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.

Subscribe now

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

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.”

Leave a comment

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Need a Father’s Day present? Why not buy a London Centric gift subscription? If you want a more flexible gift subscription, drop us a line on email or WhatsApp and we’ll sort you out.

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.”

Leave a comment

…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.”

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.”

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

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.”

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

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.”

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

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.

Got a story about London that needs handling with care and attention? Get in touch with London Centric in confidence via WhatsApp or email.

“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…

Subscribe now

Read more

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”.

Scroll down to read that.

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.

Get in touch with London Centric over email or WhatsApp.

Subscribe now

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.

Read more

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.

Subscribe now

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.”

Leave a comment

Want to get in touch with London Centric? Send us an email or WhatsApp.

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.”

Want to get in touch with London Centric? Send us an email or WhatsApp.

Leave a comment

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.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

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.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

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.

Subscribe now

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.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Exactly a decade ago I chaired a local election hustings on how to fix London’s rental housing crisis. The Liberal Democrats – then polling around historic lows – were represented by a confident new party activist. He told the audience about the devastating impact that dodgy private landlords had had on his life.

Still, he had little time for Green Party mayoral candidate Sian Berry and her proposals to introduce caps on the rent paid by private renters. Rent controls, the Lib Dem explained, were worth looking at but had failed in San Francisco and Berlin where they led to evictions and caused “pure gentrification”. The solution to the capital’s housing crisis, he said, would instead come through constructing hundreds of thousands of new homes across the capital. “This is really a problem of supply,” he explained.

That Liberal Democrat activist was called Zack Polanski. He later left the party after an unsuccessful attempt to be selected as the Lib Dem candidate for the Richmond Park by-election, found a new home in the Greens, and as many people do over the course of a decade, developed different political views.

I’d forgotten about that debate until I stumbled across a recording on YouTube last week, uploaded by campaign group Generation Rent. It’s not exactly the most fascinating watch. The chair could definitely have done with asking better, more precise questions. But it is interesting to hear the voice of Polanski, who has gone from unknown to nationally famous over the last year, making different arguments for solving the capital’s housing crisis. This week will decide whether he can lead the Greens to an unprecedented breakthrough in London – this time running on a policy platform that promises to campaign for rent controls and radical curbs on the profits of private developers.

This election in London is one of the most open ever – with the big story being whether two breakout radical parties can win entire councils. Polanski’s Greens are looking to advance at the expense of Labour in inner London.

But today we’re looking at whether Nigel Farage’s Reform UK can win the outer suburbs from the Conservatives.

Subscribe now

Reminder: London Centric partnered with Comment is Freed to host Sam Freedman’s London election predictions. Do have a look and see if you agree. Still, remember, you can read all the predictions and journalism you like but it really comes down to how – and whether – people choose to vote on Thursday.

The Reform doughnut: On the road in the capital’s outer boroughs

By Polly Smythe and Jim Waterson

There were a lot of intriguing things about Reform UK’s London local election launch. There was Pete, half of mega-viral septuagenarian rap duo Pete & Bas, who told London Centric he was there out of exasperation with illegal e-bike riders outside his home. There was the woman who told us she was backing Reform to stop migrants “defecating in the streets”. Then there was the man originally from Ghana who said he was voting for Nigel Farage’s party because he’s still on the council housing waiting list after thirty years and objects to asylum seekers being housed ahead of him.

But probably the most telling aspect was that the sold-out rally didn’t take place in a central London venue. Instead, the big pitch to the capital’s voters took place in Croydon’s Fairfield Halls, deep in Zone 5.

In a recent BBC interview, Farage cheerfully explained why he felt his party was struggling to connect with voters in inner London: “Because we’re patriotic, we believe in the country, we’re very, very proud of British history, we respect the Judeo-Christian culture upon which literally the entirety of our civilisation was based. And somehow there are many in metropolitan London who just don’t take that view.”

If you recognise yourself in Farage’s depiction of “metropolitan London”, then you might be surprised by the talk of Reform making big gains in the capital this week.

But it’s the outer boroughs – places such as Hillingdon, Havering, Bromley, and Bexley – where Reform is focusing its efforts. These are the local councils that will decide whether Nigel Farage has a good night in the capital on 7 May – and whether Reform can build a political base that will give it a realistic chance of winning the 2028 mayoral election.

In or Out?

Sometimes it feels like there are two Londons. There is the one that strongly identifies as ‘London’: the dense, diverse, often (but not exclusively) politically progressive core inside the North and South Circular roads. Then there is the other London, consisting of suburbs that only became part of the city in 1965. Here the car is still king, the population is often whiter, and wealthy streets sit alongside pockets of real deprivation.

Reform has bet its London campaign, along with hundreds of thousands of pounds in election spending, on taking control of councils in this second part of London.

Reform is, in other words, running a partial doughnut strategy, similar to the one Boris Johnson used to become mayor in 2008, when he courted outer-London commuters who had more in common demographically with the wider south east of England than with Hackney or Lambeth.

Part of this involves rejecting the narrative of London as a multicultural melting pot being a positive thing. For many of the older voters Reform is chasing, the 1965 expansion of Greater London remains a historic mistake that yoked them to a city they might visit but don’t feel like they belong to. And if you want to understand Nigel Farage, you have to understand the Reform UK leader’s links to one village that became part of the capital during his lifetime.

Read more

I asked Sophie Wilkinson to head to Golders Green to hear what the local Jewish community is feeling. Her report is at the end of this newsletter.

London Centric will be back this week with much more coverage of the most consequential elections for the capital in a generation, including just how Reform UK could win big in London.

Subscribe now

The suspect charged

Essa Suleiman, 45, has been charged with three counts of attempted murder in two different areas of London on Wednesday morning. He allegedly began the day by attacking Ishmail Hussein, an old acquaintance, at an address in Southwark. (The exact address in Southwark cannot be reported as it provides housing for individuals with mental health conditions.) He then headed north to the Jewish area of Golders Green, where he allegedly attacked two men, Shloime Rand and Moshe Shine, with a knife. Suleiman is due back in court on 15 May.

Polanski apologises for tweet – but says he faces “daily antisemitism”

Green Party leader and London Assembly member Zack Polanski has apologised for “sharing a tweet in haste” about the Golders Green incident and said he had a “responsibility for lowering the temperature at a time of such tension”. He had retweeted a post suggesting Met police officers may have overreacted while arresting Suleiman by “repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head when he was already incapacitated by Taser”.

Polanski’s apology followed highly unusual direct criticism by Met police commissioner Mark Rowley, as well as from political opponents. It came in the same week that two Green Party candidates in Lambeth, one of the party’s top target councils, were arrested on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred over allegedly antisemitic social media posts.

A Green Party spokesperson said Polanski, the only Jewish leader of a political party, “faces daily antisemitism, and in the past six weeks two people have been arrested for antisemitic actions towards him”. The party said elements of the media and rival politicians were irresponsibly directing criticism against Polanski following a “violent attack on his community”.

Why are Londoners getting so many local election leaflets that aren’t very local?

With less than a week left until polling day in the most open London elections in a generation, election leaflets are flying through letterboxes. But why do many of them not feature the actual local candidates you’ll be voting for?

It’s because spending in local elections is limited, with each candidate only allowed to spend £960 (plus an additional 8p for every registered voter in the ward) on their campaign. If, as is the case for most of the candidates, they’re campaigning alongside other individuals running for the same party in the same ward, then the spending limit is reduced even further.

In short, if you’re sending multiple leaflets to tens of thousands of potential voters, you’ll hit the spending limit pretty quickly.

But there’s a loophole. While leaflets promoting local candidates count towards individuals’ spending limits, mailouts that simply promote a party or a national message do not.

That’s why you might have received multiple leaflets bearing the face of Reform UK leader Nigel Farage or Lib Dem leader Ed Davey through your letterbox, but only a few mentioning which of their party’s candidates want your vote.

One side-effect of this is it means parties end up fighting ultra-local elections on national issues – whether that’s Gaza, the economy, or immigration. It also means deep-pocketed parties can target national messages on an ultra-local level without busting spending limits.

In Bromley, one woman told London Centric that she had received four Reform mailouts, but that only one made reference to the borough. The other three, which included a two-page letter from Farage, mixed national issues like pensions and energy bills with claims about Reform councils delivering lower council tax.

This Jubilee line train is departing Shoreditch…

For London’s aspiring creatives, finding studio space that’s not prohibitively expensive has long been a challenge. Back in 2006, venue owner Auro Foxcroft decided to save four old Jubilee line tube carriages – made redundant by the Jubilee line extension programme – from being scrapped. He hoisted them onto an old railway viaduct in Shoreditch and rented out the space to artists on the cheap under the name Village Underground.

Beginning as a workspace perched high up on Great Eastern Street, the project then expanded, renovating an old warehouse under the viaduct into a music venue. The old tube trains have become an iconic symbol of the neighbourhood, as the area became an Instagrammable tourist destination over the last 20 years. (Although some people we know who have worked in them suggest they could be painfully cold in winter and far too hot in summer.)

Twenty years of rain and wind haven’t been kind to the carriages, and this week, reader Montague Ashley-Craig got in touch to say she had seen the carriages being carted off on lorries.

While Village Underground didn’t respond to our message asking whether the carriages will be replaced or refurbished, a recent Instagram post by them said: “We’ve been going through some changes recently on the trains. Stay tuned to be the first to find out more…”

Clapham disorder charges partially dropped

While the media might have moved on from the disorder that broke out last month in Clapham, that’s not the case for some of the young people involved.

London Centric was at Croydon youth court this week, where a 17-year-old girl was facing charges of assaulting emergency workers. The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was arrested on 31 March, during the second day of disorder in south west London, which went viral around the world.

In court, the Crown Prosecution Service said that charges had been dropped in relation to two of the police officers. The charge in relation to a third officer was changed from the more serious offence of assault on an emergency worker to a more limited one of assault on a police constable. The case was adjourned for six weeks, with the girl released on unconditional bail.

No fault, no eviction

A ban on section 21 “no-fault” evictions has finally come into effect this week, seven years after the idea was initially proposed by Theresa May.

The government’s Renters’ Rights Act, described as the biggest reform to the private rented sector since the 1980s, also limits rent increases to once a year, abolishes fixed-term tenancies, and allows renters to request pets in their home.

This new policy may be familiar to London Centric readers, as we have covered some of the attempts by landlords across the capital to evict tenants before the new powers came in. While new section 21s can no longer be served, solicitors, renters’ unions, and campaign groups have all reported a spike in the number of no-fault evictions issued to tenants in anticipation of May’s ban, including in the final hours when it was possible.

This means plenty of Londoners will still be leaving properties over the next few months – but the rest of the capital’s millions of private renters will be breathing a sigh of relief.

Leave a comment

Life after the Golders Green attacks: “We’re Jewish, it’s what we do.”

By Sophie Wilkinson

Shimon Cohen was directly across the road when a Jewish man was stabbed on Wednesday morning in Golders Green: “When it happened, I was there, and the police were shouting and helicopters were coming.”

Despite the commotion, he told London Centric the response for many was to continue: “Everyone was just filling up their shopping. We’re Jewish, it’s what we do.”

He said this stoical attitude should not be mistaken for acceptance, following a series of recent attacks on Jewish people, services and synagogues in London, some of which have been linked to Iran-backed groups: “If you are as old as I am, you remember that the last 50 years will be written up as a golden age of British Jewry. And now it’s business as usual.”

Essa Suleiman, 45, has been charged with three counts of attempted murder, relating to the two stabbings that took place in Golders Green, north London, as well as a separate incident that took place earlier that morning in Southwark.

The Met police has declared the incident a terror attack and the country’s terror threat level has been upgraded to “severe”. Ministers said the increase to the threat level was “not solely as a result” of Golders Green, but had also been “driven by an increase in broader Islamist and extreme right-wing” threats.

The “severe” threat level means that a terrorist attack is considered highly likely in the next six months. Yet in many corners of the capital, you’d have no idea – there’s not the shared sense of unease and fear that surfaces after other attacks.

The stabbings are the latest in a string of incidents targeting the UK Jewish community. On Thursday evening in Golders Green, things feel both safe and unsafe. Groups of children are gathering, playing, nattering, scootering, tumbling into butchers, bakeries and cafes.

There’s no hint either of what happened the previous day or of these children’s parents being about. Are girls as young as five skipping across the road at dusk safe out here because there’s a sense of kibbutzim, of collective responsibility for the community’s children? Or is it because CST (Community Security Trust) wardens – volunteers protecting the Jewish community, weaponless and wearing tabards – are stationed every 30 feet along the road, keeping their eye out for anything or anyone suspicious?

Two mounted police have stopped to chat to locals. Visibly Jewish boys reach up to pat the horses’ necks and cars behind slow down to not startle the animals. Just up the road, groups of Persian men continue their vigil for the fall of the Iranian government, outside hoardings bearing images of the protesters killed by the regime.

Just across the road, I speak to Aby, a lawyer. “I’ve got two kids at a Jewish primary school, it’s actually one of the schools that’s been named in court as being surveilled.” She explains that Met officers do regular drive-bys through the area, and that police visibility has amped up since four Hatzola ambulances – run by the Jewish community – were set on fire in an arson attack.

She adds: “I’ve had an awful time over the past few months with worrying about security. They have a sniffer dog outside of their school. Nothing says ‘Welcome to primary school’ like a muzzled security dog.”

The attack has changed her behaviour. Aby works “in town” but has decided to stay home from the office “because I want to be close to my kids”.

Cohen says: “Look around, we’re not frightened. But we’re cautious, we have to be cautious, we have to be more aware than we’ve ever been before.”

The Israeli flag can be seen along the high street, although it’s far outnumbered by the union jacks at half mast on the lampposts. Cohen draws a geopolitical comparison: “There’s a lot of people who hate Donald Trump. Are there people running around stabbing Americans? Are there people running around firebombing McDonald’s? No, it’s just about Jews. So don’t pretend it’s got anything to do with Israel.”

“People don’t love what’s going on over there. It’s nothing to do with us. Most of us are not Israelis. We’re British, very British.”

Next to the bus stop where Moshe Shine was stabbed just the day before, young, visibly Jewish boys with kippot and smart shirts are trying out each other’s scooters, munching on slices of pizza, tussling about a bit. Across the road, three women are in deep discussion. As with any Jewish community, there is a real range of views, and people like to talk them out.

Apart from a sign declaring a bakery closed for the day – not out of caution but because the road closure following the attack meant staff couldn’t start their overnight baking shift – life is busy all around us while we talk.

I encountered Laura Marks, Denise Joseph and the comedian Rachel Creeger on their way back from a women’s solidarity walk.

“The place is swarming with CST [security], so right now I feel safe, and I feel generally safe in London,” says Laura.

However, Rachel, who wears a large Star of David, says: “I refuse to feel unsafe, which I think is a different thing.”

She highlights the increased presence of CST volunteers and police, but disagrees that more investment should be put into security: “It’s like building bigger walls. Last time we got put in a ghetto, it didn’t end well! I feel like there needs to be investment in community cohesion, not into separating people more.”

Denise echoes this sentiment. She helps run Nisa-Nashim, an interfaith group of Jewish and Muslim women who organise cross-cultural events to build community cohesion: “We’ve been going since 2015 and those relationships [create] a safe space for conversation.”

Laura is reflective: “We’re living in a world where the conflict in the Middle East is being imported here. And mostly we’re quite lucky that the government are very supportive. But it’s not enough, and it will never be enough if you’ve got people who are determined to attack people because of who they are, particularly Jews and Muslims.”

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

But first, we’ve got everything from the people looking for cocaine in London’s sewage works, updates on the future of Lime bikes, and the Green Party candidate standing for his tenth political party – or scroll to the end for the lion.

Subscribe now

Want to get in touch with London Centric? Send an email or a WhatsApp.

Reform’s Tooting candidate investigated by party for anti-Muslim posts

A Reform UK candidate standing in next week’s local elections has said Islam should be banned, and called Muslims “scum that goes to mosk [sic], mass funerals, and rape young kids.”

Stephanie Dearden, who is hoping to be elected in south west London’s Tooting Broadway ward, posted a number of tweets on a now-suspended X account in 2020.

“Give them bacon and eggs three times a day, and a Bible,” said the candidate for Wandsworth council. “Once they understand British values, we might consider letting them in.”

Other tweets said that Islam “supports paedophilia” and stated that “in a civilised country Islam must be considered outlawed” and that “Islam is not just a religion, it is a state that wants to invade, occupy, gag everything it occupies.”

In another post, made during the coronavirus pandemic, she suggested any antidote should be made from pork and that the pandemic might help “stomp out” the “Islamification of the free world”.

Responding to a post from another account about an alleged attack by a Muslim migrant in Germany, she said he should be “sent to Auschwitz for a shower.”

Dearden’s posts were considered severe enough to earn the account a suspension from Elon Musk’s X, which has largely adopted a policy of not removing racist comments or inflammatory language.

If elected, Stephanie Dearden’s role as a councillor in Tooting would require her to work with other elected colleagues, as well as community groups, businesses and other local organisations, to agree and deliver on local priorities.

London Centric first approached Reform UK for comment on Dearden’s tweets eight days ago. On Wednesday a spokesperson finally responded, confirming the party does not approve of the comments and the posts are being investigated.

Wandsworth's sole Reform UK councillor Mark Justin has also told local news site Putney.News: “Language used in these posts is completely unacceptable, and we offer a sincere and unreserved apology to anyone offended by her comments.”

Leave a comment

Transport for London will get the powers to regulate e-bikes

At some point on Wednesday the snappily titled English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill will receive royal assent and become law.

It includes a few major changes for the future of London, most of which give slightly more power to the mayor at the expense of the capital’s local councils. Among other things, Sadiq Khan (and his successors) will have the ability to quickly overrule boroughs on large planning applications, with the intention of making it easier to build homes, including on green belt land. He’ll also have the ability to overrule local councils on licensing matters, with the objective of having a presumption in favour of making it easier for restaurants, pubs, and clubs to operate. There are also measures to make it easier for the mayor to raise money for major projects without central government approval.

But possibly the most visible change is that the law will give Transport for London the power to regulate the capital’s rental e-bike market.

At the moment the likes of Lime, Forest, and Voi operate in regulatory grey areas – and each company has struck different deals with individual local councils. In the next couple of years this will all change and a London-wide system will be put in place, with added scrutiny and regulation. As a result there’s a battle underway between the rival operators to establish dominance and shape TfL’s rules on what the companies will be allowed to do.

Do get in touch if you have any intel on this.

Hunting for cocaine at London’s sewage works

Since 2021, the Home Office’s Wastewater Analysis for Narcotics Detection programme has been monitoring wastewater in order to learn more about the nation’s consumption of illegal drugs. Rather than rely on crime statistics, it takes water samples from sewage works and tries to work out what has been passing through the population’s bodies.

Despite London’s reputation for City boys snorting lines, the study has found that the capital has dropped behind Liverpool, Sunderland, and Scotland in terms of the concentration of cocaine in sewage.

Instead, the capital’s wastewater suggests London is a disproportionate consumer of both MDMA and methamphetamine.

The data, collected from 50 wastewater sites across England and Scotland, showed that cocaine remains the most widely used drug in the UK, although usage of it had decreased by 19% over the last year. Instead, ketamine use has shot up by 54%, in a pattern that is likely to be reflected in the capital.

The sampling data also shows that cocaine and MDMA tend to appear in sewage over the weekend and on a Monday morning, which is consistent with recreational use.

On the other hand, ketamine is now appearing more consistently throughout the week, suggesting daily – and more problematic – use.

Once, twice, sixteen times a candidate

With such a dramatically shifting political landscape, it’s not unusual for people’s party allegiances to take them on a journey. But some journeys are more unusual than others.

Laurence Williams, 62, is running as the Green party’s candidate for Sidcup in the borough of Bexley.

This makes it the tenth party he’s stood for in sixteen different elections. In addition to running as an independent he’s previously attempted to take office for:

• The Official Monster Raving Loony Party

• UKIP

• The English Democrats

• The Christian Peoples Alliance

• The Christian Party “Proclaiming Christ’s Lordship”

• The Liberals (the continuity party that rejected the merger with the SDP to form the Liberal Democrats)

• The niche Welsh nationalist party Gwlad

• Rejoin EU

• The SDP (the continuity party that rejected the merger with the Liberals to form the Liberal Democrats).

Williams told London Centric he’d “lost count” of the number of parties he’d stood for over the last 36 years, with his political career beginning in 1990, when his local paper ran an advert encouraging people to put themselves forward.

“I just carried on going, because it was something to do every four years.”

With this now his sixteenth election, he’s hoping it will be the Green Party that finally gets him into elected office.

When asked how he justifies the seemingly contradictory parties he’s represented, Williams said: “I’ve met so many people over the years, including parliamentarians, and it’s altered my thinking as I’ve gone along.”

“The politics of the day on the world stage are forever changing, and so are my views. That’s why you see such a tapestry.”

Williams said he regretted standing for the English Democrats, a far-right party who wanted England’s “public culture” to be that of the “indigenous English.”

“They enticed me to stand as a candidate,” Williams said. “They turned out to be not really nice characters at all.”

“There was a by-election in Bexley, and I stood for the English Democrats, and actually stopped the BNP being elected. BNP looked certain to get this seat and they lost it by 8 votes and I got about 129. That night at the count, I got the biggest cheer from the Tories and Labour for stopping the BNP getting in. So that was something quite special.”

Williams said the Greens didn’t raise any objections to his English Democrat past: “Since Zack Polanski’s been on the scene, interest in the Greens has gone into hyperdrive. Lots and lots of new candidates coming on board. Some of them are actually quite controversial. I don’t think I could be cast as controversial. I’m more of a comedian.”

Having lost every single election, Williams said “I don’t expect to get elected. But you never know, do you?”

Preposterous property of the week

Ever wanted to fulfil your Bridget Jones fantasy, and live in Borough Market? Well now you can, for a rent of £17,500-a-month. This five-bed property on Park Street sits directly opposite the famous food market, and next door to fancy cheese shop Neal’s Yard Dairy.

Whether your generation’s cultural reference points are less “come the fuck on, Bridget”, and more the Instagram influencers filming themselves sampling the market’s various delights, it’s a pretty noteworthy address. And if the hordes of tourists on your doorstep get too much, you can always retire to the roof terrace, to literally look down on them.

A window on Criterion Capital

Earlier this year we reported at length on the “mass evictions” being carried out by billionaire Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital.

One of the worst-affected buildings was their Britannia Point building in Colliers Wood. Back in 2022, a glass pane fell from the twelfth floor of the same building, before smashing on the ground in a busy pedestrianised area. Merton council then spent £3m on emergency scaffolding works while safety checks took place. The council is in legal dispute with the landlord over who should pick up that bill, leaving the local authority out of pocket.

Now, the same tower block has been issued with another “dangerous structure notice” by Merton council, after another window cracked in the tower.

Criterion, which is already being investigated by Merton council after London Centric revealed it had issued fake electrical safety certificates to tenants in the same building, said it blamed an air pellet that was fired at the building by a member of the public: “Criterion treats the safety of residents and the public with the utmost seriousness. Upon identifying external criminal damage to a glass panel at Britannia Point, we acted immediately to notify the police, establish an exclusion zone with the support of the Council, and conduct robust temporary repairs to eliminate any risk to people in and outside the building.”

They continued: “A permanent replacement panel has been commissioned and installation works will commence as soon as feasible. We continue to work in close collaboration with the relevant authorities, including the emergency services and Merton Council, which has acknowledged the safety measures taken by the building management to date until a permanent replacement can be fitted.”

The council said: “We are satisfied this is a suitable temporary safety fix. However, the dangerous structure notice will remain in place until the window is repaired. These repairs should be carried out by the landowner as soon as possible.”

All roads lead to Oxford Street

Earlier this week something went very wrong with Google Maps: Almost every road in central London was renamed ‘Oxford Street’, conjuring up images of the entire capital’s grid being filled with tax-evading sweet shops. Google said that it had taken a look internally, and the issue was “now resolved”.

Ex-Lion, Tamer: Public animal dissections return to central London

This story contains a very graphic picture and is not for those of a nervous disposition. Do not continue to scroll down if you think this might affect you.

How pungent is the smell of a dead lion’s stomach acid? Earlier this month, clutching a scarf to our nose and retching, London Centric discovered the answer in central London.

That’s because we were one of hundreds of people, including a substantial number of children, who attended a sold-out public dissection of a lion in Mayfair. Conducted by Professor Ben Garrod and zoologist Jess French, the afternoon was part of a scientific lecture series held at the Royal Institution’s central London auditorium.

The 16-year-old male lion had been euthanised due to a chronic problem with his kidneys. His ultimate fate was to be stretched out on a long spotless metal table and carefully taken apart.

After a thorough external examination that took in his teeth, tail, and retractable claws, the dissection began with cutting through layers of fur and muscle to look at his shoulder joint.

Spectators were encouraged to shout out questions as the dissection took place, which ranged from queries about the weight of the lion’s heart, why it had a “sloppy” liver, and how Garrod squared slicing up animals for a living with being a vegetarian.

His answer? “I eat lunch before.”

However, one query from the crowd went unanswered: what was the lion’s name and where did it come from? There was no answer, due to a previous precedent.

In 2014, 18-month-old giraffe Marius was shot and publicly dissected by Copenhagen zoo, before his spotty remains were fed to the lions. The disposal sparked international outcry, with a petition for the zoo to rethink its decision receiving thousands of signatures.

Eager to engage the audience’s scientific and not sentimental faculties, Garrod explained that the point of the autopsy was not to humanise the animal in the manner of Marius. Instead, the audience were to learn from it. Plus, he explained that there is an agreement in place not to reveal the animal’s name or the zoo where it spent its life.

Outside the Royal Institution, Saturday shoppers on neighbouring New Bond Street were spending thousands of pounds in luxury stores. None of them knew that inside a neighbouring building an apex predator was being taken apart. The dissection took around three hours, with the vets giving detailed explanations of the animal’s anatomy, including digressions on the difference between house cats and apex predators, the bumpy surface of a lion’s tongue, as well as its “penile morphology.”

Without a mane, someone in the crowd asked why the lion looked more like a lioness. Garrod explained that, as he’d lived with his siblings, the lion had been castrated to avoid incest, but reassured spectators that the lion hadn’t “regretted living life without his balls”.

The animal had been frozen after its death, which had given its blood time to coagulate. But once the dissection got down to the organs, including the heart, lungs, and unfolding of an astonishingly long colon, blood started dripping onto the lecture hall floor. The various parts of the animal are now on their way to different institutions to be studied.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

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

Scroll down until you find something that piques your interest.

The abandoned luxury cars in a Knightsbridge garage facing the crusher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

Putting the pain in pain au chocolat at Pophams

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

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

Ollie Gold, Pophams founder, told London Centric that the notice was not for repossession but they are in dispute with their landlord over “a 451% increase in service charge”.

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

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

Update: Following the publication of this article, Gold has clarified the service charge. This is now reflected above.

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

Which Way, Waymo?

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

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

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

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

Tube strikes: Where does the RMT go from here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

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

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

The election section: two weeks to go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Conrad Quilty-Harper

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talking of Newham…

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

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

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

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

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

You can tell everybody this is Your Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

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

By Polly Smythe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A modest Lime proposal

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

Elsewhere in the in the news

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

London election predictions: Who will win in your area?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click here for 25% off

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Read more

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

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

Scroll down for all this…

Just Don’t Do It?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Which way, Waymo?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preposterous property of the week

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still with us? Good.

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

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

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

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

It definitely was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

Pret’s in a little pickle

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

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

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

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

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

Whole Foods gobbles up Queensway Market

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can’t park there, mate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mayor takes on “London has fallen” viral videos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This might have been the end of the story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

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

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

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

Scroll down to read that, but first…

You can’t spell Haringey without “Ye”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lime-inal space

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

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

Comment once, comment all

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

By Polly Smythe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Read more