Why Lime bikes beep
Plus: Are foxes occupying Google's new London HQ, what happened when everyone paid to skip the queue at SXSW, and pope-themed vegetable sculptures.
If London has a soundtrack for summer 2025 then it’s the beep beep beep of a stolen Lime e-bike approaching down a street.
The high-pitched electronic noise is near-ubiquitous in the capital at the moment, as the company struggles to find a technical solution after the capital’s ever-resourceful teenagers pioneered a new way to use the vehicles for free.
Scroll down to read why it happens — and what Lime are doing to fix it.
Is Google’s new £1bn King’s Cross HQ overrun with urban foxes?
Last week we were contacted by a well-sourced reader with a tip: “The contractors managing the final fit out of the new Google building in King’s Cross are having to deal with a ‘skulk’ of foxes (apparently that is the collective noun). I’m told the foxes colonised the building in the early stages when it was still quite accessible and are now living on the top floor which is like a small park.”
In case you’re not paying attention, Google’s new Thomas Heatherwick-designed “groundscraper” HQ is the giant building that has been going up next to King’s Cross station for the best part of a decade. Its crowning feature is an enormous rooftop garden.
As chroniclers of the capital’s urban foxes (did you know the skulls of the capital’s animals appear to be diverging from their non-London equivalents?) we asked around to see whether the fox tale was realistic. In the process we learned fox invasions of new buildings are remarkably common in London. One fox called Romeo was even found living on the 72nd floor of the Shard while it was being built.
Now, here’s how journalism should work: People tell a reporter things that they believe to be true (you can get in touch with London Centric very easily!) and then the journalist tries to verify if they’re correct. You talk to sources, look up public records, and ask questions of experts. The final stage of this process is to email an organisation’s press office and ask them directly.
Google’s UK press team is large and effective. I’ve emailed them dozens of times over the years. They’re usually very responsive and are quick to knock down and deny things that they believe aren’t accurate. But after a week of emails, phone calls and texts, I heard nothing back. I’d been ghosted. I asked whether the press office itself has been overrun by foxes. The response from our new fox overlords? Nothing.
Out of desperation, with AI destined to take all our jobs, I asked Google’s Gemini service whether it was possible that its parent company’s HQ was overrun with foxes. Its conclusion was this was “plausible” and “likely”, listing a series of reasons why the trillion-dollar tech company may have accidentally constructed urban fox paradise.
We’re left with a conundrum. In the absence of any further evidence or an outright denial, we’re inclined to assume that Google’s giant new building has been colonised by vulpes vulpes. But we don’t have the definitive proof. If you’re a fox living on the roof of Google’s HQ — or someone involved in chasing animals around a giant billion quid office block — please do get in touch. We’ll let you know any updates.
UPDATE: Following the publication of this piece, Google got back to us to confirm that they had been the victim of a series of vulpine incursions. A spokesperson said: "Fox sightings at construction sites are pretty common, and our King's Cross development is no exception. While foxes have been occasionally spotted at the site, their appearances have been brief and have had minimal impact on the ongoing construction.”
As trailed in London Centric last week, it sounds as though the capital is set to be overlooked by chancellor Rachel Reeves when she announces new spending plans on Wednesday.
The briefing from Sadiq Khan's office this morning is that they fear “there will be no new projects or funding” for the capital, despite the Labour mayor presenting a long list of requests to the Labour government. That would mean no extension of the DLR to Thamesmead, no extra cash for the Met police, and no replacement for the 53-year-old Bakerloo line trains. The latter are so old that they’re falling apart, meaning there’s no spare trains to enable them to be cleaned of their increasingly-prevalent graffiti.
As a “source close to the mayor” puts it: “We must not return to the damaging, anti-London approach of the last government… Sadiq will always stand up for London and has been clear it would be unacceptable if there are no major infrastructure projects for London announced in the Spending Review and the Met doesn’t get the funding it needs.”
London Centric’s reporting is paid for by people who are willing to support traditional, on-the-ground journalism about the capital. If you haven’t joined already and are willing to become a paid subscriber then your support is much appreciated.
We’ve got a bunch of members-only investigations coming up in the next fortnight that you won’t want to miss out on.
The very best vegetable sculptures from the Lambeth Country Show
Every year the residents of London compete for one of the most prestigious and historic prizes in the capital: the best vegetable sculpture at the Lambeth Country show in Brockwell Park.
This year’s entries focussed on two world-defining events: The never-ending dispute over the use of Brockwell Park to hold the event and the election of a new pope.
SXSW comes to London — and teaches Brits how to queue
By Rachel Rees
Attendees at last week’s much-hyped maiden European outing of American festival SXSW in London found themselves paying up to £1,300 for a ticket so they could engage in a typically British pastime: queueing.
The six-day event across 34 venues in Shoreditch – an expansion of the decades-old tech and culture festival from Austin, Texas – featured two former British PMs, ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, and even a brief appearance from King Charles. It also featured lots of waiting around.
The main problem was that almost everyone seemed to have paid for priority access – ultimately meaning that no-one got it. “They’ve oversold the primary tickets,” said one employee working on queue control at the main stage. “A lot of people think it’s VVIP, but when everyone has them [it doesn’t work].”
“I spend more time in the queue than in talks,” said Katia Buriol on Thursday, standing near the front of a line for the main stage in the rain, already hundreds-long half an hour before the scheduled start of a talk about AI. Buriol, who bought a £1,200 ‘Conference’ ticket at the last minute, said that the best day of the festival had been Monday, “because it was not packed”. Tuesday – the first day open to ticketholders on the cheaper three-day passes – had been “insane”, she added.
“Don’t say the Q-word”, one employee, who like others asked to remain anonymous, cheerily told London Centric while checking in attendees at a talk in the event’s central Truman Brewery hub. Lines at the festival’s largest stage had been “crazy”, they added, with twice the hall’s 600-person capacity showing up for some events – particularly those with big names such as actor Idris Elba or self-described “Consciousness Explorer” Deepak Chopra.
A ticketholder queuing elsewhere confessed that they did not even know what event they were in line for: “I just thought I’d join it”.
Of the five different ticket types available for the festival – peaking with the ‘Platinum Pass’, priced at £1,300 + VAT – the majority granted priority access to all conference talks. As a result, almost everyone thought they had paid to skip the queue.
“It’s supposed to be such an exclusive event,” but there is “pretty much no exclusivity,” another employee commented, saying that they had seen “way more ‘Platinum [Passes]’” than any other ticket types in the queue to the main stage.
“We were pleased to see that there was such appetite for our high profile and broad ranging programming in the first year”, a SXSW London spokesperson said, when we asked them why the queues were so long, adding: “We were constantly monitoring queues around the campus… and we will inevitably look to build an even better experience for future years.”
“I have many opinions,” said one attendee working in the creative industries, who asked to remain unnamed due to his employer. “£1,300, really?”, he added, saying that he had heard multiple people expressing surprise at the lofty price-tag of tickets, especially the popular ‘Platinum Pass’. He had received his ticket free from a music company and “had only met four people who paid for their tickets”.
One of the few attendees who was not forced to stand around in queues was King Charles, who visited some of the festival’s multiple venues on Thursday to the dulcet tones of Taylor Swift’s ‘London Boy’. London Centric was not granted an audience, sadly.
“Maybe they didn’t expect so many people,” speculated Tim Redgate, a director at tech services company Axioned, who also expressed disappointment that the talks had not been more “insightful” for a professional audience. After attending two days of events on his three-day pass, he “nearly didn’t come back” for the third but did so purely to attend some networking meetings he had scheduled.
“It feels like Austin’s more set up for it,” he added.
Last week we wrote about the Genesis cinema in east London where the owner, who wants to demolish it, dismissed those who started petitions against the redevelopment as not real film goers.
Alex Shaw, the man who started the petition, has got in touch to insist he’s a “film nerd” and is trying to save something for the local area: “I’ve lived in the area for 15 years... I get that it’s a really tough industry but Genesis is a community asset and to not work with your community to try and come up with a solution is just really bad.”
How Lime is planning to fix the capital’s beeping e-bikes
There are some journalistic assignments that are tougher than others: Covering conflicts, conducting undercover investigations, and trying to get a reply from Google’s press office.
Yet we’d have to say that convincing London teenagers riding stolen e-bikes to stop and tell us how they nicked the vehicles is up there.
Over the last few weeks London Centric has been trying to understand how the beep beep beep from Lime bikes became the soundtrack of summer 2025, just as the click click click was the sound of 2023.
On one occasion, close to the Oval in Lambeth, we thought a rider had stopped and might be willing to chat — but it turned out they were using the stolen Lime bike to conduct a drug deal. On another occasion, on a suburban street in Hanwell, west London, the rider cycled away on their stolen vehicle as soon as we cheerily approached them to ask some questions.
But eventually someone, after we convinced them that we weren’t an undercover cop, kindly showed us how the capital’s schoolchildren are hacking the bikes, in a method that it is also available to view on several viral TikToks.
The mechanical click click click that was everywhere in 2023 usually resulted from people pushing a bike down a street with a wheel up in the air until it broke the Lime bike’s rear lock, something that was eventually largely fixed by the e-bike rental company.
London Centric’s in-house bicycle mechanic expert James Holloway explained the latest exploit that causes the ubiquitous beep is all about a feature designed to stop legitimate cyclists from being thrown off their vehicles: “For safety reasons Lime cannot put a hard stop on their bikes at the end of a hire time.”
This safety feature ensures people aren’t accidentally thrown off bikes, with the mechanical lock stopped from engaging exact at very low speeds.
Londoners have worked out how to abuse this feature, enabling them to use the bicycles without paying — as long as they’re happy to accept a constant beep beep beep as the Lime bike protests that it has been stolen.
This approach requires continuous pedalling, meaning that stopping at traffic lights is a no-go.
Holloway explained: “Kids have worked out how to trick a bike into thinking it is still moving, abusing the safety feature. This is why you see teenagers ‘testing’ bikes to see if the locks have engaged before they ride off on them with the ‘beep beep beep’ we all know and love. The teenagers then have to avoid completely stopping which may then fully engage the lock.”
A spokesperson for Lime told London Centric that they are aware of the ubiquitous beep and are planning to modify the tens of thousands of their vehicles on the capital’s roads: “The vast majority of people use Lime bikes responsibly, but when they are stolen, damaged or misused, we take it very seriously.
They said they had previously dealt with the click click click noise two years ago and a solution to the beep beep beep is on the way: “When we saw fraudulent trips in 2023, our hardware team successfully delivered several targeted improvements to stop this misuse. We are now developing further measures to counter the latest attempts to damage and fraudulently use our vehicles, with enhancements rolling out this summer.
“In parallel, we’re working with TfL and the local authorities to hold offenders to account, and we urge the public to report any incidents they see, including time and location, so we can act quickly.”
One serious issue is that under-18s are barred by Lime and other e-bike providers from using their services. While reporting on Lime we have encountered teenagers in school uniforms being told to get off Lime e-bikes by police, on the basis they shouldn’t be hired by children.
All of this points to an unmet demand: The capital’s schoolchildren want bicycles to ride around London. Lime is, at the moment, unwillingly meeting this need.
Got a story for London Centric? Get in touch via WhatsApp or email, or leave a comment.
Petition to keep the beep - it's always a handy reminder to put my phone back in my pocket...
They’re not stealing them. They are borrowing them. There is no intention to keep them. Same as the company Lime are ‘borrowing’ the roadways and paths where they leave their unlocked and unprotected.
property.
Reality should be faced , that this commercial,operator are providing a free service to those who can’t otherwise access it. Try cycling a clicking 30kg lump up a hill, no electric assist. It’s not free.
This is back payment for staking out and trying to privatise the kings highway and pavements , turning up and dumping trip hazards all over the place, imagine being partially sighted or blind and falling over them.happens a lot.
On he bright side a lot of non cyclists now know how to cycle. Learning the hard way , breaking collar bones on over powered lumps. And kids get free school trips, evidenced by all the bikes outside of schools in the morning . Anything that keeps car use down in a London is great!