Nike ambushes parkrun
Plus: The buyer of London's most expensive house, Austin Powers stands for election, a phone box for sale, and more on the canny council house purchase involving a Labour mayoral candidate.
Hello to the hundreds of subscribers who joined London Centric after a shout-out on NTS Radio’s breakfast show this week.
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.
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”.
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.
Thanks for sticking with the Newham housing story. It's particularly upsetting how normalised this seems to be. And where are the internal controls in the council?
I've done tail walking at parkrun a lot and half the time you're spending a lot of the time reassuring people that they're *not* too slow and that they *are* welcome there, so Nike's choice of slogans to use is just really unhelpful. If you're going to take advantage of an event you're making no financial contribution to, the very least you can do is not completely contradict the message they're trying to give.
I also really dislike the 'runners only' signs, because parkrun makes a real effort to remind people that they don't have exclusive use of the park. A decent chunk of people in the park for non parkrun reasons aren't going to differentiate between the Nike signs and the actual parkrun ones (which usually say 'Caution, runners') and are going to either feel like they're being banned from parts of the park or just even more annoyed with the whole thing than they already were. It's just making running the event harder for the volunteers