Our best articles of the year + Last-minute Christmas gift delivery
From snails to mudlarks via The Ritz, unbuilt motorways and pedicab drivers — plus even more stories you might have missed.
If you’re looking for a last-minute Christmas gift, the London Centric shop is still open.
Digital gift subscriptions, at a new subscriber discount, can be bought right up until the morning of 25 December. In addition, if you want a physical gift card featuring a festive take on some of London Centric’s stories then there’s still just about time to get one!
I’ll personally hand deliver a gift card tomorrow to any address in Zones 1-3 if you order by midnight tonight. (I love all our readers in Zones 4-6 and will try to take any requests into account but there is a physical limit to what can be achieved!)
Click here to purchase a gift subscription.
Last year’s pre-dawn Christmas Eve delivery run covered 40 miles across the capital from Lewisham to Tooting and up to Hampstead via Westminster. This year’s route is already looking even more ambitious.
The more last-minute gift cards that are sold, the earlier in the morning I’ll have to get up to cover the distance. Think of it as a fun way to check if London Centric really does put the effort in, a wheeze to make a journalist work harder, or just a good way to nail that final Christmas present.
Today’s edition is a little different — it’s a look back at some of our best stories of 2025. London Centric will be a little bit quieter than normal over Christmas, with full service resuming in the new year.
The snail farm investigation that FT journalists say you should read
Last week the staff of the Financial Times issued their list of the stories they wished they’d published, which is always a year-end highlight full of long reads to gorge on.
Amazingly, in what’s probably the best honour I could imagine receiving, they voted London Centric’s piece on the capital’s tax-avoiding snail farmer as their top pick of the year.
There were also votes for our article on high street brands moving into local kebab shops and that time we found out the garden rooftop of Google’s new London HQ had been overrun with urban foxes. This gave us six nominations in total according to this graphic.
You might reasonably challenge the methodology of the FT’s list, its use of a first-past-the-post voting system, and the very suggestion that a year-old local news outlet with two members of staff is in any way competitive with some of the biggest names in global publishing.
In response, I would simply say that there is a graphic on the Financial Times website that appears to show London Centric outperforming the Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic. I’m not exactly going to question it too much, am I?
(My personal picks from the FT Alphaville-curated list are Bron Maher’s brilliant piece for The Fence on the ‘Tina Triangle’ of south London, Jennifer Williams’ rule-busting years-in-the-making piece from the FT itself about Britannia Hotels, and Sheffield Tribune’s investigation into the dodgy London solicitor buying up freeholds across the Yorkshire city. And if you aren’t already reading FT Alphaville they’ve just launched their own newsletter which is well worth a look.)
The story of snail farmer Terry Ball wasn’t London Centric’s most-read story of the year but it’s the article that people seemed to enjoy the most.
The piece was licensed for reprinting in the Guardian, The Week, and — for some reason I’m not entirely sure I understand — is currently being translated into Afrikaans for “South Africa’s highest-circulation magazine”. French television stations went crazy for it, prompting multiple debates on national television (you can watch one TF1 report on les escargots here) and the Guardian employed the actor Nicholas Camm to read it out if you prefer an audio version.
All of the licensing fees have been put back into hiring more freelance journalists to conduct a series of members-only investigations. These will start to hit the inboxes of paying London Centric subscribers early in the new year.
Photographer Joel Goodman, a friend of London Centric who went viral ten years ago for his “Renaissance painting” photo of New Year’s Eve in Manchester, also took some wonderful pictures of Terry Ball which are scattered throughout this post.
As an end-of-year treat all our subscribers can now read the original piece here.
But just remember this Christmas, if you’re celebrating with friends, that somewhere in an empty London office block is a snail munching away inside a sealed box, with no awareness that its only purpose in life is to breed and avoid taxes.
London Centric’s most read stories of 2025
Many commercial news outlets fixate on how many people click the stories, spending their time working out how to trick readers into clicking headlines, hastening the decline of an already-struggling journalism industry.
Luckily, London Centric is freed from this need to chase clicks. As a result, this is the first time I’ve looked at our view count data this year. Luckily, it broadly tracks with the journalism I’m proud to have published.
The snail farmer of London, his mafia friends, and a £20m vendetta against the taxman
Why can’t anyone stop the fundraisers outside London stations?
The real 5G conspiracy: How Londoners are being lied to about their phone signal
Drumsheds in crisis: What’s really going on at London’s biggest nightclub?
Still, I think it would be a shame if people missed these other stories.
London’s mudlarks at war: feuds, fights and slurs on the shoreline
Why Omaze is giving away London’s most expensive council house in a raffle
“Maximising value”: The secret plan to make money from Hampstead Heath
The working men’s club and the dispute over a missing Banksy
THANK YOU…
To everyone who has sent in story tips. Over the last year London Centric has received hundreds of ideas, nuggets of information, and bits of gossip via email and WhatsApp. Some of them have become fully-fledged national news stories. If you hear of anything, big or small, that you think we should know about then please do get in touch.
To the paying subscribers who make everything possible by liberating this publication from the need to chase clicks. This means we can spend months working on a single story and have the backing to take on powerful people and institutions.
To the brilliant journalists, photographers, illustrators, and filmmakers who have worked for this publication over the last year and produced proper journalism they should be proud of.
To everyone who has read, shared, forwarded, laughed, gasped, enjoyed, or just had any response at all to a London Centric story. The main motivation of this publication is to work hard to delight you and inform you about what’s really going on in the capital. Hopefully we’ve published some tales that you feel met that ambition.