals. The decline of local journalism in the capital also means that no journalist appears to have read the planning register and noticed this was going on until, like many other outlets, London Centric was alerted to it by an online petition this week.

Queensway Market is the latest in a string of evictions hitting London’s independent and often immigrant-run indoor markets hard, with traders at Brixton Plaza, Dalston’s Ridley Road, and Elephant and Castle battling to keep operating.

Mohamed Sultan, 58, has run a fresh juice stall in the market for 17 years: “I built this business from nothing. But small businesses are always vulnerable when rich companies come.”

He gestured at the rest of the street, lined with coffee shops and restaurants: “They don’t want something like this in the area. Money always speaks first.”

Vito De Barra, 35, who has run a shop catering to the LGBT community for seven years, said: “This is not my shop. This is my home. I love London for giving me the opportunity to open my shop. But I don’t have money to open another shop. I’d need about £80,000.”

He said: “I am gay. It’s difficult to open a sex shop. I had to do a lot of work on Instagram. Look at my face? Stress. You have a sex shop in Oxford Street. But that’s for men. Not a sex shop for women, lady boy. This is for all people, women, beautiful women and ladies. I am so sad.”

Jassar Mohamed, who manages the day-to-day running of the market, said that some of the traders were now trying to negotiate a longer notice period. “We are like a family, a community. I see the traders more than my son, or my mum and my dad. We’ve been here twenty years.”

A spokesperson for Whole Foods said: “We can confirm we have signed a lease as a tenant with Bourne Capital, but we don’t have any additional updates at this time.”

Traders at Brixton Plaza, a similar development that has previously appeared in London Centric, this week stopped a similar eviction with a high court injunction against offshore landlord Governside, who wanted to replace their units with a branch of Aldi. Their legal team at Leigh Day argued that rather than being temporary “at will” tenants, the stallholders were effectively operating under full commercial leases and could not be easily evicted at short notice.

Can’t park there, mate

A Labour councillor in Hounslow criticised for parking his Lamborghini in a disabled parking bay has been selected to stand again despite being found in breach of the council’s code of conduct.

An investigation was launched into Farhaan Rehman after the council received complaints over his conduct on four counts. Rehman was found to have breached the code for parking in a disabled bay, as well as for failing to declare his interest in three companies. He was cleared on two other matters.

The council did not intend to publish a copy of the internal report but we’ve seen it anyway. A spokesperson for Hounslow Council said they would not normally make the findings of such an investigation public in situations “where the monitoring officer has concluded that there has been no breach, that no further action is needed, or the matter has been resolved in some other way”.

This means voters would be going into next month’s election, where Rehman is standing again, without knowing the outcome.

The report acknowledged that Rehman had already resigned from his role as chair of the licensing committee and made a £160 donation to charity following previous publicity about parking the luxury car in a disabled parking bay.

Rehman was cleared on another parking allegation, for which the officer failed to find sufficient evidence. The officer also cleared him over the failure to declare his interest regarding a trip to Pakistan with real estate company Adam Mercer Group, given that no personal financial interest could be found.

Rehman told London Centric: “The matters you have raised are not new and were widely reported on in November. The report you are quoting from acknowledges that I have already accepted the breaches and sought to remedy them. You will know that there is nothing unknown in the public domain here.”

It’s just the latest in a series of scandals that have hit Hounslow’s Labour Party recently, amid disputed selection procedures. Last year, Labour councillor Hina Mir was fined over £43,000 for employing an illegal worker as a nanny in her home. Mir, a qualified solicitor, was also caught parking in a disabled parking bay without a blue badge.

The mayor takes on “London has fallen” viral videos

Sadiq Khan gave a speech at King's College, Cambridge on Thursday night about the challenge posed to the capital by negative online viral videos, saying there is “a growing gap between the reality of life in London and how our city is being portrayed online”.

The mayor started by telling the audience about London Centric’s investigation into the TikToker who was secretly filming fake anti-immigrant content inside Londoners’ homes. He held it up as an example of the falsehoods that proliferate online about the capital city – and how it’s left to journalists and researchers to pick up the pieces.

Even with the setback of globally viral footage of teenagers running through Clapham, Khan has decided to make taking on the tech platforms one of his priorities this year.

As London Centric sees it, there are three different issues at play here, some of which overlap:

1. Coordinated disinformation campaigns spread by organised groups, such as foreign states or extremist groups, conducted for ideological reasons.

2. Real footage of genuine disorder and theft in London. Sometimes this gets more attention than it deserves and sometimes it highlights real problems and shames the authorities into action.

3. Bad faith or fake videos made by individuals responding to the financial incentives of video platforms, who know that talking London down is a fast way to increase view counts and up ad revenue.

Khan seems to be using old-fashioned politics to fight this very modern challenge to the economic health of the capital: putting public pressure on institutions and media companies and asking them to explain themselves. He’s already got the Foreign Office and UK ambassadors on board as officials fret about the economic damage caused by viral videos shaping perceptions of the capital around the world.

The real question is how much of the “London has fallen” content can be solved by changes from the viral video platforms – or whether action to reduce petty theft and disorder, cutting off the raw source of some of the material, is the real solution.

The Easter holiday “link-ups” have continued, with teenagers filming themselves running around screaming in public places, giving the impression of wild disorder. But while the content may look chaotic and threatening, how many serious criminal offences are actually being committed? We checked back in with the Met.

Despite the footage of two nights of disorder in Clapham going around the world, only seven people have been arrested. After the first night, a 17-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of causing a public nuisance, while three girls – two aged 16 and one 15-year-old – were arrested on suspicion of theft and assault.

After the second night of chaos, three girls – two aged 13, and one 17-year-old – were arrested on suspicion of assaulting emergency workers.

Why this ex-council flat is shaping the mayoral election in Newham

On a small housing estate in east London is an ex-council flat that could shape next month’s local election in Newham.

That’s because the flat’s previous owner was Forhad Hussain, Labour’s candidate to be mayor of the borough. He purchased the property in 2016 with financial help from the same council he was then helping to lead.

Now, a knotty series of questions over that property transaction, which saw a council-owned property taken out of public ownership by the future Labour candidate, have become a live political issue. The messy row, which Labour says is libellous misinformation, could decide whether Labour can retain control of a borough in the face of challenges from both a local pro-Gaza independent group and the Greens.

After two weeks of looking into it, these are the facts that London Centric has been able to establish around this very confused story.

Back in 2016, Hussain was one of the first people approved to buy an empty Newham council house through the council’s in-house ‘NewShare’ scheme. This was a form of shared ownership which saw Newham council help with the cost of a deposit in order to enable local people to take out a mortgage and become homeowners.

According to contemporary council documents, the NewShare scheme was meant to prioritise “lower income residents” buying their first home who “cannot afford a large deposit or the costs of buying a home on the open market”.

Newham stated the priority for the scheme would be given to people “already on our waiting list for a council home”, “renting from a social housing provider”, or “a member of the armed forces”.

The key condition of NewShare was that any council housing being sold off had to be both empty and priced at the full market rate. This is different to the nationwide Right to Buy scheme, which enables council tenants to buy their own rental properties at a discount.

It’s unclear how Hussain was selected as one of the first successful applicants for the NewShare deposit scheme. It certainly raised eyebrows at the time that a very senior councillor was one of the early beneficiaries of the scheme, although there was nothing explicitly banning senior councillors from using it.

This might have been the end of the story.

But there is a curious detail that London Centric has been looking into over the last fortnight.

The lease on the council flat that was sold to Hussain by his own council wasn’t issued in the same manner as some other council properties offloaded in the NewShare scheme.

Instead, records filed at the Land Registry show that the property appears to have been sold by the council through a legal process normally used for Right to Buy transactions.

This is unusual. It also means the sum Hussain paid his own council to buy the publicly-owned flat in 2016 was never made public at the Land Registry.

This matters because after living there for three years he sold the flat he bought with council assistance for £255,000. Although there’s no way to know if he made a profit on the deal, both transactions occurred during a time of still-rising property prices and he would be unlucky to have been left out of pocket.

Labour, for its part, told us that the “matter was investigated, and no further action was taken”. They wouldn’t clarify who investigated and when.

On Thursday, things got even messier. While we were writing this story, elements of it were passed to the website Novara Media, complete with a quote from the local Green party. Novara published an article on some aspects of Hussain’s property transactions and made a series of definitive statements about what Labour’s mayoral candidate had supposedly done, some of which we do not believe to be accurate based on our reporting.

Within hours, Novara Media wiped its story from the internet following a legal threat from Labour which described the report as “categorically untrue, baseless and libellous smears from the Greens”.

Labour has cited the story’s deletion as evidence that there is nothing to see here: “The 2016 property was a shared ownership purchase, not Right to Buy, with full transparency… This is gutter politics at its worst – deliberate misinformation to damage a local candidate. The Greens should withdraw these claims and apologise immediately. We are exploring legal options to put an end to this outright disinformation.”

London Centric has no interest in pursuing a party political agenda. This story is not making any definitive claims. It is not based on statements by the Greens.

Instead, we have repeatedly asked a simple question of Labour and Forhad Hussain based on our reading of publicly-accessible legal documents: If it’s true that you didn’t buy the council flat through Right to Buy, will you be urgently asking Newham council to investigate why it appears to have wrongly issued you a lease using its Right to Buy powers?

It is entirely possible there is a straightforward explanation for this. But Labour has yet to reply.

If the council did make a major legal mistake on the paperwork selling a council property to a serving councillor, how come Hussain’s solicitor didn’t spot it during the purchase?

When London Centric visited the flat earlier this week, we talked to neighbours who recalled Hussain living in the flat, talked of him with affection, and said they intended to vote for him. But they were also interested to discuss the circumstances in which he’d ended up owning the property and what it says about an area of the city with an acute housing crisis.

We’ll let you know if Hussain can provide any further clarification on his past purchase of a council house from the council he hopes to run.

London Centric has got lots of original stories coming next week. Thanks to all the paying subscribers who make it possible. You can get in touch with us here if there’s something you think we should be looking into.

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PS… A couple of years ago London Centric subscriber Alex Wilson told us that one of the cheapest and most pleasant co-working spaces in London, with a ready supply of coffee and strong WiFi, is the Oval cricket ground on a match day. We took this to heart, extolling the potential of “work from cricket” when we were interviewed about London Centric on Surrey’s YouTube livestream last summer. The powers that be at the Oval seem to have been listening and this week announced a marketing promotion to get homeworkers to the ground on quiet days over the summer months. Just please don’t take our spot.

Coincidentally, today Sadiq Khan is announcing a £30m investment in 32 new “late-night youth clubs” for every London borough. His team blames past austerity measures and directly links this investment to efforts to do more to tackle “phone theft, shoplifting and antisocial behaviour”.

Today’s main story is on another new phenomenon that has become an accepted facet of London life, that as yet hasn’t received much attention. Is it now normal to work unpaid shifts in order to be considered for a job pulling pints? Are cash-strapped London hospitality venues taking advantage of the capital’s glut of unemployed young people to get them to fill gaps in their rotas?

Scroll down to read that, but first…

You can’t spell Haringey without “Ye”

Wireless Festival has been cancelled after the government blocked Kanye West, who was set to headline all three nights of the event, from entering the country due to his history of antisemitic comments.

Public land use rights in London parks probably aren’t the top thing on the-artist-currently-known-as-Ye’s mind right now. But one of the side effects of his visa refusal is an inadvertent victory for campaigners against private festivals in London’s open spaces, with Finsbury Park now potentially open to the general public for longer in July.

“We’re obviously pleased in the sense that the park and local residents won’t be subjected to another overly enormous, overly loud, overly invasive event,” said Katie Dawson, co-chair of Friends of Finsbury Park, when we gave her a ring on Tuesday. “Haringey don’t own this park. It was bequeathed by an act of parliament, in the 19th century, for the good of people living in an urban environment around the park. It’s not for them to just then milk it, trash it, and abuse it, to get a bit of money.”

Promoter Festival Republic, part of Live Nation, will push ahead with three big gigs the weekend before, featuring Biffy Clyro, Kasabian, and Wolf Alice, meaning there will still be substantial disruption as an arena is built to hold 50,000 people a night. But the site could be cleared earlier than expected.

Curiously, it’s only a couple of weeks since Haringey approved an extension to the promoter’s contract to use Finsbury Park to host Wireless every summer until 2032. Councillors were told events in Finsbury Park, including those put on by other promoters, generate £1.2m a year to cover the cost of maintaining the green space in the face of budget cuts elsewhere.

We tried to contact Haringey council to find out if the local authority would be left out of pocket by the Kanye West cancellation or if the promoter’s insurance would cover payments to the council. The council’s press office phone number hasn’t worked for the last two months and they haven’t replied to our emails – but we’ll let you know if we get through.

Lime-inal space

The first new, smaller – and possibly safer – Lime e-bikes have been spotted on the streets of London. We saw one zooming past London Bridge station on Monday morning, while subscriber Thomas Dawson has been in touch with an early review: “Had a new Lime for the first time today! Pros: Basket is better for storing bigger bags. Cons: seat only goes up to 9, seems less powerful (really struggled on hills).”

He reckoned they felt safer: “Would want to see how they go in the rain and after it’s been bashed about a bit, but you can definitely feel the weight being under/behind you rather than further forward.”

Comment once, comment all

The London Centric comments section continues to be one of the most interesting places on the internet, featuring a group of people whose feedback is sometimes smarter and more nuanced than a lot of London journalism, ours included.

It’s always good to see new voices join in the discussion – such as the cluster of freshly-registered users who spent the bank holiday weekend posting comments in support of landlord Asif Aziz beneath one of our old pieces about his company’s “mass evictions”.

We always welcome frank reader feedback. But it seemed strange to see a group of newly-registered users leaving a string of pro-Criterion comments on an old piece, all within the space of a few minutes. So we contacted Substack’s support team. After investigating, they said the users showed signs of “coordinated and inauthentic” behaviour and deleted their comments.

The following day, another cluster of comments arrived. A spokesperson for Criterion Capital said it had nothing to do with them and we’re none the wiser as to who is behind them.

But to answer one of the questions posed by our new friends:

No, the investigation is not funded by “powers that be”. Unless you count our wonderful paying subscribers.

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PS: Two quick updates on Asif Aziz and Criterion Capital.

1. Merton Council has been in touch regarding our investigation into seemingly invalid electrical safety certificates issued to Criterion’s residential tenants. The council says the paperwork has now been received and is “being reviewed as a matter of urgency” with the potential to fine the landlord tens of thousands of pounds per breach.

2. Our investigation into the tax-evading central London gift shops that rent their shop units from Criterion Capital has been shortlisted for the best financial journalism of the year at the Wincott Awards.

From the Tate to your local pub: Are London venues turning to unpaid trial shifters to fill rotas?

By Polly Smythe

When Lucy, 24, arrived for an unpaid trial shift at the Peppa Pig afternoon tea bus sightseeing experience, her tasks were simple: for four hours, she had to arrange finger sandwiches on platters, carry trays of macaroons, and pour cups of tea, all while the bus lurched about central London carrying excited families.

The trial seemed to go well: “I was very proud of myself. I didn’t drop a single macaroon.” She wasn’t being paid anything for her time, and the slow traffic meant it lasted an hour longer than planned. But having done a good job, and with a few years of hospitality experience behind her, Lucy felt confident she had a good chance of being hired.

Several weeks later, she finally heard back from the operators, who said there was no work: “In the months since, I’ve felt more and more aggrieved about it. I found it very demoralising.”

Lucy is just one of a growing number of young Londoners expected to work a full hospitality shift for free in order to be considered for a job, in what a leading union has told London Centric is a “growing problem.”

With youth unemployment in the capital at its highest level in a decade, there’s fierce competition for entry-level roles. But employers say that increases in national insurance contributions and the minimum wage have made taking on new staff in hospitality and retail prohibitively expensive.

The suspicion is that squeezed businesses are instead turning to the ranks of young people desperate to find work as a way to plug staffing gaps for free.

“There’s this sense of, ‘what can you do about it?’” said Lucy. “You’re completely at the mercy of the boss. In the back of your mind, you know they’re getting hundreds of CVs handed in all the time.”

The biggest change in recent years, according to staff and managers, is the growing deployment of trial shifters on busy weekend shifts.

One restaurant manager said that trial shifts are increasingly scheduled on Fridays and Saturdays because they are seen as “a good way to get ad hoc shifts.”

The manager, who has supervised unpaid trial shifters in previous jobs, said this is a terrible time to judge whether someone is up to the job: “Management will go, ‘let’s get the trial in on this day because that’s going to be more helpful for us.’ That’s bad because you’re throwing someone in at the deep end.”

Still, they said that the high turnover of staff, aided by short or non-existent notice periods, means that the distinction between hiring for a job that exists and a job that might exist in a few weeks is often blurred: “If a staff member quits with one week’s notice and you suddenly have space to fill, restaurants like to have contacts available for when they have sudden exits.”

Carolina, 25, did a four-hour unpaid trial shift at an Italian restaurant in Clapham. “Nine times out of ten, a job is going to have an unpaid trial shift,” she said. Her shift was scheduled on a Saturday morning, to cover the brunch rush.

“It makes you see yourself as someone whose time isn’t valued,” said Carolina.

It’s not just smaller venues that are using unpaid trial shift workers. Late last November, Michael worked an unpaid trial shift as a barista in the cafe at Tate Britain. The venue was an hour’s travel from his house and the trial lasted for two hours: “It felt like I was just filling in for someone. They’re quite understaffed. It took a week or two for them to get back to me, and then they said on this occasion we’re not selecting you.”

“It was near the Christmas period, which made me think this doesn’t feel right. It was a busy time.”

The Tate did not respond to our request for comment on whether its use of trial shifts was widespread.

But others with hospitality jobs said they regularly see them used this way. Charlie, who used to work at a bar on south London’s Bermondsey beer mile, said: “Trials were always in the evening when it was busier.”

Those on a trial weren’t allowed behind the bar and instead were tasked with glass collection, which freed up paid bar staff to focus on serving pints faster and getting more money through the till.

“Without them we would’ve been stretched,” he said. “Pubs have a quick turnover of staff, so there were always vacancies. But the vacancies didn’t correlate with the level of trials I saw coming in.”

Bryan Simpson, who leads on hospitality for Unite, said the union had seen a “clear rise in concerns about unpaid trial shifts coming through, both through direct complaints and anecdotally from workers across the hospitality and service sectors”.

He said: “Increasingly, these aren’t short, skills-based assessments but long, gruelling shifts that look and feel like real work – with no pay at the end of it.” The trial shifts are “being used to plug staffing gaps during busy periods, with no genuine job on offer, which is simply exploitation by another name. Workers are effectively providing free labour in workplaces that are already under pressure to cut costs.”

Job listings are rarely upfront about whether a trial will be paid, or for how long it will last. But once workers have arrived for their trial, often having spent money on travel or suitable clothing for the shift, it can be difficult to ask questions without the fear of jeopardising the chance of getting hired.

Daniel Burke, 22, has done four unpaid trial shifts, the longest of which lasted eight hours. A baker, he’s been tasked with mundane jobs like separating crates of egg yolks and egg whites, or shaping endless piles of dough.

“Unpaid trial shifts are so normalised that a lot of people don’t even think of them as being bad,” he said.

Employment rights minister Kate Dearden told London Centric that the government is “tackling the dodgy use of unpaid work trials, which some employers exploit to secure free labour under the guise of recruitment”.

“Updated guidance will make clear where the law stands and how workers can challenge unfair treatment,” she said.

After her Peppa Pig rejection, Lucy attended a “recruitment day” for a weekend-only bar job at a mini golf venue. There were 50 people in attendance for only a handful of positions, with the day spent performing various tasks. No one was paid for their time spent trying to secure a minimum wage job.

“After each round, they’d read out a list of names of those who’d progressed. It was like the X Factor. And everyone there was more than qualified to do that job.”

Brigit’s Bakery, the company behind the Peppa Pig bus experience, said it only uses trial shifts as a “short, structured, and supervised way to assess a candidate’s suitability” and that they are “proportionate in length and focused on assessing practical skills relevant to the role.”

Lucy has now secured a full-time job in a different sector. “My job hunting period was cursed. People would say, ‘how’s the search going?’ I’d go, ‘Well, I did a four-hour unpaid trial shift on a Peppa Pig-themed afternoon tea bus and I didn’t get the job. How do you think it’s going?’”

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Sadiq Khan began the week telling British ambassadors to go out and debunk viral videos that portrayed London as being in the midst of a chaotic crime wave. He ended it by announcing police crackdowns in a bid to limit the global impact of viral footage showing children rampaging through the Clapham branch of Marks & Spencer.

The young teenagers who filmed themselves running through shops on Clapham High Street over two nights last week have unwittingly created one of London’s most potent political talking points of the year. The events have filled social video feeds, hit the homepages of major news outlets, and attracted tens of millions of views just ahead of May’s local elections. By Friday afternoon one chicken shop owner in Clapham had spoken to 12 different journalists, with French and German media outlets among those arriving to cover the topic. The Clapham chaos has become a truly global story, shaping how the world sees London.

But what really happened last Saturday and Tuesday in Clapham High Street? How much damage was actually done? And why have these particular videos taken hold in a way that others haven’t?

London Centric spent this week in south-west London talking to local teenagers, shop staff and restaurant owners. What we found was a perfect storm of retailers fed up with police inaction on so-called ‘low-level’ crimes such as shoplifting, bored teenagers blurring the lines between filming crimes and participating in them, and viral videos spreading awareness of what people can get away with in the face of security guards trained not to confront teenagers.

The Clapham disorder wasn’t the most serious incident to have been filmed happening in London this week, let alone this year. But it has become symbolic of a wider sense that, while London’s authorities may have brought the murder rate down, they’ve taken their eyes off day-to-day crime.

The incident has also left Khan facing personal criticism from the bosses of Marks & Spencer, who singled out the mayor and the Met Police for failing to back retail workers on shoplifting.

“I keep hearing crime is falling, especially in London - something none of us believe and very few people working in retail would see,” said M&S’s retail chief Thinus Keeve on Thursday.

Crucially, what happened last week was a very different beast to the pan-London riots and looting of 2011 that affected nearby streets, which caused millions of pounds in damage and leaving buildings burned to the ground. While a small number of teenagers have been arrested this week, with the Met promising more arrests coming, the main theft seems to have been of small food items rather than the electrical goods or expensive trainers that looters made off with fifteen years ago..

Instead, there seemed to be a new purpose – filming yourself engaging in a public display of disorder, to be uploaded to the internet in real time. The footage is no longer just the record of the behaviour, but the point of it. Rather than damaging property and stealing goods, the lasting damage seems to have been to trust in the Met’s ability to keep order.

“They’re trying to make a statement that they can do whatever they want,” said one 15-year-old we talked to at one of Clapham Common’s basketball courts, reflecting on the events of last week.

What follows is the story of what really happened in Clapham last week – including the motives of the young people involved, the rapid politicisation of the events, and why local teens are baffled that the media keeps calling these gatherings “steaming”.

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Unhelpfully, at this point a woman walked into the pub and, using a well-established distraction technique, placed a piece of paper over some of the phones on the table and used it as cover to steal the visitors’ devices.

In this instance, we grabbed the thief, who immediately surrendered the phones and headed off to find other victims. The pub manager said she was a regular visitor but there was no point in reporting her to the Met police. It wasn’t the best introduction to London for the Nordic visitors – and another reminder of how such experiences damage the capital’s reputation around the world.

Today we’ve got details about how the government is treating negative viral videos of London as a threat to Britain – with the acknowledgment by Sadiq Khan that the capital’s global reputation as a theft hotspot could damage the city’s economy.

We’re also bringing you some updates on our investigation into the dubious electricity certificates handed to residents of Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital, the shift to Gulf Candy Stores on Oxford Street, and a chance to live in a £4m chapel.

Sadiq Khan asks British diplomats to fight back against “London Has Fallen” viral videos

Sadiq Khan joined the UK’s leading diplomats at the foreign office on Tuesday afternoon to discuss an issue that the government believes poses a real threat to the UK’s economy: viral videos showing London in a state of decline.

There is a concern in both City Hall and at the top levels of government that the massive popularity of such clips is putting off overseas investors and tourists from coming to the capital. As such, the UK’s leading diplomats – including Christian Turner, the newly-appointed ambassador to Washington DC – were briefed for an hour by both the mayor and Met Police commissioner Mark Rowley on how to fight back against the viral tide.

“There is a perception around the globe about London being unsafe,” Khan told the assembled diplomats, acknowledging the seriousness of the situation and arguing it didn’t reflect the progress made on reducing the murder rate and knife crime.

The issue is that in a global information marketplace, the days of the BBC defining global perceptions of London are fading. Instead, people tasked with attracting investment to the capital are more concerned about what an Indian businessman or a potential Singaporean tourist is seeing on their algorithmically-driven social media feeds.

It’s often not pretty.

Very real clips of disorder and theft on London’s streets are mixed with mislabelled footage of unrelated events elsewhere in the world, alongside completely fabricated stories about the capital. One major driving force has been the shift by platforms such as Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, towards paying users who upload videos that go viral depending on how many views their content receives. In recent years creators have realised that so-called “London Has Fallen” content reliably gets huge numbers of shares, increasing the money they earn and incentivising the creation of more material.

Often it’s business executives’ personal fears about safety that drive wider business investment decisions. It’s unlikely that someone will want to relocate their company to London if they or their other half have spent hours watching videos about the theft of expensive watches or handbags.

While many of the most viral clips about London are real, such as video of a recent daytime smash-and-grab raid at a jewellery shop in south west London, other clips are faked for cash.

Some of the more extreme videos play on the false idea that London has become a Muslim-dominated city under Sadiq Khan’s leadership or are virulently racist, even if they’re produced by content farms based overseas. As one TikTok creator exposed by London Centric for creating fake content about the capital put it: “Hate brings views”.

There’s even an entire genre of YouTube travelogue dedicated to showing the apparent decline of the capital. On the QAA podcast, presenter Annie Kelly dubbed this “London Has Fallen” content, after a phrase that often pops up in descriptions of the videos.

The prevalence of these videos has led to Londoners having baffling conversations with people around the world who are convinced the capital isn’t just a gritty or flawed city but is instead the most unsafe place on the planet. On a Spectator podcast last year, the commentator Tim Stanley suggested a driving force for some of these discussions might be the cultural transatlantic “marrying of Trump and Brexiteers” which has left American politicians “just more conscious of what’s going on” in the UK.

The objective of Monday’s meeting, according to Khan’s spokesperson, was to give British ambassadors around the world arguments to convince a Dubai investor to ignore such material on their Instagram or TikTok feeds and still come to the UK’s capital.

Ambassadors and high commissioners to countries including Singapore, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates were presented with “evidence to counter false perceptions of crime in the capital” as Rowley set out what the police are doing to counter issues such as phone snatching.

“The aim was to brief international representatives and ensure they and their teams are equipped to support London’s efforts to counter these false narratives,” Khan’s spokesperson said. “They agreed to do more to share information and deploy joint tactics and ideas to disseminate the facts about London to a global audience.”

Meanwhile, Khan pointed out that London’s murder rate is now the lowest since records began and is below other major cities such as Paris, Berlin, New York, and Milan: “Of course, one crime is one crime too many, but people are spreading false propaganda about city because it serves their interests. So we all need to challenge the disinformation, misinformation and lies.”

He told the ambassadors they had to fight back and make a positive case for the capital as a hub for tech and financial jobs: “When you hear news about London being unsafe that’s just not true.”

Whether the ambassadors will be able to be heard over the sound of the next viral video is another matter.

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Criterion Capital admits issues with safety checks on its tenants’ properties

One of London’s biggest landlords has acknowledged problems with the electrical safety certificates it issued to its residential tenants… but only after Sadiq Khan, government ministers, and London councils called on them to answer questions first posed by London Centric a month ago.

Some residents in blocks owned by Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital were recently handed safety-critical electrical checks on their properties even though they had no recollection of an electrician ever visiting. We later discovered the company that supposedly signed the paperwork went out of business three years ago and was not registered with the required trade body at the time of the test.

Landlords are responsible for ensuring valid safety checks have been carried out and can be fined up to £40,000 per property, plus costs, if the local council chooses to pursue the case.

The apparently non-existent electrician who signed the safety checks gave their address on the paperwork as an empty shop unit in Greenwich. That supposed headquarters is located directly opposite the constituency office of housing minister Matthew Pennycook – the same man tasked by Keir Starmer with getting answers from Criterion about how it has been treating tenants.

London Centric first noticed the issue while touring flats with local councillor Stuart Neaverson, as Criterion tenants facing a “mass eviction” repeatedly raised questions about the legitimacy of the safety checks on their buildings. As we pieced it together, we realised that flat after flat, in different Criterion-owned buildings across London, had all been issued with identical safety paperwork that bore no relation to their actual home.

After four weeks of asking questions, Criterion has responded to us. The company says it has fallen victim to a rogue electrician: “We take the safety of our residents extremely seriously and have robust processes in place to ensure compliance with all electrical safety requirements. Criterion contracted a third-party contractor to carry out electrical inspections and issue EICRs across a number of properties, in accordance with its obligations as a landlord. However, we recently became aware that in a small number of cases, the certificates were not issued in accordance with the standards we demand and expect.

“As a result, we acted immediately to terminate our relationship with the third party contractor, and commenced a programme of re-inspections across the relevant properties using a new firm of independently verified and accredited contractors. This process is complete, and all affected properties have valid EICRs, with no electrical safety issues identified.

“At no point would we ever compromise on resident safety. We expect the highest standards from our third party suppliers and will act swiftly and decisively when services are not up to standard, as any responsible landlord should.”

Enforcing whether landlords actually carry out checks is up to local councils who, in many cases, seem to take a hands-off approach following years of funding cuts. But following our questions both Merton and Croydon councils, as well as the operators of the relevant electricians’ professional register, have taken an interest. Merton council told us: “We are deeply concerned about allegations around the Electrical Safety Installation Certificates (EICR) at Criterion Capital properties. We have been investigating the allegations, including contacting partner organisations to review all information available to us.”

London Centric asked Criterion whether its statement means it acknowledges issuing fake safety paperwork to its tenants – and whether it would therefore be self-reporting itself to Merton and Croydon council for a possible breach of its legal obligations as a landlord.

The company responded: “As you know, that is not at all what we have written and is patently untrue and misleading. Any attempt to characterise the matter in this way, despite the facts we have presented to you, would be a very clear breach of your journalistic and legal obligations.”

Last week London Centric linked to an article in Vittles about a number of restaurant operators in Brixton who are set to be evicted from a shop facing redevelopment. We summarised the publication’s findings and stated that while it was hard to trace the ownership of the building, the landlord “appears to have links to… the family of Asif Aziz, the boss of Criterion Capital”.

Criterion Capital has since confirmed to us that the family member linked to the Brixton property’s owner is a “very distant cousin” of Asif Aziz. The company said that therefore it would be wrong to imply either Aziz or Criterion Capital had a financial interest in the building or responsibility for its management. We’re happy to make that clear.

Preposterous property of the week

Ever wanted to eat, relax, and watch TV in the nave of a chapel? Well, you too could luxuriate in the cavernous surroundings of “The Chapel at Rosary Manor” in Mill Hill on the northern edge of London… as long as you’re happy to wait for a 12-month reconstruction job to complete.

The former convent school was run by the Sisters of Charity St Vincent between 1887 and 2007 and most of the site has already been converted into apartments. But the chapel remains unfinished, with it now being marketed as a four-bed work-in-progress complete with a cinema room and gym. Yours for £3.95m.

Goodbye American Candy Store, Hello Gulf Candy Store

Since the pandemic, central London has seen a vast influx of garish “American candy shops” selling overpriced sweets to passing tourists, with shops decked out in replicas of the Statue of Liberty and other US-branded tat.

But is there a new global hegemon in town? One sweet shop on Oxford Street, close to Marble Arch, has rebranded to carry a “Gulf Candy” sign in its window.

Dr Nayana Prakash, a tech and geopolitical researcher who first alerted London Centric to the name change, said: “I think it’s very funny to see how American soft power might be shifting and associations with American candy may not be as glamorous as they once were.”

When London Centric visited the shop to find out if the sign was a reflection of shifting tourist demographics, the ongoing realignment of global power, or a reflection of the West’s growing interest in Middle Eastern flavours after the Dubai chocolate viral phenomenon, management refused to give us a comment. The stock, with brands like Cheetos, Oreos, and Hershey’s, was distinctly American. After we attempted to obtain details of the store’s parent company and registered operator, our reporter was asked to leave the shop.

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Scroll down to read that parable of the capital’s baffling housing market, or first read on for a series of quick updates on what’s going on in London.

The Morgan McSweeney phone theft complex

Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s former chief of staff, has been in the national news this week after claiming he’s lost the WhatsApp messages he exchanged with disgraced former ambassador Peter Mandelson. The reason? His work phone was snatched by a thief on a bicycle last October on Belgrave Road near Victoria station.

The Met Police initially closed the case without investigating the theft, even though the phone in question was being used to run most of the government.

Depending on your level of cynicism, the loss of the phone is either a convenient incident – or admirable proof that the Met’s failure to investigate phone thefts is a universal policy that does not discriminate. (The police have since huffily released a transcript of the 999 call made by McSweeney and pointed out that he didn’t mention that he was the prime minister’s chief of staff).

Luckily, London Centric has been working on a forthcoming story about phone theft in the capital, which includes police data obtained by former Lib Dem mayoral candidate Rob Blackie.

McSweeney’s phone was stolen in what is known, in Met Police terms, as the “Central West” policing zone. In October last year there were 1,341 people, including McSweeney, who reported the theft of a phone in that area. How many of them have so far seen a “positive outcome”, such as a thief being found and held responsible? According to Blackie’s data, it’s a sum total of… two. Most of the other devices are likely to be on their way to a market in China or Algeria.

Don’t expect to see those WhatsApps any time soon.

All roads lead to…

We were intrigued to read in Vittles, London’s leading in-the-know restaurant publication / investigative food outlet, a story about the eviction of restaurants from Brixton Plaza in south London. In some senses it’s another London tale about traders who built a community on a site awaiting redevelopment – and are now preparing to see that destroyed for something blander. What caught our eye was the name of the landlord. While it’s difficult to trace through a web of legal entities, the company responsible appears to have links to… the family of Asif Aziz, the boss of Criterion Capital.

Talking of which, our reporting on Criterion Capital’s mass evictions of residential tenants has reached the Guardian, where Peter Walker got hold of a letter sent by housing minister Matthew Pennycook to the company.

In response, Criterion told the newspaper that the use of the term “mass evictions” by the media to describe its attempts to remove hundreds of private rental tenants from their homes has caused “unnecessary alarm to tenants”.

The company spokesperson also said a third of the affected tenants have already left without anyone having to resort to legal proceedings: “These were tenant-led decisions and we have supported them – they were not evictions.”

PS There’s going to be competition for the tax-evading Harry Potter shops of central London, after Warner Bros announced that an official wizard store will open on Oxford Street in the autumn. Will this prompt them to take a look at how their merchandise is being sold in neighbouring shops?

When you’re tyred of London, you’re tired of Lime

Over the last few months we’ve had a steady stream of readers getting in touch to ask: Who keeps slashing the tyres on Lime bikes – and why?

Parts of London have been afflicted for months by outbreaks of mass deflation of the rental e-bikes. The damage doesn’t appear to be a product of regular wear and tear but instead punctures that are inflicted with purpose.

Lime previously told us they haven’t identified this as a trend. But early Sunday morning, it looked as though a culprit might finally have been identified in one small area. The police were called to Nevill Road in Stoke Newington following reports of a dog walker with a bladed object going around attacking Lime bike tyres.

“Residents have been baffled as to why there are so many Lime bikes with deflated tyres on our streets, and now we know why!” said a local resident who posted a picture of the supposed Lime bike slasher in a local Facebook group.

Yet despite arriving within four minutes of the initial call, no suspect was located. The police told London Centric that officers found “no damage to any bicycles” but said officers will pursue any viable lines of enquiry should further information come to light.

Do you know a Lime slasher? Do you have any intel on what’s going on? Get in touch.

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The council making Londoners homeless so it can house homeless Londoners

By Polly Smythe

In the final weeks before the government bans no-fault evictions, there have been high-profile examples of London’s private renters being ejected from their homes, most notably by Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital.

But in a dark twist, one London council is contributing to the problem by indirectly evicting dozens of longstanding residents from a block of flats so it can use their homes to house homeless Londoners from another part of the city.

Private renters in Garden Court, a collection of 32 flats overlooking the gates of Kew Gardens in south west London, were recently given two months’ notice to leave their homes. Their landlord has struck a £16m deal to sell the block of flats to Labour-run Westminster Council for use as temporary accommodation units – on the condition it was delivered without existing tenants.

One resident told London Centric that Richmond Council has now offered to house her “hundreds of miles away” from London, all so Westminster can use her existing flat to house their homeless residents.

“They don’t care about people like us,” she said of Westminster Council. “This will shorten my life, the anxiety and the hopelessness of it all.”

Other residents, such as Susu Myat, 57, and Justin King, 61, have been in their flat for 16 years. “Living around here, we’re all like a family. We take care of each other.”

Both had recently returned to university, but feared they’d have to give up their studies to focus on finding somewhere new to live. Myat, a gastroenterologist, is due to sit a specialist exam in the upcoming weeks. “My studies are not going anywhere. I can’t think about anything.”

Westminster’s Conservative opposition leader Paul Swaddle called it an “act of staggering hypocrisy” by his council’s existing Labour leadership: “There is no justification for throwing people, including elderly and vulnerable residents, out of their homes at two months' notice.”

It’s all part of the bizarre economics of temporary accommodation in London, where the legal duty of councils to house some homeless people has collided with the exploding cost of finding any temporary accommodation in the capital.

Whereas in the past councils would provide new social housing, now they’re panic buying existing blocks of flats.

Deputy leader of Richmond Council Jim Millard told London Centric that Westminster is creating “a revolving door of evictions” that pushes the problem of homelessness further out of the capital’s centre.

“What may well happen is that people who have been living at Garden Court for years will find themselves presenting as temporary accommodation to Richmond Council,” said the Liberal Democrat politician.

This is how, from Southwark to Lambeth, from Richmond to Brent, you might find your neighbouring block of flats being turned into temporary accommodation for the displaced residents of a different borough.

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Has one of the world’s most powerful companies managed to move on their unwanted vulpine houseguests before the £1bn building opens this summer?

Scroll down to read that. We’ll be back with more investigations later in the week.

Want to contact London Centric? Click here to get in touch.

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What happened to the tube strike?

Anyone hoping to give the new Lime bike model a test drive during the forthcoming tube strike might be disappointed to hear that the first round of industrial action has been called off by the RMT union and trains will be running as normal.

That doesn’t mean that the dispute is resolved. instead that the RMT will now enter into negotiations with London Underground management.

The dispute rests on what kind of four-day working week is acceptable to London’s tube drivers. Members of the Aslef union are in favour of TfL’s proposal. But the RMT is adopting a more radical position and fighting the current TfL offer of a 35-hour four-day week. They are instead calling for a maximum of 32 hours’ work.

An RMT spokesperson told London Centric that London Underground management had committed to exploring “several new ideas presented by the union regarding how a four-day week could be delivered”. The union had also committed to responding to the new ideas ahead of further planned strike days in April.

There’s more here on the dispute between the two unions if you want the background.

Just a Standard night out

Lord Lebedev, the owner of the London Standard, made the headlines for two reasons over the weekend. First, he was named by the Guardian’s Peter Walker as the peer with the joint lowest attendance record in the House of Lords. Second, he pushed ahead with hosting the annual Standard Theatre Awards, even while staff at his news outlet desperately try to get answers from him about the future of their jobs.

In previous years the theatre awards have taken place at a central London venue. This time the awards were held at Lebedev’s personal residence of Stud House in Hampton Court Park. This resulted in the sight of actors Cate Blanchett and Rachel Zegler posing with the peer in front of one of Lebedev’s fireplaces, rather than on a red carpet outside a central London hotel.

The event has raised questions among exasperated Standard staff who are desperate for Lebedev to give his news business a bit of attention. Earlier this year he announced that most of the Standard would merge with the Independent, a decision that was accompanied by the departure of both the Standard’s acting editor and its chief executive. Since then the remaining journalists’ lives have been in limbo while waiting for voluntary redundancy payments to be signed off, as deadlines for the merger have come and gone.

Which is why it was a bit strange for Lebedev’s journalistic staff to read his praise for all the hard work that goes on behind the scenes to keep London’s theatres on the go – while they’re still left hanging.

Preposterous property of the week

The Theosophical Society has operated out of this handsome townhouse in Marylebone, holding regular public lectures on the “unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man.” Derived from the Greek for “divine wisdom,” the philosophical movement began in 1875 as a way to bring Eastern spiritual practices to the West. Such was the movement’s popularity it was able to afford this enormous property during the 1930s.

The Society is now looking to sell its London headquarters, with the five-storey building on the market for £7,000,000. While New Age in practice, the property is definitely old in decor. Given the need for modernisation, a touch of clairvoyance might come in handy when realising the property’s potential.

Summer festival legal season is upon us

Londoners feeling the sun on their faces can mean only one thing: festival discourse is nearly upon us. Last summer was dominated by a fierce debate about who the city’s public spaces are for, with the Battle for Brockwell Park setting a legal precedent that will force many festival organisers to apply for full planning permission.

The discussion rages on in north London, where 11 Green Party candidates have called on Haringey Council to postpone its decision to approve five more years of private events in Finsbury Park. The Greens argue that the council conducted a “fundamentally flawed” consultation by failing to notify all 38 stakeholder groups about its proposed deal with Live Nation, the company behind Wireless Festival and Krankbrother raves.

But the council maintains that a system error meant only two groups weren’t notified of the proposal in the usual way, and that it has now reached out to both of them to hear their views. Other battles are underway elsewhere in London, with Gunnersbury Park in west London another flashpoint over for-profit festivals in parks, while parts of Victoria Park in east London could be out of use for up to 75 days every summer.

Hunting Google’s foxes: Where did the animals end up?

Last summer London Centric brought you the news that the roof garden on Google’s new £1bn London headquarters had been overrun with urban foxes.

Our story was covered around the world. American readers were particularly intrigued to discover the important cultural role of the urban fox in London life. The Guardian received substantial pushback from pro-fox activist readers who objected to the newspaper’s description of the animals as “pests” when they are legally classified as wild animals. (It’s the same reason that your local council’s pest control unit will not intervene if you find yourself kept awake by mating foxes. Vermin is not just in the eye of the beholder, it is a legal status.)

The company may be one of the most powerful businesses in the known world but even the pioneers of artificial intelligence are no match for London’s foxes which, as we’ve previously reported, are developing bigger brains than their rural cousins after feasting on the capital’s bins.

Since then we’ve received occasional vulpine updates from friendly London Centric readers who work at Google. There was, we were told last year, a disproportionate amount of senior staff time spent working out how to respond to the fox infestation story – and also, according to one source, on how to “humanely” remove the animals from the site.

“Nobody thinks about pests until they have them”

Google’s problem was that some of the companies that specialise in fox removal carry out their task with a gun. Yet no one at the company wanted headlines about a Google-induced fox bloodbath on an impromptu rooftop firing range in the middle of London.

In any case, as Google’s Gemini AI would put it:

Mario Stanchev, a senior pest controller at environmental pest control company Archers, told London Centric that the problem of the Google foxes “should have been predicted before the building was even designed by an architect – but nobody thinks about pests until they have them, especially with foxes.”

For any building already filled with the creatures, one option is to attempt to dislodge them in between their breeding seasons, so as to prevent successive generations of foxes denning in the building. That normally entails locating exactly how the foxes are gaining entry into a building before blocking the entrance off, or working out what their food source is and restricting access to it.

“Foxes are the same as us,” he said. “They would rather create a den near a grocery store, or a Tesco. The longer distance they travel, the bigger risk to their survival.”

Stanchev said many people think of pest controllers as “murderers” but for the most part the profession was made up of “very soft people with a big heart for animals”. As such, pest controllers will do “as much as possible” to humanely deal with fox infestations. But, if all attempts are exhausted without any success, they will resort to culling.

“Foxes are not protected as a lot of people think they are,” he said, explaining that it’s legal to kill foxes using a particular set of methods, which include shooting. “If a fox has to be culled, we pick a way where it won’t suffer.”

While smaller animals such as pigeons can be dispatched with an air rifle, foxes need to be shot with a more substantial firearm due to their size.

“That can be a bit of an issue legally,” he said. “Anyone who’s dealt with firearms knows that getting a rifle to shoot something in London is a big problem. Shooting a shotgun is very loud.”

Heatherwick, it’s me, the foxy

In any case, there was precedent for bad publicity around fox death. The last time one of the animals was killed by a prominent public figure, it involved a top barrister and made several national newspaper front pages.

Google’s AI services also offered advice to the building’s designer, Thomas Heatherwick, who also designed the New Routemaster and the 2012 Olympic cauldron.

Gemini warned Heatherwick that prevention is the best approach in future:

Pro Tip: Foxes love the “wild” aesthetic of modern London roof gardens. Keeping your garden tidy and reducing dense cover makes it feel less like a safe sanctuary.

“Where is it going to sleep?”

The fox trail went dead for a while. Then, earlier this year we were again contacted by Google employees who claimed to have heard the animals were on the move. One staffer claimed the gossip within the company was that, like many tech workers who have made their money in London, the foxes had relocated to the Cotswolds.

When we put the claim to Google, a spokesperson denied they had been relocated to rural Oxfordshire but offered no further details on their fate.

In any case, pest controller Stanchev warned that foxes might not survive a relocation: “The fox might arrive alive to the destination. But what about all the other issues? How will the fox provide itself with food or water, or where is it going to sleep? He wouldn’t know how to provide for himself, and would die in a much more horrible way, by starvation or dehydration.”

When we recently visited Google’s HQ, the people putting the finishing touches to the building were very aware of the foxes. Four of the workers we met by the site exit said they hadn’t seen the animals recently, suggesting a move may have already taken place – although one construction worker claimed he’d recently encountered some fox excrement on the roof.

Ultimately, it’s only a few weeks until thousands of staff start moving into the building, now rechristened Platform 37, which will initially be home to employees working on Google’s DeepMind AI project.

Right now it’s not clear where the foxes have ended up and whether they will be there to greet the Google employees. Sometimes you have to choose to believe in the legend. On this occasion, it would be nice to imagine the pampered foxes are hanging out in the Cotswolds at Soho Farmhouse with Jeremy Clarkson and the Brooklyn-less Beckhams. If any London Centric readers know otherwise, please do get in touch.

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I’d been working on a story about how the company is bringing a safer bike design to London’s streets in the coming weeks – but this morning the company just went ahead and publicly announced it.

So here’s a short midweek update on what you need to know before hopping on an e-bike this summer – plus London Centric talks to Angela Rayner, the favourite to be the next prime minister, on why she is criticising London landlord Asif Aziz.

An end to Lime bike leg?

In early 2025 the London Centric inbox was flooded with X-rays of shattered legs from members of the public who’d suffered severe injuries while riding a Lime bike.

What initially appeared to be a series of unfortunate accidents began to reveal a pattern as our investigation pieced it together. Many of the Lime customers claimed that the company’s ubiquitous Gen 4 bicycle had a design flaw: the heavy metal bar at the centre of the bike that, when someone fell sideways, would focus all of the vehicle’s 35kg weight on a single location on their leg as it pressed against the tarmac.

This thesis was backed by Mr Jaison Patel, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon who treated some of the victims. He was critical of Lime’s bike design: “It ends up creating a pivot point. You’re causing a bend in the bone with the heavy force.” We reported that doctors had started dubbing it “Lime bike leg” and the national media picked up the term. The issue was raised in the House of Lords and transport ministers said they had been reading our coverage.

Now, it seems Lime might have a solution. They’re bringing an entirely new type of rental e-bike to London’s streets from next month, with smaller wheels and the middle bar removed.

The company began trialling the new bike design in Paris and other cities around the world last year, with London Centric readers on their holidays regularly sending in updates. Officially, the company has not linked it to safety concerns. Yet the feedback we’ve received from readers who’ve tried it is that they feel much more stable on the new version of the bike.

“The big improvement is that the battery is moved behind the seatpost and so the downtube wouldn’t put so much pressure on the legs in a crash.”

Another reader said:

“Still seemed super heavy but the battery has been moved - now under the seat, so centre of gravity presumably changed.”

Lime is only going to be introducing a few thousand of the new bikes in the UK at first, running as a parallel fleet to its existing model while the transition is made. But the company has been emphasising the new bike’s “low step-through frame for stability and accessibility” and potential appeal to both women and older riders.

Lime’s approach to growing as fast as possible ahead of a planned stock market listing has transformed cycling in London, getting hundreds of thousands of people onto bikes for the first time and opening up parts of the city. It’s also seen the company accused of ignoring local concerns, swamping markets and cutting corners in the dash for growth. Aside from the design of the bikes, keeping them maintained is a major challenge – with safety-critical parts often missing.

Cycling is far safer and healthier than driving but there have been lingering concerns about the choices made by an unregulated private transport company. As things stand Lime is not accountable to any external checks when it comes to the safety of its vehicles or their maintenance regime. Lime has already defended its safety record, even as it faces an ever-growing number of lawsuits over shattered bones.

The company has established itself as the dominant player in London e-bikes and has recently looked to cement this by launching a £6.99 a month subscription option that offers unlimited rides of up to 20 minutes for a flat £1.70, below the price of a London bus fare.

Central government is expected to eventually give London-wide power to regulate rental e-bikes to Transport for London but that’s a couple of years away. This is creating a battle to grab as much market share as possible before the regulations come in, with Lime, Forest, and Voi battling each other for the right to operate in each London borough. At the moment we know so little about how Lime operate that we don’t even know how many bikes they have.

Some of the people we interviewed for our original investigation have never truly been able to return to work and are facing a lifetime with limbs propped up with metal plates. Many of the people with life-changing injuries are still hoping for payouts from the company. If the new design starts to dominate, it might free up space in the capital’s A&E wards.

Editor’s note: Lime invited some media outlets to a launch event for the new bike on Tuesday night, where they were able to put questions to the company’s executives. Lime did not invite anyone from this publication.

If you have intel on Lime’s lobbying activities with local councils and central government, we’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch in confidence.

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Angela Rayner brands Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital “incredibly vindictive” over mass evictions

On Tuesday former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner visited Croydon to meet some of the hundreds of residents facing eviction from their homes at the hands of Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital.

She joined Croydon Labour mayoral candidate Rowenna Davis to brand Aziz’s company “disgusting and disgraceful” and said Criterion “should not be landlords” due to the “incredibly vindictive” way they treat tenants.

Criterion has issued hundreds of no-fault eviction notices to private tenants ahead of the Renters’ Rights Act, as first revealed by London Centric, with the apparent intention of replacing them with more profitable temporary accommodation units.

“I don’t care that this landlord’s nose is being put out”

Rayner met some of those losing their homes at a surgery hosted by local MP Sarah Jones. Speaking outside, she said: “There’s a lady in there crying in front of a young child, worried about what’s going to happen to her future. Somebody on a spreadsheet has decided ‘we don’t want you anymore’. This is their home.”

She said she had little time for Asif Aziz’s insistence that Criterion is acting within the letter of the law and that media coverage is unfair: “I don’t care that this landlord’s nose is being put out. I hope he sees the work being done to highlight this case. You should shine a light on it and let people make their own minds up on whether it’s acceptable to do what they’ve done to these people.”

Rayner added: “These people should not be landlords. They should have no place in providing homes, because the way they’ve treated the people here is disgusting and disgraceful.”

“There are some really good landlords that provide homes for people.... People shouldn’t be seen as an asset where a landlord can, on a whim of a pen, evict you to put somebody else in because they can make more profit.

Rayner is the bookmakers’ favourite to replace Keir Starmer as prime minister, despite resigning from the cabinet last autumn after she was found to have underpaid stamp duty on the purchase of a flat. She’s currently awaiting the outcome of an HMRC investigation into her tax affairs but is on the comeback trail, this week declaring that Starmer is “running out of time” to turn around his government and avoid being seen as the party of the establishment.

“I say to that billionaire, would you want your family to be treated like that?”

Rayner made the comments while meeting residents of the Delta Point building at a drop-in eviction clinic hosted by Croydon West MP Sarah Jones, where lawyers were on hand to assist with their fight against Criterion.

Labour’s Croydon mayoral candidate Rowenna Davis said that if elected she would work with other councils to block the use of Aziz’s companies for housing if they didn’t improve: “If you can up your standards, we will keep you. If you can’t, I will work collectively across other councils to say you can’t be doing this.”

Rayner said she’d been shocked by some of the stories she’d heard about Criterion, which is facing claims it faked electrical safety certificates: “People are too frightened even to raise legitimate concerns around safety and standards because they think they'll get evicted”

She posed a question directly to Aziz: “I say to that billionaire, would you want your family to be treated like that? I bet you’d lawyer up. And I bet you’d do everything in your power to protect your loved ones... These people do not have the resources to be able to do that, and that’s why the state should be there for them.”

“People need to feel that somebody is on their side and standing up for them. That's why I've come down today: to say that landlord's behaviour is completely unacceptable.”

Mudchute city limits

Good news from east London – Mudchute Park and Farm in the Isle of Dogs, which offers the chance to look at animals in the shadow of Canary Wharf, has secured its future.

As we previously reported, the charity that runs the city farm had been in dispute with Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman over a new lease for the site. But now a deal has been reached for a new lease on a higher rent, subject to approval at next week’s full council meeting. If you’ve never been, it’s well worth a celebratory trip down the DLR to look at the llamas, sheep, and pigs going about their business next to giant skyscrapers.

PS. The government has launched its local news strategy, which aims to ensure there is a future for regional journalism. The document highlights four examples of the importance of local journalism across the UK when it comes to “shining light on wrongdoing and the misuse of power”. One of them is London Centric’s ongoing investigation into high-street tax evasion. Thanks to all the subscribers who enable us to carry out this work!

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Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh, a longstanding critic of the billionaire landlord, raised the issue with Keir Starmer in a packed House of Commons.

The Mitcham and Morden MP said:

“Silently and in semi-secrecy, London and the south east of England are experiencing the largest mass eviction by a private landlord in decades. Criterion Capital have issued at least 130 no fault evictions across their portfolio including in Britannia Point in Colliers Wood in my constituency. Those affected have done nothing wrong. They have paid their rent, looked after their homes and worked hard. They are simply victims of a voracious landlord who always wants more. Will the prime minister ensure that in the final weeks before the abolition of no fault evictions his government do all they can to hold Criterion Capital to account?”

In response, the prime minister said he would “condemn any unfair evictions” and asked the housing minister to look into Criterion Capital: “Renters should have security… I’m proud to be abolishing section 21, a practice that’s pushed thousands of renters into homelessness.”

With many people in authority from the prime minister downwards now concerned about Criterion’s attempted “Azizification” of the London housing market, will the landlord cave under the pressure? Possibly.

“Concern or uncertainty”

On Friday, after the prime minister’s comments, London Centric learned that Criterion has sent a strange letter to hundreds of tenants who were told they were losing their homes.

In it, the company blamed “media reports” for creating “concern or uncertainty” over whether the tenants will have a place to live. The note denied that issuing a section 21 notice – commonly known as “no-fault eviction” – necessarily meant there had ever been an intent to evict the tenants. Instead, Criterion said that anyone who wishes to stay in their current home should give their lettings team a call and discuss the options available to them.

Many of these residents are sceptical that this is a genuine U-turn. They have been stung before, especially after London Centric’s initial reporting prompted a bizarre incident where tenants were verbally told door-to-door their evictions would be cancelled if they recorded a video message. It’s also only two weeks since Aziz paid lawyers at Carter-Ruck to tell London Centric it is libellous to suggest the evictions would ever be paused. Residents who no longer trust the company and want to move elsewhere have been unable to get references for their new properties.

In any case, Criterion’s actions have created substantial awareness at the top levels of government and among the general public about London Centric’s 18 months of reporting on the Aziz family’s business activities.

From hosting tax-evading Harry Potter gift shops and candy stores in their central London buildings, to undermining the capital’s cinemas, to threatening hundreds of tenants with eviction, broader questions remain: How did Asif Aziz come to dominate so many aspects of life in the capital with barely anyone noticing? And how did he amass the funds to do so in just a couple of decades?

PS. It’s almost three weeks since we put a simple question to Aziz’s Criterion Capital: Have you been issuing fake electrical safety certificates to your tenants, which can result in a fine of up to £40,000 per property? They’ve still not replied. We’re going to keep putting this question to one of London’s biggest landlords until they feel able to give an answer.

PPS. Thanks to the many Criterion Capital employees who have got in touch to share information about the company’s inner workings. It’s enormously helpful to our forthcoming investigations. If you have any relevant information please do get in touch. Anonymity is guaranteed.

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So, how would the mayor tax large SUVs?

This week, Transport for London released an update on the mayor’s Vision Zero plan to eliminate all deaths and serious injuries from London’s roads by 2041. While the document itself contains a long list of ways to make London’s roads safer (scroll down to read that) the mayor’s team chose to push a particular aspect of it: the potential introduction of a charge on the owners of large cars such as Range Rovers and other SUVs.

The argument goes that larger and heavier cars are simply too wide for London’s parking spaces and too big for its roads. They’re more likely to cause serious injuries or death, with the occupants of the car safer but pedestrians or cyclists in a much worse position.

SUVs are also rapidly growing in popularity, now accounting for two thirds of new car sales in the UK.

But how would an SUV tax actually work?

One problem is that “SUV” – which stands for sports utility vehicle – is more of a marketing term than a set of explicit criteria. TfL would first have to decide exactly which cars would be impacted by a charge. If London defined which size of vehicle counts as an SUV, then that would become the de facto national standard, which could incentivise manufacturers to design vehicles that stay below that level.

Oliver Lord, of campaigning organisation Clean Cities, said that such measures are usually enforced by taking into account either a car’s physical size or its weight. He said the rapidly increasing height of cars on London’s roads is a “major cause for concern when it comes to visibility of children, and hitting people in their vital organs”.

Reducing SUV use shouldn’t be done by purely punitive measures, he said. It’s also about providing alternatives for people, particularly after the departure of car-sharing company Zipcar from London: “TfL could be doing a lot more to point out that there are alternatives to buying huge cars.”

What are other cities doing?

Similar SUV taxes are usually achieved by charging more for parking. In Paris, fees for parking heavy cars have been tripled. In Cardiff a similar system is being introduced based on a car’s weight, while Bath is looking to charge more for parking based on vehicle size.

But the mayor and Transport for London don’t have London-wide control over parking, which tends to be devolved to the 33 local authorities. (Haringey council has already introduced a small surcharge on cars over four metres in length.)

Instead, this suggests any London-wide system would have to be enforced using TfL’s existing ULEZ and Congestion Charge cameras – if they’ve not been blown up. This system already works to enforce new safety standards on lorries entering Greater London.

What about just taxing all cars?

Fundamentally there’s a political tension at the heart of all of the mayor’s Vision Zero work. As TfL itself puts it in the report, cutting private car usage is “one of the most effective ways to cut road danger”. And the fastest way to reduce private car use is to make it more expensive and annoying to drive a car. Understandably, people who rely on their car or feel they don’t have suitable public transport alternatives, especially in outer London, don’t like the idea of having to pay more for something they see as a necessity.

As London Centric previously revealed, TfL had developed detailed plans to introduce per-mile road charging in London. But these were scrapped ahead of the 2024 mayoral election, amid fears that the policy could hit both Sadiq Khan’s re-election campaign and Labour’s national election campaign. Since then private car usage has continued to creep up in London, in direct contravention of the mayor’s objectives.

What else does the mayor’s Vision Zero report propose?

The report makes 43 commitments to reducing risks on the road, including:

• Making 20mph the default maximum speed in London

• More enforcement against illegal number plates by targeting the use of ghost and cloned plates

• Making it easier for the public to report dangerous driving using footage from dashcams and helmet cameras

• Installing 1,000 new zebra and signal-controlled pedestrian crossings

• Tackling the use of unsafe and non-road-legal e-bikes and e-motorcycles.

• Focusing on making high streets safer, as they are where 46 per cent of all deaths and serious injuries in London occur

Londonmaxxed out

One of the strangest things about the decay of old social media platforms, especially X – the site formerly known as Twitter – is how a trend can feel ubiquitous to users of one platform without it ever reaching the rest of the population.

Which is what happened with “Londonmaxxing”, a nebulous term that began to be used ten days ago by a group of young tech workers who were seemingly motivated by a) genuine enthusiasm about the capital’s economic prospects especially around investment in artificial intelligence, b) their enjoyment of living in a big city that, unlike Dubai, isn’t arresting Londoners for posting about drone attacks, c) both.

“Londonmaxxing” briefly went viral on Elon Musk’s social media platform, prompting Sadiq Khan to change his X bio to include the term, as part of his pitch to convince AI companies such as Anthropic to move more staff to the capital.

Anuj Mishra of City University tracked down Charlie Ward, the boss of a co-working space, who is credited with coming up with the term. He said: “People like Londonmaxxing because there’s a lot of people who actually really love living here and who see a lot of potential here. It’s definitely a reaction to the negativity.”

Within a week – according to Google search traffic – the term Londonmaxxing appears to have died. But the moment reveals a strange story: X and many other platforms have become overwhelmed with videos portraying London as being in a state of complete collapse. As a result, anyone trying to be remotely positive about the city has to come up with a whole new term if they want to cut through the negativity and express a mildly positive opinion about the capital on the platform.

“Car is a necessity not a luxury”: How Newham’s election is being fought on the right to drive

While Sadiq Khan is threatening to tax SUVs, elsewhere in London low-traffic neighbourhoods and pedestrianisation are a key battleground for May’s borough-level elections. In January, the court of appeal ruled that Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman had acted unlawfully in carrying out his election-winning pledge to remove LTNs. In Croydon, it was ruled several LTNs were illegal because they had been introduced to raise money.

Now, the future of a key climate policy in the east London borough of Newham looks uncertain, with both Labour and its main challenger outbidding each other with pledges to make it cheaper to park a car in the borough.

Back in 2019, the local Labour leadership declared a climate emergency in the borough, introducing an emissions-based parking permit system whereby higher polluting vehicles pay more but electric vehicles get a permit for free.

Now, this is almost certain to change.

Mehmood Mirza, the Newham Independents’ mayoral candidate, initially targeted Labour over its policies on the war in Gaza but has now branched out into maintaining weekly bin collections, providing plentiful free parking, and build a new multi-storey car park in Forest Gate.

He’s promised to not only scrap the first car charges, but offer two hours free parking for residents, cancel all proposed LTNs and “properly consult” on the existing ones, and build a multi-storey car park for 100s of cars.

“Car is a necessity not a luxury,” he said in his leaflets.

In response, Labour’s mayoral candidate Forhad Hussain has now also pledged to reverse his own party’s emissions-based permit system if he wins election. This means giving the first car permit for free, as well as providing one hour of free parking across the borough.

Newham’s Green Party mayoral candidate Areeq Chowdhury, who defected from Labour, told London Centric that “abolishing car parking charges will cost the council millions of pounds” and take away funding from services such as youth centres and housing repairs. Yet even the Greens have pledged to review emissions-based permits, with the possibility of instead moving to a weight-based car parking system.

Labour has dominated Newham for years and during the 2010s held every seat on the council under former leader Robin Wales. Now the party’s support is fragmenting, with Wales joining Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and the Newham Independents and Greens picking up votes. If control of the council does switch in May, there’ll be a lot written about the big factors at play – but parking charges might be just as important.

Big scoops elsewhere

Sometimes in journalism you get scooped and miss out on an exclusive story. And sometimes you get scooped on a story about ice cream. Which is why we’ve got to give a nod to Andy Silvester at The Times for being first to highlight the toxic Magnum odour pumped into the pedestrian tunnels at King’s Cross St Pancras tube station.

We also have to recognise the valiant work of Robert Smith of the Financial Times, who has attempted to explain a wildly complicated British business scandal that is costing Wall Street banks billions of pounds by tracking down its connection to a greasy spoon cafe in Edgware.

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Today – we go hunting for an Iranian banker’s London home, find the thinnest house in east London, and look at where Zack Polanski could stand for election.

The RMT wants a four-day working week on the London Underground – but not that four-day working week

Tube drivers belonging to the RMT union have confirmed plans for 12 days of strikes running from the end of this month through to May.

This might be confusing for anyone who remembers autumn’s tube strikes, which ended with a pay deal that was heralded in some media outlets as ending disruption for three years.

London Centric reporter Polly Smythe was ahead of the curve on this one, explaining back in November that the two biggest tube driver unions are deeply divided on plans for a four-day working week and nothing was really settled.

Mention the words “union” and “tube” to most Londoners, and they’ll likely think of the RMT. But the underground has nuanced politics when it comes to unions. The RMT, which is traditionally more militant, represents all categories of workers, whereas rival union Aslef represents only tube drivers.

Both unions compete for drivers who pay union membership fees, with Aslef having slightly more drivers than the RMT.

The dispute at the heart of the forthcoming strike is the arrival of the four-day working week on the London Underground. Last April, TfL presented a proposal for a 35-hour four-day week to the capital's 3,500 tube drivers, which would be achieved by compressing hours and paying drivers for their meal break for the first time.

Aslef welcomed the plans as a "once in a generation opportunity" for its members to have a day off every week. But the proposal was rejected by the RMT, which argued that the change needs to be accompanied by a shorter working day.

RMT general secretary Eddie Dempsey said TfL’s plan raises “serious concerns around fatigue, safety and work-life balance,” with the union asking for drivers to work a maximum of 32 hours a week.

This was dismissed by Aslef. Its regional organiser Finn Brennan publicly criticised the RMT’s decision to strike: “It will be the first time in the history of the trade union movement that a union has voted to strike against a shorter week and fewer days at work.”

The RMT hit back at Aslef, with a source at the union telling London Centric: “This scheme is being imposed without agreement with RMT members. [London Underground] bosses want a blank cheque to be able to extend maximum driving time, push drivers to work more intensively throughout the day, start earlier and finish later, with the ability to change drivers’ shifts at just one day’s notice and curtail drivers’ ability to transfer between depots. It’s for these reasons a majority of drivers on [London Underground] oppose this change.”

TfL is now trying to implement its proposal on a voluntary basis, starting with the Bakerloo line. This will see the introduction of two parallel rotas for drivers depending on which working pattern they prefer.

As things stand, tube drivers who are members of the RMT are due to go on strike for 24 hours on six separate occasions, spread across 12 days in order to maximise the impact:

• 24–25 March (12:00pm Tuesday to 11:59am Wednesday)

• 26–27 March (12:00pm Thursday to 11:59am Friday)

• 21–22 April (12:00pm Tuesday to 11:59am Wednesday)

• 23–24 April (12:00pm Thursday to 11:59am Friday)

• 19–20 May (12:00pm Tuesday to 11:59am Wednesday)

• 21–22 May (12:00pm Thursday to 11:59am Friday)

Disruption is likely to be more limited than in the autumn, with RMT members in other London Underground roles, such as station staff, not on strike. Aslef drivers will also be available to run some services. The ability of London Underground unions to bring the capital to a halt has also been limited by the growth of the separate London Overground and Elizabeth line services – plus the Lime bike.

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Preposterous property of the week

Ever wondered what a Victorian townhouse on Ozempic would look like? Well, wonder no longer. This skinny house in east London offers the prospective buyer 26 square metres on each of its three floors, along with a roof terrace.

What the property lacks in space on each floor it makes up for in height, with high ceilings, “expansive” sash windows, and a private roof terrace overlooking Mile End park. The estate agent’s turn of phrase describes the house as being both “spacious and intimate.” Yours for £850,000.

Hunting for the Iranian banker’s London home – and the Crown Estate connection

Over the last few months London Centric has been working with the financial analyst Duncan Stewart to trace the assets of the Iranian elite in London.

One of our main people of interest is Ali Ansari, an Iranian banker who is close to the country’s leadership and was sanctioned by the UK government for funding Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. In addition to developing the world’s biggest shopping mall in Tehran, he’s the owner of two opulent flats that cost a combined £35.75m on a side-street on the edge of Hyde Park.

We first visited the Palace Green apartments in January, passing security guards, the Israeli embassy, and a 15-bedroom mansion owned by former Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich on our way to the front door. Paperwork suggested that Ansari had based one of his overseas companies at the address but it was hard to prove he had actively used the property.

But sometimes, if you ask a direct question, you get a direct answer. The concierge at Palace Green freely confirmed to London Centric that Ansari still owned both the properties but that the Iranian hadn’t been seen for two years. The building employee promised to do his best to pass on London Centric’s business card to the banker. We never heard back.

What we did notice was that the freehold of the building is ultimately owned by the Crown Estate, suggesting that some modest ground rent payments have been travelling from the Iranian businessman to the organisation that holds the King’s land on behalf of the government. The Crown Estate did not respond to a request for comment on whether this has now stopped.

Ansari came to the government’s attention in October 2025 after an article in Private Eye used Iranian court records to tie the banker to the ownership of a portfolio of derelict properties on Bishops Avenue in north London. Ansari was sanctioned a few days later, with ministers arguing that Ansari has been funding Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Ultimately, we were beaten to publication on Ansari’s property empire by Bloomberg News. They went further and claimed that Ansari really bought the flats on behalf of Mojtaba Khamenei, who was elected as Iran’s new supreme leader this week following the assassination of his father. We haven’t been able to establish that element of the story. Ansari’s lawyer has rejected the idea that the banker has “any financial relationship with Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” or the new supreme leader of Iran.

What is certain is there are now two vast, seemingly unused flats in central London – and another example of how behind the capital’s high-end property purchases, there’s often a story of global intrigue.

London’s first public drug-testing units to open – with club drugs also covered

London is getting its first regular public drugs testing services, with two new drop-in harm reduction centres launching in Hackney and Camden.

The sites, run by drug-testing charity The Loop, will provide tailored health advice, quick chemical analysis of drugs, as well as collect information about dosages or contaminated batches that can be shared with communities.

The charity said the new testing sites, which will initially be pop-ups that open for one day a month, are particularly important given drug-related deaths are at an all-time high in the UK. This is driven by the emerging prevalence of synthetic opioids, which are far stronger than heroin, posing a particular risk to drug takers.

Although the system is aimed at dependent drug users, people will be able to take drugs associated with recreational use such as cocaine and MDMA for testing. The Loop told London Centric that it encourages “people who take drugs, of all types, to visit our services to find out more, possibly surrender a substance, and access harm reduction advice”. The sites are licensed by the Home Office and supported by the Metropolitan police.

For the last 18 months, the charity has been delivering a “back of house” service in London, testing drugs that have been confiscated or surrendered to amnesty bins or handed over by medical staff, but without providing direct advice. It also monitors drug trends, such as highlighting the spread of Lime bike-shaped ecstasy pills on the capital’s streets.

There have been several recent high-profile drug-related deaths at London’s nightclubs, including Drumsheds and Fold, but drug testing, especially in clubs, has historically faced opposition due to the belief it could encourage illegal usage. A nightlife taskforce set up by Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, concluded that some club operators avoid “drug-related harm reduction, for fear of inviting involvement from the police”.

Zack to the start in Stokey?

Speculation over exactly where Green party leader Zack Polanski intends to stand for parliament continues to swirl, especially with the politician putting down roots in east London. Labour MPs in that corner of the capital have been nervous, resulting in a game of Polanski-ology among Labour activists, who try to second-guess his intentions by looking at where the Green leader is popping up in local Facebook groups. David Lammy in Tottenham, Stella Creasy in Walthamstow, and Meg Hillier in Hackney South and Shoreditch are among those worried they might have to go head-to-head with the increasingly popular Green party leader.

Polanski, a member of the London Assembly, last tried to get into Westminster politics in 2016, when he sought selection as the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for Richmond Park in south west London. This time he’s aiming to become one of London’s first Green MPs.

What’s interesting is that London Centric has been hearing of pushback from the local Green party activists over the idea of Polanski standing against Labour’s Diane Abbott in his home constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington.

Even though they’re in opposing parties, many Greens in the constituency don’t want to see Labour left-winger Abbott kicked out of office. Polanski has now nodded to this in an interview, saying he won’t stand against a “national treasure” but would consider running in the constituency if Abbott voluntarily steps down.

“It’s definitely not up to me to decide when Diane Abbott is going to retire,” he told The House magazine. But he added: “Hackney North and Stoke Newington is one seat that is definitely in consideration.”

Asif Aziz, you have our number

It’s now almost two weeks since London Centric first asked Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital if they had issued fake electrical safety certificates to tenants in their properties. Failure to issue the correct safety paperwork can lead to a fine of up to £40,000 per flat.

We’ve still yet to receive a response from one of the capital’s biggest and highest-profile landlords on this specific matter and the company has stopped replying to our emails. They’ve also yet to respond to tenants, local councils, and Sadiq Khan on this matter – even though the mayor of London has publicly raised concerns about the safety of Aziz’s residents.

So, please forgive us if we ask again publicly: Mr Aziz, if you can explain what’s gone on here, we’d love to print your company’s side of the story and reassure your tenants that their flats are safe places to live while they await eviction.

Meanwhile, Conservative peer Lord Jamieson posed a question of government ministers in the House of Lords on Monday. He asked if the mass eviction of tenants by Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital was ”a rational response” to the forthcoming Renters’ Rights Act “or the action of a rogue landlord”.

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One politician fighting the evictions told London Centric he now has concerns about the wider “Azizification” of the London property market. Merton councillor Stuart Neaverson defined this trend as “the process by which a landlord evicts longstanding tenants in order to relet their flats to councils as more profitable temporary accommodation”.

Start this edition up top with updates on the fight by hundreds of Londoners to remain in their homes – or scroll down to read stories about the concern over David Attenborough’s north London foxes, the latest on the red vs blue school wars, a London property with its own tunnel network, and the man talking the capital down while trying to sell a £175m Knightsbridge penthouse.

Criterion Capital’s mass evictions: What you need to know

Did Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital issue fake electrical safety certificates to its tenants? It’s a week since London Centric asked the billionaire’s company this question. They have yet to respond. But now Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has weighed in and said he shares our concerns.

Landlords who fake electrical safety certificates can be fined up to £40,000 per flat by local councils – and the residential towers owned by Criterion contain hundreds of flats.

London Centric has seen five electrical safety certificates given to tenants in Criterion-owned buildings. Despite being issued in recent months, they were signed by an electrician who went out of business three years ago. When we visited the electrician’s registered address in Greenwich, we found an empty shop unit leased by an unrelated company. Several of the tenants, some of them paying £1,700/month for a one bed flat, said they had not let anyone into their properties to do the tests on the days they were issued. The paperwork was identical at all the flats, across two entirely separate buildings, with no reference to the actual electrical connections in the flats.

Now Sadiq Khan’s spokesperson has told London Centric: “The mayor is concerned about reports of potentially fake electrical certificates issued to residents. City Hall is supporting boroughs to investigate any breaches of housing law that might be putting Criterion tenants at risk.”

A spokesperson for Merton council, where some of the affected properties are located, said they were “worrying allegations” that they are reviewing with partner agencies.

Merton’s chief executive has also asked Criterion to explain why it is evicting tenants, among other concerns about Aziz’s properties: “We have also requested information relating to the maintenance of the tower to ensure that the appropriate safety measures are in place. We also understand that the London Fire Brigade are shortly carrying out a fire safety inspection of the communal areas in the building too.”

Although Criterion has yet to acknowledge any problems with the safety certificates in its flats, in recent days we’ve had reports from tenants facing eviction that Criterion employees have been accessing their flats without permission in order to conduct new safety tests.

From the Telegraph to the Independent, people are waking up to the impact that Criterion Capital has on so many aspects of London life. The Financial Times’ Josh Gabert-Doyon wrote a brilliant piece on the mass evictions, identifying yet another Criterion-controlled residential building where private tenants are being evicted ahead of the Renters’ Rights Act.

He met a Ukrainian refugee with a disabled child who is being evicted by the Aziz family’s business to make way for temporary accommodation.

“It’s a more lucrative business for [the landlord]” said Oleksandr Shyrokov.

Lawyers for Criterion previously told London Centric the evictions are legal and “part of a standard asset management process to regularise occupation terms”.

Last week youth homelessness charity Centrepoint cut ties with the Aziz family’s charitable foundation and turned down a planned donation from them. Now, we understand that Opportunity London, the influential government-backed organisation that works with big businesses to promote investment in the capital, has also ended its partnership with Criterion Capital.

Last week Sadiq Khan wrote personally to Asif Aziz asking for swift answers on the evictions. Aziz replied directly to Sadiq Khan – and told the mayor of London the evictions are going full steam ahead and blamed the media for politicising a legitimate series of business transactions. Once again, it’s a sign of how little power the mayor of London has to intervene directly on the ground beyond public statements and trying to coordinate responses with local councils.

Letter To Sir Sadiq Khan From Criterion Capital

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We’re still trying to track down the mysterious individuals who went door-to-door giving Criterion tenants false hope last week that the evictions would be called off. If you work at Criterion, you can contact us in confidence. We’re very grateful to all the sources helping us with our reporting. You know who you are.

If there’s one thing that’s come out of this story, it’s that London’s political leaders are waking up to the risk posed by what local councillor Stuart Neaverson dubbed the “Azizification” of the capital’s housing market.

Councils have a legal obligation to help some homeless people, which they often meet by placing people in temporary accommodation units at great expense. This process sees vast sums of public money flow from local authorities to landlords – often giving property owners more money than they can earn by providing long-term leases to private renters.

Now, London Councils, the body that represents all local authorities in the capital, has written to Asif Aziz warning they are considering refusing to use Criterion as a temporary accommodation provider. This could undermine the entire financial rationale for the mass evictions and potentially cost Aziz’s company millions of pounds.

The letter to Aziz was signed by a cross-party coalition of the capital’s housing leads (Labour’s Grace Williams, the Conservatives’ Lynne Hale, and the Liberal Democrats’ Jim Millard). They state that local authorities in the capital have a “responsibility and a financial imperative” to discourage landlords who “exacerbate London’s homelessness crisis”.

The trio told Aziz that their councils have previously refused to work with housing providers who engage in poor practices: “If the reports of the approach being taken by Criterion are accurate, we will be forced to consider whether a similar approach is necessary with regards to any temporary accommodation that might be made available by Criterion.”

The councillors told Criterion: “Our councils would view it as unacceptable if a major landlord is seeking to unnecessarily evict tenants in secure accommodation on a large scale in order to profit from London’s homelessness crisis.”

And finally, last week lawyers Carter-Ruck claimed Asif Aziz had reported London Centric editor Jim Waterson to the police for unspecified offences. This was after Waterson visited the billionaire’s office and home to ask if he was pushing ahead with the evictions. The Met police press office said they have no record of such incidents being reported to the authorities.

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Red vs blue school wars: Arrests for “encouraging or assisting” a crime.

There was a big reaction to Tuesday’s story on the viral “school wars” trend. While we heard from lots of London Centric readers who felt the posts played into tropes about the capital’s supposedly crime-ridden reputation, others wrote in to say that they had reported brawls involving schoolchildren to the police in recent days.

When we asked the Met why those incidents hadn’t been linked to the “school wars,” they told us that not every fight in London could be chalked up to the trend, and that an officer would need to investigate fully to establish why any fight had broken out.

On Wednesday evening, the Met confirmed that two people have been arrested in connection with the trend. The suspects, a man aged in his 20s and a boy aged 15, were arrested in Central East London on 1 March on suspicion of “encouraging or assisting in a crime”.

Preposterous property of the week

You’d hope that shelling out £3,999,995 in London’s housing market would mean that your new four-bedroom property on the edge of Blackheath might come adorned with a few bells and whistles, such as a sauna or cinema room.

In this case, that price tag gives you access to something slightly different: a Grade II listed modernist house with a rare network of sand tunnels. The tunnels were initially dug to extract sand for use in the glass industry back in the 18th century, before being used as a bomb shelter during World War 2.

Any prospective buyer would not only be living in the only private home of renowned architect Julian Sofaer, but would have access to “numerous murals and sand sculptures that have been engraved over the centuries.”

Are David Attenborough’s London foxes under threat?

Back in January, north London’s foxes played a starring role in David Attenborough’s latest documentary Wild London. Filmed sniffing at the broadcaster’s hand, eating discarded chips from a carton, and wrestling against a Fiat Panda, the wild creatures were much loved.

But now, two months after they found fame alongside the capital’s pigeons and peregrine falcons, are Attenborough’s foxes under attack?

This week, a Tottenham residents’ WhatsApp chat has been abuzz with concern for the vulpines, after the discovery of two dead foxes (and a dead cat) in back gardens close to the allotments where parts of Wild London were filmed.

Residents quoted a Haringey council worker saying there had been “several” dead fox reports in the area, prompting panic that someone was poisoning the animals filmed for Attenborough’s show.

Over the last month, other dead foxes have been reported to Haringey Council. We asked Haringey Council, as well as Veolia, who the council subcontracts out waste management to, if they had noticed an uptick in dead foxes. The council declined to comment.

When London Centric went to check if the vulpines were in fact still alive, we found plenty of evidence of their continued existence, with several rubbish bins upturned and packets of nibbled Ritz crackers strewn across the street.

Helena, 32, found the dead cat in her garden on Monday: “I thought the cat was sleeping, but it wasn’t moving. I went out to check on it and it was completely unaffected other than a bit of blood around the mouth. It was horrible. Just really sad.”

Following the incident, her one-eyed white and ginger feline named Ugi is no longer allowed outdoors. She thought the culprit wasn’t a local fox murderer, but more likely poorly placed rat poison.

She’d found a dead rat in her garden last year, and said the area was known to have a rodent problem: “It’s not necessarily someone wanting to kill foxes but people not being sensible about where they put rat poison down.”

And finally…

This week has seen a strange proxy war break out over a real war, with current Londoners trading barbs with ex-Londoners who have given up on the city and moved to Dubai.

One of those joining in was Nick Candy, who made his name as a London property developer (and husband of one-time pop star Holly Valance). Candy, who spends an increasing amount of time in the Gulf while also serving as treasurer of Reform UK, is entitled to his opinion. But it’s also a bold stance from someone who is still trying to find a buyer for his own £175m duplex penthouse in the One Hyde Park development he built with his brother in Knightsbridge.

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Carter-Ruck state that it is wrong to suggest that Aziz’s Criterion Capital ever considered calling off the evictions in the face of political pressure from Sadiq Khan, even though many residents were verbally told on their doorsteps that a U-turn was underway.

The lawyers also say Criterion Capital will be pushing ahead with the evictions, as they are part of a “lawful and commercially acceptable” process. They also say it is wrong to describe a private tenant being issued with a legal eviction notice as being “made homeless”.

Carter-Ruck also state that Asif Aziz has reported me to the police on unspecified grounds after I visited his office and house in a bid to get a response on behalf of his tenants as to whether they were losing their homes.

I’ll have more on that story in due course. But today we’ve got a very different story – looking at the reality behind the “school wars” meme spreading across London schools. Scroll down to read that.

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I’ve been experimenting with making some of our stories into videos on Instagram. Some of them have gone unexpectedly viral and reached a global audience, resulting in the curious sight of actor Sarah Jessica Parker liking a video on Asif Aziz’s eviction of tenants at Britannia Point tower.

If you’d like to join the Sex and the City star in learning more about whether Sadiq Khan will succeed in stopping the Section 21 notices issued to Colliers Wood tenants, do follow London Centric on Instagram.

How the London school wars meme spread from TikTok to mass panic – without a single reported police incident

By Jim Waterson, Sophie Wilkinson and Polly Smythe

On Friday a dozen schoolchildren were kept at home for their own safety in just one year group at a school in Merton. In Haringey, teachers increased their usual patrols outside at kicking-out time. In Forest Hill, a boys’ school cancelled its after-school clubs and warned children that if they were spotted at Lewisham Shopping Centre, they’d be expelled. Schools across the capital have been finishing early.

All of these incidents, described to London Centric in recent days, were prompted by viral online posts warning of “red vs blue school wars” that are supposedly under way across the capital.

The posts follow a simple formula: they divide local schools into two rival groups (“red vs blue”), notify people on social media that there will be a violent battle taking place at a specific time, and warn specific year groups at those schools to prepare for war against the other group of schools. Each graphic follows a simple colour-coded format, sometimes featuring gang iconography and sometimes (in the case of Croydon) rival shopping centres. Some of them specify the weapons that should be brought, usually day-to-day items such as protractors and rulers rather than knives.

In response, schools have been activating emergency protocols. Hundreds of Met police officers have been deployed to school gates. Councils are running special response teams providing daily updates. And as the posts have spread out of teenagers’ social media circles and reached their parents’ feeds, it appears hundreds of children are being kept at home as a safety measure. The trend is now spreading outside the school system, with universities such as Goldsmiths closing campus gates to protect their students against the perceived threat. Cities outside London are now seeing their own variations.

But is there any basis for the abundance of caution – or have parents, schools, and the police overreacted to rumours spread by a handful of teenagers hiding behind anonymous TikTok accounts?

On Monday night the Metropolitan police confirmed to London Centric that there have been no reported incidents that the force has linked to the supposedly all-pervasive “school wars”. Despite this, it said it would continue to provide reassurance in the form of a “strong, visible presence around schools”, issuing dispersal orders, and asking social media sites to remove videos.

One London headteacher, who is receiving daily updates from the police and their local council on the meme, said they were unsure if it posed a real threat: “It’s not a thing – until it is a thing and one child reacts.”

One rogue child?

It’s two weeks since London Centric was one of the first outlets to report on the initial claims of a “school war”, which was supposedly going to take place in Hackney. Like many of our stories, it began when a number of readers got in touch to say their children’s schools had issued warnings about posts from a TikTok account calling itself Hackney706, declaring a battle would be taking place in east London on Mare Street, close to a popular branch of McDonald’s, on Friday 13 February.

Some news outlets took the threats at face value, stirring up fear and amplifying the original claims. London Centric instead sent a reporter to spend the day in Hackney watching what actually happened. We found a large police presence and a number of bored children standing around hoping to see something interesting. In the end, no violence was recorded and the children dispersed.

Curiously, that same weekend, two parents got in touch to claim that a child had been suspended at a Hackney school for running the original account that led to the chaos. We have not been able to verify this claim and like any attempt to trace the origins of any unsigned viral material shared over WhatsApp, Snapchat, TikTok, or other platforms, it is hard to pin down exactly who posted what first.

Either way, whoever published the first social media graphic planted a seed that has cost the authorities millions of pounds in extra policing costs and spread fear throughout London – and increasingly the nation.

A perfect meme

The imagery of that initial Hackney “school war” post and the sense of ‘othering’ rival schools into colour-coded blocks proved to be a meme format that was made for going viral. Everyone wanted to know which side of the divide they were on.

Like all successful memes, when a topic connects with an audience, other content creators and influencers pile in to surf the viral wave. Within days of the Hackney non-event other anonymous social media posters began using similarly-formatted graphics to declare more local “school wars” were on their way.

AI image generation tools have made this much easier than in the past, removing the need for graphic design skills. While some AI tools such as ChatGPT refused to create such material, it took London Centric a few minutes using Elon Musk’s Grok AI tool to create a plausible pastiche for a school war poster in the fictional London borough of Downminster.

Influencers and media outlets who wanted to reach big audiences began recording videos on the topic, warning of impending chaos. A user under the name The Bouncer Hub uploaded a popular video calling for parents to “stop and search” their children on the way out to school. Reformed gang member Chris Preddie OBE has posted four videos on Instagram about the school wars, combining them with posts advertising his mentoring services. The Daily Star’s TikTok account attracted almost 3m views for its video on the Croydon version of the graphic, which took the claims at face value.

Viewers were encouraged to alert their friends and fellow parents out of an abundance of caution. School WhatsApp groups pinged with parents posting warnings “just in case”. No one is going to get in trouble for sharing a concern.

“Everyone at school’s really scared”

Back in 2019, parents and schools across the country went into panic over the ‘Momo Challenge’, an entirely false claim that a character on WhatsApp was messaging children and urging them to harm themselves. Schools issued warnings, parents panicked, and children’s charities urged people to stay calm.

While the Momo Challenge was easy to disprove completely, the “school wars” meme is based on a very real fear: knives in London schools are a genuine problem. One of the factors that led the Met police to deploy such a visible presence in Hackney on 13 February was a stabbing that had taken place at a school in Brent just a few days earlier, which was not linked to a “school war” poster. A 13-year-old boy has since appeared at the Old Bailey on charges of two counts of attempted murder.

Patrick Green, chief executive of The Ben Kinsella Trust, an anti-knife crime charity, told London Centric that the “school war” posts posed a threat to young people even if no battles ever actually take place. By raising the fear of an attack at school, children could be tempted to bring in knives to defend themselves, whether this week or in the future.

“The videos clearly have considerable impact in terms of raising concerns of young people about their level of safety and making them more fearful of schools in the opposite brackets,” he said, warning that the substantial quantities of knife crime content on social media increased nervousness among young people.

The London headteacher who spoke to London Centric said the suggestion in the original Hackney “school war” graphic that children should brandish rulers and compasses as weapons was “quite twee” and hinted the author was not exactly a hardened gang member.

But they said the concern is that something could happen as a result of increased fear among young people and their parents who believed the threat was real: “A kid who thinks they’re going to be jumped with a compass could bring in a knife.”

Despite the Met saying no violent incidents have been linked to the school wars, the anxiety continues to spread. Children from different corners of the capital have told London Centric that they’d heard rumours of kids being stabbed. Parents said children in their local area were referring to themselves as being on the “red” or “blue” sides when they met up in recent weeks.

One father in Haringey said his son’s class WhatsApp chat was full of 12-year-olds discussing their fears over the viral memes. His child intended to “run home after school this week and change out of his uniform quickly” to avoid being identified by members of the opposite colour gang.

The son told London Centric: “Everyone at school’s really scared and people have decided not to walk home alone anymore. I’m thinking about not going to a club that ends pretty late because I don’t want to be out when it’s darker.”

“My students can barely manage to equip themselves with a black biro”

What’s hard to ascertain is whether the heavy police presence and school interventions have stopped any actual violence – or just increased the tension. The authorities have to strike a difficult balance between taking the threat seriously and accidentally exacerbating it. Footage of police officers outside schools at kicking-out time has been uploaded to TikTok and Snapchat as evidence that the threat is legitimate.

While some children profess their fear and stay at home, other children are now making videos mocking the trend. TikTok is full of clips of teenagers buying water guns, wiggling rulers in a faux-threatening manner, and trying to emulate the speed of footballer Kylian Mbappé as they leave the school gates.

Other videos by teenage TikTokers raise the surprisingly prevalent concern that the “school wars” are a hoax started by the government as a way to find a “legit reason” to ban social media for under-16s.

Even some London teachers are quietly rolling their eyes.

“It made me laugh a bit that the social media posts are like ‘bring compasses, a ruler, a metal comb’,” said one. “My students can barely manage to equip themselves with a black biro. Plus, if we’re being real, everyone knows that ‘perilously sharp-edged broken protractor’ would be the true weapon of choice.”

One parent of a secondary school child in Merton said she blamed the proliferation of school WhatsApp groups for the panic: “The parents were getting scared and spreading it. The kids were laughing about it.”

The biggest impact of the “school war” in her part of south west London had been chaos at pick-up time on the scheduled day of the supposed fight, with “people parking on yellow lines and shouting at each other” as parents drove to pick-up rather than letting their children take the bus home.

She argued that the meme is just the traditional school rumour mill colliding with social media algorithms. What used to spread around the playground as gossip is now visible to millions: "Of course youth violence is a problem, but it's not a problem in Merton in that way. School fights have been going on forever. I'm 42. I remember girls attacking girls from other schools in town centres. That has always happened."

“Why is it allowed to go on a platform?”

TikTok has now banned the search term “school wars”. The social media giant may be trying to stop people posting new school wars flyers, but it cannot fully stamp out the paranoia. Posters have managed to get round the ban by using search terms like “red v blue”, “school wrs” and “school warrs”.

One London Centric reader based in Islington said her daughter was concerned for her safety. At the same time, the parent considered the content to be in the same league as the “London is fallen” genre of negative videos about the capital: “Reaction among parents I know is mixed, some are genuinely worried and others think it’s all social media chatter. But school WhatsApp groups tend to be dominated by drama and scaremongering so maybe they’re not representative of wider concern.”

For Patrick Green, who runs The Ben Kinsella Trust, the question of who is creating the videos is less important than how video platforms such as TikTok have made them easy to spread: “Regardless of whether they’re created by somebody who is doing this for menace or for fun, why is it allowed to go on a platform which then accelerates it through an algorithm?”

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Early this morning I found myself standing in front of the south west London home of billionaire landlord Asif Aziz. I was there to make a last-ditch attempt, after all other avenues had been exhausted, to get answers from one of London’s most powerful families about the fate of hundreds of tenants housed by their Criterion Capital business.

Today the youth homelessness charity Centrepoint told London Centric they would cut ties with Aziz, turn down a planned donation from his foundation, and cease to be the charity partner of his ongoing central London Ramadan Lights display with immediate effect. They no longer felt able to associate with a landlord that professes a commitment to housing people while also trying to evict them. We understand moves are also afoot at Merton council to encourage all London councils to cut ties with the family and refuse to pay them for temporary accommodation.

Then this evening, London Centric learned that the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who met Aziz at a charity event only last week, wrote directly to the billionaire landlord asking him once again to permanently stop the mass evictions.

The letter, seen by London Centric, states that Criterion has failed to engage with the mayor’s team all week and this “has created an increasingly worrying and uncertain situation for tenants, particularly now that further allegations have been put to us about evictions already underway”.

“The right to a good, safe and stable home is fundamental and I am steadfast in my opposition to the use of Section 21 no-fault evictions, let alone their potential use on a mass scale,” said Khan, asking for an “urgent response” from Aziz.

A U-turn on a U-turn?

When London Centric uncovered Criterion Capital’s plan to carry out the biggest mass eviction in recent London history, it sparked an immediate political row.

On Monday, the day after the story was published, Aziz’s tenants received bizarre door-to-door visits explaining that their evictions had all been a big misunderstanding. They were told they would be allowed to stay in their homes if they recorded videos requesting to remain in the properties. There were celebrations among residents. I wrote that the evictions had been halted “for now” but, having reported in depth on Asif Aziz’s business activities over the last year, wrote that we’d be keeping an eye on the deal to make sure there was no backsliding.

What I hadn’t expected was the backsliding to happen so quickly and so dramatically. Within days, tenants who had been verbally told they could extend their tenancies learned this was no longer the case. Legal representatives of Aziz’s Criterion company denied that a man called “Jason” who had gone door-to-door revoking the eviction notices, even existed. It seemed that our story and the mayor’s subsequent public intervention had halted the evictions – but just for a few days, possibly in the hope the attention died down.

I’d promised the tenants that we would not let up on this story, especially when many of them got in touch to ask us, in the absence of any clear communication from their landlord, whether they still had a place to live.

We sent reporter Liv Facey to try to knock on every door in Criterion’s giant Delta Point housing development in Croydon. What she found, after visiting more than 200 flats, was a vast number of units that had been vacated by private tenants in recent days. It became increasingly apparent that rather than simply planning a mass eviction, the Aziz family’s business had already been carrying it out.

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It now appears the Aziz family have been kicking hundreds of Londoners out of their homes using no-fault eviction notices since January ahead of the Renters’ Rights Act coming into force. According to sources with knowledge of the company’s operations, the objective is to make more money from the flats by renting them out as temporary accommodation to London councils.

In a dark twist, money from the housing blocks affected was then flowing directly into the Aziz Foundation, the family’s PR-friendly charitable arm. The Aziz Foundation then funded the capital’s Ramadan lights and launched a partnership with the youth homelessness charity Centrepoint, who today distanced themselves from the family.

“There is no electrician in the building”

With the assistance of Merton Labour councillor Stuart Neaverson, who has spent the last week trying to help tenants, we also dug into the legal paperwork issued to the Aziz family’s tenants. Neaverson dubbed the family the “cruellest landlords in London” and said the “attempt to put so many people onto the streets is reminiscent of something from Dickensian times.”

Some residents threatened with eviction told us that electrical safety certificates on many of their flats were issued without an electrician actually gaining access to the properties in question.

Every single electrical safety certificate we saw also had identical results, despite being supposedly conducted across flats in multiple buildings that are miles apart. The electrician whose name was on the paperwork, with a signature dated only a few months ago, could not be traced. The business that the certificates stated the electrician worked for had been liquidated three years ago. When I visited the electrician’s stated headquarters on a busy road in Greenwich, I found an abandoned unit. The current leaseholder told me simply: “There is no electrician in the building. The shop is empty.”

“Omar will come and meet you”

Since London Centric first learned of the mass evictions, the Aziz family have failed to acknowledge our multiple requests for comment. Phone calls have been ignored. Emails received no response. Criterion Capital’s head of communications asked us to stop contacting her on a number we obtained for her, saying it was her private line, and declined to offer an alternative phone number. She deleted our public comment from her LinkedIn page asking if the evictions were going ahead.

Criterion Capital is held through a web of off-shore companies based in the Isle of Man. While no one doubts that the Aziz family run the sprawling multi-billion pound London property empire on a day-to-day basis their names have been removed from almost all the legal documents relating to their holdings. The real source of their money is obscured.

I went to the registered office of Criterion Capital in the windowless Zedwell hotel in Piccadilly Circus – in the Trocadero building where the family rents shop units to tax-evading gift shops – and requested a meeting with their management.

For a brief moment it seemed I might be given a meeting with Omar Aziz, the founder’s son who now runs the operation in London after his father moved his tax domicile to Abu Dhabi.

I was told he was upstairs: “Omar will come and meet you.” Then, after a long wait in which several people walked downstairs and appeared to scope me out, the offer was rescinded.

“Mr Aziz, are you making hundreds of people homeless still?”

All of this is how I found myself outside the Aziz family home at dawn on Friday morning. At 8am on the dot the figure of Omar Aziz walked out of the Jacobean mansion in south west London where he lives.

“Mr Aziz, are you making hundreds of people homeless still?”, I shouted from the other end of a long courtyard.

For a brief second he stared at me as he got into his chauffeur-driven BMW, then it sped out through the gates and into central London.

Today, some of those who partnered with the Aziz family are distancing themselves. The homelessness charity Centrepoint told London Centric: “The Aziz Foundation invited us several weeks ago to become the beneficiary of their annual Ramadan Lights celebration. We accepted the invitation because it is a well-known and popular annual event, and the proposed donation would have supported our vital work with young people experiencing homelessness.

“Following media reports this week, we reviewed the partnership and decided to end it, to decline the proposed donation, and not to pursue any further relationship. This is the right decision on behalf of the young people we support and in line with our mission to end youth homelessness.”

“It is not befitting of our city”

There is one person who does seem to have previously enjoyed comparatively easy access to the Aziz family: Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London. He has been a regular at the family’s social events. He has repeatedly pressed the button to launch the Ramadan Lights that the Aziz family funded using some of the money from the tenants they have evicted. The mayor’s presence at the Aziz family’s charitable events has given them legitimacy in London society and photo-ops that they promoted on social media.

This evening Sadiq Khan again condemned the Aziz family’s mass evictions. But was the wool pulled over his eyes earlier in the week? And how far will he go to ensure the biggest mass eviction in the capital’s recent history is stopped?

The tenants who are facing homelessness say it’s now up to Khan to take the lead. In addition to the U-turn on evictions, they are now receiving urgent requests from Criterion to gain emergency access to their flats to check supposed electrical faults, water leaks, and problems with the roof that have never previously been raised as concerns. Some of them have told London Centric they have doubts about the validity of the potential structural problems which have suddenly been discovered by their landlord after eviction notices were issued.

Resident Alessio Ambrosj said that Criterion had “shown us the true meaning of ‘delay, deny, defend’.”

“From hot water issues, to non-operational lifts in an 18‑storey building, to extreme temperatures in the flats and more, I have been appalled by the way Criterion has been allowed to operate,” he said. “It is not befitting of our city. I respect the mayor’s work and what he represents for this city and want him to intervene to put a stop to Criterion.”

One resident, who is facing eviction, said she’d had to call Criterion 60 times in a bid to find out if she was still being made homeless. She said it was baffling that Khan was committed to fighting homelessness yet “he’s friends with this guy”.

Right now, London’s worst ever mass eviction appears to be back on. There are questions over the validity of the legal paperwork that has been given to tenants. There are questions over who will profit from the temporary accommodation that the Aziz family plan to put in the buildings. There are questions over whether hundreds of Londoners will still be out on the streets.

The Aziz family won’t answer London Centric’s questions.

Will they respond to the mayor?

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UPDATE: We have received letter from Carter-Ruck Solicitors, acting on behalf of Asif Aziz and Criterion Capital.

In the letter, Carter-Ruck objects to London Centric’s “unrelenting focus” on Asif Aziz. They say the billionaire believes London Centric has “an obsession” with him and has therefore “lost all proper objectivity”.

The letter states that Aziz has reported London Centric editor Jim Waterson to the police for turning up at his company’s office and his house. The legal letter does not make it clear on what basis the referral to the police was made. (London Centric had previously made multiple attempts to contact Criterion Capital on this story through multiple channels and not received a response.)

Carter-Ruck states that:

• It is wrong to describe the issuing of section 21 notices as “making people homeless” because they are part of a “lawful and commercially acceptable” process, while homelessness is a “complex social issue” that cannot be directly linked to the end of a tenancy.

• It is wrong to say that “hundreds” of residents of Britannia Point are being evicted, as eviction notices have only been served on 130 households in that building. (The legal letter does not provide comment on the number of households affected in other properties.)

• It is wrong to claim that Criterion ever halted the process following the intervention of Sadiq Khan earlier in the week, despite many residents being told on that same day that they would be allowed to stay.

• The process will be going ahead: “Our firm instructions are that this process has not been ‘halted’ at all, and our clients do not have any intention of doing so.”

Editor’s note: Following the publication of this piece, despite residents being verbally informed that the evictions would be cancelled, the landlord insists they were be going ahead. Our latest story can be read here.

Hundreds of Londoners will be allowed to remain in their homes after London Centric uncovered a plan to carry out “one of the worst mass evictions in our capital’s recent history” by a company controlled by billionaire landlord Asif Aziz.

Aziz’s Criterion Capital appears to have halted the mass eviction amid political pressure from Sadiq Khan, after we revealed the company’s intention to make vast numbers of private tenants homeless just before renters gain new rights at the start of May.

After the mayor of London read our coverage, his spokesperson issued the following statement on Monday morning:

“It is completely unacceptable for Criterion Capital to evict hundreds of people out of their homes due to no fault of their own. The deputy mayor for housing has contacted Criterion to make the mayor’s position clear and strongly urge them to reconsider.”

One tenant waiting to find out her fate described how she had been “crying all weekend” at the prospect of being made homeless.

“I’d never missed a payment, looked after the property, and had done everything right – and I was still getting kicked out,” she said.

The eviction plan affected, at a minimum, hundreds of flats owned by the Aziz family. The true scale of the planned clearances across the family’s property holdings may have been even larger.

After making a vast numbers of private renters homeless, the plan, according to sources with knowledge of Criterion’s business, had been to use their flats as temporary accommodation. This form of housing is much more lucrative and is paid for by local councils using public funds.

Tom Copley, the deputy mayor for housing, wrote directly to Asif Aziz after London Centric’s investigation was published, saying it is “unacceptable to force Londoners out of their homes for no good reason”.

Copley told Aziz, who recently moved to low-tax Abu Dhabi, that he appeared to be trying to get ahead of the Renters’ Rights Act, which makes it harder to evict tenants:

“To evict tenants shortly before the implementation of the Act would be a short-sighted and cynical attempt to bypass the rules and show a disregard for the very spirit of this much needed legislation.

“I cannot countenance the prospect of so many Londoners losing the security of a good home and being put at risk of homelessness. If this is indeed the case, the Mayor and I urge you to urgently reconsider.”

A big misunderstanding?

Only a few days ago, hundreds of residents of Criterion-owned buildings across London received paper notices slid under their doors, informing them they had two months to get out of their homes. When they rang their landlord to ask for an extension, they were instead asked if they’d like to leave earlier so the landlord could take vacant possession of the whole building.

By Monday afternoon, London Centric understands the same tenants were being informed that the entire thing was a big misunderstanding based on “rumours” and “false information” spread by journalists.

Hundreds of households were told that there had never actually been any intention to evict them from their homes and that it had merely been the start of a discussion about future tenancies.

Baffled residents described how they began receiving door knocks from Criterion staff, asking them to record a video identifying themselves and read from a script stating they no longer wished to be evicted by the company. Nothing was written down and residents did not receive paper confirmation that their eviction had been abandoned.

A commitment to “tackling homelessness”

Sadiq Khan’s direct criticism of Asif Aziz is notable as he has previously posed with the billionaire and publicly endorsed the family’s philanthropic campaigns.

Only a few days ago Khan joined the Aziz family as they turned on the capital’s Ramadan lights.

In a LinkedIn post, Asif Aziz described his pride at watching his daughter Rahima Aziz join the mayor to launch the display.

The lights are funded by the Aziz family’s charitable arm and covered in the family’s branding. The annual launch has become a chance to promote the Aziz family’s public persona as pillars of the London business community. In addition to this, their charitable activities include paying for Aziz-branded internships for MPs and at national newspapers.

Normal service, with lots of fresh stories on different topics, will resume later in the week. If you have something we should be looking into, please get in touch.

Asif Aziz has previously said that “tackling homelessness” is one of his main objectives in life, and the Aziz Foundation has this year partnered with youth homelessness charity Centrepoint.

The Aziz Foundation receives funding directly from the family’s residential property holdings – meaning the tenants threatened with eviction have been helping to subsidise the family’s more PR-friendly charitable activities which give them access to the top levels of the British establishment.

The sudden U-turn could prove costly for the Aziz family who, according to sources with knowledge of the company’s operations, had intended to replace the private rental tenants with hundreds of much more lucrative temporary accommodation units. These are paid for by local councils using public funds under their obligation to deal with homeless people.

“So many questions to answer”

Stuart Neaverson is the Merton Labour councillor who represents the Colliers Wood ward containing Britannia Point tower. He has been on the ground at the site since last week and dubbed Criterion’s actions “one of the worst mass evictions in our capital’s recent history”.

He said hundreds of residents had been saved from eviction: “Criterion have so many questions to answer on how they will repair their broken relationships with tenants they've so badly let down, as well as the local community."

Neaverson now wants Criterion to go further and repay the council the £3m spent by the local authority putting up emergency scaffolding after windows began falling out of the company’s building. Aziz’s company has so far refused to pay, with local taxpayers instead picking up the bill, while still pushing ahead with a large planning application for new buildings on the site.

“Turned this around for probably thousands of people”

The way in which the eviction U-turn was handled by Criterion has left some residents uncomfortable.

On Monday afternoon, Britannia Point resident Becky was asked to record a video on her doorstep stating her name and declaring: “I’m under no pressure to leave” in order to keep her flat.

She said the lack of paperwork and repeated visits from strangers knocking on her door were unnerving: “Everyone’s just really scared. We don’t now know what to believe.”

Our investigation will also increase public scrutiny of the Aziz family’s vast London property holdings, which range from retail units used by tax-evading sweet shops, to windowless hotels in converted car parks, and suburban pubs.

Where this leaves the tenants who have already been evicted by Criterion Capital in recent weeks is another question. Some residents had already moved out or made plans to leave as a result of the eviction notices, while others had already signed new, more expensive tenancies elsewhere.

One resident, who now hopes to stay in their Criterion-owned flat, said that London Centric’s reporting had “turned this around for probably thousands of people”. But they said that they would ultimately use any extra time in their home to find a new landlord: “I don’t want to pay my money to that type of company.”

Criterion Capital and Asif Aziz did not return multiple requests for comment on why they attempted the mass eviction – or why they had a sudden change of heart.

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This story began with a single tip about evictions in one building. On a hunch, having reported on Aziz’s business for the last year, we sent London Centric reporter Polly Smythe to spend two days travelling across the capital to see if this was a widespread issue. She spent time talking to sources and going door-to-door working out the unprecedented scale of the evictions.

London Centric can spend the time piecing together these stories because we’re funded by subscribers willing to back proper investigative journalism and who want us to take on vested interests, and have real impact.

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For those getting up to speed on Asif Aziz, Criterion Capital, and their influence on the capital, here’s some of London Centric’s coverage from the last year:

• Asif Aziz’s company repeatedly rents shop units to tax-evading gift shops in his central London buildings

• Asif Aziz’s threat to the Picturehouse Central cinema

• Asif Aziz’s threat to the Prince Charles Cinema

• Asif Aziz’s company has bought London’s oldest YMCA on top of his windowless hotel

• Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital staff ended up in a physical altercation with a bailiff over an unpaid photo licensing debt

• Asif Aziz ran an unlicensed version of a Forrest Gump-themed shrimp restaurant that was sued for trademark infringement by Paramount Pictures

• Asif Aziz’s unlicensed restaurant was fined £45,000 by health inspectors for poor food hygiene that left a child in hospital

• Asif Aziz’s Edinburgh hotel project ended up hosting tax-evading gift shops

We’ve got more stories about him and his businesses in the works. Get in touch if you have something we should be looking into – all of our best tips come from our readers. If you work for Criterion Capital, we can guarantee confidentiality if you reach out to us. If you want to set up a burner email address for extra anonymity, we recommend Proton Mail.

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What those attending the ceremony didn’t know was that the Aziz family were, at the same time they were publicly praising London’s community values, secretly embarking on “one of the worst mass evictions in our capital’s recent history”.

London Centric has learned that in the coming weeks the Aziz family’s Criterion Capital business intends to remove hundreds of Londoners – including some marking the month of Ramadan – from their homes. These mass “no-fault” evictions of private tenants, which sources say are planned to be finished before the government’s Renters’ Rights Act comes into effect, are taking place on an unprecedented scale. They are going ahead regardless of whether the residents are up-to-date with their rent or have kept the property in good condition. Many residents have paid tens of thousands of pounds in rent to the Aziz family’s companies in recent years.

One of the Aziz-owned blocks where tenants are being cleared out is a former office building called Britannia Point in Colliers Wood, where one-bed flats rent for £1,700 a month. Earlier this week hundreds of its residents received letters pushed under their front doors informing them that they have two months to find somewhere else to live.

Lenny Kasi-Appiah, 40, said he came home to find the eviction notice this week. “Reading it, I thought, is this a mistake? I’ve always paid my bills on time, always paid my rent on time.”

When London Centric visited the building on Thursday, there was confusion as not everyone had received their post – but an email sent to one tenant confirmed “the landlord will be seeking vacant possession of the entire building.”

Another of the soon-to-be-evicted residents is Raluca, who moved in with her boyfriend in 2019. “It’s horrible looking for somewhere else at the same time as everyone else, all in the same area. You cannot find anything for the price we’re paying for this flat. We’ll either have to increase our rent by £300 or move outside of London. It’s so stressful.”

The billionaire who made his fortune in Britain then moved to Abu Dhabi

London Centric has pieced together the enormous scale of the evictions with the help of sources with knowledge of the Criterion Capital business, local politicians, and the tenants themselves. Many expressed disgust at the way the Aziz family business operates. There was particular scorn for the contrast between the company’s treatment of tenants and how the family present themselves in public — especially the declaration of patriarch Asif Aziz that one of his main charitable objectives is “tackling homelessness”.

Aziz, who recently moved to low-tax Abu Dhabi and is increasingly delegating day-to-day control of his London operations to his son Omar Aziz, previously described his mission in life: “I have worked hard to accumulate wealth not simply for myself, but for the communities that I am a part of.”

Politicians, tenants and councils did not realise the evictions were coordinated to take place across London, rather than being isolated to individual buildings, until we told them. Some tenants only found out they were losing their homes when we knocked on their doors; others received their eviction notices the day after we visited their properties to ask if they were at risk. With hundreds of households affected, the Aziz evictions dwarf the scale of the mass evictions carried out by Henry Smith, another wealthy London landlord, which caused widespread consternation across the capital in 2024.

London Centric is making this article available for free because we believe there is enormous public interest in making this piece available to all. Thank you to everyone who supports original investigative journalism about the capital – we couldn’t do it without you.

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“Modern day robber barons”

When we showed our findings to Merton Labour councillor Stuart Neaverson, who has been helping tenants at Britannia Point, he described the actions of Aziz’s company as “one of the worst mass evictions in our capital’s recent history”.

“Criterion are acting like modern day robber barons who have no interest in the welfare of their tenants or the communities they’re in,” he said. “They should immediately reverse this decision, explain why they attempted this mass eviction, and work to repair the relationships with the hundreds of people they’re trying to throw onto the streets.”

What’s more, the Aziz family’s charitable foundation receives income directly from some of the buildings where the evictions are taking place. This suggests the rent paid by the soon-to-be-evicted tenants could be subsidising the Aziz Foundation’s PR-friendly activities, including paying for interns to work in the offices of MPs and some national newspapers.

Sources with knowledge of Criterion’s business say that the ultimate plan is to evict almost all private tenants and redeploy hundreds of flats as temporary accommodation units that can be rented to local councils for far more money. A private renter made homeless by the Aziz family in the coming weeks could find themselves rehoused in the same property, this time paid for by a London council using public funds. Temporary accommodation is far more profitable for landlords — and comes with fewer rights for tenants.

From Piccadilly Circus gift shops to the Prince Charles Cinema and mass evictions

The Aziz family are regularly featured in London Centric for tolerating tax-evading gift shops in their central London shops, filling landmark areas of the capital with windowless hotels, and fighting campaigners over central London cinemas. Over the last twenty years their Criterion Capital company has used offshore companies to buy up enormous chunks of the capital’s property from pubs to shopping centres and exert massive control over the city. Their actions shape how the capital works — and what it means to live as a Londoner.

When London Centric phoned Criterion’s letting department, an agent confirmed that the company is “phasing out” all private tenancies and shifting to becoming a temporary accommodation provider. London Centric has already seen eviction notices for hundreds of tenants in Croydon’s Delta Point building, New Malden’s Emerald House, as well as Britannia Point in Colliers Wood. Residents of Criterion’s remaining properties told us they fear it is only a matter of time until they are also turfed out.

As our reporters criss-crossed the capital to speak to Criterion’s tenants this week, we occasionally arrived at a property just hours before tenants were served their eviction notices. Many more unidentified residential properties owned by the family are also believed to be affected.

“Second class citizens”

At Britannia Point in Colliers Wood, tenants last week received a bundle of documents, including the government’s How to Rent guide and gas safety certificates, through their doors.

Housing charity Shelter told London Centric that without these documents, any eviction notice being given by a landlord would be invalid, leaving the landlord unable to go through with the eviction. While the documents should be given to a resident at the beginning of the tenancy, they can legally be informed of their rights just moments before their eviction notice arrives.

Residents who spoke to London Centric suspect their evictions are being rushed in ahead of the arrival of Labour’s Renters’ Rights Act, coming into effect in May. When the law finally comes into force, it will stop landlords from easily evicting tenants using ‘no-fault’ evictions, where landlords can issue a ‘Section 21’ notice requiring a tenant to leave a property within a short period of time for no reason.

Siobhain McDonagh, MP for Mitcham and Morden, told London Centric it was “disgraceful” that Criterion is evicting hundreds of residents just before the new law comes into effect: “Criterion needs to work with our community, rather than treating the people of Colliers Wood like second class citizens.”

“Being evicted makes me feel shit”

It’s not the first time problems have emerged in the building. Tenants were left without hot water for a month in 2023, had issues with heating, and lifts that repeatedly broke.

Kay, 36, said she had been “depressed ever since” she’d been told she would be evicted, having paid her rent even when the property wasn’t up to scratch. “Being evicted makes me feel shit. I’ve been here since 2019, through all of the no hot water, no heating. My last resort is just finding a place where I can store everything and then stay with a friend till I figure it out.”

With many tenants given the exact same eviction date to move out, there was scepticism among them that, with one lift currently broken, and the other with a maximum capacity of only five people, the building would be able to accommodate the exodus.

Criterion has an intriguing attitude to debts relating to the building. Back in 2022, a pane of glass fell from the twelfth floor of the building and smashed on the ground. An inspection found 69 other windows across the tower needed replacing and Merton council was forced to erect emergency scaffolding around the base of the tower while repairs were done. That work cost the council £3m – money it says Criterion never paid back, leaving local taxpayers to pick up the bill.

In addition, as London Centric reported earlier this month, the company failed to pay to a licence a photograph it had used to promote the Britannia Point tower – a small matter for most businesses to sort. Yet when the bailiffs arrived at Criterion’s Piccadilly Circus HQ to collect the photo licensing debt, there was a physical altercation with Criterion staff that resulted in the police being called.

The Dark Knightmare of London property

A few miles down the road in Croydon, residents of the Aziz-owned Delta Point building are also being evicted. When London Centric arrived, one tenant was loading their belongings into a van.

Two residents who spoke to London Centric said that the building’s WhatsApp chat was full of private tenants who’d received eviction notices. They estimated as many as 200 properties are impacted. The former office block, which was used as a filming location in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, has been plagued by bed bugs, leaks, clogged pipes, and a cockroach infestation so bad a resident had one “suctioned” out of her ear by doctors.

It’s a similar story in New Malden at Criterion’s Emerald House, which has 20 “stunning” luxury flats – although Ole Herman Pedersen, who has lived there for seven years and pays £1,900 a month, said the flats were anything but luxury.

When London Centric visited on Thursday, tenants had not yet received their eviction notices. However, after we left, many told us they had found the paperwork posted under their front doors on Friday morning.

“Shocking”

The Aziz family’s role as some of London’s most high-profile philanthropists earned them their place on the stage next to Sadiq Khan this week.

But Merton councillor Stuart Neaverson accused their company, Criterion Capital, of having little interest in the lives of ordinary Londoners: “It is shocking to learn that Criterion are not just evicting hundreds of residents in Colliers Wood, but across London.”

London Centric contacted Criterion Capital and the Aziz family to ask about their decision to conduct one of the biggest mass evictions the capital has seen in recent years. They did not respond.

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Now, after almost a quarter of a century of work, vast amounts of parliamentary time, plus the efforts of the greatest minds that Transport for London has to offer… there might finally be a legal process to stop pedicabs playing ABBA very loudly from their speakers in central London while charging rip-off fares.

Read on to find out what’s happening, plus a load of other stories.

London Centric’s reporters have spent this week criss-crossing the capital working on a series of forthcoming investigations into money and power in London. All of this is funded by our paying subscribers, who receive exclusive editions.

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“That’s not enough to satisfy our owner”: London’s pedicab drivers face the end of their old business model

On Tuesday evening London Centric’s reporter broke the news to the pedicab drivers of Leicester Square that their fares would soon be capped at a maximum of £1 per minute. There was a mixed reaction.

The first driver said we were “probably BBC” and wouldn’t speak to us on account of the fact we’d just portray him as a scammer intent on ripping customers off. They were trying to entice parents on half-term holidays to treat their children to expensive rides around central London and didn’t want the attention.

Others were more willing to listen — and immediately clocked that TfL’s forthcoming regulations would not be compatible with their current way of making a living. Tanvir Ahmed, 27, said he paid £120 a week to rent his pedicab. Under the new proposed rates, he didn’t think he’d earn enough to cover that cost and have enough to live on.

“It’s not enough. Right now, it’s a very quiet season. We might get only £50 or £60. That’s not enough to satisfy our owner. So the rates might work in [busy times such as] November or at Christmas, but not now.”

On Wednesday morning Transport for London lifted the embargo on their plans, which are designed to turn the existing pedicab Wild West into a tightly-regulated environment.

Among the requirements are:

• From October fares will be metered and capped. Drivers will be able to charge a base fare of up to £5, plus a per-minute charge of up to £1, then a supplement of £3 for every additional passenger.

• Drivers will have to pay £114 a year for a pedicab licence. In order to obtain this they’ll have to have an enhanced background check, hold a full driving licence or valid theory test certificate, meet English language requirements, be assessed for their understanding of safety, equality and regulatory requirements, plus meet minimum medical standards.

• Vehicles will have to undergo regular safety checks, be banned from having external audio playing from the pedicab, and carry a numberplate.

• Vehicle owners will be required to have premises with fire risk assessments, record keeping and background checks for staff. (The fire risk element is particularly notable following a fire at a pedicab garage in Southwark which resulted, according to sources who spoke to London Centric, in a number of naked people “being intimate” on the premises having to flee the burning building.)

Who stands to benefit?

At the moment the pedicab market is a vipers’ nest of small operators, vehicle owners, easily-exploited workers, and over-supply. Get it right and a driver who owns their own vehicle can make £50,000 a year. But under the new system, the regulatory requirements could be so onerous that only a small number of the existing drivers will be able to make the transition.

What’s notable is there’s clearly substantial demand from tourists willing to pay for a ride around central London. For every viral TikTok video of someone being ripped off, there’s a wealthy visitor who doesn’t mind spending £100 so they can film themselves on a fun journey from Piccadilly Circus to Selfridges.

Will it actually be any cheaper?

When two London Centric reporters took a pedicab ride from Leicester Square to Westminster Bridge last year, it lasted 11 minutes and cost a flat £50 to sit in the back as our driver broke almost every rule in the Highway Code to get there in the shortest possible time. Under the new system our journey would have cost £19 — but the driver would also be incentivised to go much slower. It could be an issue if per-minute charging accidentally created a series of very slow-moving pedicabs clogging up central London.

Correction: With apologies, the London Centric calculator broke while this piece was being written and some of you received an email with a line suggesting a much higher fare under the new system. In reality, the new fare for the sample journey would be almost always be substantially lower than what was previously charged.

What’s the likely outcome?
Regulation is likely to drive out some of the sketchier elements currently involved in the London pedicab business. It’ll also make it harder for individual operators to make big money during the busy holiday periods to carry them through the wet and cold parts of the year.

A common suggestion London Centric keeps hearing — approvingly or disapprovingly depending on the person making the argument — is that the system will likely lead to private companies trying to move into the space with a fleet of vehicles, possibly hailed via an app. It could be a case of goodbye tinsel and loudspeakers, hello standardised pedicabs featuring corporate sponsorship.

All of this is a uniquely London problem (at least in the UK)
As London Centric explained in last year’s deep dive into the London pedicab industry there’s no one who dislikes a London pedicab driver like another London pedicab driver.

What’s more, the regulatory mess that enabled them to flourish is unique to the capital.

The modern music-blaring neon-light-covered electric-powered London pedicab you see on the streets of the capital exists entirely thanks to a loophole accidentally established by the Victorian members of parliament who wrote an 1869 law designed to govern horse-drawn vehicles.

The Metropolitan Public Carriage Act, passed before the invention of either the modern safety bicycle or the motor car, defined two forms of vehicles which could “ply for hire” and pick up passengers at the sides of the capital’s roads. There was the hackney carriage (a horse-drawn vehicle rented in its entirety, now used as the basis of the definition for the motorised black cab) and the “stage carriage” (where someone rents a single seat in a horse-drawn carriage and each passenger is charged a separate fare).

When the first modern pedicabs arrived on London’s streets, back in 1998, the black cab drivers brought a court case arguing they were illegal hackney carriages. Unexpectedly, a high court judge concluded that

Within the boundaries of London, pedicabs are not “hackney carriages” but “stage carriages”, on the condition that passengers pay a fare calculated on a per passenger basis.

A “stage carriage” is better known today as a “stagecoach”. As a result, it’s a law that has more in common with the era of Dick Turpin than modern London that has left us in this mess. It’s the need for a compromise with an industry based around this loophole which is why London is only regulating the vehicles, rather than banning them completely.

Read more: London’s Pedicabs: Sex, loathing, and highway robbery

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…or get in touch with a story we should be covering, or read on for more nuggets of news.

Crouch End Tiger, Hidden Dragon

When Hornsey Town Hall closed for redevelopment in the 2010s, the community was told that the council couldn’t afford to maintain the north London landmark. The trade-off was that Hong Kong-based developers Far East Consortium would reopen it as a public space if they were allowed to build flats on the site.

A decade later, Haringey Council has been accused of “betraying” Crouch End amid claims that the Hong Kong developer has built the flats — but failed to deliver the promised community arts centre.

The modernist building is a north London landmark, with bands such as The Kinks, Queen and Dexys Midnight Runners having performed there. But the 2010s saw it fall into disrepair, with asbestos and leaks eventually leaving it closed to the public for years. When the site was sold, a development agreement between the council and the property developers included an explicit commitment to community use and ongoing arts activity as part of the restoration. While private flats and a boutique hotel have been completed, residents have repeatedly expressed concerns over whether the promise of an arts centre will come good.

Following a meeting last Monday between the Far East Consortium, Haringey Council, local community groups and General Projects, who manage the space, a group of local campaigners told London Centric it is now confirmed that Hornsey Town Hall will not be a community arts centre.

Campaigners say that there is no planned schedule of events or community engagement projects. Instead, all that is on offer is building hire, with rental rates that are prohibitively high.

Haringey council declined to provide an on-the-record comment on their claims, while Far East Consortium did not respond to our questions.

General Projects, the group managing the venue, said it was committed to providing a mixed-use location, with a “strong and active community programme” operating alongside private events, such as weddings. It said it would offer 25 hours of free use of one of the building’s newly restored event spaces to local groups, as well as offering discounted community rates for charities. It added that it planned to make some space available free of charge for community-led activity, having already run events like Crouch End Community Chanukah Celebration and a three-day course teaching teenagers about film.

Chris Arnold, co-founder of the Crouch End Festival, said this was the equivalent of showing “a few crumbs and claiming you’ve made bread”.

He argued the price of venue rental would be well beyond most community groups: “They promised a community arts centre. That’s not a dry hire that occasionally gets rented by someone doing something cultural. By that logic, the local church or pub is also an arts centre. This isn’t about scheduling a few arty activities so that you can tick a box.”

Preposterous property of the week

There’s nothing inherently extreme about this week’s dive into the London property market. It’s just one of those properties that leaves anyone living elsewhere in the UK gawping and going “…how much?” Because if you want to live in this five-bedroom property in Wimbledon you’re going to be paying £4.45m. That’s twelve times the price of a private island in Wales.

Walk like a defection

A few weeks ago we wrote about the Greens’ London defection unit picking off Labour candidates ahead of May’s local elections. Last night Southwark cabinet member James McAsh became the latest to jump.

McAsh was briefly elected as leader of Southwark council last summer before the result was overturned amid an internal battle between two factions of the Labour party. Yesterday he defected to the Greens, saying Labour is “no longer the vehicle for social justice I once thought it was”.

Like many Green defectors in inner London, McAsh now faces a three-way battle to remain a councillor against the Liberal Democrats and Labour — with voters having to work their way through contests where three or four parties could credibly win. Expect more of this chaos in the coming weeks in the most open and competitive London local elections in a generation.

That said, the Greens didn’t help themselves by initially issuing a press release announcing McAsh as a Lewisham councillor who would be appearing with party leader Zack Polanski in Lewisham, before clocking they’d mixed up the two different south east London councils.

The nine lives of Catford Mews

Something that is definitely happening in Lewisham is the reopening of the cursed Catford Mews cinema site. Originally launched a few months before the pandemic by American entrepreneur Preston Benson, Catford Mews was welcomed by residents, who were delighted to see money being invested in the otherwise run-down, council-owned shopping arcade.

But it didn’t take long for excitement to turn to despair, with the pandemic exacerbating the implosion of Benson’s company, Really Local Group, leading to the cinema being repossessed by Lewisham Council over unpaid rent. When we looked into Benson’s multiple high-street cinema businesses, he wasn’t happy with our overall assessment of his company’s viability — but he did raise the interesting argument that he’d put in the money to fit out a cinema which the council subsequently repossessed.

After 18 months, the site is being reopened under the new name of 32 Winslade Way, with day-to-day management handed to the team behind Hackney’s Castle Cinema in east London. The challenge will be making sure the public turn up to support it — or else councils could once again find themselves on the hook for community cinema projects that people say they want, before then staying at home and watching whatever is on Netflix.

PS. Across London, councils are rushing to announce projects or start construction works before May’s local elections. In some cases that’s because they want credit from the public before the vote. In other areas, it’s because once a bike lane or low-traffic neighbourhood is under construction it’s harder for it to be removed if there’s a change in the ruling political party. Do let us know if you spot any particularly intriguing electioneering.

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Please enjoy this weekend update, which is full of exclusive stories. Promise there’ll be something you haven’t read elsewhere as you scroll down – or your money back. Fresh investigations are coming next week.

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From the Amazon rainforest to rural Australia, the world thinks London is collapsing

Thanks to all the readers who got in touch to share their stories of encountering people in some of the most remote corners of the world (which I define as meaning locations ranging from Suriname to Surrey) who think London is in a state of total societal collapse.

This follows our story about the would-be TikTok entrepreneur who said he decided to specialise in fake videos about London homes being given to illegal immigrants because “hate brings views”. On Friday night the Met Police told us they are continuing to investigate whether an offence was committed by the individual behind the TikTok account, who wrongly thought they were posting without any potential consequences.

It’s increasingly clear that London is suffering a global reputational crisis exacerbated by the incentives of viral video sites. It’s impacting tourism, investment in the capital, and the general sense of wellbeing in the city. It’s driven by legitimate raw videos that feature highly visible thefts of mobile phones and violent robberies. It’s then exaggerated by unscrupulous content creators and social media platforms who incentivise ragebait about the supposed total collapse of the city’s society.

First place for the most remote encounter went to London Centric reader Joe Jones:

In November 2025, I was visiting Suriname on holiday. We flew in this tiny plane to a remote jungle outpost in the Amazon rainforest, where we stayed for five days. It is completely off the grid with this small eight-seater plane coming and going twice a week to drop off/pick up guests and drop off supplies. And there was no access to the internet for the guests staying there.

It was run by this Surinamese bloke of about 60. He’d worked there for about 30 years and would rarely leave, preferring to spend his time in the jungle. He was a super warm and friendly guy, and loved having people visiting so he could share his passion for the rainforest with them.

When it came time for us to go, just as I was stepping into the small plane to leave, he poked his head through the door and asked where I was going back to, and I said London. He instantly responded, “oh you better watch out. That mayor of yours…”

I was taken aback and said, “Yeah, what about him?”

“You’ll have Sharia Law by next year, mark my words. It’s terrible what he’s done to London. Anyway, fly safe!” and he left before I could say anything.

It was really striking to me that a man on the other side of the world, who’d never been to London, living in a country that rarely even thinks about the UK, and with very limited exposure to the outside world, could have such a strong and distorted opinion about what’s happening here. A man who from all the evidence I had seen those few days was kind and thoughtful, but who had clearly had his brain pumped full of racist, far-right crap.

Second place went to the reader who was in remote mountains on the other side of the world:

I was in Australia back in July last year, and was on a tour of Grampians National Park. Was sat having lunch when the guide, a Kiwi-Aussie guy, came to sit with me. I’d been asking him about the birds but then he asked me if he could ask a question about the UK, and then came out with “so is the UK about to have a civil war?”

I was just flabbergasted! He said he’d been watching stuff on YouTube, including a guy who goes round old school pie shops in London. I kind of shut the convo down as it was so weird.

Nathan, another reader, got in touch with a report from the United Arab Emirates, where the BBC World Service has been replaced with Elon Musk’s X world service:

I was in Dubai at the end of last year, travelling for the F1 in Abu Dhabi and had a very odd experience with a taxi driver. I mentioned to him that I lived in London, and he immediately started talking about how dangerous it was and how I ought to be careful. He described how crime had been going up, how people were getting jewellery stolen off them in the street and that knives were everywhere.

The way he talked made him sound very familiar with the place so I assumed he had lived in or at least visited London recently. Only later did he say that he’d never been to London or the UK and that his entire impression was based on what he’d seen on social media and heard from other people in his cab.

Now London’s not perfect, but given the dystopian eight-lane motorway we were driving on at the time and that the smog was obscuring all view of the sky, I was quite glad to be heading back to London a few days later.

The anecdotes from around the world continue to flood into our inbox. There was the person with the relative in Los Angeles who was worried about going to London because their friend had seen a TikTok claiming that knife crime in the capital is so bad you now need ID to buy any cutlery from a shop, after seeing stories about restrictions on buying spoons. Another person said friends in Manchester regularly raised concerns about their safety. Times Radio’s Fi Glover got in touch to say one of her relatives now refused to come in from Surrey to central London because “it’s a hellish no go area, she’d be mugged for sure and all the shops were boarded up anyway”. A common thread was the perception that there are constant, rolling violent riots on the capital’s streets.

This isn’t about saying that life in London is all fine and dandy just because of the recent news that the murder rate is in decline. If you’ve read London Centric you’ll know we’ve broken news on how certain forms of theft are effectively legalised in the capital, housing can be infested with cockroaches, and stolen mobile phones are discarded with barely any police interest. Whether you’re an illegal ice cream van, a dodgy charity fundraiser, or a triad gang daubing houses in red paint… we’re still coming after you.

But the reason London Centric carefully reports these stories and establishes facts is because we think a great city can be made even better – and we want to put pressure on those in power to improve a place we actually like to live in.

For some YouTubers, X posters, or TikTokers who just need cheap clicks, London is nothing more than a filming location that provides them with the background footage for whatever viral ragebait will earn a few dollars in advertising revenue. We’ll have more on who’s behind these accounts in the coming weeks.

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The Hackney school war that wasn’t

In any case, Londoners are more than capable of creating their own viral panics.

Schools in Hackney, east London, were thrown into chaos on Friday when a video began circulating on TikTok encouraging students to attack pupils at neighbouring schools. Clips posted by an account calling itself Hackney706 divided eight of the borough’s schools into either “red” or “blue” groups and urged Year 9 students to assault any student from a school with the opposing colour.

Calling it a “Hackney War,” the videos encourage pupils to film any attacks, before sending the footage to the TikTok account to be posted.

Under the words “be violent,” the post lists possible weapons, which include a compass, metal comb, and rulers. What’s hard for the authorities to tell is whether such posts are a legitimate threat of violence or the fantasy of a single school pupil with a TikTok account. A third option is somewhere in between – an incident could accidentally become reality thanks to the rapid spread of a single dubious post.

The Met Police told London Centric they took the video threats very seriously, especially after this week’s stabbing at a school in Brent. London Centric’s reporter spent the day in Hackney observing the heavy police presence caused by the TikTok message, as schools deployed staff in a bid to ensure pupils dispersed.

Officers issued a dispersal order to the Mare Street area of Hackney, allowing them to remove individuals from the area for 48 hours if they believe there’s a risk of antisocial behaviour. The local Hackney branch of McDonald’s was also not allowed to allow any under 16s to enter without an adult, with officers congregating outside.

At school kicking-out time central Hackney filled with schoolchildren who looked very disappointed by the lack of an incident, milling around while trying to avoid eye contact with the police. The schoolchildren mainly seemed annoyed they couldn’t get into McDonald’s. One woman, eyeing up the heavy police presence, asked our reporter if “there’d been a heist at M&S”.

The police and schools are understandably concerned that the virality of the messages on TikTok could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What’s also clear is that the line between a real threat and teenagers messing about on the internet is increasingly blurry and difficult to deal with.

High-rolling activity in west London

We’re always keeping an eye on what London’s richest residents are up to. Which was why London Centric was intrigued to see an online gambler under the username GCottrell93 place a series of bets on Monday afternoon totalling £90,000 that Keir Starmer would be deposed as prime minister by the end of February.

The GCottrell93 account has previously been linked to sometime Kensington resident George Cottrell, a professional gambler, convicted fraudster, and unpaid aide to Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. The bet on the Holborn and St Pancras MP being deposed looks to be a duff one – if GCottrell93 cashes out at the time of writing, they’ll lose £20,000. Reform UK did not respond to a request for comment on whether the account really is owned by one of London’s wealthiest gamblers – and whether he’s allowed to flutter on politics while working at HQ.

Criterion Capital watch: Fights on the doorstep of HQ

Regular readers will know our sprawling and seemingly endless investigations into the curious business practices of Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital, one of London’s biggest landlords. The company controls a large chunk of the buildings around Piccadilly Circus, snaps up suburban pubs, and purchases shopping centres such as the giant redevelopment site in Dalston. The company has tolerated tax-evading gift shops in its most prominent properties, run knock-off trademark-infringing restaurants with poor food hygiene standards that left children hospitalised, and posed an existential threat to both the Prince Charles Cinema and Picturehouse Central. It’s also well-connected: Through its charitable foundation, the Aziz family has paid for staff to work in the offices of Labour MPs and leading newspapers.

Luckily, an ever-growing number of sources connected to Criterion, who have concerns about the company’s business practices, are gaining the confidence to speak to London Centric. (If you work there, you can get in touch anonymously.) One of the most curious things we’ve been told in recent weeks is that bailiffs were sent with court approval to enforce a very small debt that Criterion Capital had repeatedly refused to pay. The dispute is believed to be over the company’s use of an unlicensed photograph on its website of the Colliers Wood tower development.

When bailiffs were sent to enforce the debt, it resulted in a violent altercation with Criterion employees outside the company's office at the Zedwell Hotel in Piccadilly Circus, leaving some of those involved with injuries.

A Met Police spokesperson confirmed to London Centric: “Police were called to a business in Great Windmill Street, Piccadilly, at around 09:30hrs on Wednesday, 21 January, following reports of an altercation between two bailiffs and a member of staff at the premises. Officers attended and made enquiries. There were no offences disclosed that required further investigation and no arrests made.”

Which raises the question: What does it say about the business affairs of one of London’s leading landlords when its staff are involved in fights outside their offices over their failure to pay small debts? Criterion did not respond to a request for comment.

Welcome to the Battle for Victoria Park

It’s grey and miserable in London – but planning for the summer festival season is already underway. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that last year’s Battle for Brockwell Park is causing serious repercussions for festival promoters across the capital.

For those who can’t remember, last year a group of south Londoners took Lambeth council to court over the number of days that Brockwell Park was fenced off for ticketed events such as Mighty Hoopla. Traditionally, London promoters have used temporary development rights to host festivals, with approval nodded through by the same council that stands to benefit financially from renting out their public park.

The Brockwell Park locals said they’d actually bothered to read national planning law and concluded this standard practice was illegal. They argued if a festival promoter wants to put structures on a public park for more than 28 days, including set-up and deconstruction time, they need to apply for full planning permission. A high court judge agreed with the locals, throwing the entire model of London festivals in chaos.

AEG, the mega promoter of events in east London’s Victoria Park including All Points East and LIDO, is among those readjusting to the new normal — as we first suggested would happen last May. Because of the Brockwell Park ruling it is having to submit a full planning application to Tower Hamlets council, in which it states it wants to take over a large chunk of Victoria Park for 75 days every summer for the next six years, in order to host 11 major festival events plus eight community events. For the first time, the public will have a chance to formally object and scrutinise the proposals in Victoria Park – and potentially put pressure on local councillors to demand changes.

Would you swim in the River Thames?

News that part of the River Thames will be formally monitored for wild swimming quality has caught our eye. The government has announced that a stretch of the river by Trowlock Island will be checked for water quality between May and September. It’s between Kingston and Teddington Lock, meaning it won’t be affected by the tides on the lower reaches of the river.

The location also narrowly avoids the untreated sewage from misconnected properties on the River Crane and River Brent that London Centric has literally waded through, as thousands of properties bypass Thames Water’s sewers and deposit effluent directly into the river. Solving London’s other sewage scandal is the real challenge if Sadiq Khan wants to deliver on his desire for more swimming in the river.

The former Finchley councillor running Reform in Wales

After a series of high-profile Conservatives jumping ship to Reform, the announcement of Dan Thomas as the party’s Welsh leader was met with one question: Who? Traffic to north London’s Barnet Post spiked, as Welsh residents rushed to Google who their new man was.

Thomas has long been a fixture of the north London political scene, becoming the Conservative leader of Barnet council from 2019 to 2022 after previously being the cabinet member who led its “easyCouncil” outsourcing reforms. The plan, which earned it the nickname in the press inspired by the cut-price airline, was to introduce a drastic cost-cutting plan to deliver only the legal minimum of services in-house while outsourcing everything else to service provider Capita on contracts worth around £500m.

Reform has its eyes trained on London’s suburban outer boroughs, like Barnet, where it hopes to make big gains. But rather than lead that campaign, Thomas last year decided to head back to Wales, where he grew up. Despite living hundreds of miles away, he remained a councillor for Finchley Church End ward until December.

Peter Zinkin, the current Barnet Conservative leader, told London Centric that Thomas should refund the councillor’s allowance paid to him during his “prolonged absence from Barnet” having previously criticised him for having “abandoned the borough, changed parties and let down residents”.

Zinkin said that the new Welsh Reform leader’s “level of engagement in the last year was very modest [...] If your job is not in Barnet and you don’t live in Barnet anymore, then you don’t actually qualify to be a councillor.”

When he was leader of Barnet council, Thomas pushed a positive portrayal of London as a diverse city. Following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, Wales’ new Reform leader said the events had “led me to reflect on racism at home, as well as abroad, and how proud I am to represent Barnet – a borough made so much better and more interesting thanks to its rich diversity.”

This item was reported by London Centric in conjunction with the Will Hayward newsletter in Wales, which is a great read for anyone wanting to get to understand Welsh politics.

No, you can’t get out of a parking fine by asking ChatGPT to write your appeal

We’re sure that all London Centric readers pay close attention to the annual report of London’s Environment and Traffic Adjudicators, the people who handle appeals for traffic offences. For those that haven’t, it’s clear that AI is increasingly causing chaos. People are asking chatbots to write their appeals and the AI systems, keen to please their users, are then writing absolute nonsense with no basis in legal reality which then has to be formally considered by the tribunal.

“Adjudicators have found that these ‘hallucinated’ cases are appearing in arguments before them,” said the traffic adjudicator. “In one appeal, 5 of 7 cases cited by an Appellant did not exist. The other two were genuine cases but they were not on the points advanced by the Appellant.”

We keep hearing the same thing – AI-generated legal appeals are clogging up London’s councils, courts, and public services. People who used to complain in green ink can now file pages upon pages of legitimate-sounding AI nonsense that legally has to be considered by those in authority. If you have any good examples of this, get in touch.

We’ll be back next week with more original investigations. Thanks to all who pay for London Centric and make it possible. If you enjoyed this edition, please forward it to a friend and spread the word.

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