One year of London Centric
A selection of our favourite stories that you might have missed — and a quick note from Jim.
It’s a year since I quit my job and nervously published a piece announcing the launch of London Centric. It pledged to carry out investigative reporting into “the people, institutions, and dubious money that make the capital what it is”.
Twelve months on, I hope you feel I’ve made good on that promise.
The basic principle has remained the same from the start: What happens if you head out across London and look for the stories that other people have missed and the tales that help people understand why their city is the way that it is?
With a tiny budget, no investors, no advertisers, and a skeleton reporting staff I’m proud that London Centric has broken more news stories than many substantially bigger outlets. We’ve been profiled in the New Yorker. MPs and peers have raised our reporting in parliament, while we’ve forced ministers to U-turn on policies. Every national newspaper and every national broadcaster has followed-up a London Centric story. Sometimes they even remembered to credit us.
But the single best thing during the last year has been the community of Londoners that is growing up around this newsletter. They’ve posted hundreds of fascinating comments below articles, sent me thousands of WhatsApp messages, and provided countless story tips. Readers have been responsible for some of our best stories — whether it’s the person who wanted us to investigate who was paying for fake reviews of the Ritz, the individual who helped us uncover the secret plan to charge London’s drivers by the mile, or the source who knew about the fox infestation on the roof of Google’s expensive new Kings Cross HQ.
Being funded by readers and having bare minimum overhead costs means I’m able to run an ultra-lean operation. There’s no external shareholders demanding big financial returns or, as in the case of the Evening Standard, oligarch owners begging Elon Musk to save their London newspaper.
In an era when corporate local news publishers are turning to artificial intelligence to write their stories, I prefer an old-fashioned approach based on employing humans to go out on the streets. As more people subscribe, more money goes out of the door to pay more reporters to do more local journalism about the capital. I’ve already launched a rolling six-month paid traineeship for reporters, providing a new route into the media for young Londoners.
London Centric is a publication held together with a lot of hard work, long hours, and the love of telling a story well. But doing journalism the right way is a very expensive business. I could make more money writing cheap clickbait stories smothered in advertising that crash your browser. Instead, I’ve focused on growing slowly, through big investigations that cost thousands of pounds to report, such as this one into the people behind the dodgy tax-evading gift shops of Piccadilly Circus.
So thank you from the bottom of my heart to all the paying subscribers who have put their faith in the idea over the last year. I’m almost ready to publish our next investigative piece, but some new information has come up. While we work that through, I wanted to bring you some big reads you might have missed, particularly for those who have only joined in the last few months.
If you’re not already a London Centric member but have been considering it, then I’d really appreciate it if you were willing to make the jump and join now. You’ll be directly funding reporting into the powerful people and institutions who run the capital, receive exclusive members-only investigations, and ensure London Centric can bring you even more ambitious reporting over the next year.
Thank you so very much.
Jim Waterson
PS Scroll down for a selection of my favourite reads you might have missed.
If you’ve got any feedback about London Centric then please get in touch. Honest feedback is the best feedback. You can contact me here or, alternatively:
London Centric will be having birthday drinks later in the autumn at a central London location, with an invite going out soon to founding members. If you want to upgrade your membership and ensure you’re on the list, you can click here.
Here’s nine of my favourite big reads from London Centric’s first year.
1. Why Omaze is giving away London's most expensive council house in a raffle
How did Omaze end up giving away an ex-council house in a raffle? Is 21 Park Street really worth the £4.5m they claim? And is the politician who authorised the council’s sale of the property now buying Omaze tickets in the hope of winning it for himself?
The story of 21 Park Street is the story of modern London. What was an abandoned industrial property became a council house in the 1980s, a squat in the 2010s, and a £4.5m social media prize draw prize in the 2020s.
2. London's mudlarks at war: feuds, fights and slurs on the shoreline
In March last year, the mudlarking world was rocked after graffiti was spotted on the wall facing the river. Photos passed to London Centric show two sites, each with the same foot-tall pink letters. “LARA = FAKER LIES” says one. The other reads: “LARA = SELFISH FRAUD”. In a dark passage under Vintner’s Place, an office building overhanging the north foreshore, the remnants of the other graffiti is still just about visible after an attempt to paint over it.
“Lara” is Lara Maiklem, a veteran mudlark widely credited with turning an old niche hobby into an aspirational semi-mainstream pursuit that has generated countless column inches alongside hundreds of social media channels, and now a major exhibition at London Museum Docklands.
Simon Usborne, one of the UK’s best feature writers, took a break from writing for the Financial Times and the Guardian to investigate the dark undercurrents of the mudlarking world.
3. The billionaire and the tax-evading gift shops
Today, London Centric sets out a story of repeated and brazen tax evasion, taking place in plain sight in a row of gift shops on one of the busiest streets in the capital. It appears to have cost taxpayers millions of pounds over the last decade and shows no sign of ending.
Asif Aziz has rarely been out of the pages of London Centric in 2025, with the billionaire landlord linked to everything from threats to close down cinemas, to cockroach-infested flats in Croydon and knock-off Forest Gump restaurants.
Our investigation began with a probe into the taxes of London’s rapidly multiplying Harry Potter shops. It has now led to questions about Aziz’s wider property empire, with our investigation taking us up to Edinburgh.
This has prompted a growing number of politicians and members of the public to start asking the question: Why does one of London’s richest landlords keep renting prominent properties to tax-evading gift shops run by students? We’re still waiting for an answer.
4. How London's bus drivers got the city home on 7/7
To have a bus service in place by 5pm so Londoners could get out of the city centre, TfL needed to start preparing almost immediately. Most of all, it needed to alert London bus drivers scheduled to drive the afternoon and evening shifts that they still needed to come to work. Many of them would have been following the rolling coverage of the attacks on their city from home.
Twenty years ago London was hit by a horrific series of terrorist attacks. This piece by Gareth Edwards offered a previously untold story of how London’s transport network came back to life.
5. London’s Pedicabs: Sex, loathing, and highway robbery
What’s the most publicly embarrassing way you could die?
London Centric pondered this last month while sitting in the back of a pedicab as it jumped several red lights and bombed across Trafalgar Square at full speed with Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” playing from its speakers. After narrowly avoiding being shunted by a furious black cab during our uninsured ride past Nelson’s Column, we headed on towards parliament.
The world of pedicabs is a chaotic mess with rival factions facing obliteration under plans to regulate the sector. Beyond the viral clips of tourists being charged £200 are a group of people trying to make a living — and often struggling.
6. Lime bikes keep breaking Londoners' legs
Patel, the orthopaedic consultant, warned that the substantial weight of Lime’s e-bikes, especially around the middle of the frame, appears to be causing a large number of leg breaks when the central bar lands on top of riders: “It ends up creating a pivot point. You’re causing a bend in the bone with the heavy force.”
I’m obsessed with Lime’s e-bikes, which have done more to change the urban landscape of central London than any other intervention in years, gaining millions of users in the process. That this was all done by an unregulated Uber-backed private company from California that pushed ahead without asking permission of anyone makes it all the more intriguing. This story, nominated for Private Eye’s Paul Foot Award for investigative journalism, was the first in a series of pieces that popularised the term “Lime bike leg”, which has now entered London’s vernacular.
With Lime’s starring role during the tube strikes, its plans for an IPO, and its status as an iconic youth brand that features on both illegal drugs and a pop-up members’ club, we’ll be staying on this story for a while yet.
7. 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!”
The Smorthits may have good reason to want to avoid the media.
This investigation into the missing Banksy at the heart of the £4m battle for Bethnal Green Working Men's Club in east London took months of work and meetings in East End cafes. A story that raises questions about the future of London’s soul and the bizarre world of the art market was a hit with readers. We shared our findings with the Financial Times, who honoured it by putting the story on the front-page of its Weekend edition.
8. How to catch a London bike thief
“Is it a block of flats? We do not attend when it’s a block of flats,” the operator said, explaining the police could not spare the time trying to retrieve stolen goods in a building with multiple floors. The conclusion was clear: If you’re going to have your bike stolen with a tracker attached, and want the police to intervene to help retrieve it, then make sure the thief lives in a detached house with its own front door.
The story of petty crime in London is one of the things that shapes people’s perceptions of the city, even if the threat can be overstated. This piece on bike theft is best read in conjunction with our recent story on how you’ve got more chance of winning a prize on the National Lottery than retrieving a stolen bike in the capital. Also check out the story of how your stolen phone could be on its way to Algeria.
9. Ice cream wars and illegal gambling: How Westminster Bridge became lawless
Inside the depot was a woman who identified herself as Jan Sanli, one of the third generation of Sanli ice cream sellers. She said video of me filming her company’s van on Westminster Bridge had already been circulated by their staff: “I can see you on the recording, you do realise that right? And you do realise you’re on a CCTV camera right now, right?”
In a common theme among the illegal traders on Westminster Bridge, she soon began complaining that I was unfairly focussing on her family’s law-breaking when there were other criminals operating in the area.
“I hope you’re also writing about the Albanians,” she said.
The old saying is that “when the ravens leave the Tower of London, the kingdom will fall”.
I believe a more modern equivalent is “when the ice cream vans stop illegally parking in the Westminster Bridge bus lane, London will rise”.
The work you do is amazing!
Best subscription ever, well done on a year of amazing work and keeping proper journalism alive! 🔥