Does London heat really feel different?
Plus: Labour politicians defect to the Greens, a big legal bill for defending festivals in parks, and does the Standard actually like London?
Saturday’s members-only investigation into the missing Banksy of Bethnal Green had a massive response from readers. A special thank you to those who messaged to say they’d made the jump to a paying subscription in order to read the piece: "You are writing the stories that no one else is"; "Absolutely cracking yarns"; "Few people write about London's nuts and bolts anymore — certainly not this well.” We read all the messages, we appreciate them, and we reinvest the subscription money in creating more journalism for you to enjoy.
London Centric shared the notes from our investigation with Josh Spero of the Financial Times, who kindly put the story on the front page of Saturday’s FT Weekend print edition. All of this is only possible thanks to readers’ support for an outlet doing proper journalism about the capital.
We’ll have another in-depth read for paying subscribers this weekend so if you’re hesitating, why not sign up now for 25% off and make sure you get the piece straight to your inbox to read with your Saturday morning coffee.
But today we couldn’t ignore the big topic that everyone in London is talking about this week – yes, the heat. You might have seen a viral video of people born in hot countries insisting that London heat really does feel worse — so we wanted to find out if that really was the case. Scroll to the end to read what we found.
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Exclusive: Former Labour councillors defect to Greens.
Two London councillors originally elected as Labour politicians have defected to the Greens and will officially be unveiled by their new party on Wednesday, London Centric understands.
The Greens are targeting the capital’s left-wing Labour voters ahead of next year’s local council elections, with the aim of building footholds in boroughs across the capital. The Greens also hope to convince disillusioned Labour councillors to defect if they are uncomfortable with the government’s stance on benefits cuts, funding for the capital, and the war in Gaza.
Former Labour councillors Mark Blake from Haringey and Liam Shrivastava from Lewisham, will formally join the party at a photocall with other Green politicians in Whitechapel at 10am. Blake had already quit Labour over Keir Starmer’s position on the Middle East, while Shrivastava recently clashed with his Labour colleagues over demands to divest pension funds from firms supplying Israel with weapons.
Shrivastava explained why he was defecting to the Greens: “Labour under Keir Starmer has cut winter fuel payments for pensioners, rowed back on net zero commitments, slashed welfare benefits for sick and disabled people, ramped up deportations, refused to scrap the 2-child benefit cap and aped the far-right with anti-immigrant rhetoric.”
The challenge for Labour is showing London voters what the capital is getting in return for electing the party’s MPs in 59 of the capital’s 75 constituencies at the last general election. Sadiq Khan has loudly complained that his party is failing to provide the money the city needs and yesterday the mayor directly criticised Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves. He told them to “think again” over proposed changes to the benefits system, which he said will result in 360,000 poor, vulnerable and disabled Londoners facing a reduction in their incomes.
What happens when you’re a local newspaper that doesn’t actually seem to like the city you write about?
Staff at the London Standard have privately raised concerns that the paper is “stirring up racial hatred” after publishing a “special report” under the headline “Is our migration model broken?” which suggested the capital is a city in decline driven by high immigration, the growing number of Muslims, and a fall in the “White British” population.
The pessimistic article, spread across two pages of the weekly print edition, came with a Dad’s Army-style graphic featuring invading Albanians, Indians, and Bangladeshis getting ready to cross the English Channel and invade London.
The author and journalist David Goodhart was given the prime slot in the capital’s newspaper to suggest racial change means London might even have to give up its status as the seat of the UK’s government, asking: “Is there some minimum number of natives that a capital requires before it ceases to be the capital?”
Hina Bokari, the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the London Assembly, said the paper was pushing a “harmful narrative” by publishing a “divisive piece that scapegoats immigrants and Muslims for London's challenges and fuels Islamophobia”.
The piece, which was presented as reporting rather than an opinion or comment piece, wasn’t new territory for Goodhart. However, sources in the Standard newsroom told London Centric that they weren’t sure why they felt the need to publish the piece.
“It feels like we’re actually stirring up racial hatred,” said one journalist at the Standard. “It’s not right.”
“It was always a rightwing paper but they put other stuff in the comment pages. It feels much more serious to be doing this [in the news section]. There’s a lurch to the right — and it’s not a shift, it’s a lurch.”
Lord Lebedev, the newspaper’s part-owner, is reported to be much more involved editorially than he was previously — when not plugging his own podcast about living forever.
Another comment piece recently published by the Standard argued that the Royal Horticultural Society, organiser of the Chelsea Flower Show, has “caught the woke bug” and now pushes “woke shrubbery” on people to promote “ideological orthodoxies on everything from the environment to class and race”.
Standard staff speculate the piece may have been commissioned to please Lord Lebedev, who was publicly upset by the Royal Horticultural Society turning down his request for free tickets to a flower show in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Exclusive: Will Lambeth end up out of pocket over Mighty Hoopla?
The Battle for Brockwell Park may be over for another summer but London Centric can reveal that Lambeth council has run up an £82,000 legal bill fighting local residents over who has the right to hold festivals in the public space. The figure, revealed in a freedom of information request by this publication, includes £35,000 of costs the council has to pay to the victorious residents.
While the council has not shared the exact amount it expects to receive in rent from hosting Mighty Hoopla and other festivals in the south London park, the council previously said that the festival organisers contribute £100,000 towards the upkeep of the green space.
With a further legal challenge on the way, the council’s legal costs are expected to rise even further, meaning it is likely to spend more defending the right to host the festivals than the parks receives for hosting them.
Lime legs it to Goldman Sachs as investors eye payday
Lime, the e-bike service that has revolutionised how Londoners get around the city while simultaneously flooding NHS trauma wards with cases of “Lime bike leg”, is planning to float on the US stock market next year.
The Californian tech company, which is backed by investors including Uber, has hired bankers at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, according to Reuters, with a target valuation that could be in the billions of dollars.
Lime’s financial performance in the capital, one of its biggest global success stories and where it has converted hundreds of thousands of Londoners into cyclists, is likely to be key to whether its early Silicon Valley backers can cash-in with a high valuation.
As a result there could be increased pressure on Lime’s operations in London to show a strong financial performance in the coming months. One of the biggest threats to this would be proper government regulation and new safety requirements that would improve the experience for customers but increase costs for the business.
Transport minister Lord Hendy said he’d been reading London Centric’s coverage of Londoners with broken legs who struggle to make the company pay damages for crashes blamed on faulty bikes. The government has now told us that it’s looking at a way to regulate Lime and other e-bike providers with a focus on “safety considerations” that could include “specific insurance requirements” to protect riders involved in accidents.
Meanwhile, Lime’s outsized cultural influence on the capital continues to grow. Not only can you buy MDMA stamped with the Lime logo but in the last few days we’ve seen Joan Collins complaining about Lime bikes blocking London streets, the Met using a Lime to prop up police tape at a crime scene, warnings that Lime bikes dumped in canals are damaging boats and leaking chemicals into water, the BBC talking to an 83-year-old Londoner severely injured after being hit by a Lime bike, and an artist who “obtained” a Lime bike and heavily modified it with the addition of a lance to resemble a Mad Max machine.
Why is London heat the worst kind of heat?
By Rachel Rees
If you’ve been struggling to handle London’s recent heatwave, you’re not alone.
“It is insufferable,” Yinrun Huang told London Centric.
Huang, a former Big Brother contestant, is one of a number of UK-based TikTokers born in hotter climates who have recently posted videos lamenting the London summer — and apologising for previously mocking Brits’ complaints about the heat.
Originally from Shanghai, Huang has lived in the UK for over three years, and is now based just outside the capital.
She is used to hot weather – temperatures in her home city in China reach well over 30 degrees for several months in the summer. But she said it’s different in London: “There’s nowhere to hide. I physically experience it… When I talk to people I can’t help but do some deep breaths, because of the humidity in the air, the muggy weather. And I can feel my body too, it’s sticky hot. I need to take two showers a day.”
After one user collated their videos in a compilation, it helped spark a debate in the capital’s WhatsApp group chats about whether the capital really has it worse. Russell Valentin, a Londoner originally from Chicago who also featured in the TikTok compilation, agreed, despite summer temperatures in his hometown routinely hovering around 30 degrees: “it really does feel like it hits different here”.
All this left us asking: why do London heatwaves seem to feel so much hotter than abroad? Is it just the hellscape that is a sweaty tube? Or is there something else going on?
Last week’s heatwave – which peaked at 33C in London on Saturday, well below the highs of 40C currently being experienced in Dubai – left the tube like an oven, fan supplies depleted, and some unfortunate Thameslink passengers evacuating a faulty train while relying on a delivery driver throwing bottles of water to stranded passengers.
Emma Howard Boyd, who chaired last year’s London Climate Resilience Review for Sadiq Khan, told London Centric that people coming from overseas and looking at the temperatures in the capital might wonder “what’s all the fuss about?”
This changes, she said, when you get inside a London building and “experience the urban heat effect”. This is the simple concept that cities are hotter than their rural surroundings.
This is essentially down to the presence of many surfaces that absorb heat, such as concrete-heavy areas lacking trees, combined with a lot of activity. All of this “just magnifies these temperatures and makes things feel even worse”, explained Howard Boyd, who also served as chair of the UK’s Environment Agency until 2022.
“The fact that we haven’t been designing London, building London, for operating in different temperature levels and particularly heat, means that you experience London in a very different way” to cities in hotter climates, she added.
Air conditioning – a common sight in many hot countries – is one notable absence in many residential buildings and older commercial premises in the UK.
A spokesperson for the Met Office said that “whilst other countries may reach similar temperatures more regularly during the summer months, or temperatures above that reached during the recent heatwave in the UK, people may feel less affected by the heat as they can cool off more effectively in air conditioned rooms, especially overnight”.
Another issue in London is high relative humidity compared to many other hot countries, meaning there is a large amount of water vapour in the air, according to the Met Office: “The air cannot easily contain any more water as a vapour and so cannot effectively evaporate the sweat from our skin.”
American-born Valentin backed this, describing himself as “walking up and down the aisles of the supermarket” in the hopes of cooling down, and “waddling down the sidewalk with two or three tower fans from Argos”.
Huang, the influencer, said that people in London have “nowhere to hide” compared to her home city.
“In Shanghai, people actually go to the tube for the air con, because the air con in the tube is so strong”, she said, comparing it to the “sauna” of the tube.
A hundred years ago the newly-constructed Central Line was so cool that it was a selling point to consumers, who were told by an iconic poster that "the underground's the only spot for comfort when the days are hot". But a century of heat-producing activity has permanently warmed up the clay around its tunnels, making it unbearably hot down below.
Today, just 40% of London Underground’s trains have air conditioning, although stations have additional cooling systems such as large fans and chiller units as part of Transport for London’s “hot weather plan”, a spokesperson said. The new Piccadilly line trains have air conditioning but their introduction was recently delayed until late next year, meaning Londoners will spend another summer sweating all the way to Cockfosters.
While ancient buildings such as churches tend to stay cool in a heatwave, much British housing is ineffective at keeping the heat out – a pattern intensified in a densely populated city like London.
Howard Boyd urged the prioritisation of “natural systems of cooling” – better building practices, as well as simple acts like keeping curtains closed – “so that you’re not adding to the problem by using air conditioning”, pointing to the fact that the heat displaced by artificial cooling has to go somewhere.
There are “simple solutions”, Boyd explained, such as the shutters found across southern Europe, or trees that naturally shade properties, but “those simple solutions [...] are not part of the way that we’re designing our homes”.
Another problem is that the modern focus on insulating London’s homes to reduce energy usage and retain heat in winter is making them unbearably hot in summer. Howard Boyd urged the government to make new projects climate and heat resilient and not just build “new housing that people are saying is too hot”.
She said: “We have a massive opportunity to make sure that the very core of those homes is built in a way that people can live in them and be comfortable in them at a whole range of temperatures. We have a massive opportunity to build in that climate resilience rather than locking in that climate vulnerability.”
London’s new ‘cool spaces’ – the summer equivalent of communal spaces that allow locals to escape cold weather in winter, designated and mapped by the mayor’s office – are another important way of mitigating against heat and climate change. Howard Boyd warned we “need to be ready” for ever-longer heatwaves in the capital as temperatures continue to rise and the climate changes.
In the meantime, Huang is just about coping with the British summer so far. Although she finds the heat in London too much, she likes the fact that it gives everyone something to talk about together, whatever their background. To keep herself cool in the absence of air conditioning, the former Shanghai resident has turned to cold showers “and my best friend, Mr Whippy”.
Got a story for London Centric? Get in touch via WhatsApp or email, or leave a comment.
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Where's London's missing Banksy?
“It’s the police!” shouted Margaret Smorthit, when London Centric began asking questions of her husband Steve on the doorstep of their house. The reality, I explained, was worse: I was a journalist who wanted to know about a financial deal involving one of Banksy’s best known London artworks. Steve started to explain that he couldn’t discuss the issue. Margaret ordered her husband to get inside their house immediately and stop talking: “No communication! Shut the door!”
Great piece on the heat in London.
Though I’m not sure the following is true:
“Another problem is that the modern focus on insulating London’s homes to reduce energy usage and retain heat in winter is making them unbearably hot in summer.”
Isn’t good insulation meant to keep heat out too, because it primarily prevents heat transfer?
The summer weather situation in London is mesmerising. Yes it’s hot but not unbearably so unless you’re in the tube. I say that after 16 years in London and being from central Spain, where the heat starts from late April and lasts until September, with temperatures often reaching over 40 degrees during heatwaves.
I agree that humidity makes it far worse especially if you’re not use to hot weather and don't know how to manage it, but there are simple things that can make a massive difference. Every Southern European I know is astounded by the lack of both curtains and shutters in most UK homes as they insulate against cold and heat and, most importantly, offer privacy. I’ve seen things walking past people’s houses you humans couldn’t believe...