In the past, default service charges in the UK were limited to sit-down restaurants. Tipping culture, where you’re expected to add an extra payment on top at the moment you place your order, was a strongly resisted American affectation. If you were having a good night out, you might offer to buy a drink for the bar staff, or leave some money at the end of a meal, but that was the limit.

Now, in the space of just a couple of years, that has completely changed. What began as a trickle has become a tidal wave. Service charges are being automatically applied to pints served in historic pubs, cocktails in bars, and takeaway coffees in cafes where your interaction with the barista lasts a few seconds.

Paying by card? Then you’ll increasingly be asked to choose which percentage you want to add on top, while the staff member looks on awkwardly, or just find that a service charge has been added by default.

But why?

It’s always tax

London Centric has been talking to hospitality operators and workers across the capital. They say there’s a holy trinity of factors which have combined to bring automatic tipping culture to London.

Firstly, and by far the biggest reason cited by operators, is increased taxes on employers. The key moment was chancellor Rachel Reeves’ decision to substantially increase the rate of employer national insurance from April 2025. She also, in a move that attracted less attention, massively reduced the exemptions for part-time staff, hitting many pubs and cafes.

Secondly, a law introduced in late 2024 means all tips and service charges must go to staff rather than being swallowed up by a venue’s operator. The flipside of this is that, provided a service charge is genuinely optional, operated independently, and can be removed by the customer on request, the service charge money can go directly to employees with only a 20% deduction for income tax.

This means staff earn far more from increased service charges than they do from increased wages.

Thirdly, the introduction of new technologies and touchscreen credit card machines made it feasible for a venue to prompt for a tip even if you’re in a fast-moving queue.

Essentially, at a time of ever-increasing wage demands, all these factors have combined to push the capital’s struggling hospitality trade into a mass outbreak of (entirely legal and logical) tax avoidance.

Service charges are a way of getting more money to staff and giving less to the government

Vicky Chiriga, 36, is the managing director of hospitality company Quiet Enjoyment. She told London Centric that one of her venues was an early mover and introduced a default 5% service charge on bar orders in 2022: “It was a way for us to generate more funds for our staff. We were really struggling at that time to afford our team, as there’d been multiple minimum wage increases. It was a way for us to stay competitive without having to increase our menu pricing directly.”

Traditionally, if a venue wanted to pay their staff higher wages, they simply put up their menu prices. But price-sensitive customers increasingly object to these headline price increases. There’s also the tax issue.

“If we increased the drinks prices by the same amount, which is what a lot of people say you should do, that would be taxed very differently by the government, and then there’d be less to give to the staff,” said Chiriga.

In simplified terms, putting an extra £1 on the headline price of a drink will enable an employee to receive 52 pence in their bank account. But if you put £1 on the price of a drink via a service charge then that will give an employee 80 pence in their bank account, as it removes all the deductions for VAT and national insurance charges.

Matt Paice, the co-owner of Michelin-starred central London restaurant Chishuru, said the shift to service charges was a sign of strain within London’s hospitality industry: “It’s a move of desperation in the face of relentless wage increases.”

He said staff and operators now consider ubiquitous default service charges to be a reliable alternative form of salary that sidesteps the tax system: “Labour is now by a long way the principal cost of running a food and drink venue. It used to be ingredients, not any more.”

Rapid increases to the minimum wage rates are pushing up salary demands across the board. As a result, wages for London bar staff are increasing rapidly, exacerbated by a shortage of cheap European staff post-Brexit.

Rebranding part of an employee’s salary as a “service charge” also means owners get to engage in “menu engineering” to keep headline prices low.

The employee receives more money. Both sides pay less tax. And the customer? They can be left feeling a bit miffed, especially if they don’t understand the reason for the sudden proliferation of service charges.

London goes American

“For me it’s good, it adds a few hundred on a month, so I obviously like it,” said Ben Smith of The Black Penny in Covent Garden. “But as a customer it’s frustrating, I can see both sides. For the customer the bills are already very high… it’s becoming a bit too much like America.”

Harriet, who works in one central London coffee shop, said moving to an establishment that applied a service charge had made a massive difference to her take-home pay: “It’s way busier in Costa and you get paid much less.

“It works like this: the money you lose in tax, you basically get back in tips now.”

Card payment systems that automatically prompt for tips also mean people don’t have to manually input the sum they’re willing to give.

Chiriga said she asks her bar staff not to apply the service charge when someone is just buying one or two pints, or if the order is less than £10, because “everyone is going through the same economic challenges”.

She said there’s enormous pressure to keep headline prices down: “I go out myself and I’ll buy a pint and it’s £8.20, and I’m shocked because it feels so expensive. So that is always really my last port of call to put the prices up.”

In turn this is pushing Londoners out of bars and communal spaces: “People will come, they’ll buy the more expensive drink, but they might have one instead of two. Or they might come once a month, instead of two or three times a month, because it’s just too expensive for them.”

London’s hospitality industry is going through a tough period, with some operators lobbying the government for a reduction in VAT. It’s also competing for high street locations with dodgy shops that unilaterally opt out of paying taxes. These dubiously run stores have substantially lower operating costs, because they choose not to pay taxes, meaning they can afford to pay landlords higher rents than legitimate cafes. All of this incentivises legitimate outlets to find new ways to pay staff while reducing their tax burden.

Chiriga said she completely understands why people are anti-tipping and why a small number of customers ask for the service charge to be removed. But she wants the public to understand that a standardised service charge is replacing the big cash tips that used to be common pre-Covid: “London bar culture has changed over the years. When I was a bartender at 18, I used to earn more in tips than I did in my basic wages. This was before card machines were the default way that people paid, and more people paid with cash. I think it’s worth reminding people that tipping has always been a big part of hospitality wages.”

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Dawn Butler raises money ahead of her mayoral run that may or may not be happening.

So far, our reporting on the 2028 London mayoral election has been dominated by unknowns: who within Labour could replace Sadiq Khan as the party’s candidate? Will Khan run for an unprecedented fourth term? Does anyone want to stand for the Greens?

Amid the speculation, only one thing has been guaranteed: despite the absence of a formal vacancy, Dawn Butler MP has repeatedly and publicly said that she’d like to be the next Labour candidate for mayor when a vacancy arrives. And she’s been campaigning as if there will be a vacancy ahead of the 2028 election which, as she is close to Khan, would indicate his time as London mayor is coming to an end.

At the end of May she denied a story by Ava Santina on PoliticsJOE that she was about to turn her informal mayoral campaign into a formal, public campaign. (London Centric has heard this didn’t go down especially well at City Hall.)

Yet despite the denials a quick look at Butler’s recently released parliamentary register of interests shows that she received more than £11,000 in donations, the sort of money that would be helpful for a mayoral campaign, around the same time that she was denying it. Two of the donors are Felicity Minton and Jacquie Lawrence. They’re former television executives who now run Jackdaw Media, which focuses on creating women-led stories. The company created a documentary about Linda Riley, the founder of Lesbian Visibility Week, who also recently donated to Butler. Back in 2017, Butler appointed Riley as the Labour party’s LGBT Diversity Lead. The rest came from Supreme Creations, a company that manufactures reusable bags and eco-friendly packaging.

Butler’s spokesperson told London Centric: “Faced with increasing pressures on workload, the donations received by Dawn’s office are to support the running of her office and its campaigns. Dawn has never hidden the fact that it would be her dream one day to serve as mayor of London, and will put her name forward to stand when there is an opportunity to do so. London is currently served by Dawn’s close friend the brilliant mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.”

Meanwhile, the clock is starting to tick for Khan to make his mind up on a potential fourth term. The mayor, who outpolls his party in the capital, would have a clear run if he wanted to aim for 16 years in power. But if Khan has had enough and stands aside too late, his replacement as Labour candidate might not have time to bed in and introduce themselves to the public. Based on previous political cycles, Khan would be expected to declare his hand by Labour party conference at the end of September.

Did Andy Burnham really pledge to cut Londoners’ transport fares?

We keep getting emails about this Standard story, in which former Herne Hill resident and future prime minister Andy Burnham appears to have committed to cutting the cost of travel in London. The headline is clear. The detail of whether this was actually Burnham’s intention is not. Everyone actually involved in London transport policy seems a bit baffled by it.

What appears to have happened, as per WalesOnline, is that someone on Burnham’s campaign team wrote an opinion piece on the need for Manchester-inspired devolution across the UK, changed a few place names, then sent subtly different versions to news outlets in Scotland, Wales, and London.

All of the different pieces carried vague pledges with the placenames changed to fit different regional audiences.

The London version went to the Standard and told Londoners that they could learn from Burnham’s Greater Manchester bus model. This is strange, as it’s essentially a copy of the system London has had since the 1980s.

For instance, in the Scottish version, Burnham described how he has an economic plan based on devolution:

“For Scotland, that means energy, housing and transport. It means taking the cost of bills, rents and buses seriously. It means making sure people are not left overpaying for the basics while their wages stand still and their communities are asked to accept less.”

With a quick copy and paste, this became a new version for London readers:

“For London, that means housing, energy and transport. It means taking the cost of rent, bills and fares seriously. It means making sure people are not left overpaying for the basics while their wages stand still and their communities are asked to accept less.”

This quote then became the basis of the headline, seen by millions of people, that Burnham would definitely be cutting London fares, even though a bus fare in the capital remains below the Manchester rate.

The same kept happening. Scottish audiences were told by Burnham that moving part of Downing Street to Manchester would improve their lives:

Number 10 North will be the nerve centre of a rewired Britain. It will be the conduit through which we redistribute power and resources across the UK. Its job will be to make power flow into places like Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Paisley and Easterhouse, not hold it back.

For London, with a quick Ctrl+F to find some London place names, this became:

Number 10 North will be the nerve centre of a rewired Britain. It will be the conduit through which we redistribute power and resources across the UK. Its job will be to make power flow into places like Lewisham, Enfield, Ealing and Harrow, not hold it back.

This continued throughout, with Scottish place names switched for London boroughs. It remains to be seen if moving parts of Downing Street out of London really is a boost for London.

Talking of Burnham, at the last count he had the backing of 369 Labour MPs in the ongoing leadership election. Then, on Tuesday afternoon, it was announced that London MP Neil Coyle, who represents the Bermondsey and Old Southwark seat, had nominated Hornsey and Wood Green MP Catherine West. No one is entirely sure why.

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PS… We’ve failed to order a kids’ meal

Back in May, London Centric covered the possible tax implications of Rachel Reeves’ decision to slash VAT on “children’s meals” this summer, which covered any dish that is smaller and cheaper than normal and marketed as part of a 'children's meal', even if it isn't ordered or eaten by a child.

Since then, the adults at London Centric have been trying and failing to find a restaurant brave enough to actually explore/exploit this tax loophole. We contacted restaurant Kitty Fisher’s, which two months ago had announced a kids' menu featuring oysters, offal, and “all the other good stuff KIDS love”. They disappointingly told us this “sadly was a joke.”

Is there any restaurant in London that will let us order a luxury meal off the kids’ menu? Get in touch and we’ll send our best people there.

PPS… Note from Jim: If this landed in your inbox very late at night, apologies. I’d just finished editing this edition when I accidentally flicked a switch and started the process of emailing it to tens of thousands of readers. I couldn’t stop it being sent. But I was able to add this note at the bottom. Please take it as proof that London Centric really is a non-stop operation run by exhausted humans rather than by a soulless AI.

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There’s a minor problem: the onboard computer that’s controlling our progress knows it has right of way. But an aggressively driven SUV feels otherwise and shoots across the mini-roundabout in front of us, causing our AI-driven transport pod to abruptly brake.

The technicians on board explain that the autonomous vehicles are too well behaved. They insist on following the Highway Code, which is sometimes incompatible with making rapid progress on the capital’s streets.

Once we negotiate the junction, progress is smooth. The electric-powered vehicle drives at a steady 15mph in fully autonomous mode from Barnes High Street to Hammersmith Bridge. It traces the bend in the River Thames at a steady pace, albeit with an uncannily conservative approach to driving that feels more like being on a tram than a bus. There’s no steering wheel, just two wide benches at both ends of the vehicle. It feels like you’re at the back of the Docklands Light Railway, just facing the wrong way.

It has ramps for wheelchair access and giant screens showing the mapping of potential risks for hundreds of metres around using LIDAR sensors. While passengers are currently required to sit down and wear seatbelts, in the future it could hold 14 people and operate without onboard staff. Despite our test ride taking place in 35°C heat there is incredibly effective air conditioning. Passersby and schoolchildren all want to have a look. So do the human bus drivers parked up and having a rest between shifts.

London Centric was the first news outlet to be invited on board the Ohmio vehicle during its visit to the capital this week. While self-driving pods have been tested over the last decade in the Greenwich Peninsula and the Olympic Park, this is believed to be the first time that an autonomous bus has been tested on London’s public roads in real conditions, alongside human drivers in their private cars and vans.

“This is the future of transport: autonomous vehicles,” said Charles Campion, a local architect and member of the Barnes Hammersmith Electric Light Transit group. “It’s the future of taxi transport, of personal transport, but also public transport.”

Campion is part of a community group in south west London who are trying to solve a problem. This week local government officials finally gave up on plans to allow cars or buses to return to Hammersmith Bridge, which links Hammersmith to Barnes over the River Thames in west London.

The Grade II* listed Victorian bridge, which has been closed to motor traffic since 2019, is now too weak to carry the weight of modern vehicles without vast investment. As a result it is set to become a permanent walking and cycling bridge.

But what about the elderly, disabled, or less able who can’t walk or cycle over the bridge to and from the transport hub of Hammersmith?

That’s where the proposal for the self-driving pods comes in. A standard TfL single-decker bus weighs around 15 tonnes. Unlike robotaxis, the pods follow a fixed route and only weigh three tonnes, which the community group says would fit within the bridge’s weight limits.

“There isn’t a business case for the government to fund the rebuilding of Hammersmith Bridge,” argues Campion. “We’ve got to be real, and accept where we are now.”

These vehicles also don’t need as many staff, he says, although it’s not entirely clear how you’d convince people to tap their payment card: “Once you take the operator, the driver out of the equation, costs come tumbling down.”

In recent months Londoners have got used to the sight of driverless taxis from the likes of Waymo and Wayve circling the capital on test drives while covered in sensors, ahead of their launch to paying customers later this year. But Campion, along with a group of local activists, wants to convince Transport for London that a network of lightweight self-driving AI buses can fill a gap in the capital’s transport networks, starting with Hammersmith Bridge.

The initial proposal is for a service from Hammersmith transport interchange to the Barnes side of the bridge. This could then be extended all the way to Barnes railway station, says Campion: “We’re looking at a fleet of maybe 10 vehicles, eight running, with one pod across the bridge at any one time. We can carry thousands of people a day.”

It would require some specialist infrastructure, with a total cost estimated at around £10m. While there wouldn’t be drivers, there would need to be a control centre with permanent staffing in the local area to respond to any incidents.

The Hammersmith Bridge closure has changed the area. The residents of Barnes, one of London’s wealthiest enclaves, have lost the miles of traffic that used to blight their area, as residents of south London no longer drive through Barnes to get north of the river.

Not everyone’s happy with this. Some local MPs have campaigned for the bridge to be reopened, with Putney’s Labour MP Fleur Anderson leading a campaign on the basis it causes congestion elsewhere and leaves “Roehampton effectively cut off”. But responsibility for the bridge was given solely to Hammersmith & Fulham council in 1986 when the Greater London Council was abolished. And they don’t have much interest in paying the enormous cost of sorting it out for the benefit of residents south of the river.

As the FT’s Stephen Bush put it, it’s a microcosm of London’s bodged devolution deal: “The people of Hammersmith and Barnes mostly get what they want, a beautiful bridge free of cars. The drivers of Wandsworth will have to take longer journeys.”

Transport for London, for its part, put the kibosh on the suggestion it would back the driverless buses proposal.

“We have no plans to introduce these vehicles on Hammersmith Bridge and no plans to introduce driverless buses elsewhere on the network,” a spokesperson for the transport authority told London Centric.

Oh, and the unions that represent bus drivers aren’t necessarily going to be happy.

The Barnes group aren’t giving up though. A solution will eventually need to be found, they believe. And they are going to keep making the case for autonomous pods.

“If I was looking at a place where I used to run several bus services across seven days a week and now I can’t, to me it’s natural to start looking at an alternative,” says Campion.

If you want to see the vehicles in action, pop along to the Barnes Fair on Saturday or walk across Hammersmith Bridge to Castelnau Road.

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Thanks to everyone who enjoyed our big read on teenage hacker Thalha Jubair who brought down TfL. The comments section was fascinating, as usual.

Professor Peter Sommer, who spoke to us for the piece, said a major issue is the “social element in the motivations of this class of cybercriminal”. The vast sums of money gained are not really the point:

“They meet people who are similar to them in interests and outlook, help each other out within the various groups but also want to be better than anyone else. The ransoms they collect are trophies - in most cases turning crypto into fiat cash without being traced is very difficult. But the ransom money is of course still lost to the victims.”

There’s a case to be made that the teenager Jubair was, on paper, one of the capital’s richest people, all while living in his parents’ Tower Hamlets flat.

But is the Berlin Wall art?

We had a lovely chat with Steven Thorpe, the property developer who decided to install a piece of the Berlin Wall in his south London garden.

It’s been widely reported that he’s now in a planning battle with Southwark council, after a neighbour complained that the concrete slab is too close to their garden and ruins their view. Thorpe insists it’s an artwork and has pledged to fight the case and open up his garden to community visits so locals can learn about the wall’s history and the end of the Cold War.

Thorpe showed us around his garden and pointed out how he’d raised the fence to screen the piece of wall from his neighbour’s garden: “He said it was spoiling his view. I don’t know what his view was.”

He handed us the letter from Southwark council which concludes that he does not have the right to put up a giant slab of reinforced concrete in his garden. The planning officer wrote: “I consider that the works you have carried out are unacceptable and result in a planning harm. I will recommend that a planning enforcement notice is served. That notice is likely to require the removal of the works.”

In the worst-case scenario, Thorpe risks a £20,000 fine for failure to comply. He disagrees with Southwark’s interpretation: “If it’s considered a piece of art or a historical artefact it shouldn’t be dealt with in the same way as if it was a wall or a building. There are two sides to every dispute. I would argue it’s a historic artefact.”

The story of how Thorpe came to purchase a slab of the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall is a tale in itself. A German farmer took large lumps of the concrete when the wall came down in 1989 and used them to build farm sheds. Decades later, the farmer realised he owned a supply of priceless art. Thorpe won’t say how much he paid for the slab of wall, although he says the farmer chucked in a free box of pig’s ears for his dog to eat as a thank you. He also sent us video of him transporting it to Dulwich from Germany.

Sad news from Scotland

Long-term London Centric readers will remember that our ongoing investigation into central London’s tax-evading gift shops uncovered a linked network of shops in Scotland. Last summer we published our findings in collaboration with the wonderful Edinburgh Minute because stories that begin in London often shape the rest of the UK. The Scottish government took our findings seriously, just as the Westminster government has been reading our reporting on dodgy shops.

Sadly, in the early hours of Thursday morning, part of the historic Edinburgh building that housed the tax-evading gift shops caught fire and suffered “extensive damage”. The building’s owner is billionaire London landlord Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital, which had planned to turn the unit into a branch of its windowless Zedwell hotel chain.

Criterion said in a statement: “There have been no reported injuries and we are very grateful to the emergency services for their swift response and professionalism. This building is an important and historic part of Edinburgh’s city centre and we continue to liaise with the emergency services and relevant authorities.”

Positive cinema news from central London

Restrictions on Picturehouse Central’s rooftop members’ bar, one of central London’s best-kept secrets, have finally been lifted. For the last year or so members have been unable to enjoy the full benefits. We covered this baffling situation at length last summer. Officially, both sides blamed Westminster Council for the restrictions. All of this was news to the council, who kept telling us it was nothing to do with them and referred questions to the landlord, Criterion Capital.

Picturehouse had been in a messy legal dispute which resulted in a judge ruling that Criterion unlawfully overcharged Picturehouse hundreds of thousands of pounds for the cinema’s insurance. An appeal in the case was recently abandoned and a truce appears to have broken out, suggesting the future of this central London cinema is now secure. Negotiations over the Prince Charles Cinema, another Criterion-owned central London cinema, are understood to be continuing.

Preposterous property of the week

At first glance from the street this Grade II listed London home doesn’t meet our usual high standard of ridiculous London properties. Then you notice the underground car lift.

Concealed behind its normal facade is a winding labyrinth of glass and marble. With a floor plan that we can’t quite get our heads around, this £17.95m six-bed in Notting Hill takes up 9,561 sq ft of space, and features a swimming pool, gym, and cinema.

There’s Norway they’d make a joke that bad

World Cup fever continues to hit London during the heatwave. Aside from the disturbances following Morocco vs France, there’s the fact that transport operators are competing against each other to rename their stations. Thameslink has turned Bellingham station into Jude Bellingham, while Canary Wharf is currently Kaneary Wharf. Could Reece James’ Park follow next?

On Saturday night it’s time for Norway vs England. It’s not one of football’s biggest rivalries but if you look long enough you can find Norwegian influence in London. There’s the docks in south east London where Norwegian timber used to be unloaded, which is why there’s the beautiful Norwegian church next to the Rotherhithe tunnel. There’s the annual Norwegian Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square. There’s the name of Tooley Street near London Bridge. And there’s London Bridge itself, which was supposedly (let’s not check the facts too much) pulled down by a Norwegian king a thousand years ago.

We did our best to prove on Instagram that all news is local if you try hard enough.

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PS It was the 21st anniversary of the 7/7 bombings earlier this week. Quite a few people linked to our piece from this time last year on how the capital’s (human, non-AI) bus drivers got people home that night. If you missed it last year, have a read now.

It was the takeaway order to his family’s Tower Hamlets flat that proved to be Thalha Jubair’s undoing.

Last month the young Londoner pleaded guilty to taking down Transport for London’s computer systems in one of the worst cyberattacks in British history, an event which brought months of chaos to the capital’s transport network in late 2024.

Jubair thought he had covered his tracks through an elaborate system of amnesiac operating systems and virtual private networks. These not only allowed him to cause mass chaos in his home city of London but also allegedly enabled him to extort tens of millions of dollars in ransom payments from US companies.

Then he got hungry.

According to US prosecutors, the then-teenage Jubair made the mistake of deciding to order a takeaway. To do this, he bought gift vouchers for an unnamed food delivery service using a cryptocurrency wallet. This wallet hosted on the same server he and his fellow hackers allegedly used to store tens of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin they’d taken in ransoms paid by major US companies.

Jubair then had the takeaways delivered to the flat where he lived with his parents, which is located in a high-rise block next to a Met Police call handling centre near Bow Road tube station in east London.

This was one of the clues which led to Jubair’s arrest last September, after a major investigation by the National Crime Agency, City of London Police, and the FBI. He was charged with committing unauthorised acts against TfL under the Computer Misuse Act, causing at least £39m in damage to TfL and months of disruption to the capital’s transport network. London Centric was in Woolwich Crown Court last month as the unassuming 20-year-old, who appeared awkward in glasses and a badly fitting grey suit, unexpectedly changed his plea to guilty at the last minute, alongside his Walsall-based co-defendant Owen Flowers.

So who is the TfL hacker? By attending court appearances, reviewing Telegram messages, and interviewing cybersecurity experts, London Centric has pieced together Jubair’s journey from a Roblox-playing east London child to a criminal mastermind who allegedly extorted tens of millions of pounds from his bedroom as part of the Scattered Spider cybergang.

His is the story of a very modern London adolescence.

The flight risk who took down a transport system

It was by compromising the account of a single employee that Jubair was able to hack into TfL’s systems in late August 2024, catastrophically damaging the transport authority’s ability to manage its own systems. At an early court hearing last September, the prosecutor said that the “ultimate objective of the attack was to install ransomware”.

Although buses and tubes were kept running, one TfL executive described the behind-the-scenes situation to London Centric as “an utter shitshow”, with hundreds of thousands of holders of discount travel cards affected.

The booking system for the Dial-a-Ride buses used by people with disabilities was shut down, and data on live tube times for apps such as TfL Go and Citymapper was taken offline.

Hundreds of thousands of Londoners were overcharged for using the network, and many of the capital’s teenagers were unable to access free travel, leaving some without the means to get to work or college. Sadiq Khan later told London Centric that some passengers would never be refunded.

TfL commissioner Andy Lord described the incident as a “highly sophisticated” cyber attack that could have been much worse. Staff at TfL’s HQ were unable to log on to the IT network, WiFi was taken down, and office-based staff were sent to work from home for the whole of September. When they returned, every TfL staff member had to travel into the office to have their login details reset. City Hall had just outsourced its IT to TfL meaning everyone from the mayor downwards had their work systems affected. Projects ranging from the extension of the contactless payment scheme to commuter stations to the rebranding of the London Overground lines were delayed.

Flowers, the teenager from Walsall, was arrested soon after. But it took another year for Jubair, who was portrayed in US court documents as a mastermind of the group, to be charged. We now know that the incident, which cost TfL £39m, and in which 10 million people’s data was stolen, was in part orchestrated from the bedroom of Jubair’s east London flat.

Paul Foster, the head of the National Crime Agency’s cyber crime unit, said the “profile of offenders like Flowers and Jubair demonstrates the increasing threat from cyber criminals based in the UK and other English-speaking countries”.

At a pretrial hearing last September that London Centric attended, the court heard Jubair had been asked to hand over his PINs and passwords but had declined. It was also said that, despite being ordered to hand over his travel documents, including his UK passport, he was found to have retained a Bangladeshi passport, raising concerns he was a flight risk.

Despite this, on the first day of what was scheduled to be a six-week trial, Jubair and his co-defendant Flowers pleaded guilty to the TfL hack, on the lesser basis that they had not “intended” to cause damage. Instead, the duo accepted they had been “reckless as to whether damage was caused”.

In court, it was difficult at points to believe that the awkward young person with greasy hair seated behind a glass screen was a crypto multimillionaire who’d been able to terrorise some of the biggest companies in the US and extract massive cryptocurrency ransoms, sometimes using the username @autistic.

Unlike Flowers, who often had no family present in the public gallery, Jubair’s parents appeared at every court hearing, sometimes even waving to their son. His father had the same thick-rimmed glasses and black hair as Jubair. His mother and father stuck together in the court waiting area, speaking softly and anxiously to each other, while his mother was at points openly emotional.

This article took more than a year to report, with journalists on the ground across London. Want more original investigative like this one in your inbox? Join the London Centric mailing list for free. No spam.

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“He kept to himself”

Born in 2006, Jubair first entered the world of cybercrime while living with his parents in the family’s east London flat. The 22-storey tower block where he grew up is typical of many London local authority neighbourhoods, overlooking a park and play area, and opposite a primary school. It is an unlikely headquarters for a millionaire cyber criminal.

“He went to school, came home, and that’s it,” said one neighbour. “You wouldn’t see him in the park. He kept to himself.”

He might have lived in east London, but his real home was the virtual world he accessed inside his bedroom. Like many hackers, he came through gaming, where he began winding up fellow players and stealing their usernames.

“It’s common [for hackers] to be recruited in their early teens on gaming platforms like Minecraft and Roblox,” Brian Krebs, a cyber security reporter who has traced Jubair’s hacking career, told London Centric. Jubair ultimately joined the Scattered Spider hacking group, which has been linked to last year’s hacks on M&S, the Co-op, and Harrods that left shelves bare in British supermarkets. This is in turn part of a broader loose-knit underground network of children and teenagers known as “The Com”, an online term short for “community”.

Authorities believe Jubair was 14 years old when he began offending, moving away from gaming into what was to be the initial hallmark of his career as a cybercriminal: SIM-swapping. This is when an individual’s mobile phone number is redirected to a hacker, enabling authentication codes to be sent directly to criminals.

The approach was so successful that by 2022, Jubair was allegedly helping to run a channel on the messaging app Telegram called Star Chat selling SIM-swapping services to other hackers, with a focus on targeting employees at US phone network T-Mobile. Over seven months in 2022, Star Chat gained access to T-Mobile over 70 times. Similar tactics were used on British operators.

Keen to get their hands on other people’s cryptocurrency, teenage hackers such as Jubair realised that they didn’t need to rely on sophisticated coding to hack into someone else’s crypto account. Instead, they could simply talk their way in by taking control of the person’s phone number and resetting their password.

Looking at cryptocurrency conference attendance sheets, crypto investors in the news, and leaked lists of crypto holders, they’d draw up a list of targets whose accounts they planned to take over. Then, someone in the hacking group would play the role of “caller,” which meant ringing up a phone company and convincing them to transfer a target’s phone number to a phone in their possession, enabling them to then intercept incoming two-factor authentication and password reset links.

Internal messages uncovered by Krebs show Jubair allegedly asking other hackers not to share the T-Mobile logo in messages to him, as it would make his parents suspicious if they saw it on his screen: “Parents know I simswap. So, if they see [that] they think I’m hacking.”

Jubair and his associates later moved on to social engineering tactics and ransom work, allegedly targeting some of the biggest companies in the world while working with Russian hackers. This often involved phoning up IT helpdesks and requesting passwords to be reset, gaining access to accounts, then demanding vast ransoms to be paid in Bitcoin to allow the company to continue to function. Many paid vast sums in order to get their businesses back up and running.

The total proceeds of crime allegedly attributed to Jubair are astonishing. US prosecutors linked him and his associates to at least $115m (£86m) in ransom payments. In one example cited in US legal filings, the teenage Jubair allegedly negotiated a $25m (£18m) cryptocurrency ransom payment from a single unnamed US company, while promising to pay a co-conspirator a share of the proceeds. Millions of pounds in ransom payments following a major hack of Las Vegas casinos were linked to Jubair, who also operated under usernames such as “EarthtoStar”, “Brad”, and “Austin”.

In total, prosecutors told the UK courts more than £200m had at some point flowed through cryptocurrency wallets controlled by the Tower Hamlets resident during his teenage years.

When fellow Scattered Spider member Noah Urban was in US custody awaiting trial, court documents allege that Jubair hacked the US federal court system by contacting the help desk, impersonating the relevant judge, asking for a password reset, then gaining entry to the judge’s email account.

The trial alongside the Grand Theft Auto 6 hacker

Even before the TfL attack, Jubair had a criminal record in the UK for hacking as part of the Lapsus$ hacking group and was well known to the authorities.

One neighbour told London Centric that he’d seen the police conduct a raid on the family’s flat around four years ago at 4pm, when school finished for the day, with police taking Jubair away in his school uniform.

In 2023 Jubair sat alongside Arion Kurtaj in Southwark crown court as part of the Lapsus$ hacking case, which involved attacks on tech companies including Nvidia and BT. Kurtaj became notorious for hacking into Rockstar Games and leaking unreleased footage of the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 computer game.

At the time Jubair could not be identified due to his age but it can now be reported that at the end of the trial he was handed an 18-month youth rehabilitation order in December 2023, which he was still subject to when he hacked TfL. According to a contemporary BBC report by reporter Joe Tidy, Jubair was given a three-month intensive supervision and surveillance requirement, and a ban on using VPNs online. Jubair was also sentenced for what the judge described as an “unpleasant and frightening pattern of stalking and harassing” two young women. In total he had 22 previous convictions, including 13 for fraud and one for blackmail.

Professor Peter Sommer, who gave expert evidence in the Lapsus$ trial, told London Centric that the “puzzle” is that Jubair “embarked on this further round of hacks” after sitting through proceedings.

“During his trial [...] it must have been abundantly clear the capabilities of law enforcement investigations. It must have been obvious that in any similar future events he would be under suspicion and surveillance.”

This did not faze the young Londoner, who within a year of the court case was trying to bring down the capital's transport infrastructure.

“Even his neighbours didn’t know what was going on”

As many of the building’s inhabitants were heading out for Friday prayers, London Centric knocked on doors in the block where Jubair grew up. Most neighbours, even those who’d lived there for decades, didn’t know the Jubair family, with some only learning about the multiple police raids that had taken place in the building through London Centric’s enquiries.

Younger residents were more aware of his story, with one 17-year-old telling us he used to go swimming with Jubair.

“It’s a building where everyone knows everything,” said one resident who’d lived there his whole life. “But even his neighbours didn’t know what was going on, even though they saw he got raided.”

Unlike other members of Scattered Spider, who used their stolen cryptocurrency to purchase a $35,000 diamond-encrusted Rolex and Louis Vuitton trainers, neighbours said Jubair looked normal and unassuming. He is autistic and also suffers from depression. The only remark on his appearance was that he always wore a hat. In addition to buying food delivery vouchers he also allegedly made the mistake of topping up his gaming account using funds from the same server as the ransom proceeds.

On another occasion around two years ago, one neighbour said he saw four older boys wearing Gucci clothing snatch a laptop from Jubair in the carpark outside the tower block: “His mum must have called his dad, because he skrrted up in the Prius. The dad was chasing after [Jubair].”

Despite the magnitude of Jubair’s crimes, which affected many of the residents of the block who were unable to travel due to the TfL hack, several neighbours expressed astonishment at his skills. One resident described him as a “genius” while another said they believed Jubair was probably only a “runner” for a larger criminal network who were using him as a “fall guy.” Others said the family have now moved out, with suggestions that “fake police” had previously been sent to their door in a potential bid to extort cryptocurrency.

After learning Jubair got into cybercrime through gaming, one resident mused: “I’m going to get on Roblox.”

Jubair will be sentenced on 16 July, alongside Flowers, for his role in the TfL attack. Although he still faces multiple serious charges in the US, there is no indication as yet that the US authorities are actively pursuing extradition proceedings against him.

Drawing on his own experiences of the youth justice system, one resident of the block told London Centric the judge would give him a lenient sentence, given the age at which he’d become a hacker.

One big question remains. What happened to the proceeds of Jubair’s crimes?

The server used by Jubair to buy his takeaway voucher held $36m (£27m) in cryptocurrency when the authorities seized it in mid-2024. A further $8.4m (£6m) had been moved while the authorities were in the process of taking control of the server, much of which has yet to be traced. This means that somewhere out there, yet to be identified by the police, is cryptocurrency linked to Jubair that is worth millions of pounds.

On hearing the vast sums of money Jubair allegedly controlled while living in the east London block, one teenage neighbour jokingly expressed admiration: “Allah, can he not get us all out of the hood.”

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When Callum turned up to collect the keys for his new flat in Stoke Newington he was excited to move in.

He’d viewed it a few weeks previously, when he was shown around by a chatty young woman from Islington’s Anchor Gate lettings agency. Aware of the risk of London’s increasingly infamous rental scams, he’d first checked the letting agent was a member of a government-approved scheme, carrying the royal coat of arms, to ensure he was dealing with a legitimate operator.

Anchor Gate passed every test. Suitably reassured, he paid the agency £3,500 to cover his deposit and first month’s rent for the east London property.

Yet when he arrived to move in he discovered his new flat’s door was open. Inside was a group of baffled tourists who had rented the Hackney property for a lads’ holiday to the capital.

The young woman who had shown him around the flat was unreachable. The email for Anchor Gate had gone dead.

Rather than being a flat available for a long-term tenancy, he had actually been shown around a property rented from Booking.com by scammers for a weekend and used to dupe people looking for a place to live into paying deposits.

Callum realised he had been robbed of thousands of pounds: “Immediately I felt sick, I knew then this was a scam. While I was still in the flat I called the police and called the bank.”

What baffled him was this: how had a fraudulent estate agent been able to gain real membership of government-approved schemes designed to protect renters from dodgy estate agents?

After weeks of reporting across the capital in a bid to hunt down those responsible, London Centric can reveal just how sophisticated the capital’s rental scam industry has become – and how official systems designed to protect renters have instead been infiltrated by scammers.

Like many of our best stories, this one came from our WhatsApp inbox. Callum is a London Centric subscriber who wanted us to track down who was responsible. Please do drop us a line if you have something you want investigating.

Callum shared many personal documents, including his passport and address, with these criminals during the scam. To protect his identity he asked that his name be changed.

How the scam plays out

Callum found the property, a one-bedroom flat, in March on listings website OpenRent. The young woman who met him at the property handed over a business card featuring two contact numbers and a company number, the unique code a business gets when it’s incorporated at Companies House.

In a classic estate agent trick to drive up competition in London’s overheated private rental market, Callum was shown around at the same time as another couple who were also prospective tenants.

Worried the other couple would put in an offer, he messaged Anchor Gate’s head office immediately following the viewing. An agent called Grayson Elliot-Reed replied to say it was Callum’s flat if he wanted it. Callum now wonders how many other would-be tenants were told the same thing about the same flat that weekend and whether the couple were also duped.

Ironically, Callum told London Centric that the only remarkable thing about Anchor Gate Lettings was just how professional, thorough, and responsive they were for a London estate agency. Anchor Gate head office asked for Callum’s work references, his current landlord’s contact details, bank statements, and a copy of his passport. They even sent him legitimate-looking gas certificates and electrical safety paperwork.

He was mildly confused when Anchor Gate asked to take the discussion off OpenRent’s in-house platform and onto email. But there was one thing that gave him complete confidence. For the last decade, all letting agencies have had to join a government-sanctioned scheme to deal with complaints about their behaviour.

The government authorises private companies to operate these registers under licence, which can then carry the logos of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and National Trading Standards.

One of these companies is called the Property Redress Scheme. It makes millions of pounds a year in profit by charging an annual fee to letting agents, who are effectively paying for the government stamp of approval. The more agents the Property Redress Scheme signs up, the more money it makes for its owner, major US insurance company Brown & Brown.

As rental scams become more commonly reported across the capital, London tenants have become more savvy. In response, it seems the scammers have now realised that, for a few hundred pounds, you can repeatedly set up fake lettings agencies with all the hallmarks of a legitimate business and stamps of approval from the British state.

Last November the scammers who targeted Callum paid £50 to register Anchor Gate Lettings Ltd at Companies House.

Then they paid £190 to join the Property Redress Scheme’s public register of letting agents. The scammers also paid £27 to insure a deposit with the separate government-backed protection scheme MyDeposits. For less than £250 they were able to repeatedly highlight their legitimate use of government-endorsed registers as evidence that people could trust them with thousands of pounds.

Tracking down the scammers

The paperwork Callum was sent was fake but the money he transferred was very real – to a Revolut bank account in the name “Gemma Gascoine”, his supposed new landlord.

He was also given an address for Gascoine in Chigwell, at the Essex end of the Central Line, which London Centric visited in May. On the doorstep we were greeted by a confused man. He said we weren’t the first visitors who had turned up asking for their money back from the mysterious Gascoine, who didn’t live there.

We asked the Property Redress Scheme what checks it carried out to verify that Anchor Gate, a newly formed company, registered to a shared office address on City Road in London, was a legitimate lettings company before putting it on a government-approved register. Neither they nor the government responded to multiple requests for comment.

The Anchor Gate website is no longer live after scamming Londoners out of thousands of pounds. Despite this, the company still appears on the Property Redress Scheme’s public register. That’s despite London Centric repeatedly telling the Property Redress Scheme more than a month ago that it is still endorsing a scam estate agency.

The final clue

We attempted to put all of our findings to the scammers behind Anchor Gate but failed. Everything bounced back and its registered office on City Road refused to take our physical right of reply. Anchor Gate’s sole registered director, a British national called Vladimir Kuzmin, could not be traced.

But there was one final clue.

A copy-and-paste error in the emails sent by the scammers suggested the same group had, a few months earlier, pulled the same trick using a different fake estate agency name.

Just like with Anchor Gate, this second fake estate agency is still registered with the same government-backed scheme. It also has a single named director, who we tracked to an address in Bushey, a Hertfordshire town just inside the M25.

After some consideration, we’re choosing not to name this individual. He didn’t answer his door and his social media posts reveal a string of recent misfortunes including briefly being made homeless and suffering severe health challenges that led to him desperately appealing for money on GoFundMe. We also don’t have any evidence he was involved in running the actual rental scam.

Instead, he fits the pattern we’ve seen with other dodgy London businesses, where a struggling individual is paid a token sum to sign the legal paperwork and take the blame on behalf of the scam’s real operators.

“They’re doing everything except for actually having a flat”

We contacted MyDeposits, which said that rather than handing over Callum’s full deposit, the scammers had posed as a private landlord and paid just £27 for an insurance product, which was enough to produce an authentic link they could send to victims. The company said private landlords “are able to register deposits directly with the scheme in accordance with tenancy deposit legislation”.

Proof that the deposit was protected in a government-approved scheme was used by the scammers in emails to convince Callum that they were legitimate and should be sent more money. While MyDeposits stresses that the existence of a deposit registration is “not designed to operate as property ownership or tenancy verification” it was enough to silence any of Callum’s doubts.

Callum was lucky. In the end he was able to get his rent and deposit back through his bank after it accepted he had been a victim of fraud. But many other victims across London may still be out of pocket. He remains frustrated that London scammers have gained access to the systems meant to protect renters and wants the government to take action.

He’s also now wary of lettings agents that seem professional, given the slickness of the Anchor Gate operation: “When I called their number they even had a message which said the call would be recorded for training and monitoring. They’re doing everything except for actually having a flat. That’s the one bit they don’t have.”

In its emails to scam victims, Anchor Gate stated “we are proud members of the Property Redress Scheme (membership PRS055369)”. Even though their entire business was a fraud, they were telling the truth on this point. It’s just that the guardrails put in place by the authorities to protect tenants are now aiding the criminals in duping the public.

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PS…. We’ll be back next week. In the meantime, word reaches London Centric that one person who might have to deal with London estate agents soon is media baron Lord Lebedev, the owner of the London Standard, longevity podcaster, and a big supporter of London Centric.

We’ve spotted that he’s put his eight-bedroom Stud House in the grounds of Hampton Court Palace up for sale with Knight Frank at a cool £25m. The property has been owned by the Lebedev family for almost two decades and is known for being the site of garden parties featuring everyone from Boris Johnson to Rupert Murdoch and Tracey Emin to Joan Collins. Property records show that in 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, a loan was secured against the property by Lebedev, who has reduced the scope of his London media interests in recent years.

PPS… FIFA has U-turned on its plans to move England’s World Cup match against Mexico earlier in the day and will stick with a 1am BST kick-off. Expect to see a lot of bleary-eyed and/or teary-eyed people on the streets of the capital on Monday morning. One east London primary school has pre-emptively announced it won’t open until 10.15am on Monday. The headteacher told parents: “To support our students, families and staff following what is likely to be a late night for many, we have decided to take the decision to introduce a late start to the school day on Monday 6th July.” As one parent told us, the school didn’t adjust its hours during the heatwave and battled through. But the football is too much.

Scroll to the end for that.

But first, an update on our dodgy gift shop investigation.

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Why’s your London high street full of dodgy shops? It’s the tax evasion, stupid.

Our award-winning investigation into London’s dodgy high street gift shops, which has already helped prompt HMRC raids on some of the capital’s Harry Potter shops, was raised again in parliament at the Treasury select committee on Tuesday.

We’ve spent 18 months travelling across the capital investigating this topic. It’s led us to conclude that, while money laundering and other illegal activities play a part, the biggest reason for the explosion in the number of dodgy shops in the capital is the collapse of high street tax enforcement.

If a shop is raided by trading standards, or sued by a local council over nonpayment of business rates, the punishments can be absorbed as a cost of doing business. In any case you can ‘phoenix’ by shutting down your company with your tax bill unpaid and reopening the following day with another unfortunate patsy director signing the paperwork. It’s only a visit from HMRC that strikes fear into the actual operators.

In parliament Siobhan McDonagh, the Labour MP for Mitcham and Morden, cited London Centric’s reporting on dodgy gift shops and asked the witnesses about “one of London’s most prominent landlords, Criterion Capital, letting shops to people on student visas”.

She told parliament how we’d uncovered that the supposed legal operators of some of London’s most prominent retail units were people living in car parks or overcrowded shared accommodation. McDonagh said: “It’s impossible for anybody to rationally believe that that the individual [legally running the business] has the access to funds and all sorts of support that a company running a business like that would actually have”.

(Criterion’s lawyers previously told us they have no responsibility for the tax affairs of their tenants but would happily assist HMRC with any investigations into the shop operators.)

Witness Paul Monaghan, of the Fair Tax Foundation, told MPs that accountants and shop operators have clocked they usually won’t suffer any substantial punishment if they opt out of paying taxes. He said this realisation that paying taxes is optional is contributing to the state of local high streets:

“It’s so in-your-face, so pervasive, that at some point it’s going to weaken tax morale in this country.”

“Sanctions work backwards. Accountants will tell their clients, ‘If you do this, this will happen,’ and they’re less likely to do it. But if the sanction is, ‘If you get caught, ask your sister to sign it’ — it’s nothing.”

“People have to think, if they’re fraudulently doing this year after year, that their car is on the line, their house is on the line.”

“The sanctions, when you’re caught, are less than if you’d been caught littering.”

Monaghan also told the MPs that London is a national innovation centre when it comes to tax evasion. Many high street tax scams, such as dodgy American Candy Stores, start in the capital before rapidly spreading throughout the rest of the UK. (One exception is snail farms, which started in Lancashire and then slithered south.)

“Once a scam is invented and people see it, it’s like wildfire, it goes through the country.

“I met [an accountant] at a conference last week... he was literally crying, saying every one of my clients asks me to do this, this and this, which is fraudulent, because… they tell me they’ll move if I don’t.”

What if the little guy is the problem?

All of which can pose a moral challenge. Investigative journalism into tax evasion has traditionally focussed on big corporations doing clever offshore planning using expensive lawyers. This provides easy hate figures and someone prominent to blame.

What’s becoming apparent, as we continue to dig into this, is that vast numbers of small businesses unilaterally opting out of paying tax is now a far bigger financial problem for both the national government and local London councils. It’s also one of the main reasons some high streets and large parts of central London are in a mess.

There was one moment in Tuesday’s hearing that made this particularly clear, especially in the context of London’s struggling hospitality businesses.

Labour MP Yuan Yang asked if dodgy shops opting out of paying tax is “actually inflating the commercial rent on high streets.”

Witness Alistair Townsend, a fellow at the Institute of Revenues, Rating and Valuation, told MPs: “I’m afraid that is the case.”

In short, if your local legitimate independent shop, restaurant or cafe plays by the rules and pays its taxes then it only has a limited amount of money left in its budget at the end of the month to pay rent.

Your local dodgy shop, which has fewer customers than the legitimate business but has chosen not to pay its taxes, has more money left to pay a higher rent.

This way, MPs were told, over time the dodgy shops will almost always have a competitive advantage when it comes to bidding for new retail units and swamping the high street.

If HMRC continue to feel pressure from politicians, the public and the media to take this seriously then this tide could be stopped. With your support, we’re going to keep reporting on it.

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Quick updates

💷 Former Herne Hill resident Andy Burnham dubbed London “the world’s greatest capital city” this week. The likely future prime minister is committed to moving part of the Downing Street operation to Manchester and downgrading London’s importance to national government. But his broader devolution plans could result in London’s underpowered mayoralty gaining substantially more control over the city. As a start, Burnham said this would include giving Sadiq Khan (or his successors) more control “over education and housing”.

🌉 Plans to reopen Hammersmith Bridge to cars and buses have been formally abandoned by Hammersmith & Fulham council on cost grounds. The Victorian suspension bridge has been closed to motor traffic since 2019 due to structural weaknesses and any money available will now be used to maintain it as a walking and cycling route. A community group is now arguing the council should introduce lightweight self-driving vehicles from Ohmio (artist’s impression below) to enable access for those less able to walk across the river.

⚖️ Data firm Palantir had threatened to sue after Sadiq Khan blocked a planned £50m contract with the Met police, to the open fury of police commissioner Mark Rowley. London Centric can now confirm that Palantir has made good on this threat and formally filed a legal case against the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime. To help, Palantir has hired a public affairs specialist with experience of battling City Hall, in the form of Hal Stevenson, who spent the last five years running lobbying operations on behalf of Lime bikes.

🦊 Google hasn’t formally announced it yet but staff began to move into the company’s giant new Platform 37 headquarters in King’s Cross this week, sources at the company told London Centric. We had our fun with the fox invasion on its roof garden but the much delayed completion marks the end of an era for the giant building site. The epic project was first announced in 2013 when the city was still basking in the legacy of the Olympic Games.

🥪 Ever since we brought you the explosive era-defining scoop that Pret’s Jambon Beurre sandwich was off the shelves due to a “temporary shortage of cornichons,” we've had Pret Truthers sliding into our DMs. They’ve claimed that there is no shortage, given the wide availability of mini gherkins elsewhere in the world. With our tin foil hat on, we put this to Pret, who told us that they are “still working hard” to bring the sandwich back, and that their “priority is finding a supplier who can match our quality and very strict allergen requirements.”

Who wants to be the Green mayor of London?

By Polly Smythe and Jim Waterson

With May’s local elections out of the way, political parties are turning their attention to the next big electoral battle in the capital: the 2028 mayoral election.

We’ve previously documented the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring within the Labour Party to replace Sadiq Khan, who may or may not contest a fourth election, with different Labour politicians gearing up for a selection battle that has yet to begin. (As an aside, speculation has been circulating in City Hall that Sadiq Khan and Dawn Butler had a frank exchange of views in May over whether the mayor would run again, following a news story that Butler was preparing to formally launch her succession bid. Neither Khan’s spokesperson nor Butler commented on the claim when we approached them.)

Most of London’s mayoral elections have ended up as straight Labour vs Conservative fights. Yet this time Labour could face a challenge from the left. Buoyed by its performance in May’s local council elections, Zack Polanski’s Green Party is now eyeing up the capital’s top job. But whose name will be on the ballot paper next time around?

London Centric has learned that the Greens’ selection process will formally begin in September, with internal discussions about potential candidates and eligibility rules already well underway.

Here are the internal discussions from within the Greens…

Want to read the rest of this story and support original reporting on the capital? Click here for 25% off a London Centric subscription, or take a free trial by clicking the link below.

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We also commissioned photographer Jennifer Forward-Hayter to try to capture the city as our brains and bodies fried. Her photos of this week are scattered between today’s stories.

Normal service has been disrupted after the editor’s children were sent home from school, so we’re in the trenches with lots of the rest of you. We’re working away on some more big investigations that we will be publishing soon.

We won an award!

On Thursday night London Centric won the Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness. It was for our work on the “mass evictions” carried out by Asif Aziz’s property business. The judges said it was the work on the topic of homelessness that “best met George Orwell’s ambition to ‘make political writing into art’”. (This is the second award we’ve won in recent weeks for our investigations into Asif Aziz’s business activities and it’s fantastic to see multiple sets of judges agree that our journalism is clearly in the public interest.)

Our separate investigation into fake TikToks stirring up anti-London sentiment for cheap views was also runner-up in Orwell Prize’s Exposing Britain’s Social Evils category.

All of which… isn’t bad for a tiny start-up newsletter funded by readers! Thanks to all the subscribers who made these stories possible.

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Will the rest of the UK pay to cool down London?

London is the worst affected part of the UK for the extreme heat that is becoming our new normal. Billions of pounds will need to be spent to make the city liveable in the coming decades, or else school closures and hospitals sweltering with failed aircon will become an annual blight. So who’s going to pay for it? And for once, should the capital be receiving a bailout from central government to cope with its unique heat island situation, rather than cross subsidising the rest of the country?

Sadiq Khan’s long-awaited London Heat Plan launched on Thursday. It concludes that London’s economy is set to take a major hit if action doesn’t come soon. Yet making the city compatible with a hotter climate is “a public benefit with low financial returns”. The costs of coping with climate change are eye-watering: “Retrofitting the most heat-exposed homes in London could require upfront investment of between £9 billion and £45 billion, depending on the interventions and level of overheating reduced.”

Will central government cough up? Former Herne Hill resident Andy Burnham has spent part of this week experiencing the London heatwave as he returned to parliament as Labour heir-presumptive, but he has repeatedly promised to rebalance government spending away from the capital.

There are also signs that air conditioning is going to become a politically contentious topic. The report suggests it should be retrofitted to hospitals and other public buildings but is less enthusiastic about it for domestic properties. City Hall guidance strongly discourages its use in new residential buildings, but people are voting with their feet. Walk around the capital and you’ll find a vast number of flats with mobile air conditioning hoses poking out of their windows.

The City Hall report accepts residential air conditioning might be necessary but only as a last resort when other methods, such as increased shade and ventilation, fail. The stated concerns are a combination of technical and moral reasons. One issue is it could overwhelm the capital’s electricity network. The other is that richer Londoners might be able to afford air con but their poorer neighbours could be left unable to afford the costs.

Kentish Town City Farm has paused handling of its goats, guinea pigs, and donkeys “to allow our animals to rest.”

The farm told London Centric: “We have frozen treats for the animals, such as carrots, watermelon, apples, peas etc, frozen water bottles for the small animals.” Staff will be “hosing down” larger animals.

Similar techniques are likely to work on humans.

Deliveroo offers heat bonuses to riders

Many Londoners have been avoiding the heat by using food delivery. But what about the couriers paid to deliver those orders?

As riders are classified as self-employed and not as workers, gig economy platforms can’t control when they choose to log on, or how long they stay logged on for. Extreme heat causes a spike in demand from customers looking to stay indoors, and these platforms worry that couriers will opt not to work.

One way to ensure enough riders are available is by offering temporary pay boosts. This week Deliveroo did just that. Branded as a World Cup-style “hydration break boost,” the company sent a message to riders earlier this week promising them £2.20 extra if they completed two deliveries between 11am and 3pm on Wednesday or Thursday: “Just like players get a hydration break at 22’, riders can take a hydration break whenever they need one.”

The email informed riders that they could put this extra income towards “the cost of water, electrolytes, or a drink and snack in a comfortable place out of the heat.”

Official NHS guidelines for coping in a heatwave recommended, “If you have to go outside, stay in the shade especially between 11am and 3pm, wear sunscreen, a hat and light clothes, and avoid exercise or activity that makes you hotter.”

Deliveroo said the additional payment was not a pay incentive to encourage people to log onto the app, but instead was meant to encourage couriers to go at a “slower pace and take a hydration break between any orders they choose to accept.”

Deliveroo also stopped offering orders to riders using traditional bicycles, not e-bikes, between 11am and 3pm in areas covered by the red weather warning.

One food delivery courier told London Centric that riders would take the offer of extra pay but not slow down: “Riders will work more in a heat wave to earn more incentives. An incentive doesn’t work to make riders stop and get hydrated. Instead, they’ll think, ‘I need to work to earn.’ So they don’t stop. If there’s an order, they’ll accept it, even now it’s summer.”

A Deliveroo spokesperson said that they had temporarily reduced order distances, made sure water is readily available and that “no rider is under any obligation to go online.”

But the courier said that while they might not be under a formal obligation, if they choose not to work they’re not paid: “They don’t say ‘don’t work today, and we’ll pay you to stay at home.’ They want couriers working for them in a heat wave, or whatever the weather.”

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Exclusive: Après poo, le déluge

The new giant Tideway super sewer has dramatically reduced the amount of untreated sewage floating down the River Thames through central London over the last year.

Yet it seemed unable to cope with the giant two-hour thunderstorm in the early hours of Tuesday morning, which marked an all-too-brief respite before the heatwave really got going, leaving vast amounts of untreated human waste entering the river through overflows, just like in the bad old days.

London Centric was contacted by rowers who reported a toxic combination of extreme temperatures and floating effluent creating a stinking river earlier in the week.

What went wrong? Have we already overwhelmed the new giant pipe?

Not quite, says the company that operates the tunnel. Instead, it blamed the unpredictable side effects of climate change, where tropical-style storms can come out of nowhere.

Thames Water had scheduled maintenance on part of its sewer network this week, timed to take advantage of the hot, dry weather. This involved disconnecting overflow pipes from the Tideway and temporarily pointing them back into the River Thames.

All of this would have been totally fine… as long as it didn’t rain heavily.

At which point London was hit by a biblical downpour.

A Tideway spokesperson told London Centric:

Earlier this week, the London Tideway Tunnel was in the process of being taken offline to allow Thames Water to undertake some planned maintenance activity in the Lee Tunnel. This work was carefully scheduled with regard to weather forecasting. However, on Monday a ‘convective’ thunderstorm developed over London, and as a result, there were some discharges of storm sewage into the River Thames at CSO [combined sewer overflow] locations that had been taken offline.

They were confident the system would have coped… if it had actually been connected.

Beef(eater) dripping

While plenty of London’s offices have relaxed dress codes to stop staff sweltering, that’s not an option for those in the capital working in ceremonial garb.

While the army chose to suspend ceremonial guard changes on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week, the Beefeaters at the Tower of London are still being required to work in full uniform.

The Historic Royal Palaces told us that they’ve changed staff rotas for the Yeoman Warders to allow for more breaks, and that they’re wearing their summer uniforms.

Rental e-bikes are offering an alternative to getting on sweaty buses or tube trains without air conditioning. But it seems their inner tubes are struggling to cope with the heat, with vast numbers of them deflated after being left in the sun too long.

Bins out for summer

Climate change is coming for our councils, one wheelie bin at a time. As refuse collectors have no choice but to work outdoors, councils are temporarily asking residents to put their bins out earlier, so that crews can avoid the worst of the sun.

We counted Redbridge, Barking and Dagenham, Camden, Westminster, Barnet, Brent, Hounslow, and Havering as the councils that have brought collection times earlier.

But not everybody is on board with the new timetable. One refuse collector, who asked to remain anonymous, told London Centric: “This week, a lady came out of her house and said that we’d missed her bins. I kindly explained to her that because of the weather, we were working earlier so we could finish before the heat gets to its peak. She said ‘That’s a poor excuse.’”

Even with early collection times, the cab of his refuse lorry reached 39°C earlier this week: “It was cooking and because of the age of the lorries, the air-con just can’t handle it.” And whether he starts early or not, there’s the smell of rubbish in the heat to deal with. “And maggots. Lots and lots of maggots.”

London empties

People really are staying away from central London due to the heat, according to analysis of people’s mobile phone data. (Not that they’d have got a signal anyway.)

O2’s Motion division, which examines anonymised aggregate usage data, shows there was a spike in people heading into central London on Monday as they went into the office or got their shopping done before the heatwave hit.

But by Thursday morning the number of people heading into central London dropped by 13%. Numbers in the King’s Cross area were down even more, suggesting regular commuters are staying at home.

Breaking bread

If you feel hot, spare a thought for London’s bakers, toiling away next to 250°C ovens. As spots across the city struggle to keep both their staff and their dough chilled, the heatwave is creating a shortage of baked goods in the capital.

Camberwell’s Toad Bakery has reduced its hours and its menu, with fewer pastries and no bread or sandwiches for much of the week … Dusty Knuckle has changed opening hours and reduced orders … Banook Bagels, a newly opened spot in Peckham, reduced bagel quantities and stopped offering toasted bagels as the toaster “acts like a furnace next to the sandwich line”… and Hackney’s E5 Bakehouse is offering a smaller selection of bread and pastries than usual.

London’s food wholesalers are also struggling to adapt. Chocolate Trading Co, a key supplier to London’s patisseries, has paused deliveries this week to ensure chocolates are “delivered in good condition”, hitting supplies of high end chocolate pastries.

From our “London, it’s getting hotter” archives: Why London flats are really hot, Why London doesn’t have air con, the growing wildfire risk to London’s parks.

The Londoners who can’t turn off the heat

While most of us are busy lamenting the lack of air con, some of London’s residents are stuck with the heating permanently switched on.

Heat networks supply heat to flats from a central source, often a communal boiler, through pipes that carry hot water. But in many London blocks this is impossible to switch off.

A resident of the mid-century Gilesmead estate in Camberwell told London Centric that Southwark Council fitted a new heating system back in 2014.

But he said that the system installed was designed for a five-bedroom house, not a one or two-bed flat. “We have a 220 litre hot water tank in every flat. And that is kept at a temperature of about 80°C, 24/7.

“At any time, there’s about 8,000 litres of hot water in the building. And that emanates an enormous amount of heat, which needs to be there at all times, because otherwise we don’t have our water.”

His heating unit sits in a cupboard that once housed a wardrobe: “I open that door, it's hot like a sauna.”

Can it really only be 35°C?

While the weather app might be showing you 35°C, we can collectively agree that it feels much, much hotter. But is that scientifically true?

In May’s heatwave and the last time the 40°C barrier was broken in 2022 the air was dry. This time it is very moist. The more humid the weather is, the harder it is for our sweat to evaporate and cool us.

Kirsty McCabe, meteorologist at the Royal Meteorological Society and editor of MetMatters told London Centric that this means that “even if the number on the thermometer isn’t as high, it will feel much worse. Especially at night. If we can’t cool down overnight, the risk of dehydration, heatstroke and death rises, especially in the elderly and very young.”

What makes this worse is the urban heat island effect. McCabe says that “all that concrete, tarmac and brick absorb heat and only slowly release it – that’s really noticeable at night when cities can be 10 degrees warmer than the countryside.” This effect means that Londoners get little respite from the heat.

And with more industry, cars and trains adding to the heat the general busyness of the capital is to blame too. Couple that with less greenery and large buildings blocking the chance of a cool breeze giving you relief and there’s no wonder you’re hoping to work from home all week.

McCabe explained that when meteorologists talk numbers they use shade temperatures. “So we can compare like for like around the world, we take air temperature measurements in the shade. In direct sunlight those numbers can be much much higher. And even worse on an underground train without air conditioning!

“Add in moisture and it puts extra stress on your body as you can’t cool down by sweating. If the air is already saturated your sweat won’t evaporate. That will send your core temperature soaring.”

To understand how hot it’s going to feel she suggests looking at the humidity, ideally the dewpoint temperature or the wet bulb temperature. She says “These measurements give an indication of how much moisture is in the air, and can be used to calculate the heat stress – such as the one used during Wimbledon.”

But what’s the answer to a boiling, moist London? For McCabe it’s long term steps rethinking the way our homes are designed as well as adding more green spaces and shade to our streets. She also says that schools need heatwave measures in place and exams should be moved to earlier in the year.

For now she recommends keeping your curtains closed and try to limit going out at the peak of the heat during the mid to late afternoon.

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London’s schools are supposed to remain open in all temperatures. They’re closing anyway.

When temperatures top 30C, farmers are advised to stop transporting cattle and other livestock as part of their legal duty to protect animal welfare.

As one London headteacher pointed out to London Centric on Monday, there’s no equivalent upper temperature limit on when you should stop putting children in classrooms. Instead, the guidance remains that it is better for young people to attend lessons in extremely hot weather than suffer the academic and social impact of missing out on education.

What we’re seeing in London this week, with temperatures heading towards 40C, is that this approach of compliant muddling through is breaking down. Without clear political leadership on how to respond, headteachers are having to take unilateral decisions on what they think is best for their pupils in the heat.

Dozens of parents contacted London Centric on Monday to say their schools are shutting down entirely for the rest of the week, instituting partial closures after lunch, or offering parents the voluntary opportunity to collect their children early. As more and more schools follow suit, leaving parents unable to work, the impact on London’s life and economy this week will start to spread, with momentum heading towards more closures.

“We just heard our child’s secondary school will close from Tuesday midday to Friday: 2.5 days of lost learning and impact on our ability as parents to work,” said one London parent. “Offices have budget for air con; often schools do not.”

Regardless of the exact solution, many of the capital’s headteachers are conceding that effective teaching will be nearly impossible this week.

“We’re expecting to have loads of kids off,” said one teacher in south London. They said actual academic lessons are being abandoned with staff reduced to “babysitting”.

Comedian Alistair Barrie told us he is voluntarily taking his kids out of school on Tuesday and Wednesday: “Whole school only has two rooms with air con. The headteacher is looking on Amazon Prime for affordable fans. Good job it’s all a hoax.”

One problem for headteachers is that if they send children home then it will impact attendance statistics, a key measure for regulator Ofsted. This can influence the decision to encourage pupils into school, even if it then sees students sent home early.

Attempts to keep standards high and pretend everything is normal also result in strange outcomes. Children at one secondary school in east London were told: “Students must still bring their blazers to school every day. However, they do not have to wear them this week.”

Other London schools are improvising. Shacklewell Primary School in Hackney responded by shifting the entire school day forward, starting at 8am and then shutting down completely by 1pm.

While the British stereotype is of classrooms that are horrendously cold during winter, increasingly the problem in London might be brutally hot teaching environments in summer. Sitting an exam on a 32C day carries around a 10% lower likelihood of passing than on a 22C day, according to a recent report by the Climate Change Committee, suggesting future GCSE and A-level students could be affected by more heatwaves in June.

One London secondary school teacher said “there is no way existing school budget have the ability to absorb the cost of installing air conditioning and other potentially necessary interventions”.

The Department for Education on Monday reiterated that “children are unlikely to be seriously affected by hot conditions”, encouraged school attendance and reissued guidance on dealing with heatstroke.

Official government guidance also recommends turning off mechanical fans in schools when temperatures top 35C on the basis that they can actually cause harm above this temperature.

One parent with a child in a London special school said the headteacher had taken the decision to shut the whole site down completely on Wednesday and Thursday: “I think it’s the right decision as the children are incredibly vulnerable and need a high level of adult support… Also there is a huge risk of children getting ill and having seizures due to the heat which would put extra pressure on the school.”

Yet she doubted that the children would find it cooler to be at home with their parents: “Some are in two bed flats with limited ventilation… [the government] definitely needs to focus on helping keep all children at school in a heatwave.”

This was echoed by the teacher in south London, as they weighed up whether to close: “If we shut then kids will be in even hotter and unsafe flats.”

Parents looking for alternative ways to entertain their children could struggle, with the Young V&A museum in Bethnal Green among the attractions announcing it is closing due to the heat.

Some of the impacts of the heatwave hit harder than others, especially at Weston Park school in Haringey. One message in the London Centric inbox informed us that its sports day had been cancelled due to the weather: “Parents mainly upset because Mr Motivator was going to do the warmup.”

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Even office air con isn’t enough to keep the city running

Bosses who struggle to get work-from-home staff back to the office might find desks are unusually full this week, as employees try to take advantage of air conditioning. But some workplaces such as the BBC are suggesting staff in London work from home for fear of the impact of the heat on the journey into the office. Buildings built in the last couple of decades fare no better. Kings Place by King’s Cross, where the air conditioning system has to be shut down whenever it tops 35C, has long tormented the Guardian journalists who work inside it.

Yes, this week’s heat really is unprecedented

“London has never seen three consecutive days above 37C,” said TheSnowWatcher, one of our favourite weather accounts, who suggested the record might not be standing at the end of this week. They added: “The intensity of heat on Wednesday is definitely going to feel worse than 40C in 2022. Back then we had very low relative humidity and more of a breeze.”

What’s making this heat particularly unusual is that this is happening in June, rather than at the traditional height of summer. The previous June high was 35.6C, recorded in Camden in 1957. That record is expected to be smashed multiple times this week, along with the potential for the highest overnight London temperature on record.

Good luck getting any sleep.

“Competitive” community bid for Brixton Market

There was a good debate in the comments beneath our weekend piece on the sale of Brixton Market. We also had some interesting direct correspondence, with one former restaurant owner suggesting the site is now overloaded with food and drink businesses and the market infrastructure needs substantial investment if it’s going to cope. Others pointed out that the site had been struggling financially in the 2000s and it was a previous for-profit landlord that had rebranded part of the site as Brixton Village and turned it into a different type of food destination.

The Advocacy Academy, the south London youth charity spearheading the campaign to take control of the site on behalf of traders, confirmed it met the deadline to submit a bid yesterday to the estate agents handling the sale. The group was hoping to raise pledges of £15m by Monday, towards a headline purchase price of £50m.

A spokesperson for The Advocacy Academy told London Centric that it cannot “provide any further details on the bid itself” but it is “competitive”. They said the traders are “currently going through due diligence with a significant number of major institutional donors” to back their plans for a community purchase.

Manchesterism with Peckham characteristics

In the second most important national news story this week after the hot weather, former Herne Hill resident Andy Burnham arrived in London by train on Monday afternoon to be sworn in as MP. His Avanti West Coast train was more than 20 minutes late into Euston, entitling him to a 25% Delay Repay refund on his ticket. As he was whisked away into the bowels of the capital’s station, news helicopters showed the stalled mess of a rebuild site, which won’t currently even connect to Manchester.

What would Burnham mean for London? Well, the probable future prime minister told London Centric last year that “London needs to be more liveable, for young people particularly” and warned that the government’s focus on growing London’s economy risks “overheating” the city (not literally) and making it an unpleasant place to live for its residents.

He also bemoaned the high rents charged to the capital’s residents by landlords, compared to when he lived in the capital during the 1990s: “It was common that four or five people from my old college would be in Greenwich in a house together. I just don’t think they could do that now, could they?”

Defining Burnham’s “Manchesterism” ideology has been hard. One of the people trying to do it is Miatta Fahnbulleh, the Labour MP for Peckham, who has been advising the likely next prime minister on economic policy and is even being tipped as a potential chancellor. Could a Burnham leadership be a return to his south London roots?

Transport for London hackers plead guilty at the last minute

Two individuals have admitted carrying out a cyberattack on Transport for London that saw around 10 million people’s data stolen, cost £39m, and caused widespread chaos to the capital’s transport system in late 2024.

London Centric spent Monday watching in a very hot Woolwich Crown Court as Thalha Jubair, 20, from east London, and Owen Flowers, 18, from Walsall, West Midlands, took responsibility for the 2024 hack that disrupted TfL services for three months.

The pair had been charged with conspiring to commit unauthorised acts against TfL under the Computer Misuse Act, with a trial expected to last between four and six weeks.

Instead, the prosecution accepted a last minute guilty plea on the basis they had been reckless as to whether damage was caused by the hack and had not intended to cause damage.

The National Crime Agency previously said it believed the attack had been carried out by hackers from the cyber-criminal group, Scattered Spider.

In a development that can only now be reported following his guilty plea, Jubair has separately been charged by the US Justice Department with extracting more than $115m (£87m) in ransom payments following a spate of cyberattacks on 47 separate American organisations.

Flowers, who wore a blue sweater and grey tracksuit bottoms, also pleaded guilty to two separate attacks on American health care companies, SSM Health Care and Sutter Health.

Jubair, who wore a grey suit and striped tie, had pleaded not guilty at an early hearing in November after refusing to provide login details for his devices. That plea remains unchanged, with the prosecution indicating that the charge would lie on file.

London Centric previously reported that despite the fact that TfL’s operational systems remained largely unaffected by the cyberattack, one senior executive told us that behind the scenes it was “an utter shitshow.”

The duo will be sentenced on 15 July.

Can you solve the mystery of where Boris Johnson wanted a second cable car?

Boris Johnson wanted to build a second cable car in his time as mayor (reports Ross Lydall, former City Hall editor at the Evening Standard).

Johnson opened the capital’s first cable car across the Thames – linking the Royal Docks and the O2 arena in North Greenwich – shortly before the start of the 2012 Olympics. The £44m project had to be heavily subsidised by its first sponsor, Emirates, and has remained little more than a tourist attraction.

This apparently did nothing to dampen Mr Johnson’s enthusiasm for a second “dangleway”, according to the TfL commissioner at the time, Peter Hendy.

Lord Hendy last week recalled receiving an unexpected late-night call from the then mayor when both had been out (separately) one evening.

“I was walking home after having a few glasses of wine in a restaurant near my flat in Pimlico, and suddenly the phone rings, and it was Boris wobbling about on his bike,” Lord Hendy said. “He had also had a few glasses of wine.

“He said: ‘Why don’t we build another cable car?’ [I thought:] ‘Oh shit.’ I said to him: ‘How about we not do that? Why don’t we do the next thing in the transport strategy?

“He said: ‘What’s that?’ I said: ‘It’s Crossrail 2.’ He said: ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea!’

“The point of that story was that I knew what the next best thing to do was. We had worked it out. We had a strategy which said, if you want London to grow, this is the best thing to do.”

Lord Hendy is now the rail minister. (He recently told a transport select committee that he read a London Centric story in the morning “over my toast”, which is the only way to do it.)

Hendy was speaking at a Campaign for Better Transport conference on Friday and said he could not recall exactly where Mr Johnson had wanted to build the second cable car.

But he said another legacy of his time working for Mr Johnson was that he always answered his mobile when it comes up as “unknown number”.

Two years ago, this paid huge dividends. “I was sitting in my study at home,” Lord Hendy said. “The phone rang. It said: ‘Unknown number’.

“Now, I always answer unknown numbers on my mobile phone because, when I worked for Boris, he didn’t know how to put the number into the phone. It always came up as ‘unknown number’. And it was either him or an insurance salesman.

“The caller said: ‘This is the Number 10 switchboard and the Prime Minister would like to speak to you. Would you take the call?’ [I thought:] Yeah, OK…

“I got Keir Starmer on the phone. He said: ‘Would you like to be the rail minister?’ And I thought: ‘Well, I would.’ I didn’t tell Sue [Lady Hendy] until afterwards, but she was very understanding.”

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PS It’s hard to beat this Reddit thread of lightning pictures from the early hours of Monday morning, so we won’t try to compete.

Today we’re looking at an issue that has been requested by many subscribers this week: What’s really going on with the threat to sell Brixton Market?

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Do you have a spare £15m to buy this market?

On Wednesday a stark call to arms was issued on social media: “Brixton Market as we know it could disappear.”

The campaign, launched by the south London youth charity The Advocacy Academy, warned that the site is about to be sold to “private equity bidders”. This, they said, could result in evictions, increased rents, and a market “filled with faceless multinational chains”.

Brixton Market’s reputation spreads beyond its south London location. It’s home to hundreds of independent businesses and has become a food destination in its own right that’s a short trip down the Victoria line from central London.

The latest events comes on the back of a string of evictions that have hit London’s largely indoor markets hard, with traders battling closure at Brixton Plaza, Dalston’s Ridley Road, and Bayswater’s Queensway Market.

The Advocacy Academy is proposing a radical solution to head off that possibility: a community buyout, led by the traders currently in situ, that gives them control of their site. They have opened a petition, signed by almost 25,000 people. They’ve started a crowdfunder, which has raised more than £20k from small online donations in a matter of days, topped up by a combined £130k from two offline donors. They’re trying to convince philanthropic trusts and “high-net-worth individuals” to pledge a further £15m by Monday towards a headline purchase price of £50m.

The issue has filled Instagram feeds, flooded WhatsApp groups, and received national coverage. On Friday night Martin Abrams, the new Green leader of Lambeth council, and local Labour MP Helen Hayes pledged their backing at a public rally in Brixton.

Yet what has been thin on the ground are the actual details around the sale, whether we really know who the rival bidders are, why it’s come to a head now, and whether it’s possible for a small team to raise millions of pounds in a matter of days. So London Centric decided to try to establish the facts.

It takes a village…

The area of central Brixton behind the Victoria line tube station has long been a battleground for competing visions of what London should be about and who it should be for. Brixton Village — as part of the market was rebranded in the 2000s — has also gained a following well beyond its local area. Over the last fifteen years it has acted as a testing ground for restaurants that would later take over London, such as Franco Manca and Honest Burger.

Following this transformation, in 2018 the wider Brixton Market site, which includes several arcades, went up for sale. Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct lost a bidding war and it was instead bought for £37.3m by a joint venture between investors Angelo Gordon and DJing Texan millionaire and businessman Taylor McWilliams. He had grand plans for redeveloping the site. Instead, he got a bloody nose from community activists , the media, and politicians.

His attempts to evict the longstanding wholesaler Nour Cash and Carry attracted a local outcry during the pandemic. His plans for a 20-storey office block in the heart of Brixton were even more controversial. After that planning application was withdrawn in 2023, ahead of an expected intervention by Sadiq Khan, the owners threw in the towel and put the whole site up for sale.

As things stand the freehold for the majority of the site is owned by a company called Ag Hondo Market Row, registered in the Netherlands. This holding company is in turn controlled by TPG, the giant US private equity firm that has invested in a vast number of businesses, ranging from major US telecoms businesses to Cirque du Soleil and the media company Vice. It now owns Angelo Gordon, one of the original investors, and they want out of the troubled site.

While the sales pack was never made public, briefings to the press in late 2024 suggested the current owners wanted £80m, more than double their original investment, for the Brixton site.

Then everyone went publicly silent. Until now.

How long have they got?

The Advocacy Academy, a charity which works with young people in the local area, started organising with the Brixton Traders and Community Association two years ago. Their initial plan had been to help occupants of the market in the short term with leases, securing contract renewals on favourable terms, and improving working conditions at the market. The longer-term aspiration was to help them take control of the whole site.

“For a long time it was just kind of quiet,” Hiba Ahmad, community director at the Advocacy Academy, told London Centric. The charity’s remit is training young people with “lived experience of injustice to drive systemic change” from its Liberation Centre headquarters near the market.

At the start of this month the charity employed a property agent to formalise their interest in the site and indicate they were in the early stages of planning a community buyout. This was their first contact with the owners.

The agent soon got back with bad news: there were other interested bidders in the property, which had been for sale for almost two years. What’s more, within days of The Advocacy Academy’s initial approach, the estate agents said all potential purchasers had until Monday 22 June to show they have a “credible amount of money” to move to the next stage of the process.

This was a shock, said Ahmad: “We didn’t know at the time that there were other buyers. We were hoping to have a year or so to put our ducks in a row. We’d be very able to raise the money if we had a year. We’d got 12 days.”

She got to work with her colleagues, before going public with the plan on Wednesday: “It’s been like late evenings, early mornings, leaving no stone unturned because we really, really believe that this asset is too big for us to fumble. This is a generational opportunity and we don’t want to waste it.”

But is it “viable”?

The group is trying to arrange firm commitments of £15m by Monday from “high-net-worth individuals within and outside of the community who understand the importance of Brixton’s markets”, while also appealing to charitable funds. The idea is that these cash pledges could then be used to unlock loans to buy the whole site for around £50m in a leveraged community buyout.

Some trusts and potential investors are holding emergency board meetings to decide whether to back the buyout by the Monday deadline, said Ahmad: “The bulk of the donations are going to be coming from philanthropic institutions and they take a lot longer to come through, as we have to show that we are viable to them as an asset.”

The identity of the rival bidders interested is not public, although the charity has publicly claimed they are “private equity”. Its petition states it was urgent to act now as “our corporate sale window has been narrowed from six months to just days”.

A source close to the site’s existing owners pushed back on this, saying that “at no point” had they promised a six-month sale window to any of the bidders.

Ahmad confirmed this: “It was an assumption we were working off because we thought we were the only people interested in buying. We didn’t know about any other buyers and usually when you start the process, it takes about six months or so to just be nominated as the buyer. So we were working with the assumption that we had about six months to raise the money that is needed to take on this level of debt, essentially.”

The Gail’s question

The finances of the market could be healthy for any potential buyer, especially if they prioritised rent increases. London Centric understands bidding material states that the site currently makes £3.3m a year in rent from the current leases and that it had the potential to increase this to £4.5m, adding to suspicions that any new owner would introduce substantial rent hikes.

A planning application, approved in February 2025, also gave permission for the first floor to be refurbished to fit out an office and restaurant, as well as a second storey roof extension. Council consent for the plans adds value to the site, as prospective purchasers know that the site’s expansion has existing approval.

One of the traders who is concerned about the direction of travel is Simone Ogunbunmi, who was born and raised in Brixton. After trading for half a decade in the area, she decided to move to the market and open Haus, a plant and vinyl store. Two years on from its opening, she told London Centric “it’s turned into a space where everybody feels at home.” She’s served everyone from elderly people stopping in for a chat after they’ve finished their shopping, to Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who bought a plant, and Hollywood actor Michael B Jordan, who browsed her record collection.

Things aren’t perfect with the existing operators, she said. The “rent is high,” with traders also paying service charges and insurance. There has been a substantial turnover of tenants in recent years.

Yet Ogunbunmi fears things would only get worse with new owners: “If rents rise significantly, which is what will happen if it’s bought up by equity developers, many traders simply won’t be able to afford the higher rent, and some would have to leave.”

The chance that independent businesses would be able to take over empty units is low, she argues, linking it to wider discussions about chain shops in the area. “We’re going to have a Gail’s,” she said, referring to the bakery’s recently announced plans to open in a former branch of Starbucks next to Brixton station. “If we manage Brixton Market ourselves, the profit that is made goes back into the market. Whereas if you have these large corporations, they’re looking to pocket that money.”

There are still no details on who else is interested in buying the market site, whether a political intervention could influence the sales process, and what any rival bidder plans for the site. Yet in just a few days a local political consensus has been built around the potential community bid.

For Hiba Ahmad, who is helping to run the campaign, it will all come down to what happens over the weekend and on Monday, as potential backers decide whether to get behind the plan: “There is a huge appetite for community ownership within the philanthropy sector as of now. But there’s so much work that needs to go into it to ensure that it’s legally viable, that it’s sustainable as a business and, in the long term, that there is actual democratic infrastructure to support it.”

By Monday, they will know if they’re in the running.

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Scroll to the end to read the story of how Stratford in east London was sent into panic by an AI-generated viral post and how London can deal with this in the future.

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Exclusive: Would you want your bus driver sleeping in this box?

Late nights, irregular scheduling, long unbroken periods driving, and the need to pick up extra shifts and overtime due to low wages have contributed to a crisis of bus driver fatigue, according to Unite the union. They found nearly half of drivers had experienced a ‘close call’ as a result of exhaustion in the past 12 months.

In 2019, when the union first raised the issue, Transport for London allocated £500,000 in funding for bus companies to find innovative ways to reduce driver exhaustion and protect passengers.

Where did that money go? Bus operator Metroline, owned by the Singapore-based ComfortDelGro, used it to buy two “Rest Space” sleep pods at Willesden bus garage in north west London. The box beds – which lock from the outside and retailed for £10,000 – are now being used for storage after drivers refused to enter them, although the pillows remain in place for those wanting to nap at work.

The union’s general secretary Sharon Graham told London Centric that making drivers “take a nap in a cupboard in their depot won’t cure the problem” and “bus drivers are being overworked to the point of extreme fatigue by the bus companies”. She said “long hours, terrible shift patterns and the poor workplace conditions” pose safety risks. Metroline did not respond to a request for comment.

Other experiments with the money have also struggled to take hold. One of them involved installing experimental eye-scanning fatigue detection technology in buses, which would vibrate a seat if it found drivers to be fatigued. The kit was removed after the provider stopped supporting the technology during the pandemic.

Why hasn’t the man arrested on suspicion of being the Putney Pusher been named by the media?

On Monday it was confirmed that a 44-year-old man had been arrested on suspicion of being the ‘Putney Pusher’, the jogger who shoved a woman into the path of a bus on Putney Bridge back in 2017. No one was ever charged and it became one of the most notorious cold cases in the capital.

News of the man’s arrest, for potential attempted grievous bodily harm, was broken by the Daily Mail, which described the arrested man as being a “banker” who previously served in the army and has “ties to the royal family”.

On Tuesday morning, a Met spokesperson confirmed a man had been “bailed pending further investigation”.

Several London Centric readers have been in touch asking why the man hasn’t been named.

A decade ago it’s almost certain the suspect’s identity would have been published in the media. But following a legal case brought by the singer Cliff Richard, news outlets rarely name people who are subject to an official investigation but have not been charged with any offence. In this case, the arrested man’s identity is known to newsrooms but his right to privacy is considered to outweigh the public interest case for naming him.

Ironically, it was the Putney Pusher case that showed one of the problems with the old system that prioritised the media’s right to publish. The last person arrested in relation to the case had his name all over the newspapers, despite having a solid alibi. That man was later released without charge.

X marks the spot

Sadiq Khan has committed £7m to an international tourism and investment campaign to promote London and fight back against what he terms “false narratives” caused by viral videos.

City Hall said its in-house analysis concluded one of the biggest threats to London’s global reputation was Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter. Research by the mayor’s office found that the financial incentives introduced by Musk, where accounts with blue ticks can get paid small sums of cash for going viral, have substantially exacerbated the problem in recent years.

“Verified X accounts can be a particular challenge as they pose as news outlets and spread false posts that will create high levels of engagement to make money,” the mayor’s office said.

They said these posts on X then seep into other languages, with Japanese and Chinese-language accounts “mirroring and amplifying narratives originating from the UK’s extreme right-wing” about London and undermining the capital’s tourist market.

Despite this, a City Hall source told London Centric that, after weighing up the options, there are no plans for Khan to stop posting on X or boycott Musk’s site: “It’s where thousands of Londoners get their information and news, whether from media or politicians. We continue to communicate with Londoners wherever they are, across multiple platforms.”

OK, London’s getting self-driving cars. But what about self-driving buses?

London’s self-driving taxi battle is heating up, with paying members of the public set to get in the vehicles by the end of the year. But could other vehicles be next?

On Monday morning, London Assembly members gathered at the King’s Cross headquarters of Wayve, just behind Egg nightclub, to take a test run in the company’s self-driving cars.

Not to be confused with Google-backed Waymo, Wayve is a British startup that’s been testing self-driving cars in the capital since 2018. Unlike Waymo, which operates its own fleet of cars, Wayve licenses AI software to other operators. It’s launching rides in collaboration with Uber in the coming months, albeit with a driver still behind the wheel.

Given Sadiq Khan’s stated goal of getting people out of their cars and onto public transport, there’s a real risk that new robotaxis flood the roads and add to the congestion on the capital’s streets. But what if the self-driving technology wasn’t reserved for taxis but opened up to bigger vehicles that aid the public transport system?

Caroline Russell, the leader of the Greens at City Hall, told London Centric: “Wayve are really interested in getting their technology used on buses, on public transport, on big lorries and delivery vehicles.”

She added: “At the moment, the autonomous passenger vehicle model is where the money is. Wayve are trying to get hold of a huge amount of money to keep developing this technology. The government needs to be thinking, why are we allowing the public purpose of this technology to go off to the private sector?”

Russell suggested minibuses in the capital’s “public transport deserts” could be fitted with the technology: “Why isn’t the government or TfL investing in this to make buses safer?”

Missed Saturday’s piece on the raids on Harry Potter gift shops? Read it here.

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“Drinks and food will be provided”: Stratford Westfield and the AI-generated riot that didn’t happen

Last Wednesday afternoon, Stratford Westfield shopping centre in east London was set to be the scene of a bloody riot. Local offices in the venue, which was the scene last year of a viral video of a teenager narrowly missing shoppers as he threw a chair from an upper floor, let staff leave early to get home safely. Warnings were issued to nearby residents. Extra security was drafted in.

What prompted all this was an image that had been circulating rapidly across local WhatsApp groups for the previous 48 hours, declaring that an “East London War Link Up” would take place in the shopping centre at 5pm.

Over a dystopian illustration of motorbikes in an urban hell, it boldly instructed: “Bring machines. Bring ammunition. Bring swords.”

Somewhat improbably — and possibly added automatically by an overenthusiastic AI design package — the advert also promised riot attendees that “drinks and food will be provided”.

More than a dozen concerned members of the public forwarded it to the London Centric WhatsApp number as it pinged around the area’s group chats. Children were warned by their parents to stay away. Some versions we saw appeared to be the original image; others were photos of the poster printed out and stuck to a wall.

In the end, nothing happened.

When London Centric visited Westfield on Wednesday evening, there were extra security staff and dog teams, plus additional checks at the entrance, searching the bags of confused shoppers. A security guard told us, “Something was put on social media… we’re expecting it to be young boys, juveniles.” But perhaps due to parental anxiety, there appeared to be even fewer teenagers hanging around than usual. The Metropolitan police later confirmed there had been “no disorder and no arrests.”

Once again, a corner of London had briefly held its breath in fear of an imagined turf war, which appeared to be the concoction of someone with access to AI and WhatsApp. But where is the line between imagined and real disruption to the capital from bored teenagers’ social media networks? Which threats should be taken seriously and which ignored? And how do Londoners deal with all this?

“Forwarded many times”

Journalism, understandably, tends to focus on the things that might happen or did happen. It doesn’t spend much time analysing the things that didn’t happen.

Last week’s Stratford non-incident was what might once have been a schoolyard whisper campaign. Instead, it prompted a multi-agency response that diverted resources from elsewhere in the city. It’s impossible to say how many people saw the call-to-arms in the 24 hours it circulated, but based on the sheer number of messages, it could plausibly have reached hundreds of thousands of Londoners, or even millions. Many of them will have felt less safe in their city as a result.

Despite the relatively low-key nature of the threat, even large businesses didn’t know how seriously to take it. Some of the big employers based in offices in nearby Endeavour Square, home to the likes of the Financial Conduct Authority and Transport for London, issued warnings to staff. And those warnings served to inadvertently lend credence to a threat that had previously remained unsourced.

Dive London, an aquatics club based in the former Olympic swimming pool in Stratford, sent an email to members saying Westfield staff, the Olympic Park security team and the Metropolitan police were all aware that “a violent disruption” involving weapons was being planned. The email said similar events had been mitigated by security in the past, but nonetheless advised people to avoid the Stratford area.

That Dive London email was then screengrabbed and went viral in local WhatsApp groups – with the “forwarded many times” tag that the app automatically adds to viral content. This second email was then held up as evidence that the original AI-generated posters had legitimacy.

Whether there was ever going to be a riot, or whether local teens were ever planning to turn up, is hard to judge. It could be that the drizzly weather and the substantial security presence made would-be attendees turn straight back around. It could be that they were never coming in the first place.

We have been here before. Earlier this year London Centric was the first news outlet to visit the location of a supposed “red vs blue” school war meeting. What we found was a group of younger teenagers milling around outside a McDonald’s, ready to film content in case anything happened. Nothing did. But this is a generation for whom recording online content can be the whole purpose of an activity, rather than simply applying a lens to it.

Within weeks, similar red vs blue posts had spread across the rest of London and then the nation, with coverage across mainstream media raising fears among both children and parents. In some cases the school wars became a self-fulfilling prophecy and scuffles broke out. Whispers of real fights and stabbings spread fear among teenagers. A few weeks later came the very public chaos in Clapham, which went viral around the world and disrupted Sadiq Khan’s work with the Foreign Office to convince the UK’s ambassadors to sing the praises of London as a safe place.

“Some skater kids”

It’s not easy to work out who is responsible for these viral calls-to-action — and whether anyone should, or could, be held to account for what is becoming a pattern of panic-stoking images. It’s relatively easy to arrest someone for shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre. It’s harder when the person shouting fire is an anonymous teenager with little risk of being caught – and when the message is spreading far beyond the place they first set it going.

On 1 March, the police arrested a man in his 20s and a 15-year-old boy on suspicion of encouraging or assisting a crime in connection with the red vs blue school wars trend. But the force has now told London Centric that both have been released pending further investigation, as there was not enough evidence to charge them.

Similar efforts to crack down on the young people involved in the more serious chaos in Clapham, which we covered at length, resulted in a handful of individuals being charged. The case of a 17-year-old girl charged with assault on a police constable, which we reported on recently, is due to return to court next month.

The skill required to work out what’s a real threat, what’s a joke and what’s AI slop is finely balanced. The Met has the task of distinguishing the bad pastiche of a bored 13-year-old, or a viral content-filming opportunity by an influencer, from a genuine safety risk.

Back in Stratford on Wednesday night, the security guards earning overtime at Westfield were among the few people benefiting from this cautious new normal, in which a viral post can cause low-key chaos and paranoia.

As one security guard put it, as they looked at the sparsely attended shopping centre: “Some skater kids put on social media that they may come here in large groups. We’re just here for added safety.”

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PS… Who doesn’t want London Centric’s reporting about them to appear on Google?

Over the last few weeks, something curious has been happening. An unknown person has been asking Google to remove London Centric’s reporting about them under “right to be forgotten” powers. Until relatively recently, Google would have told London Centric which pages were being blocked from search rankings.

But a 2024 court decision in Sweden means the only information we get is that someone, somewhere, isn’t a fan of our work appearing when you search their name. So we’re flying blind. If you’re Googling the subject of one of our stories and can’t find the link, do let us know.

Over the last 18 months we’ve exposed the dubious ownership of many of the capital’s gift shops, highlighted how billionaire landlords collect their rent, and traced their dodgy profits all around the world.

One of the people who read London Centric’s reporting was Dan Tomlinson, the Labour MP for Chipping Barnet and exchequer secretary to the Treasury. He is the government minister in charge of HMRC and chairs the board of the tax authority.

This week Tomlinson oversaw a series of raids on six central London gift shops, including those stocking “wizarding” goods. He said this will be part of an ongoing campaign targeting the tax affairs of the capital’s souvenir stores. The raids found several criminal offences had taken place and HMRC officials are now examining detailed financial data from the businesses.

In a statement the government minister said: “I want to thank Jim Waterson and local campaigners for highlighting the issue of dodgy shops in London. To dodgy shop owners and landlords turning a blind eye everywhere: we are coming for you.

“Too many high streets have been blighted by illegal activity that harms local communities and undercut honest businesses, and we’re determined to fix this. We’re increasing our action across the UK to target the criminals using shops as a front for tax evasion, money laundering and fraud.”

How the gift shops actually make money

London Centric’s reporting has tried to bust the myth that dodgy gift shops in the centre of the capital are empty money laundering fronts without any real customers.

Instead, we’ve explained how many Harry Potter shops, American candy stores and other similar souvenir operations are high revenue businesses that target popular tourist areas and sell substantial volumes of goods to real people. The shops can make millions of pounds a year in illicit profits thanks to their decision to unilaterally opt out of paying taxes, paying the minimum wage, or employing staff with the legal status to be in the UK.

A core part of this business model involves paying small monthly stipends to individuals, usually recent immigrants or overseas students who do not intend to remain in the UK long term. These individuals then sign the legal paperwork at Companies House stating they run the shops.

These patsy directors, including one who gave their home address as a location that we tracked down to an abandoned car park, often have low incomes, live in precarious housing situations and are willing to take the blame on behalf of the people really running the operations.

When anyone in authority starts to question a specific shop’s failure to pay business rates, VAT or corporation tax, the operator “phoenixes” the unit. This means the shop sheds its existing legal identity, only to reopen within days under a new name, with a new legal owner, often with the same stock.

Gift shop businesses that actually pay their taxes, or other legitimate companies that want to rent central London retail units, cannot compete with the higher rents that a tax-evading outlet can afford. The end result is a sea of highly profitable tat shops enveloping central London and Oxford Street.

Our reporting is based on talking to dozens of people directly involved in running London gift shops over the last two years. All requested anonymity due to fear of the individuals and criminal organisations involved in the trade.

“Magic and wizarding products”

In the past, many raids on London’s gift shops were led by trading standards staff. Officials focused on seizing fake or dangerous goods, such as chocolate that doesn’t meet food safety standards. These raids sometimes resulted in fines, which could be written off by the shop owners as a cost of doing business.

Thanks to the support of paying London Centric subscribers who fund our journalism, we’ve been able to make the case to politicians that, if they want to clean up central London, they instead need to follow the money and treat this as a tax enforcement issue.

This week saw a new approach. HMRC officials were present at the central London raids and seized full downloads of all the till data at the gift shops. In a statement, the tax authority said it will now analyse the data and conduct “detailed tax compliance enquiries” before deciding on any further action.

HMRC said the raids targeted “shops selling royal family, London and UK-themed gifts, along with magic and wizarding products”. They were a coordinated operation with Westminster Council, the Met Police and the Home Office.

This week’s gift shop raids have already resulted in three arrests for immigration-related offences and a £40,000 civil penalty issued to one shop for employing an illegal worker. Trading standards officials also seized goods worth £5,433, including 289 disposable vapes, 173 squishy toys, counterfeit bags, hats, scarves and unsafe travel adapters.

It is not known which specific central London gift shops were raided by HMRC officials, due to taxpayer confidentiality pending any prosecutions.

Magic away the tax bill

At least one major landlord that has hosted tax-evading gift shops has previously stated its willingness to cooperate with authorities. Last summer we informed Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital that the company had repeatedly rented units in the Trocadero building near Piccadilly Circus to tax-evading gift shops that had engaged in “phoenixing”. The company’s lawyers said that while a landlord is “entitled to let to tenants who will pay a market rate for the property”, it would assist HMRC with any investigations.

What’s clear is that there does seem to be a change in attitude underway at HMRC, recognising that the sight of blatant tax evasion on some of the country’s most prominent streets undermines faith in the entire system.

As Kensington and Bayswater MP Joe Powell, a longtime campaigner on this issue, put it when he raised our reporting with Treasury ministers in the House of Commons last summer: “An increasingly common issue on our high streets is phoenixing. That is where a shop unit continues to trade while cycling through multiple limited companies every few months, none of which pays corporation tax, VAT or business rates.

“Can the minister encourage officials at His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to walk along Whitehall, just a few hundred metres from this chamber, and take a look at whether the series of Harry Potter-themed gift shops across London - which have been accused by London Centric of doing exactly that - are playing by the rules? Will they ensure that tax enforcement supports legitimate small businesses on our high streets?”

Now it appears the tide is turning.

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This isn’t the end of the gift shop story…

In recent months, London Centric has had reporters working on this story in distant locations such as India, Dubai, and Oxfordshire. Our aim is to finally identify the people who are really profiting from the capital’s dodgy gift shops.

Our reporting on these shops won the Wincott Award for best regional financial journalism in the UK. But we want to go further.

Reporting this story has cost London Centric more than ten thousand pounds and the bill is continuing to rise, alongside the substantial legal risk. We’re funded by our readers, we have no financial backers, and we’re not afraid to take on vested interests. If you’re able to become a paying member and support original investigative reporting about the capital, your subscription will help fund this work.

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Preposterous property of the week

Are you desperate to simultaneously channel Henry VIII and a James Bond villain from the 1990s? We’ve got the property for you. Mottisfont Hall, an eight-bedroom Victorian mansion, is on the market for £9.5m.

Situated in south east London, the house is on the historic site of a medieval Royal Jousting Yard and next door to Eltham Palace, where the Tudor monarch spent his childhood. It’s fair to say that it is a unique combination of old and new.

Not only does it come with the standard mansion amenities, such as a cinema room, wine cellar, and gym, but it also features a frigidarium plunge pool, orangery, and a cottage for staff.

Is London’s iPhone theft era really coming to an end?

Following increasingly angry accusations that the Metropolitan Police is failing to tackle phone theft – including by allowing thieves to use the capital’s flowerbeds as holding areas – the force has launched a very public campaign to promote its efforts.

We’ve previously highlighted figures from former Liberal Democrat campaigner Rob Blackie that show the abysmally low chances of a prosecution of anyone who steals a phone. The Met has now released figures claiming substantial falls in reported phone thefts this year, especially in central London.

The Met has also repeatedly complained that the main reason phone theft is out of control in the capital is because it’s so easy to flip the phones for a quick profit.

In March, Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley gave tech companies until this summer to come forward with “concrete commitments that make stolen phones unusable anywhere in the world”, or else he would ask the government to legislate to force them to improve their technology.

This week the Met announced it had reached a deal with Apple to brick more phones. iPhones are the main target of London criminals, with Samsung devices often dumped by thieves due to their relative undesirability to criminals.

What’s actually changing?

Part of that deal relates to increased data sharing, with Apple pledging to tell the Met whether or not a stolen device reconnects to a phone network once it’s been stolen, which allows the police to better understand where handsets go after they’ve been snatched.

The other part relates to the new safety precautions that Apple has introduced, which Rowley said means “rather than the vast majority of phones being factory reset after they’re stolen, it’s now a small minority, maybe around 20% of Apple devices.”

What is the Met saying is new?

Apple devices have a tool called Activation Lock, which is designed to prevent thieves from using a device once it’s been reported stolen. But criminals have designed software able to bypass this feature.

While this doesn’t give thieves access to the phone’s data, it does enable them to factory-reset stolen iPhones and sell them on. Apple says it will now block software that enables this factory-reset bypass, billed by some media outlets as a “kill switch.”

But is it really that simple?

Jake Moore, an advisor for cybersecurity firm ESET, told London Centric that while the idea of a kill switch “sounds incredible, conjuring up this idea that we’ll just press a button and the phone will never work again,” the reality is much more complicated.

“Criminals have increasingly relied on software tools and workarounds to bypass protections,” he said. The problem is that a lot of phone theft is not done by petty thieves, but by “structured criminal organisations” that can “start at a bus stop in London and it goes all the way over to China”.

The game of cat and mouse between law enforcement agencies and criminals has a long history. Moore, who used to be in a police digital forensics unit, said: “We used to get a phone, and sometimes we wouldn’t be able to crack into it because the encryption was too strong.”

Rather than giving up, Moore’s team would “sit on it for six months” and wait for new unlocking software to come out.

He said that “what criminals are also going to potentially do is still steal your phone” then work out a way to crack the devices: “I can’t see how they will ever be able to fully protect this.”

Talking of phone networks… TfL this week doubled down on its pledge to have phone coverage on all the underground sections of the tube network by the end of the year. It now has 60% of the network live, with new stretches of the Bakerloo line, Metropolitan line, and Circle and District lines gaining coverage in recent weeks. The Northern line will also see a major upgrade in the coming weeks.

If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of this enormous technical challenge, we’ve previously explained how a single joined-up, successful infrastructure programme led by Boldyn Networks has resulted in the strange situation of Londoners now having better phone signal while moving at speed deep underground, compared to when they pop up onto the capital’s streets.

We’ll be back with more original investigative journalism next week.

Get in touch if there’s a story we should be looking into. If you want to follow London Centric on Instagram, that is a thing you can now do.

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Scroll down to read that piece, which looks at how fire safety reports were rewritten at the request of Aziz’s company, meaning it took eight years for the hotel to be shut down and the public to be made aware of the risk.

London Centric is funded by our paying readers. If you’re able to support original investigative journalism about the capital, every subscription makes a massive difference to what we can achieve.

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Asif Aziz, the Wembley hotel, and a fire safety test gone very wrong

This article is the subject of a legal complaint from lawyers for Asif Aziz. They say it is defamatory of him and that it does not fairly and accurately report the Essendi UK Hotels 2 Limited v London Property Company Limited high court judgment, which can be read in full here.

Billionaire landlord Asif Aziz has been personally criticised by a high court judge over how his company handled dangerous Grenfell-style cladding on a high-rise hotel it owns next to Wembley Stadium.

Hundreds of thousands of people stayed at the Ibis Wembley hotel over an eight-year period without knowing they were inside a tall building coated in material that had “no flame-retardant properties”.

London Centric has spent the last year investigating Aziz’s companies. We’ve revealed how they have a history of hosting tax-evading gift shops in their buildings, conducting mass evictions of tenants, and issuing fake electrical safety certificates to residents. We’ve also looked at the billionaire’s ownership of the Prince Charles Cinema and the purchase of the world’s oldest YMCA.

Now, in a damning high court judgment, His Honour Judge Stephen Davies raised a series of concerns about how one of Aziz’s companies handled the “intolerable fire risk” posed to people staying in its Ibis hotel next to Wembley Stadium.

The judge spelled out:

• The personal involvement of Aziz, a Labour donor and self-styled philanthropist, in the response to fire safety concerns at the Wembley hotel.

• Details of a “mystery” incident in which a piece of cladding supposedly from the hotel was provided for fire safety testing by an unknown person, even though it could not have actually come from the building.

• How Aziz’s company had a fire safety report rewritten to remove suggestions that more detailed checks should be carried out.

Although safety concerns about the Ibis Wembley were first raised in the wake of the Grenfell disaster it took until late 2024 before a proper fire safety test was carried out. In that time vast numbers of people slept there after attending football matches, gigs, and other events at Wembley Stadium.

The building suddenly closed for remedial works last summer after checks were finally carried out by the hotel operator, which had come to doubt the evidence provided by Aziz’s company that the building was safe. The decision left hundreds of people attending that summer’s Oasis gigs with nowhere to stay and the hotel remains closed.

The “mystery” of the wrong testing sample

The Ibis Wembley is operated on a day-to-day basis by hotel firm Essendi but the freehold of the building, which comes with responsibility for maintaining its structure, is owned by London Property Company Limited. This is one of many offshore companies used by Aziz for his financial interests.

In late 2017, following the Grenfell disaster, Aziz’s company was warned that the cladding on the Ibis Wembley was “similar to that used on Grenfell Tower” and advised to refer the 210-bedroom, 16-storey building to the fire service.

This did not happen. As a next step, according to the court, Aziz’s company hired a different fire safety consultancy called Clarke Banks to investigate the cladding.

This check would normally involve cutting away a piece of the building’s outer wall and subjecting it to a fire test.

“What then happened is something of a mystery,” said the judge.

In most circumstances an external fire safety consultant would travel to the hotel, cut a chunk of cladding off the building, then inspect it to see if it met the required standards.

In this case, the judge said, an unknown individual instead obtained a piece of cladding and showed it to the consultants at Clarke Banks.

They concluded the specimen would have passed a fire safety test because it was made of pure aluminium.

There was one problem: the pure aluminium cladding sample didn’t come from the Ibis Wembley. It was a completely different material to the flammable cladding that was actually on the hotel, which was “similar to that used on Grenfell Tower”.

The judge suggested there were three possible explanations for what had gone wrong with the test and he could not definitively conclude which was correct.

One explanation was “someone positively misleading [fire safety consultants] Clarke Banks by providing it with a sample which could not have come from the hotel building”. The second was “an inexplicable error” by the fire safety specialists. The third was “some other unexplained reason”.

Aziz’s solicitors at law firm Ronald Fletcher Baker told London Centric it would be wrong to suggest London Property Company Limited “deliberately provided a wrong sample, knowingly misled anyone, or deliberately concealed the cladding issue”.

They continued: “On the contrary, the judgment records that what occurred during the 2018 sampling process remains a ‘mystery’ and that there was insufficient material to make a findings [sic] of deliberate concealment by any party. Any suggestion to the contrary would be false and highly defamatory. London Property Company maintains that Clark Banks [sic] had the correct sample.”

Missed opportunities

Even accounting for the “mystery” of the initial testing mistake, the true severity of the fire safety situation at Aziz’s Wembley hotel could have been resolved back in 2017 with a second, more thorough, safety check of the building.

Yet when the fire safety consultants at Clarke Banks wrote a draft report recommending further inspection of the cladding, the judge found they faced pushback from Aziz’s company, which demanded multiple rewrites to the report.

The intention, the judge said, was to remove the “caveats contained in the first version” which recommended additional testing.

Instead, a sanitised version of the report, giving the building’s cladding a clean bill of health, was then supplied to the operators of the Ibis, which the judge said potentially endangered people staying overnight in the hotel after events at Wembley Stadium.

If further checks had been carried out, it would have quickly revealed the cladding was dangerous and the hotel would have been likely to shut immediately, potentially leaving Aziz’s company with a vast bill for remedial works.

Clarke Banks did not respond to London Centric’s requests for comment on why it rewrote its fire safety report to remove the suggestion of further checks following pushback from its client.

The judge said he did not have enough evidence to “make a positive finding of deliberate concealment” by Aziz’s company. But it was clear to him that, having obtained a favourable report, the business “displayed a firm reluctance to have any further invasive investigations undertaken by any independent consultants”.

“Somewhat unconvincing and unreliable”

Amid growing concerns, the operator of the Wembley hotel finally carried out its own fire checks in 2024, which swiftly concluded the building was dangerous. This led to a messy court dispute over who was responsible and who should pick up the bill for remedial works. Aziz’s London Property Company lost, has to remove the cladding, and now faces paying substantial damages.

The judge was critical of the two witnesses put forward by Aziz’s company in the court dispute, calling one of them “somewhat unconvincing and unreliable”.

He also said he believed Asif Aziz was personally involved in the discussions regarding the cladding on the hotel as one of his employees had to “obtain instructions from Mr Aziz for all major matters”.

The judge said: “Although both [witnesses] were keen to describe Mr Aziz as a ‘big picture’ man... that is belied by the documented extent of his involvement in the case from start to finish, which shows that on occasions (although I accept not always) he was directly involved in the details.”

Why didn’t Asif Aziz personally put his case across in court?

Aziz styles himself as a major philanthropist in London, owning the Trocadero building along with vast swathes of central London and residential towers. Through his family foundation he has donated to Labour MPs and also funds journalistic internships in many major newsrooms.

The billionaire left the UK in early 2025, relocating to Abu Dhabi, with the media attributing his decision to leave to the tax burden of the new Labour government. He occasionally returns to the UK and this year met mayor of London Sadiq Khan at the switch-on of London’s Ramadan Lights, which are funded by Aziz’s family foundation.

The judge was critical of Aziz’s failure to give evidence at the trial and said the billionaire could have given evidence by video: “My strong suspicion… is that much of the evidence in this case in reality emanates from… Mr Aziz, who in my view plainly could and should have been called as a witness, unless there was some very good reason for not doing so.”

Aziz will soon become one of the biggest hotel operators in London, as his company rushes to open thousands of windowless rooms in buildings operating under his ‘Zedwell’ branding, many of them in underground basements.

Although the judge concluded that Aziz has “control of” the company that owns the hotel’s freehold, his lawyers said: “Mr Aziz is not a director of London Property Company Limited and is not involved in the day-to-day management relating to the cladding. The decision as to which witnesses to call was a matter for the legal team and was based on which individuals had direct operational involvement in the relevant issues. Unfortunately, the key witness and a valued employee passed away shortly before the trial. London Property Company Limited disagrees with the judgment and intends to appeal.”

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Updates on previous stories… our story on Lime’s removal of speed limits for Deliveroo riders was raised with the company by Paul Swaddle, the leader of Westminster City Council… we’re hearing that the office in Hackney where goat sacrifice may be taking place has possibly already been cleared out….

Self-driving taxis are (sort-of) coming to London this summer on Uber

Is a self-driving taxi truly a self-driving taxi if it still has a human in the driving seat in case the self-driving fails? It’s a thought experiment that is about to become reality in London, after driverless taxi firm Wayve confirmed plans to start carrying paying customers around London by the end of the summer, attracting substantial media interest.

Wayve, for those struggling to keep up, is a homegrown startup that has been testing its cars on the streets of London since 2018. It is completely separate from the similarly named Google-backed Waymo which has also been flooding London with self-driving taxis in recent months and is planning to launch later in the year.

While Wayve plans for future operations to be fully driverless, at first all trips will have a licensed operator behind the wheel in case anything goes wrong.

Rather than build its own app, Wayve is launching in conjunction with ride-hailing company Uber. People requesting an Uber might find themselves being assigned a Wayve self-driving vehicle at no extra cost. If you want to increase your chances of being matched then go into your Uber account settings, tap on ‘ride preferences’ and register your interest in the ‘autonomous vehicles’ section.

We’ve been obsessed with who owns The Holme in Regent’s Park, formerly London’s most expensive home, since it was sold to an unknown purchaser for £139m in 2024. Now, the FT reports, the owner of the 40-bedroom house is close to flipping it to another unknown purchaser for £190m. Due to the UK’s unreformed property transparency laws, the owner is obscured by a trust and we’ll never know who stumped up the cash.

Would you like an unlicensed HMO with your pizza?

London Centric has reported on its fair share of dubious landlords. But we were surprised to see Pizza Pilgrims pop up on City Hall’s Rogue Landlord checker. It shows the proponents of Neapolitan pizza were fined £10,000 after being prosecuted for failing to ensure a house in multiple occupation was “safe and in good condition”.

A spokesperson for the pizza chain told us the breach of the law relates to a “historic administrative oversight” regarding a flat above the company’s Camden branch: “The issue was fully resolved as soon as the issue was brought to [Pizza Pilgrims’] attention and the property is now fully compliant. It did not relate to the operation of the restaurant itself, and there are no ongoing issues in relation to this matter.”

Lambeth Walk of shame

Despite the local elections taking place over a month ago, Labour in Lambeth is continuing to take a kicking. The former Labour stronghold now has a Green Party leader for the first time, after Zack Polanski’s party formed a coalition with the Lib Dems.

Now, former Labour councillor Andrew Collins is suing the party for deselecting him, after he was barred from standing in May’s local elections following what he claims was a “corrupt and unlawful process”.

First elected in 2022 to represent Clapham East, he saw his bid to stand again as a Labour candidate blocked by the party, which cited attendance issues. Collins has already defected to the Greens but told London Centric that he’s still bringing the case against his old political party for the “benefit of future Labour Party members whose rights we must safeguard.”

Got a story for us? Get in touch here via email or WhatsApp! We rely on your tips. Even if we can sometimes get overwhelmed by the sheer number of messages that we receive, we read every one of them.

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PS We’re baffled and delighted to learn that London Centric has been mentioned in a novel. Thanks to reader Rebecca Elliot, who encountered the mention in Losing the Plot by Mia Page, described as a new “uplifting bookish rom-com” .

We have never, to our knowledge, linked to a ranking of olives, but there’s a first time for everything.

At 10.22pm a man drags the animal by its horns through double doors into a rented office, a rope trailing from the goat’s neck. A second man quickly follows, carrying a folded-up cage.

The goat is never seen again. Instead, the CCTV records the same men leaving the room at 4.31am without the animal. One man is carrying a black rubbish bag, while another man hands over a transparent plastic container, containing an item that resembles horns, to a third participant.

The day after the CCTV footage was recorded, a video posted to the men’s Instagram account shows what appears to be the same goat inside the office, its horns being tightly gripped. Another video on the same account shows the same goat motionless on the ground. A man kneels over it with his hands raised in the air and chanting. The office’s walls are painted black and red.

We asked Ben Dustan, the president of the Goat Veterinary Society, whether he had encountered anything like this before. “Only in horror stories,” he said.

The man on the CCTV who dragged the goat into the office has a record of similar activity. London Centric has found years of Instagram posts featuring him holding dead birds by the legs, posing with a severed goat’s head, or pushing animal hearts wrapped in leaves into the earth with his bloody hands.

What’s more, when not operating from the Hackney office, in a building shared with business tenants such as viral political campaign group Led By Donkeys, the man appears to carry out similar rituals in the capital’s public cemeteries.

In recent weeks London Centric has uncovered videos of his organisation conducting elaborate ceremonies involving animal body parts, explosives and the burning of replica coffins by graves belonging to unrelated individuals.

But who is this man running a “black magic” temple a few minutes’ walk from Hackney town hall? What is he doing in there? And how does it all come back to a chef called Hugo who used to work for Marco Pierre White?

Read more and watch the CCTV footage below:

Read more

Scroll down to read today’s stories, including how the current London Underground dispute could finally come to an end.

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Exclusive: How Lime removed restrictions to let Deliveroo riders go at full speed through London’s parks

If you use Lime’s rental e-bikes, you’ll know that the capital is dotted with ‘go slow’ zones where the vehicles automatically slow down, enter ‘turtle mode’ and have their speed limited to as little as 8mph.

These areas, often agreed in negotiations with local councils, include public parks, busy high streets, or other areas where there is a high risk of collision with pedestrians.

That’s unless you’re a Deliveroo rider.

London Centric has been sent leaked internal WhatsApp messages that show how Lime has removed speed restrictions for London’s food delivery drivers. In the process the company has created a two-tier system where someone delivering a pizza is allowed to go through London’s parks and pedestrian areas at a top speed of 15.5mph but ordinary members of the public are not.

Matt Ward, Lime’s US-based “general manager for new verticals”, told a WhatsApp group for London delivery riders in April: “We are testing allowing delivery drivers exclusive access to quickly deliver into these areas without losing boost.”

Riders were later told the change applies both to red zones where Lime does not have an agreement with the local council to operate at all, and also the yellow “go slow” zones.

Well-known “go slow” zones include major central London locations such as St James’ Park, Regent’s Park and Hyde Park, plus locations further out such as the newly pedestrianised Camden High Street, Greenwich Park, and Battersea Park. Paths along the Thames in south west London are also heavily restricted for ordinary users.

The speed limit avoidance feature was developed as part of the company’s new Delivery Pass service. It aims to convince food delivery drivers to use Lime’s vehicles to meet Londoners’ insatiable appetite for rapid door-to-door delivery.

At the moment many delivery riders rely on the illegal e-bikes that form the backbone of the capital’s Deliveroo and Uber Eats network. Illegal e-bikes with throttles can easily travel at up to 30mph, often powered by cheap conversion kits that are contributing to the enormous growth in deadly lithium battery fires when they are charged at home.

Lime is trying to take on this market by offering couriers unlimited use of its consumer e-bikes for £12 per 24 hours, or up to £49 for a week, arguing it is safer for riders and better for Londoners. Lime will even give drivers a free luggage rack to attach to the back of Lime bikes with some of the packages.

The challenge for Lime, it seems, is that delivery drivers who are used to getting around London on fast, illegal vehicles are not delighted by the speed restrictions on Lime’s legal e-bikes. Slower journeys mean fewer completed jobs for the delivery drivers and therefore less income in a food delivery system that incentivises drivers to take risks and break the law.

At some point the decision was taken by Lime to prioritise speed, even in public spaces. When we tested a Delivery Pass in Regent’s Park all the normal speed restrictions on Lime’s bikes immediately disappeared.

On Monday, London Centric asked Lime whether it had checked with the capital’s local councils before giving the go-ahead for food delivery drivers to go at full speed through the capital’s parks and busy pedestrian areas.

In response, the company told us it would now U-turn on the policy and will soon be removing it. A spokesperson said: “The Lime Delivery Pass is in its pilot phase, and we’re continuing to learn and test new features that help optimise the experience for delivery riders.”

The company, which is in the process of listing on the stock market at a $2bn (£1.5bn) valuation, continued: “Lime’s Delivery Pass is designed as a viable, and safer, alternative to the large number of illegal high-speed delivery e-bikes seen on London’s roads. Every Lime e-bike has a speed cap of 15.5mph, and passes regular safety and quality checks, including on battery safety. The pilot regularly tests new features and aims to develop a safer option for delivery riders in the city.

“We are currently in the process of reinstating ‘turtle mode’ and yellow ‘go-slow’ zones for delivery riders. This was tested in limited areas for a short period of time as we continue to learn and build our DeliveryPass. That trial is ending and will not be part of our offering to delivery riders going forward.”

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…still, you could just stop the bikes in the traffic

One other detail in the leaked WhatsApp messages caught our eye. In a bid to deal with London’s bike theft epidemic Lime’s US-based technology team also tested a new ‘auto pause’ feature for delivery drivers. This automatically locked an e-bike if it was parked up for a few minutes while the driver popped into a restaurant or block of flats to collect or deliver food.

Unfortunately, the feature started misfiring, with delivery drivers reporting that Lime e-bikes would lock themselves while they were cycling along London roads.

The tech team immediately turned off the feature.

How to end the tube strikes

Talks between the RMT trade union and Transport for London collapsed on Monday afternoon, with no resolution to the ongoing dispute over how many hours a tube driver should work in a four-day working week.

London Centric has reported extensively on the strike, digging deep into what’s actually at stake. We’ve also spelled out why half of the capital’s tube drivers, who belong to the rival Aslef union and support TfL’s definition of a four-day working week, will be turning up to work as normal.

Your experience of the tube will depend on which union your line’s drivers belong to. You might not notice it at all if you rely on the Elizabeth line or Overground, which aren’t affected by the strike.

It now seems to us that there are two routes out of the dispute, other than a complete capitulation, which would allow the RMT to claim some sort of victory.

• The voluntary-means-voluntary route: TfL has said its proposal for a 35-hour four-day week will be introduced on a voluntary basis, with RMT members free to stay on the old five-day week rota. But the RMT says it fears that the new proposal will quickly become the default. One way out of the dispute would be for TfL to sufficiently persuade the RMT that the proposal will remain voluntary.

• The terms and conditions route: The RMT has suggested instead that drivers work a 32-hour week, which would cut the total number of hours in the working week. Another off-ramp for the dispute would be for either side to compromise on some of the details of four-day working arrangements, such as drivers being required to spend slightly less time at depots.

As things stand, another RMT tube driver strike is planned for Thursday.

Would someone please collect their abandoned sex toy from Tottenham bus station?

A Freedom of Information request has found that a total of 26 sex toys were handed in to Transport for London’s lost property network last year, of which six were later reunited with their owners. The FOI request (h/t Diamond Geezer) found the majority of items were found inside another piece of lost property such as a bag, although a small number were found abandoned on their own.

The sex toys were generally recovered at the end of railway lines or at bus depots, with the Elizabeth line’s Shenfield station, Tottenham bus station, Embankment tube station, and Tolworth bus station among the locations to register multiple finds.

Did a London school really ban ham sandwiches?

Over the weekend Orla Minihane, a national spokesperson for Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party, claimed that Eastbury School in Barking, east London, had left a young girl in tears after confiscating her packed lunch.

Minihane claimed this was because the pupil “had a ham sandwich [and] pork is banned” at the school.

The post on X quickly amassed 33,000 likes, more than half a million views and vast numbers of anti-Muslim replies. In response to those who asked for the evidence of the ham sandwich ban, Minihane said she was “merely telling you what I was told”, and invited followers to “call the school” if they don’t believe her.

So London Centric did exactly that.

The school directed us to Barking and Dagenham Council, who told us: “Eastbury Community School is not a pork-free school and pork products are available within the school’s catering provision. The school is not aware of any incident in which a pupil has had food confiscated for bringing pork products into school.”

Minihane has quickly risen to prominence within Restore. The party is a splinter group from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, backed by X owner Elon Musk. Restore has campaigned for mass deportations and a party spokesperson has stated “Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith”.

We tracked down Vinycius Kaizer, the man in the picture. He slightly walked back the central claim and told London Centric: “There appears to have been some misunderstanding regarding information that has been shared online. I can confirm that I have made the decision to home school my children and I am currently in the process of organising everything required for that transition. As you can appreciate, this involves a number of practical and educational arrangements and is not something that can happen overnight.

“My understanding is that the school has policies regarding certain food items, including pork products, and this is one of several concerns I have raised as a parent. However, I do not wish to comment on any specific interactions involving my children or discuss school-related matters publicly. The decision to home-school is based on a range of factors and concerns that I have regarding my children’s education and school environment, rather than any single issue. For that reason, I would prefer not to provide any further comment at this time.”

When asked if he could confirm whether a ham sandwich had ever actually been confiscated from his child, Kaizer repeated his desire to refrain from “commenting on school-related matters.”

Minihane did not respond to a request for comment on whether she had any doubts about her original viral post and the reaction it had prompted.

A picture is worth a thousand Waymos

Ever since Waymo started to test its self-driving taxis in the capital we’ve been waiting for the moment when the cars caused chaos on London’s roads.

Last month, it seemed like that moment had come, when a Waymo drove straight towards a police cordon in Harlesden. But the company later insisted the car was being driven in manual mode by a human who has since been disciplined.

Then, last week, this image of a Waymo at the end of Waterloo Bridge went viral. It appeared the car had driven the wrong way through the one-way Strand underpass and was being intercepted by a police car.

Another computer failure? Not quite. In an account of events that’s backed up by the Met police, Waymo said two of its vehicles had become stuck behind a broken-down traditional taxi in the narrow tunnel, which was originally built as a shortcut for trams and used to have its own underground station.

Unable to proceed, the police advised the onboard Waymo test drivers to reroute back through the tunnel and the picture shows them blocking the entrance on Waterloo Bridge to ease their progress. As a result, cynical Londoners are still waiting for the first true Waymo traffic chaos. At the moment Waymo still has test drivers in its cars to assist in these situations but it aims to remove them completely by the end of the year. This will leave the cars to make their way around the capital without a human on board.

Guess who is McBack

While the local elections took place three weeks ago, their impact is still being felt in Southwark, as part of a very public personal spat.

Last summer leftwing Labour councillor James McAsh was narrowly elected leader of the local Labour party and therefore the council. This was then overturned on a technicality following an internal party row that split along ideological lines, with opposition to McAsh led by local Labour MP Neil Coyle. In response, McAsh defected to the Greens, helped his new party to its best-ever local result, became leader of the local Greens, did a coalition deal with the local Liberal Democrats, ousted his former Labour colleagues, and last week was elected council leader for the second time in a year.

Coyle has not taken this well, using X to share a letter addressed to McAsh setting out his “severe concerns” about the coalition, in which he said he suspected it would “McCrash and burn.” The letter said McAsh had jumped ship with “other Marxists no longer welcome in Labour” and that the council leader’s impact would be “just as grim” in his new role.

McAsh responded that he would “not attempt to respond to the many factual inaccuracies” in the letter, in which “even my name is misspelled.”

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We won an award! London Centric has the best local financial and business journalism in the country, according to The Wincott Foundation. The judges said this newsletter uncovers “the seamier side of London’s business scene” from dubious snail farm operators to the tax-evading gift shops hosted in billionaire landlord Asif Aziz’s Trocadero building.

And yet. There’s no point doing all that local journalism if everything stays the same. As things stand (more on that below) Sadiq Khan will pedestrianise half of Oxford Street in just a few months’ time. The mayor will then proudly walk down the middle of a street that’s… lined with dubious gift shops operated by front companies registered to penniless students.

In recent months I’ve been approached by a growing number of politicians who have read or watched London Centric’s reporting on tax-evading gift shops and want to do something about it. In the process I’ve become an accidental tour guide, taking MPs on tours of the shops, explaining their business practices, and offering suggestions on how to fix it. They seem to be listening. If you’re a politician or policymaker who wants to solve this problem, just drop me an email.

And with a bit of luck and a bit more journalism, London Centric readers can get the authorities to crush the capital’s tax-evading plague of tat.

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As for today’s edition, it’s mainly about the heat…

Londoners are rushing to install air conditioning. And the government is quietly subsidising it.

Last summer, we asked why so few homes in the capital have air conditioning. The answer was a combination of planning guidance, environmental concerns about the ethics of using extra energy, the cost of electricity, anxiety over whether the power grid supply can cope with high demand, and a vague notion that it’s not a very British thing to do.

The problem is that in response to the heat, people are taking matters into their own hands and bodging it. City Hall guidance says that London property developers should try to avoid installing air conditioning in new-build flats and first try other “passive” methods such as window shutters. But anyone who passes a new-build block of flats will already see the distinctive pipes from mobile cooling units curling out of the windows onto the balconies.

When Anna Mavrogianni, Professor of Sustainable, Healthy and Equitable Built Environment at UCL, started out as an academic in the early 2000s, the dominant research in her field was all about how to make homes warm.

Now, she said, it’s about keeping them cool: “In the UK, heat has been seen as something to look forward to. You see media images of barbecues and people having a good time on the beach, and there’s less emphasis on the adverse health effects, particularly for the more vulnerable segments of the population.

“Across the UK, the housing stock is in no way prepared for heat. That’s because it has been optimised for a different climate, where these types of excess heat events were not that frequent. Most homes have been designed to retain heat, rather than getting rid of it.”

As our summers get progressively hotter, our relationship with heat is changing. She said: “The estimate in 2011 from housing surveys was that around 5% of homes in England had an air conditioning system or form of active cooling installed. Now, surveys estimate around 20% of homes have some form of active cooling.”

The risk is that Londoners will buy cheap mobile air con units that can be expensive to run, operate very inefficiently, and put substantial strain on the electricity grid.

“There will be many more sweaty nights ahead”

What’s more, the government is now quietly subsidising the costs of installing electric cooling for an entire residential property. In November, the energy department announced a £2,500 grant towards the cost of replacing a home’s existing heating system with an “air-to-air heat pump.”

The government hasn’t been making a song and dance about this. Most of the marketing is about this technology being a way to heat your home. But an “air-to-air heat pump” is essentially a term for a two-way air conditioning system that can both cool and warm a property. (One problem is that the £2,500 subsidy is for homeowners. Private and social renters will have to take up the fight with their landlords, creating a social divide over who is cool in summer.)

Sky News economics editor and author Ed Conway is an air-to-air heat pump truther. He told London Centric the UK has failed to take cooling into account when encouraging people to install eco-friendly heating systems in recent years: “So much government policy seems to be focused primarily on vague notions about what’s ‘right’ for the climate and far less on what people actually want, or what actually makes the most sense for long-term emissions.”

Renewable energy production is shooting up in the UK thanks to the rapid growth of solar farms, meaning the cost and climate contribution of using more electricity in summer is falling.

Conway argued all of this means it’s time to rip out the boiler-powered radiators that are currently used to heat many of the capital’s properties and replace them with air conditioning units: “Air-to-air heat pumps wouldn’t work for every home. But for many homes in London (possibly most) they would be a better, cheaper option in the long run than replacing our existing boilers with air-to-water pumps. They also consume less power and hence contribute less to our climate emissions.”

“And that’s before you get to the added bonus - the one we’re all particularly conscious of right now: they would also enable us to cool our homes in summer as well as heating them in the winter. That’s a shame because they are a genuinely more efficient way of heating our homes. Plus they would help millions of Londoners sleep through sweaty nights like these. And believe me, there will be many more sweaty nights ahead.”

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The ghost of air con past

Any Londoner unlucky enough to be commuting in this weather knows full well that some of the sweatiest spots in the city are underground. Aware of the slick state travellers were finding themselves in, Transport for London installed experimental air cooling units back in 2012 at Oxford Circus and Green Park stations, which would circulate cool water through the platforms in a bid to reduce the temperature.

But according to a Freedom of Information request by a London Centric reader, the hulking units have had their “cooling functions” decommissioned for almost a decade.

Nick Dent, TfL’s director of customer operations, said it is a challenge to ensure “our transport services remain resilient in the face of more extreme and frequent hot weather events”. He told London Centric: “The units at Oxford Circus circulate air and provide ventilation, however the cooling element failed in 2017.

“We are currently prioritising investment on cooling programmes that will see the biggest benefit for the largest numbers of passengers, such as the introduction of new Piccadilly line and DLR trains that include air-conditioning. Alongside tunnel ventilation systems, there is air conditioning on more than 190 Tube trains, covering 40 per cent of the Underground network, and on all of the London Overground and Elizabeth line trains.”

What happens in a world without air con

As summers in the capital get hotter, pressure on the small handful of spots available to Londoners to cool down intensifies, occasionally with dramatic consequences.

On Bank Holiday Monday, the police were called to Parliament Hill Fields Lido on Hampstead Heath following an altercation. A boy, aged 17, and a man, aged 25, were arrested on suspicion of affray, while the London Ambulance Service attended to a 15-year-old boy and a man in his 40s with minor injuries.

The City of London Corporation, which manages Hampstead Heath, said it shut the lido for the “safety of our staff and the public” after a fracas “involving a small number of individuals” broke out.

A spokesperson for the Corporation said: “We condemn the unacceptable behaviour that led to the temporary closure of the Lido,” and that the pool will “reopen as soon as it is safe to do so.”

London prepares for Kid’s Meal Summer

Rachel Reeves’ decision to slash VAT on “children’s meals” this summer is opening up all manner of exciting possibilities for the capital’s restaurants. The tax guidance makes it clear that the legal definition of a “children’s meal” is essentially a meal that’s smaller than normal, cheaper than normal, and marketed as a ‘children’s meal’ on the menu. There’s nothing in the rules about it having to be ordered or eaten by a child. (The FT’s ever-wonderful Alphaville blog explains this in a bit more depth.)

All of this opens up some exciting possibilities for discount small plates dining this summer. Restaurant Kitty Fisher’s announced: “We are thrilled to announce we are going to be offering A KIDS’ MENU this summer featuring lobster, steak au poivre, oysters, offal, snails and all the other good stuff KIDS love.”

Going one step further, the Blue Stoops in Kensington announced a ‘Chancellor’s Children’s Menu,’ offering up snail salad, oysters, anchovy butter toast, and a ‘tax break tart’ for dessert.

Jamie Allsopp, the pub’s founder and a former hedge fund manager, said he’d introduced the grown-up children’s menu so that “everybody can feel the benefit of this new policy, and enjoy some of the best seasonal ingredients prepared by London’s finest chefs at a price that is fair, reasonable, and equitable.”

Oxford Street pedestrianisation challenge walked back

The newly-elected Conservative leadership of Westminster council appears to be backing down on its election-winning pledge to challenge Sadiq Khan’s pedestrianisation of Oxford Street in court.

Leader Paul Swaddle told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that the current pedestrianisation plan is a “bit of a Temu plan” done on a budget. However, council officers have now advised him there is little realistic chance of stopping it in the courts, meaning the cost of bringing a legal challenge would be for nothing.

Westminster Labour had also tried to fight the plans when it was in power. But the local party fell in line when Sadiq Khan struck a power-grab with central government, which saw him take direct control over the area around Oxford Street through a Mayoral Development Corporation – a process usually used to regenerate areas such as docklands.

Update: shortly after we published, Westminster Conservatives put out a statement that King's Counsel had confirmed that the legal window to bring a challenge in the courts had closed.

The deadline to file a challenge expired on 26 May, the same day that the legal advice commissioned by Swaddle was received. The KC said there were “no credible grounds for a judicial review with any material prospect of success” and that the change of administration at the Council would not be accepted as justification for the delay.

New Dawn Fades?

Dawn Butler would like to be Labour’s next candidate for mayor of London. You can tell because the Brent East MP has been publicly saying exactly that for almost two years, while conducting the sort of public campaign activity that a mayor of London candidate would do.

The problem is there’s still not a vacancy, as her old friend and political ally Sadiq Khan maintains his stance of constructive ambiguity as to whether he will run again in 2028. (Whenever there’s a headline claiming he’s taken a definitive public position in either direction, just look at the actual wording.) This has created a strange shadow race behind closed doors, where Labour candidates such as Butler jostle for position without formally saying they are running for fear of disrespecting Khan and turning him into a lame duck mayor.

Last week, it looked like that was no longer the case, when PoliticsJoe reported Dawn Butler planned to formally announce she is running to become Labour’s mayoral candidate at a Labour Women’s fundraiser on Wednesday. Butler, one of Khan’s closest political allies, said the story was false. The journalist who wrote the story said they’d checked it with Butler before publishing. The event on Wednesday mysteriously passed by without any announcement. In a statement, Butler said that while she had “never hidden” her desire to run for mayor, “it is simply the case that there is no vacancy”. Yet.

London Centric in the news… our story on a curious neighbours’ dispute in Notting Hill was picked up by the Times and pretty much every other outlet… our story on leaked plans for the rebuild of Euston station was referenced in parliament at the transport select committee…

Will the West End see strikes this summer?

It’s not just gravity the cast of Wicked are defying, but their West End bosses too, as Equity members vote for possible strike action this summer.

Members of the performing arts union overwhelmingly backed an indicative ballot this week, with 98% voting yes to potential industrial action. The union can now ballot its membership on formal strike action, which would affect Saturday shows this summer.

Negotiations between Equity and the Society of London Theatre began in December 2025, but the two sides disagree on pay, holiday provision, and incapacity pay for anyone injured while performing. The union is pushing for a 7% pay increase for its members each year for the next three years.

The general secretary of Equity, Paul W Fleming, said: “The West End is internationally renowned, and these world class stages should pay world class wages, not leave workers needing second jobs to pay their bills or burnt out by six day weeks and insufficient holiday.”

Preposterous property of the week

What does £5.475m get you these days in London? This five-bed property in Barnes, south-west London has a staircase finished in soft green Argentine leather that took four seamstresses 120 hours to hand sew and stitch.

It also boasts a Gosney pizza oven and a mini forest of 30 silver birch trees. But the feature that really caught our eye was a wooden “bespoke indoor slide” linking the landscaped garden with a cinema room.

Saving a cafe… from itself?

We do a lot of reporting at London Centric on small businesses struggling to cope with the city’s rising rents, rapid transformation, or greedy landlords.

Whether the threat is posed by developers or gentrification, we’ve found that the stories about the closure of beloved institutions can be more complicated than they first appear. Case in point: Madeira Star in south London’s Kennington, a Portuguese cafe that’s been open for 30 years.

We were alerted to its closure by an online petition to save the cafe, which said the “much-loved establishment” was being “displaced” by the landlord’s decision not to renew the lease. The petition called on Lambeth Council to grant the cafe community asset status and demanded that “consideration for the people and the community’s needs supersede interests that solely focus on the financial gain of property development.”

But when London Centric called the restaurant to find out about this apparent injustice, co-founder Luis De Freitas told us that it was the owners who’d initiated the closure, rather than the landlord.

He cited the difficulties of trading during a cost of living crisis and said he didn’t want to keep running the cafe. He said he “didn’t know who started the petition” and that “customers have been complaining, but it’s our decision.”

What will he do next? “It’s been 30 years. I think I deserve a long holiday.”

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On Wednesday morning a nervous 15-year-old boy entered Stratford youth court, where he was due to be sentenced for his part in creating one of London’s most notorious viral videos.

Before this year’s footage of kids on Clapham’s High Street became a worldwide story about the state of London, there was another globally viral video clip involving the capital’s teenagers: the footage from March 2025 of a young boy hurling a heavy chair over a balcony at Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, captured on camera by his friend.

The timid teenager in an east London court this week didn’t show any of the giddiness he had displayed when he filmed the original incident, which was posted on Snapchat with the caption “No way bro almost killed someone” and “Nahhh” followed by laughing emojis. Although the clip of the chair being thrown went viral, London Centric has now obtained exclusive CCTV footage from the floor below, where it landed, narrowly missing passing shoppers.

Repeated delays to the trial date and other problems with the justice system meant this was the boy’s ninth trip to court in little over a year. All of this was to deal with the aftermath of an incident that lasted a few seconds. Over the months the staff had grown to know the teenager well. When he stood for the judge, the court clerk remarked how tall he’d grown.

The boy, who appeared in court the day before his English language GCSE exam, was handed a 12-month referral order, meaning he will now be subject to a curfew between 10pm and 7am each night for three months.

He received a lighter sentence than the one given to the teenager who actually threw the chair, who was previously given an eight-month detention and training order. Both teenagers, neither of whom can be named for legal reasons, were found guilty of criminal damage and recklessly causing a public nuisance.

In the 14 months since their chair-throwing stunt went viral around the world, London Centric reporters have repeatedly travelled to Stratford youth court to watch the case unfold. We’ve sat alongside teams of translators, social workers, family members, and lawyers. We wanted to understand more about the motivation behind one aspect of the capital’s viral video crisis, where teenagers film their own criminal acts for content and then seem surprised when the footage leads to real‐world consequences.

“No way bro almost killed someone”

Neither boy should have been at Westfield Stratford on Saturday 1 March 2025. Three weeks earlier, they’d both been issued with anti-social behaviour notices by police banning them from entering the shopping centre, after security guards had spotted them throwing pebbles over railings at the site.

The shopping centre, built ahead of the 2012 Olympics in one of the poorest parts of the capital, is a hub for local young people. After attending an early court hearing in the summer of 2025, London Centric encountered two youth workers wandering through the shopping centre. They work as part of Newham Council’s Detached Youth Work Team, providing support to young people while they are out and about in the borough.

“This [Westfield] is the biggest youth centre in Newham,” said one of the youth workers, gesturing to the shopping centre, saying kids “come here for the wifi, for the shops”. Outside of school hours and during holidays, the shopping mall is flooded with young people, they said. They said most of the local children just want a place to be and it’s just a small minority who engage in violent or anti-social behaviour “sometimes [due to] boredom, sometimes wrong company, maybe even [they’re] frustrated with the establishment”.

“We must deal with young people as quickly as we can”

That Saturday afternoon last March, the two boys ignored their ban and headed to the shopping centre, where they spent hours wandering around. At 10:30pm the older boy threw a 15kg blue chair over a glass balustrade from Westfield’s top floor as the other filmed, before the pair ran away giggling.

Described by prosecutor Matthew Groves in court as “a large and ungainly item”, the piece of furniture fell 50ft down a void between multiple floors, narrowly missing shoppers.

It was an act that could have had catastrophic consequences. But far from trying to avoid being identified as the perpetrators, the pair had filmed themselves doing it and then shared the footage. The crime was content, and it seemed that getting the content was the purpose of the crime.

New CCTV footage obtained by London Centric shows just how close the chair came to hitting people wandering along the ground floor of the shopping centre.

In a pre-smartphone world that would have probably been the end of the story. But as with hundreds of other clips of disorder in London, the footage quickly went viral around the world, alerting the police to the initial incident. Before long, the teenager who actually threw the chair was identified by a police officer from CCTV footage. Soon afterwards his friend, the person filming the incident, was also arrested. A brief moment of online fame gave way to months of grinding through the capital’s overloaded criminal justice system.

At an early court hearing in May 2025, the judge said: “We must deal with young people as quickly as we can.” But the trial was plagued with setbacks, which meant it was more than a year before proceedings concluded.

The boy who filmed the incident needed his parents in court to support him. Yet the courts often failed to meet the parents’ own complicated requirements for specialist assistance and translators, meaning the case could not proceed. On one occasion, interpreters for the wrong language were booked. There were delays in securing experts, problems locating vital reports, plus issues with the legal aid portal. Sometimes it was as simple as notes not having been retrieved in time for the hearing.

The delays had more than administrative ramifications: there are different sentencing powers for people aged 12 to 14 and 15 to 17. While boys in the older bracket are immediately eligible for custodial sentences, a 14‐year‐old would only receive one if they were a persistent offender, which the teenager was not. The time taken to deal with the case meant the teenager moved into the upper bracket.

The desire to create online content for the dopamine hit of likes and comments is nothing new, but there is an innovative element to the slew of mobile phone videos that show disorder on London’s streets, in that it’s often filmed by the perpetrators.

When teenagers ran through a Marks and Spencer in Clapham earlier this year there were multiple videos uploaded online of the event, many of them filmed not by bystanders but by participants. The footage was often accompanied by the breathless commentary of the teenagers themselves, and no effort was made by anyone to conceal their identity. Those involved seemed either unaware they were incriminating themselves, or so intent on creating content they didn’t care about the consequences.

Often fuelled by the city’s detractors, London’s viral video crisis is becoming self-perpetuating. Teenage misbehaviour is hardly new. But the videos appear to show that petty crime goes unpunished – and can make incredibly viral content. This message isn’t lost on bored kids looking for something to do.

“You know Stratford, it’s always like this”

London Centric visited Westfield Stratford on a busy Monday afternoon in the Easter holidays of 2025, shortly after the video of the chair being thrown was filmed. “It’s just lawless,” said a security guard working for a prominent British retail chain, who asked that he and his store remain anonymous. School holidays are the “worst”, he said, describing the main problem he sees as “youth aggression”.

He has worked there for the past decade, but “it doesn’t feel as safe as it used to”. One Saturday there were six incidents, he said; another viral video incident, with multiple stabbings, occurred just near his store minutes after it closed.

As well as a body camera, he was wearing a stab-proof vest. Weekly weapons searches at the site are unearthing knives “as long as your arm,” he claimed.

He seemed amazed by the aggression he encountered from some teenagers: “I’m double your age, your dad’s age, and you still want to fight me.”

“A laboratory for regeneration schemes”

The site on which Westfield Stratford was built was previously a railway works, when the area was a centre for industry and trade – but by the time the Australian company Westfield bought the site in 2003, it was a disused goods yard.

Regeneration swiftly followed: two years later, London won the bid to host the 2012 Olympics, centred on a plan to radically change Stratford.

Ken Livingstone, then the mayor of London, said in 2008: “I didn’t bid for the Olympics because I wanted three weeks of sport. I bid for the Olympics because it’s the only way to get the billions of pounds out of the government to develop the East End”, describing it as a ploy “to ensnare the government to put money into an area it has neglected for 30 years.”

By the time Westfield Stratford officially opened in 2011, its neighbours included the new Stratford International railway station – something of a misnomer, given that international trains have never actually stopped there – and vast amounts of new residential construction. The Elizabeth Line provided another boost to the area when it opened in 2022, reducing the time taken to travel from central London to the door of Westfield to just 15 minutes. New‐build properties a few minutes’ walk from the shopping centre now sell for well over £1m.

But the story isn’t so simple. While parts of Stratford are full of flashy redevelopment, “the regeneration that’s happened is not a tide which has raised all boats”, cautioned Paul Watt, an urbanist and visiting professor in LSE’s sociology department.

Stratford scores highly on gentrification indices, he explained, but also on deprivation indices: “Essentially, putting it crudely, you’ve got social polarisation.”

This is not unique to Stratford – east London as a whole has been “a laboratory for regeneration schemes since the 1980s”, he said – but the speed and intensity of recent development makes it “most visible” there. A 2021 report by Newham Council found that while house prices in the London borough increased by 87% between 2011 and 2020 and rents went by 55%, wages increased by just 37%. This left some of the area’s poorer residents facing “London levels of rent” on “Blackburn levels of wages”, according to Watt.

While emphasising that he was not “trying in any way to justify crime or anti-social behaviour”, Watt suggested that this dichotomy might be part of the reason behind aggression towards the mall and its “glittering space full of displays of expensive consumer goods”, an exclusionary place “which both attracts and repels”.

“Gets caught up with his peers and does silly things”

When the boy who filmed the chair‐throwing returned to court this week, his lawyer Nimra Ashraf said he had changed. He was now “excelling in sports, focusing on his GCSEs, and getting good grades” and that he was considering starting an apprenticeship as a bricklayer or a car-wrapper. When asked about his future by the judge, the boy told the court he’d taken up drumming, and wanted to “be a successful musician.”

Ashraf added that he’d been on repeated child protection plans, had witnessed domestic violence, and hadn’t committed any other offences. He also had “some significant learning needs”.

The lawyer said that a psychiatric report had found her client had low levels of maturity, leaving him particularly susceptible to peer pressure, something that was echoed by a youth justice worker, who characterised him as someone who “gets caught up with his peers and does silly things.”

The older teenager, who actually threw the chair, had already been convicted of more serious offences, although he is planning to appeal.

At the hearing on Wednesday, District Judge Talwinder Buttar tried to understand the mentality of the younger boy: “Everyone saw what happened because you posted it online. It was horrible to watch. What were you thinking at the time?”

“I thought it was a joke,” said the boy.

He was asked what he thought now about his involvement in the chair‐throwing incident, as he sat in court facing a severe punishment.

“Not good and I’m stressed about it,” the boy said, adding “I’m sorry because of what could have happened. I could have killed someone. That’s serious, very serious.”

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The much-derided London railway station, famous for its 1960s concrete design and travellers sprinting down ramps at the last minute, is due to become the terminus of the long-awaited High Speed 2 railway from Birmingham.

Yet a stash of confidential documents and design plans obtained by London Centric sets out fears within Transport for London that attempts to build a cut-price solution following years of political interference could result in a dangerously undersized and overcrowded station.

The plan is for the existing Euston mainline station to remain largely intact. A new, underground High Speed 2 station would then be attached at the western side where there is currently a giant building site.

At the end of last year Transport for London bosses warned central government that they may have to block the potential expansion of High Speed 2 for safety reasons. They were concerned the rebuilt Euston’s concourse could quickly become overcrowded and additional passengers from Manchester would overload the capital’s transport network and cause fire risks.

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“The station could hit capacity constraints within six years of operation,” warned a confidential internal briefing in late 2025. The document, seen by London Centric, continued: “That would likely mean TfL would have to object to commercial development plans in the local area and would limit the ability of HS2 to run additional services… thus hindering the potential expansion of the network and impacting the Midlands and the North to a greater extent.”

According to the documents, TfL set out a series of concerns to central government about the plans to rebuild Euston. These included:

• TfL warning it has “no funding” to upgrade Euston tube station to cope with the thousands of extra passengers arriving in the capital off High Speed 2 trains every hour.

• Fears from London’s transport planners that the capital could “bear disproportionate long-term costs” if Euston tube station is overloaded, with deputy mayor for transport Seb Dance telling rail minister Peter Hendy the capital cannot pick up the costs for what is a national project.

• Predictions that plans to fund the construction of the new High Speed 2 station by building housing, shops, and offices around Euston will further overload the station by attracting commuters and shoppers to the area – as well as causing years of disruptive construction work.

• Details of Sadiq Khan’s team having looked at taking out new loans to help pay for the required upgrades, repaid with increased taxes on businesses in the local Euston area, impacting City Hall’s ability to borrow for other projects.

• “Concerns” from TfL about the predicted High Speed 2 passenger numbers and a belief they may have underestimated passenger growth, based on the explosive popularity of the Elizabeth line which is outperforming all expectations.

• Warnings that, as the High Speed 2 station could be at a completely different height to the existing station, there might be disability access issues. One solution under consideration is for the Euston concourse to be dug up and dropped to remove the dangerously steep ramps down to the existing West Coast Main Line platforms.

There will also be the option to add three extra half-length platforms in the future, potentially to enable services to Manchester or Scotland. Under the current plans these could never be expanded to full length platforms as the required space would instead be taken up with new commercial buildings, permanently limiting HS2’s capacity.

This week the TfL press office told London Centric the comments “referred to options under consideration at that time, which have now been superseded” but did not clarify whether it still has concerns about funding and capacity for Euston station.

The TfL spokesperson continued: “We are working closely with our partners on proposals to ensure that Transport for London’s infrastructure at Euston can meet future demand and deliver the best possible experience for our customers when HS2 services begin.”

Despite hundreds of millions of pounds being spent on abandoned designs for a new station at Euston there is still no agreed plan, following years of political wrangling and attempted cost-cutting which has often pushed up the price. A new delivery company has now been formed to try to get the project sorted.

On Tuesday, as we were preparing this story, transport secretary Heidi Alexander coincidentally announced that High Speed 2 is now expected to start services to Birmingham from Old Oak Common in west London in the late 2030s, with trains finally making it to Euston in the early 2040s. This means decades of disruption for those living next to the site.

“If it’s built as planned we’ll have huge queues in the morning and evening peaks,” one person with knowledge of the ongoing planning process told London Centric. “Why would we want to build a brand-new station that’s as crowded as the current one?”

The individual warned attempts to cut costs for political reasons could result in immediate demands for a rebuild: “If we don’t get this right we’ll be pissing money up the wall.”

Paying subscribers can access the rest of this story, including the detailed leaked designs of what a new Euston station might look like…

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We’ve been dodging the hail this week while working on a series of exclusive investigations to run over the coming weeks.

Today we’ve got a tale of the strange world of London’s super-rich. It’s about a Notting Hill property dispute involving a Bollywood star, her billionaire husband, plans for a giant refurbishment, and whether they are turning a neighbouring block of flats into “servants’ quarters”.

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Burnham of Brockwell Park

We’re trying to avoid politics after a few weeks of election coverage. But it’s hard not to notice that former Herne Hill resident Andy Burnham, currently on long-term loan to the north as mayor of Greater Manchester, is doing his best to return to parliament, become prime minister, and once again live in the capital.

He told London Centric last year that “The London I moved to in the 90s is not the London of today”. That said, he also talked fondly of living on Regent Road opposite Brockwell Park lido, drinking in The Commercial pub by Herne Hill station, and getting fish and chips from Olley’s.

Burnham will have to resign as mayor if he’s elected as an MP, due to restrictions on double-jobbing. But, due to a quirk in the law, there is no such restriction on a mayor of London also being an MP – a loophole that Boris Johnson happily exploited.

That loophole will close when a new piece of legislation comes into effect in the coming months, but until then there’s little to stop an ambitious London mayor from finding a parliamentary seat. Sadiq Khan, your window to cause chaos is closing fast.

How many cyclists have been fined for speeding in London’s parks?

Last year London Centric learned that Wandsworth council had started using a speed gun on cyclists exceeding 12mph on Tooting Common, in a story that quickly went around the world. Now thanks to a Freedom of Information request by reader Justin Cash, we’ve learned the council fined a sum total of… 10 cyclists in this manner, clocking them at speeds between 16 and 18 mph. Six cyclists paid the £50 fine immediately, while four attempted to fight it. In the same year the council received 134 complaints about the speed of cyclists.

There are no speed limits for bicycles on public roads. Some parks, such as Tooting Common, have historic by-laws imposing a limit, although these are rarely enforced given few cyclists have a speedometer. In the same month that cyclists were being fined for going too fast across the south London park, an 11-year-old girl was hit by a car driver on a neighbouring road and later died.

How do you shoplift from B&Q if the trolley has been shoplifted?

The next time you need a few heavy DIY supplies from a London B&Q you might find yourself dragging them round the store. The home improvement store has been withdrawing its large flatbed metal trolleys from some London stores because, according to staff members, they are “forever being stolen for scrap”.

One B&Q employee explained that “it’s normally people in a van” but “sometimes it’s just individuals doing it”. Another staff member told us that whole replacement shipments of the trolleys have been stolen overnight shortly after arriving and it seems the company has decided it is losing too much money on them.

An employee at the Old Kent Road branch said they didn’t bother reporting the thefts because – in a sentence that will be familiar to London Centric readers from stories about “low-level” crime in the capital – “there’s nothing police can do”. B&Q didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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The billionaires next door: “We’re going from living in a community to living in servants’ quarters”

By Polly Smythe and Jim Waterson

When the actor Sonam Kapoor and her billionaire husband Anand Ahuja bought a giant Notting Hill mansion just off Ladbroke Grove for £21m in 2023, the neighbours didn’t see any major cause for concern. Wealthy buyers are common in this corner of west London, where some of the richest inhabitants live alongside families who have been in the area since long before local property prices went stratospheric.

Kapoor and Ahuja’s company spent years developing plans for a complete rebuild of the mansion, which involves demolishing everything aside from the external walls. The proposal also features a giant basement and swimming pool, which would be disruptive but not particularly unusual for the area.

Then the residents of Hillcrest, a 1960s block of flats next to the mansion on Ladbroke Grove, started noticing something strange. Their new neighbours were expanding into their building. One by one, a separate company with Kapoor and Ahuja as directors began buying up flats in the neighbouring block with the apparent intention of using them to house their staff.

“We’re going from living in a community to living in servants’ quarters,” one resident complained to London Centric.

Over the last three years Kapoor and Ahuja’s company has spent more than £4m buying five of the 23 flats in Hillcrest, which abuts the mansion they plan to redevelop. It has also managed to purchase all of the Hillcrest garages to house the family’s car fleet.

In recent months the remaining residents in Hillcrest have taken to sending legal letters to the couple in a bid to probe what they perceive as the continued conversion of their building from a series of permanent homes into transitory staff quarters for a billionaire family’s employees – a characterisation that the family strongly disputes. The residents also wanted to know whether the purchases count as a potential breach of the apartment building’s leases, which require the properties to be used by permanent residents.

At first this seemed to be an intriguing but straightforward story about the changing face of the capital’s high-end property market and how, with Russian investment collapsing, ultra-wealthy Indians are among those stepping into the gap.

Then things took a strange turn. The billionaire couple’s representatives allegedly told the neighbours that, if London Centric published this article, they would turn the newly acquired flats into “social housing”. The residents understood this as a warning: If you create negative headlines for us, we’ll change the social make-up of your building.

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London Centric is entirely funded by paying subscribers. So I’m really delighted that we’ve been nominated in two categories at this year’s Orwell Prizes, which are awarded in memory of the author. It’s all thanks to the people who put their faith in this project and are generous enough to back it financially, enabling us to carry out ambitious local journalism about London.

Our reporting on Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital and the company’s “mass evictions” has been nominated in the ‘Reporting Homelessness’ category. Judge Mel Young said: “London Centric’s entry was very well researched, the product of a great deal of work, but it was also extremely engaging: as a reader, you wanted to find out what was going on. It illustrated what is clearly a major problem in the rental sector, and how vulnerable people can be.”

Katherine Denkinson’s story on the TikToker filming inside Londoners’ homes to produce fake viral content was nominated in the ‘Exposing Britain’s Social Evils’ category. Judge Abby Jitendra said: “A fascinating look into the strange dynamics social media platforms give rise to, with fake stories gaining huge attention and worsening public trust – thoroughly investigated and novel.”

The full Orwell Prize shortlist can be seen here, where there are loads of links to incredible pieces of journalism. London Centric only launched in September 2024, so it’s amazing to be competing alongside some of the biggest and best-funded news organisations in the world.

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Homeless In Need under investigation over its fundraising activities

If you step outside a central London tube station, you’re likely to encounter fundraisers representing a “community interest company”, standing in front of a banner and asking for money for causes from veterans to the homeless. These groups look like charities and have similar messaging to charities – but they’re often run as for-profit companies with limited oversight on how they spend their money.

London Centric has learned that yet another of these organisations, Homeless In Need UK, which is regularly operating outside Green Park tube station and at other locations, is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Fundraising Regulator into its tactics.

Homeless In Need says it is collecting money to support individuals experiencing homelessness, particularly those suffering from PTSD. Taking donations from commuters in cash or with card machines, they might appear to many Londoners to be a registered charity.

The company’s most recent accounts suggest that little of the money it raised during its first year of operation ended up with the homeless. Instead, filings show the company spent almost half of its £41,000 income on “directors’ fees”, with founder James Gordon Adams the only named director.

It also spent £12,847 on “materials for fundraising” as well as around £6,000 on wages and expenses.

This left little money to fund actual direct help to the homeless. The only explicit spending in the accounts was £980 providing food to the homeless in Gillingham, Kent, and £880 on “PTSD support”.

A previous iteration of the company’s website claimed that this money had gone a long way: “So far we have helped thousands with food donations, accommodation needs as well as PTSD treatment.”

Legal grey area

Like other groups spotted soliciting money outside London stations, such as Inside Success and We R Blighty, Homeless In Need is not a charity – although this distinction might not be immediately apparent to anyone rushing by on their way to work.

Amid mounting concern from well-meaning donors, the Fundraising Regulator – which is run and funded by registered charities – has attempted to crack down on the growing number of these non-charitable organisations. The body previously found both We R Blighty and Inside Success in breach of the fundraising code of practice. The City of London also successfully prosecuted We R Blighty for carrying out illegal street collections in the square mile.

London Centric reader Florence Batchelor told us that when she walked past Homeless In Need on her way to work she was pleased to see someone other than We R Blighty collecting. “I saw a couple of guys with buckets, and since they were different I thought I’d put a tenner in the bucket,” she said. “Afterwards I got a feeling that there was something strange about them…It’s so easy to get caught out by these groups.”

If you want to sell goods on the streets of London, you need a street trading licence from the local council. Alternatively, if you want to fundraise for a registered charity, you need a licence from the Met police. These groups operate in the grey area, sometimes claiming to use an exemption that was originally meant for newspaper sellers.

Legitimate charities argue it is relatively simple to bring prosecutions against community interest companies (CICs) but say there is little desire on the part of the police or councils to dedicate any resources to dealing with the issue. In some cases London Centric has had to inform local London councils and councillors that they have the authority to prosecute them.

“Highlight the good things”

When we called James Gordon Adams, the director of Homeless in Need, he said the figures in the accounts “are from two years ago… our real accounts which will be out in a month. If you just talk about two years ago, you’re going to muddy the waters.”

Like many of the community interest companies that solicit money outside central London stations, Homeless In Need is based in Kent.

Adams said “there was a slight error between fundraised materials that should have gone onto fundraising,” but asked London Centric to “highlight the good things” about his organisation’s work, claiming that negative coverage would affect income.

The Homeless in Need YouTube channels show videos of several individuals who appear to have genuinely received help from the group. One man called Matthew states: “Homeless in Need have been more helpful to me than all other charities. Not only have they been able to support me from time-to-time with accommodation, they have now managed to get me the support and stability where I’m able to propose myself towards getting jobs again.”

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I Ran (So Far From Ealing)

An attempt by Transport for London to reduce flooding caused by falling leaves at one of its tube depots appears to have resulted in a massacre of birds. Netting was installed at its Northfields depot last month. But locals told London Centric a flock of seagulls instead became ensnared in the mesh, leaving them dying slow deaths while their shrieks tormented people living near the depot.

Locals claimed TfL staff at the depot refused to intervene, while the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds reportedly said it was unable to act as the distressed avians were on TfL property.

Adrenne Read, Head of Built Environment, Maintenance and Renewals at Transport for London, said: “Unfortunately, some damage to part of the netting has allowed a small number of birds to become trapped.

“We take animal welfare very seriously. We are removing the birds and will urgently repair the netting to prevent this happening again.”

The festivals in parks backlash is causing events to be cancelled

The Battle for Brockwell Park was temporarily paused last week, after a judge refused residents’ latest legal bid to overturn the approval given to music festivals such as Mighty Hoopla.

But the precedent set in south London, which means many outdoor gigs now require full planning permission, is continuing to cause problems for promoters across the capital.

Two music events set to take place in west London’s Gunnersbury Park have both had to relocate in recent days, with electronic dance music festival Waterworks moving to The Cause nightclub, and a Lenny Kravitz concert being held instead at the Crystal Palace Bowl.

The change in location is a result of a row over planning permission, following a review in March by Hounslow Council into the park’s licence to operate events.

The review was triggered by the Gunnersbury Park Garden Estate residents committee, which has long raised concerns over drug use and antisocial behaviour at the festival, as well as unsafe noise levels and reduced public access.

While Hounslow Council chose not to revoke the park’s premises licence, in April it announced a new set of conditions for future events held there, including a capacity cap and mandatory community engagement plan with local residents.

Last week Waterworks announced that a delay in planning permission being granted for the event left it with no option but to relocate, or risk committing to spending “hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of infrastructure orders, supplier and crew commissioning, with no certainty of permission in place.”

The statement by Waterworks said that plans are “underway” for the festival to return to the park in 2027. London Centric has contacted Waterworks and Hounslow Council for comment.

Why won’t YOU take the bus?

Londoners taking the bus at the weekend this summer will be able to take unlimited journeys for the price of a single fare, after mayor Sadiq Khan announcing a new fare cap in a bid to encourage people back on to London’s buses

The offer will run from 25 July and until 31 August on Saturdays and Sundays, as well as during the late August bank holiday. That means that if you tap in once, you can take unlimited bus journeys at no extra cost for the rest of the day. The offer also applies to tram journeys for those in the south of London.

The mayor has also indicated his intention to delay a planned increase to the £1.75 bus fare, which was expected to come in this summer.

The real issue the experiment is trying to solve is the stubbornly falling passenger numbers on TfL’s buses. This is partly due to the general decline in Londoners moving around the city but also due to bus speeds slowing down to 9.2 miles per hour – which, on top of the lack of air conditioning in hot London summers, can make the bus an unappealing option. In February, TfL announced it was putting aside £20m in funding for “fares innovation” to try and find new ways to boost passenger numbers.

How much does London need Lime – and how much does Lime need London?

One of the challenges to the bus in London is the growth of the rental e-bike market, led by the growing popularity of Lime, which has done more than almost anything else to encourage cycling in the city.

Last week Lime confirmed its long-awaited plans to list on the stock market, with the FT saying it is aiming for a $2bn (£1.5bn) valuation.

As part of this process, the lossmaking company has to publish a warts-and-all financial document setting out the financial state of the company and telling investors about any risks it may face in the future.

London Centric’s reporting on Lime bike leg and lost kidneys gets a reference in the reputational risks section:

Claims of accidents involving our vehicles or other causes of injury, particularly injuries involving serious injury or death, including negative publicity surrounding such events, have occurred and are likely to continue to occur. Additionally, the perception that our offerings are unsafe could harm our reputation and may make it less likely that riders would be willing to try or continue using our platform. For example, in the United Kingdom we are subject to claims that our vehicles increase the risk of leg injuries.

The legal documents also show the enormous importance of the London market to Lime’s financial performance, with a quarter of global revenue coming from the UK market during the first three months of this year, most of it in the capital.

These figures suggest Londoners are spending almost £10m a month on Lime e-bikes and scooters.

Another London bridge crumbles…

London Bridge might remain intact, but the same can’t be said for the other bridges along the Thames. In 2019, Hammersmith Bridge closed to cars, with Albert Bridge becoming pedestrian and bike-only in March this year.

Now, Transport for London has introduced a weight restriction on Vauxhall Bridge, after an assessment found signs of deterioration. The 18-tonne restriction will be introduced from 1 July and won’t apply to emergency vehicles and buses. As long ago as 2020 the transport authority was warning major investment was needed to secure the future of the Edwardian structure.

TfL said that the bridge doesn’t currently pose any risk to users, with the measures instead aimed at avoiding further damage while it resolves the issue.

While 39,500 vehicles cross the bridge each day, TfL said currently only around 200 of these exceed the 18-tonne weight limit. But it’s another indicator that much of the capital’s physical infrastructure is ageing and might soon need a lot of money spending on it. Who’s going to pick up the bill is the question no one wants to answer.

…and the tube strikes are still going ahead next week

Lime bikes at the ready, as some of London’s tube drivers head back out on strike, with the action likely to cause disruption for much of the week.

Members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) are set to hold two 24-hour strikes, starting at midday on Tuesday 19 May, then again on Thursday 21 May.

The dispute centres on TfL’s proposal for a 35-hour four-day week on the London Underground (full explainer here). While rival union Aslef has welcomed the change, the RMT has rejected it on the basis that the plan crams five days’ work into four, arguing the plans need to be accompanied by a shorter working day.

When London Centric spoke to the RMT last month, it said the interlude between strikes offered a “window of opportunity for TfL to come forward with a decent proposal so we can reach a negotiated settlement.”

But no talks have been forthcoming, meaning there’s still no end in sight for the dispute. How badly your tube journey will be affected depends on whether your line is largely staffed by Aslef or RMT drivers.

An RMT spokesperson told London Centric: “Despite promises about talks, TfL has not made any attempt to engage in negotiation meetings to resolve this dispute. London Underground is still pushing implementation plans through a forum that excludes senior managers and union officials, instead of engaging in proper negotiations.”

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Instead it’s all about what the vote means for London – and, crucially, what the victors actually plan to do to the city.

This is the end of all of London Centric’s election coverage. We’ve got lots of fun non-politics exclusives coming up next week which will probably come as a blessed relief to many readers. See you then! (And don’t forget there’s always the London Centric archive to check out.)

Who actually won on Thursday?

All 32 London boroughs had all of their local councillors up for election, alongside a handful of directly-elected mayors.

Turnout was up, contests were tight, and there was something for (almost) everyone. Many councils ended up as ‘No Overall Control’ – meaning no single party did well enough to govern with a majority.

This is what the London results look like, with all results in…

This, for comparison, was the previous election result from 2022, showing how Labour used to dominate.

Until this week the party ran 21 out of 32 London councils….

What happened:

It was a big night for the insurgent Green Party, as Zack Polanski’s party took control of a sweep of formerly Labour-run councils. Greens were elected as the executive mayors of Hackney and Lewisham. They took control of Waltham Forest and also dominated the Hackney councillor results. The Greens helped push Southwark and Haringey into No Overall Control territory and are still making big gains in Lambeth (where the count is so close at the time of publication that the final result has been delayed) while also coming a close second in many wards across London…

Yet despite the enormous success there was a sense among some in the Greens that they could have done even better. Missteps and media criticism in the final week of the campaign – plus a lack of campaign experience compared to Labour’s established get-out-the-vote operation – held them back from turning some of their ultra-close defeats into victories. They’re hoping to learn from this experience and push on even more.

Reform UK spent big on its London campaign, even buying front page wraparound adverts on newspapers such as the Standard. The party took control of Havering, the east London territory which includes Romford and Upminster. Reform celebrated by talking about a fresh push to take the borough out of the capital and move it to Essex.

Yet Reform’s big outer London suburban push largely fell short, with Nigel Farage’s party making some gains but failing to make the gains it had confidently talked about – meaning the capital bucked the national trend.

The Conservatives successfully defended Bexley, Bromley and Hillingdon, sometimes by asking Labour, Lib Dem, and Green voters to lend their votes to keep out Reform. The Tories also celebrated victories such as winning back Westminster and coming very close in Wandsworth. They also held their forever heartland of Kensington and Chelsea and modern heartland of Harrow. The Conservatives also clung onto the Croydon mayoralty by a very narrow margin – a result that would, as the FT’s Stephen Bush pointed out, have probably gone Labour’s way if the central Labour government’s incoming changes to the voting system had been approved a bit earlier.

One of the challenges of political journalism is that so much is about media narratives and expectations management – and when expectations were so low for Labour, it looks like a comparative success to just hold onto councils they used to dominate.

This time around Labour performed strongly in Ealing, Merton, Hammersmith & Fulham, and Barking & Dagenham, while clinging on despite taking blows in Camden, Islington, Hounslow, and Greenwich. They lost control of Enfield and Brent. In Barnet they slipped back but still won an equal number of seats as the Tories, giving the balance of power to a single Green Party councillor.

Labour also won the mayoral contest in Newham after a three-way with a local independent and the Greens, while also seeing off a strong challenge from Jeremy Corbyn-backed independents in Redbridge.

Still, it’s been a brutal set of results for a party that until this week dominated London, has the ruling mayor, and delivered a vast number of Labour MPs at the last election.

As for the Liberal Democrats, they built North Korean-esque levels of total dominance in the south west London boroughs of Kingston upon Thames, Richmond upon Thames, and Sutton, winning almost every seat, while struggling in all but a few other ultra-local pockets of the capital.

Over in Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman from the Aspire Party was re-elected as mayor.

Update: Late council results:.Three boroughs with elected mayors counted their council votes on Saturday. The Greens followed their mayoral victory in Lewisham by taking the council from Labour, while Lutfur Rahman’s Aspire did the same in Tower Hamlets. The Conservatives took the Croydon mayor but the council itself remained in No Overall Control.

Possibly the most dramatic late result was in Lambeth, a former Labour stronghold, where the Greens ended up beating Labour to become the largest party – but not with enough votes to form a majority administration. The power now lies with the small group of Liberal Democrats on the south London council.

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What does all this mean for Sadiq Khan – and the next mayoral election?

In less than two years Londoners will vote for the next mayor of Greater London. Sadiq Khan, who has already served three terms, has still yet to indicate whether he’ll stand again. But at some point in the next year he’ll have to make up his mind and either start a campaign or let Labour choose his successor.

Multiple Labour candidates, including Dawn Butler, one of Khan’s closest allies in politics, have been openly running for the Labour nomination under the impression that the mayor will stand down.

Yet Professor Tony Travers, director of LSE London, told London Centric this week’s results strengthen the political case for a fourth Khan term: “He’s a Labour politician, like Andy Burnham, who Labour understands is likely to be able to deal with the Greens. I don’t know what he wants going forward. But, for Labour, the choice between him and a new candidate embeds the risk that a new candidate couldn’t defeat the Greens.”

On Friday night Khan came out and said Labour faces an “existential” threat without a change in direction and warned that “London has been taken for granted for too long”. The mayor said Labour needs a “bold assertion” of progressive values to take on the Greens as the “only party that can unite progressives and close the door to the darkness and division of Reform”.

The real question is whether those are the words of a man limbering up for another election – or just someone able to speak his mind to the party leadership now he won’t face the London electorate again.

What some of the new councils are actually pledging to do

All the parties running pledged change. But, when local budgets are extremely limited, how much scope is there for change on the scale that voters are demanding? Hundreds of new councillors will have to understand the challenges of local politics as they attempt to implement their manifesto pledges. Here are some areas where the results could have an impact.

Westminster’s Conservatives pledge to fight Oxford Street pedestrianisation
Sadiq Khan has pledged to remove traffic from the western half of Oxford Street by the end of this year, a policy that has been unpopular with some residents in the immediate local area.

After the Conservatives won the local council back from Labour on Thursday, the new council leader Paul Swaddle announced plans to mount a legal challenge to Khan’s plans. The party’s manifesto also commits it to challenging any attempt to remove what it calls “accessible bus routes” along Oxford Street. (In response, Khan’s team say they’ll be pushing ahead with the plans, with the street no longer under the control of Westminster council due to a deal with central government.)

Other pledges by the Westminster Conservatives include creating a cabinet member for enforcement, who’ll be tasked with ensuring mobile phone theft and antisocial behaviour is tackled, as well as illegal short-term lets. Their return to power could also spell trouble for Lime rental e-bikes, with the manifesto promising the introduction of fines for badly parked dockless bikes.

Hackney Greens to stop sending bailiffs for council tax debt
What will a Green mayor and council mean for Hackney? To pick a few points from the borough’s lengthy manifesto, they include introducing a roaming community skip collecting bulky waste for free to stop fly-tipping, aiming to respond to housing repair requests within a week, 100% council tax relief for the “lowest-income” residents and ending the use of bailiffs for council tax debt, and using Hackney Council pension funds to buy back council properties.

Mayor Zoë Garbett’s other policies include lobbying Sadiq Khan for local rent control powers and for a free public transport pilot scheme.

Havering’s bid for freedom could be on with Reform UK support
Reform UK won its only London council with a manifesto promising more “visible policing”, 1,000 new trees and urban gardens, housing that’s prioritised for “local residents”, and a focus on clean streets.

Although not formal party policy, Reform MP for Romford Andrew Rosindell floated the idea that a Farage national government would see Havering leave London and join Essex.

Greens pledge e-bikes for Waltham Forest
Whether you’re in Chingford or Walthamstow, the party has pledged to set up a dedicated renters’ support service, expand protected cycle lanes and cycle routes, explore introducing dockless bikes to a borough that has resisted the lure of Lime, push for pension fund divestment in support of Palestine, and refuse housing developments that “don’t meet the borough’s needs”.

What you might have missed…

Dylan Law, Hackney’s new Green deputy mayor, is 20, meaning he was born after Tony Blair last won an election … The husband of former PM Liz Truss, Hugh O’Leary, failed to get elected as a Conservative in Greenwich… the Labour leader of Camden, Richard Olszewski, did a “chicken run” to stop the Lib Dems beating him in Fortune Green. He went to stand in the supposedly safe Labour seat of Holborn and Covent Garden, only to lose to the Greens instead … Bailey Nash-Gardener, founder of the social media news aggregation account Politics UK, was elected for Reform UK in Havering … Green candidate Laurence Williams, standing for his tenth political party, came in seventh in Sidcup … Former Conservative leader of Barnet council Dan Thomas, who left London to become leader of Reform in Wales, is now leading the opposition in the country … Wandsworth councillor Malcolm Grimston, an ex-Conservative kicked out of the party back in 2014, has suddenly become the king-maker of the local area, after the Conservatives won 29 seats and Labour 28 … Darren Manning and Richard Law, both expelled from Reform after London Centric revealed they were former BNP members, stayed on the ballot but failed to get elected in Merton… The sole Reform candidate elected in Greenwich was Paul Banks, who ran on a platform of being “sociable, courteous, and unbiased” … Saiqa Ali, one of the two Green candidates suspended following an arrest over alleged antisemitic social media posts, remained on the ballot and won in Lambeth…Reform UK’s unsuccessful Brixton Windrush candidate Oliver Cromwell Khan has still not been spotted on the campaign trail… Hounslow Labour councillor Farhaan Rehman, who was caught repeatedly parking his Lamborghini in a disabled parking space, underperformed his Labour colleagues and lost his seat to the Conservatives.

Did the alphabet swing key election seats?

It’s nice to think that voting is a logical and considered process. If you think that, read this.

Almost every council ward in London elects multiple councillors. Voters are given a ballot paper with a long list of candidates arranged by their surnames in alphabetical order, rather than by political party. Voters are then offered the chance to vote for multiple individuals.

This means that candidates standing for the same party in the same area can end up with very different numbers of votes. Some of this might be because residents know or like a specific local candidate, so tactically split their vote.

But some of this is because of what’s known as the “ballot order effect” – people voting for people whose surnames begin with ‘A’ or ‘B’ but losing interest or changing their minds by the time they get to candidates whose surname starts with a ‘Y’ or ‘Z’.

London Centric analysed all of Thursday’s results in three councils: Bexley, Westminster, and Hammersmith & Fulham.

In 82% of cases the party candidate whose surname appeared highest on the ballot outperformed their party colleague whose surname appeared lowest.

In some of these cases, where two parties were very close, the difference was enough to swing the election outcome – which could explain some of the areas where candidates from rival parties were elected alongside each other.

Which is why, if you’re thinking of standing at the next election, you should rename yourself Mrs Aardvark immediately.

That’s your lot. Got a story for London Centric? Get in touch here.

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PS… Democracy in action can be beautiful. Many local councils use leisure centres to count ballots. Some councils do something different.

If you cast a vote in Barnet, it was tallied up at Hendon’s RAF Museum.

Meanwhile, Lambeth’s votes were totted up at The Oval cricket ground, with anxious candidates able to distract themselves by watching a school sports day taking place.

At the end of this edition is your guide to when the results will come in.

As for voting, all you need to know is that you can vote at any time between 7am and 10pm on Thursday at your local polling station, which you can find here. While you do need a form of photo ID, you don’t need to take the paper polling card that came through your letterbox – so you can pop by on your way home from work.

Exclusive: Reform UK expels two BNP-linked candidates after London Centric investigation

Reform UK has expelled two candidates standing in Thursday’s local elections after London Centric discovered they appeared on a leaked British National Party membership list.

Membership of the BNP is explicitly banned by Reform, with all the party’s candidates having to sign a declaration saying they have never been part of the far-right organisation, which was at the peak of its popularity under the leadership of Nick Griffin in the mid-2000s.

Despite this, London Centric was able to link two Reform UK candidates standing in Thursday’s local council elections to a BNP membership list, which was published online by WikiLeaks in 2008.

Richard Law, who is standing for Reform UK in the Cricket Green ward of Merton, south west London, confirmed to us that he was the same Richard Law who appeared on the BNP membership list while living at a different address.

Darren Manning, who is standing for Reform UK in the nearby ward of Raynes Park, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. He was also ejected from the party after we raised questions about his appearance on the BNP membership list.

A Reform UK spokesperson said the party had acted swiftly after being made aware of the connection by London Centric: “Mr Law and Mr Manning have been expelled from Reform UK after failing to declare their previous memberships of an organisation proscribed by the party.”

It is too late for their names to be removed from ballot papers. But Reform UK made clear they would not be welcome in the party, even if they are successful in winning a council seat in Thursday’s elections.

Nigel Farage, who has faced accusations of using racist language in his school days, has made a point of expelling anyone publicly associated with the BNP from parties he has led.

He said last year: “I do not allow former BNP activists into this party. That’s a golden rule. We want no links with extremism of any kind at all. It’s not going to happen under my leadership.”

Manning’s Facebook page features jokes about boosting the airline industry by sending illegal immigrants back home. The Chelsea fan interspersed pictures of him posing with former England captain John Terry alongside complaints about “two-tier policing” and a petition to “stop all immigration” until ISIS is defeated.

Our story raises questions about the thoroughness of Reform’s vetting procedures and whether any other candidates may have also slipped through the net. Reform UK faced a rush to get enough candidates to stand for the party after it surged in the polls.

Earlier this week, London Centric outlined how Reform could win big in the capital by focusing on London’s outer boroughs – in case you missed it, you can catch up here.

Thanks to all the London Centric subscribers who pay for our original investigative journalism about the capital – you make it all possible.

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Where’s Labour playing defence?

One way to see which areas the party of government feels exposed in is to track where Labour has been sending its leading politicians. With that in mind, we’ve taken a look at the campaign diaries of three Labour big-hitters, who’ve been making flying visits to boroughs that only a few years ago the party would have been shocked to lose.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, who outpolls his own party, has hit the campaign trail in Merton, Greenwich, Waltham Forest, Newham, Hackney, and on the Henry Prince Estate in Wandsworth, where he grew up.

While prime minister Keir Starmer has had limited involvement in the campaign, with visits to Southwark, his internal party rivals have been making trips from their northern constituencies to help out in the capital – where there are many party members who will decide the next leader.

Angela Rayner has taken trips to Lambeth, Dagenham, Haringey, and Newham. She released two separate videos of her trip to Southwark with the MP for Peckham, Miatta Fahnbulleh.

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, has turned up in Haringey, Islington, and Lewisham, three councils where there’s a genuine fear that Labour might lose control.

Correction: An early version of this post erroneously implied Keir Starmer had been sent out on the campaign trail more than he actually had. We apologise for the error.

But can they get out the vote on a sunny Thursday night in Hackney?

If there’s one thing that will decide the future of Labour in London, and how badly they are hit by a Green surge, it’s whether they can actually get their supporters to the polls. With expectations managed down to rock bottom, Labour will be attempting to spin anything other than a wipeout in inner London councils as a victory.

One Green politician told London Centric the challenge for Zack Polanski’s party is “winning the streets but not the estates”.

They said a lot of older Labour voters were reluctant to switch away from the party – but the Greens hope many will simply choose to stay at home and not vote at all, due to lack of enthusiasm. That said, many people will have already voted by post, with Labour having well-established operations for securing postal votes ahead of time. The Greens, who have seen a surge of enthusiastic new members following Zack Polanski’s election as leader, are playing catch-up on building the campaign infrastructure.

On Monday, as the rest of the city enjoyed the bank holiday, London Centric took a trip to one of the key electoral battlegrounds between Labour and the Greens: Hackney.

A Labour stronghold with an administration that’s never once lost the local mayoral elections, the borough is now a key target for the Green Party. And the fight is a personal one for Polanski, who calls the borough home and is eyeing up a run for a parliamentary seat in the area.

Online, Hackney Labour is attacking the Green Party hard, both on its record of running Bristol Council and on its national stances. It’s also focusing on local issues such as phone theft and street cleanliness. Both parties are claiming to be the only party that can stop Reform – even though Nigel Farage’s party isn’t actively campaigning in the borough.

Yet in terms of visible support, there’s one clear winner. When London Centric walked the length of Hackney, we saw only three Vote Labour posters in windows, but over 40 posters in support of the Greens.

The Reform MP still urging people to vote Conservative

A former Tory MP who defected to Reform UK is locked in a bizarre row with his old party in Romford.

Andrew Rosindell, who has represented the area since 2001, jumped ship to Nigel Farage’s party in January. He’s now facing a formal complaint from his former colleagues in the Romford Conservative Association for the “wilful deception of voters” over “misleading election communications”.

The complaint, made to the Electoral Commission, is over Rosindell’s refusal to remove 8ft signage of himself next to the words “Vote Conservative” from his former constituency office, known as Margaret Thatcher House.

Back in March, Rosindell lost a High Court effort to get back into his old office, after the Romford Conservative Association locked him out following his defection.

The Conservatives say they’ve instructed Rosindell to remove the misleading signs, but that he’s refused to do so, while threatening legal action against anyone attempting to remove them.

Dominic Swan, the chairman of the Romford Conservative Association, said: “We’re just sick of this farce.”

Tower Hamlets council spends £141,000 fighting LTNs

Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman and his Aspire Party are returning to the ballots with a continued promise to stand against low traffic neighbourhoods, or LTNs.

Back in January, the council lost a Court of Appeal ruling on the basis it had breached its duty to make its plans clear to the public. Rahman said he was “disappointed” in the ruling, adding that “once again it appears that local democracy doesn’t matter”.

A freedom of information request filed by London Centric has found that, as of 19th March, Tower Hamlets council had spent £141,822.50 on legal fees fighting the case. With Rahman announcing in February that the council had submitted its case for appeal at the Supreme Court, the legal bill could continue to increase.

Extinction Rebellion founder hoping to shake up Lambeth

It’s not just Reform and the Green Party looking to pick up discontented voters shifting their political allegiances this Thursday – the founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil might also make a difference.

In the south London borough of Lambeth, a group of independents called Shake It Up is contesting six wards, with candidates standing in Brixton, Clapham, and Stockwell. What’s not been widely reported is that they’re doing so with the help of Roger Hallam, a pioneer of direct action who founded both Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, and was imprisoned in 2024 for conspiring to disrupt traffic on the M25.

Brixton resident and Shake It Up candidate Ruby Bukhari told London Centric that the group began last December as a way to try and “get local people to go into politics and get people from the communities that don’t vote to go vote.”

She said that Hallam is an “expert in the strategy of mobilisation”, including on basic questions about how many flyers the group needs to put up, or how many times candidates need to knock on doors. Plus, he’s got a “love and enthusiasm for Brixton”.

While Labour is playing defence in Lambeth against the Greens and Liberal Democrats, Hallam has mobilised lots of people to come out door-knocking for Shake It Up. It’s hard to tell how many votes the group of independents will pick up, and which party they’ll be taking them off, all of which makes control of the borough even harder to call.

“The same issues and worries that we all share”: Reform’s pitch to ethnic minority voters

During last year’s local elections, Reform insiders argued that fielding candidates from ethnic minority backgrounds would be “pivotal” for the party to grow its voter base, particularly in big cities like London.

This Thursday, hundreds of the candidates Reform is fielding in London are from ethnic minority backgrounds. One of those is Paul Dhesi, 21, standing in the Plaistow ward of Bromley, where Reform UK hopes to take control.

In the 1960s, his grandparents moved to the UK from Sang Dhesian, a small farming village in India’s Punjab region. Indian on his father’s side and English on his mother’s, Dhesi considers himself mixed race.

Growing up in south London, he told London Centric he was drawn to Reform by the “illegal immigration problem”.

Asked whether Reform’s selection of candidates who have previously made racist statements was an issue for him, Dhesi said: “It doesn’t bother me at all. People need to stop listening to the mainstream media and start getting to know their Reform representative in person.”

“We’re the party that gets scrutinised the most. We’ve all said things in jest before, things that maybe we didn’t mean, or things we were joking about. We really need to bring back some sort of free speech.”

He said the assumption that black and Asian voters were naturally left-wing voters was “really not the case.”

“Minorities in this country, the ones that have come here legally and put roots down, made families, contributed to the economy, they share the same issues and worries that we all share, that even English people share.”

When asked if migrants like his grandparents would still be able to move to the UK under a Reform government’s policies, he said yes: “My grandparents are Sikhs. The Sikh community is the most integrated ethnic minority in the country. On the opposite side of the spectrum, you’ve got a lot of the time illegal immigrants that are of the Muslim faith that don’t integrate. That’s why you’ve got entire parts of the UK that have just been completely and utterly taken over by Muslims and Islam, and they’re not integrating.”

When will the election results come through?

Council seats in the capital’s 32 local boroughs are all up for election on Thursday. By the time you wake up on Friday morning, will you find out which party has dominated? Not quite.

Here’s the London Centric guide to timings, with the caveat that things are liable to change, given the possibility of recounts and delays.

Early hours of Friday morning

Some boroughs will immediately count the votes overnight after the polls close on Thursday, meaning that we’ll know the winners of Westminster, Wandsworth, Ealing, Sutton, Bexley, Kensington & Chelsea, Merton, Richmond upon Thames, Hammersmith & Fulham, and Havering by the time most of the city is getting up for work.

Friday afternoon

Winners of the mayoral elections in Hackney, Newham, Lewisham, and Croydon will be announced Friday afternoon, with the Tower Hamlets mayor declared in the evening.

Friday evening

The next set of results will start to come out over Friday afternoon and continue into the evening, covering Islington, Waltham Forest, Greenwich, Hillingdon, Harrow, Barking & Dagenham, Barnet, Brent, Enfield, Hackney, Redbridge, Haringey, Hounslow, Camden, Kingston upon Thames, Lambeth, Newham, Southwark and Bromley.

Into the weekend

The final set of councils – Croydon, Lewisham, and Tower Hamlets – will declare on Saturday afternoon.

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