Oxo Cube Editorial

TfL Olympic Hotspot Data Released To Developers

2012-02-16T21:45:00.000Z

Transport data showing hotspots on the road and tube networks is being released to developers to help the travelling public to get ahead of the Games.

TfL are doing a huge amount of work to prepare London for the inevitable delays on public transport around the various Olympic events and have produced a series of rather pretty maps showing road, tube, rail and bus hotspots which were launched on the Get Ahead of the Games website last month.

Read my full post on Londonist

Police Pay £600,000 To Witness Put At Risk

2012-02-16T21:38:00.000Z

Photo by pintofstripe

The Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service paid £600,000 in compensation to a teenage witness whose identity was revealed to gang members.

The 16 year old boy witnessed a violent attack and agreed to provide a statement with the proviso that his identity was kept confidential over fears of reprisals. In what the CPS rather euphemistically describe as a fall “below our accepted standard”, details of his identity were revealed to the defence, which led to threats against him and his family.

Read my full post on Londonist

Rupert Murdoch To Face London Sun Staff This Week

2012-02-14T17:20:00.000Z

Photo by ponyintheair

Rupert Murdoch will face a sea of unhappy staff at The Sun on his arrival at the newspaper’s Thomas More Square office this week.

Several senior journalists were recently arrested after the company’s Management and Standards Committee passed information to police, leading to accusations against both the Metropolitan Police and News International themselves that Murdoch and the organisation are sacrificing others to save their own skins.

Read my full post on Londonist

Sandwich Update #1

2012-02-14T13:44:00.001Z

Dear Eat

Further to my Annoying Sandwich instructions which you obviously haven't taken note of, calling something a 'Simple Sandwich' doesn't mean you can use less filling.

The egg mayonnaise sandwich filling shown here is so spartan it resembles a very bad combover on a bald man with strands of cress trying to disguise the bready scalp peeping through.

Look!

Yours hungrily

BethPH

The Enemy Of Getting Stuff Done

2012-02-12T12:36:00.000Z

Photo by me

In my drawer at work there's a notebook which I put aside to send to my seven year old niece. She likes writing stories so I decided to send her a notebook to write in with a little story penned by yours truly in the back for her. A week later, it's still in my drawer at work. Partly because I've been really busy, partly because for the life of me I can't think of anything to write a story about. Oh, and partly because of the internet which is officially The Enemy of Getting Things Done but the elusive plot excuse is better.

She likes pink frilly dresses and dressing up and glittery nail polish so the story should probably be about a princess or something. But the feminist inside me rebels against that and thinks I should write a story about the princess rescuing the prince or something. But then I remind myself that this is a seven year old child; firstly it's wrong of the internal feminist to try and impose her ideals on someone too young to understand and secondly from someone who's not averse to manicures and dressing up herself it's deserving of today's Hypocrite Hat.

Meanwhile, I've spent half the morning trawling news websites to try and find out who Luis Suárez and Patrice Evra are and why they're unable to shake hands like two grown-ups (which is allegedly what they are) and come to the conclusion footballers are even more like tremendous children than traders which is saying something. I also found this frankly word-defying universe measurement thingy. Oh yeah, and I have a Whitney Houston earworm ('I Will Always Love You', no, don't thank me, it's my pleasure to share that pain with others).

Looking at random shit on the internet is the modern-day equivalent of cleaning out the kitchen cupboard when you were a student instead of writing that essay which is due in less than ten hours. Except probably a bit more informative and fun. The internet had only just been invented when I did my degree otherwise it's entirely possible I would never have graduated and still be sharing a shabby house with five alcoholic food-thieves to this very day.

Besides the story, I also have to read a voluminous report on road pricing, go for a walk (which I really should have done yesterday when the weather was better), sew up the hem of a dress which came down after just one wearing and wash a chandelier. Only one of those things will get done. But I'll just go and read Twitter for a bit first.

Boris Johnson In St Patrick’s Day Gaffe

2012-02-11T16:54:00.001Z

Photo by daejn

It’s been something of a gaffe-prone week for London’s two main mayoral rivals with Boris Johnson joining Ken Livingstone on the naughty step after he described St Patrick’s day events as ‘lefty crap’ and linked them to Sinn Féin.

Ken Livingstone sparked outrage earlier in the week over a comment in a New Statesman interview that the Tory party is ‘riddled’ with homosexuals. In an interview, again with the New Statesman, Boris Johnson said of a gala dinner celebration:

“…And I’ll tell you what makes me angry. . . spending £20,000 on a dinner at the Dorchester for Sinn Féin.”

Read my full post on Londonist

Inevitable Snow Pictures

2012-02-06T08:26:00.000Z

Kings Oak, High Beach, Essex

Electric Car Plan Slow To Start

2012-02-02T13:57:00.000Z

Photo by BethPH

Boris Johnson’s self-imposed target of 100,000 electric vehicles (EVs) is looking on the lean side as only 588 have been registered in London in the three years since he made his pledge, giving EVs just 0.08% of the capital’s 3m cars.

The mayor was criticised last year by the Green party over the scaling-back of his original proposals and by April last year only 534 people had taken up the government’s £5,000 grant to buy EVs.

Read the rest of my post on Londonist

How To Make The Most Annoying Sandwich

2012-01-30T13:47:00.000Z

Cram as much of the filling as you possibly can right at the front where the sandwich is on display so at first glance it appears to be a generously fat specimen. Leave the back half of the bread empty or simply drape a piece of lettuce decoratively across it.
If using salad leaves to boost the size of your sandwich, bulky ones like rocket have the added benefit of making it look trendy. You can squash up a surprising amount of rocket instead of putting a proper filler in and it will also often fall out when eaten and make a mess.
Use grated cheese instead of sliced. Much easier to get away with skimping on volume and falls out while being eaten to make a mess on lap/desk/keyboard. The same goes for slices of tomato which will invariably drop out onto an item of clothing which has been freshly dry-cleaned.
If using a small yet heavy filler such as prawns or crayfish, closely observe rule number 1, but also fail to use mayo to keep the tiny fishy bastards in place so they fall out and make a mess. One will also roll under the desk and vanish.
Chutney usage should be heavy-handed. Very heavy-handed. Preferably with gag-inducingly large globs of it concentrated in one area. Ditto mustard.
Baguettes should ideally require a chainsaw to cut them. No sandwich-baguette is successful unless it's punctured the roof of one's mouth and showered crumbs everywhere.
If making sandwiches out of ciabatta or panini, use this as an excuse to put less filling in but charge more because it's continental, innit.

The above rules will be amended or added to as and when required with no notice. One last tip:

Raw onion. NO.

Sense The City @ London Transport Museum

2012-01-21T12:40:00.000Z

See Red by Geoff Holland

Last night I visited the London Transport Museum for a private view of the Sense the City photography exhibition. The project was a Londonist/LTM collaboration inspired by the museum's Sense and the City exhibition which runs until March this year. The brief was to photograph the energy or lifeblood of London, whatever the photographer perceived that to be.

There were 655 pictures submitted to the dedicated Flickr pool and they are all, without exception, stunning. Whittling the entries down to the final 50 must have been a pretty difficult task. The shortlist was projected onto a big screen in the museum so we had a good chance to see the pictures while quaffing free wine. For me, many of the photographers' names were familiar - writers for Londonist have a dedicated Flickr pool which we can lift images from to use for our posts - and it was great to put some faces to names at last. Considering the fact that for many of them photography is a hobby rather than an occupation, their imagination and ability to capture such fantastic pictures is wonderful and I wish I had half their talent behind the lens.

The evening also provided another chance to have a wander around the museum after hours which is always a bonus; I first visited last year for the opening of the Sense and the City exhibition and the new BorisMasterRouteBus or whatever it's being called was on display. This time there's a piece of another Boris Johnson grand transport idea - a pod from the much-maligned cable car.

Once again, I left the museum telling myself I will make more of an effort to visit these touristy London places which people who live here never seem to get around to seeing.

TfL Reject ‘Perfect Traffic Storm’ Report

2012-01-21T11:45:00.000Z

Photo by O.F.E

TfL have rejected a report by traffic management firm Inrix which suggests events on the opening weekend of the Olympics will create a ‘perfect traffic storm’.

Transport and traffic has been one of the over-riding concerns around the event, with the 109 mile Olympic Route Network (ORN) putting many roads out of bounds and huge increases in passenger volume on public transport.

Read my full post on Londonist

Westminster Scraps Parking Charges Plan

2012-01-21T11:43:00.000Z

Photo by LoopZilla

After announcing last year that they were postponing plans to introduce evening and weekend charges in the west end, Westminster council have finally scrapped the charges altogether.

The council had planned to put a stop to free parking for motorists in the borough after 6.30pm but the proposals sparked a storm of outrage from residents, local business and even the church.

Read my full post on Londonist

City Win Occupy Eviction Bid

2012-01-18T16:45:00.000Z

Photo by chrisjohnbeckett

The City of London Corporation have won their legal bid to evict the Occupy protesters from their campsite outside St Pauls Cathedral.

The corporation sought a High Court ruling after a previous effort to evict the group was unsuccessful. Occupy’s presence at St Pauls has divided the church and the corporation – legal action by St Pauls to clear their land of demonstrators’ tents led to a series of resignations and a climbdown from senior clergy members.

Read my full post on Londonist

Consultation Planned For Thames Estuary Airport

2012-01-18T16:42:00.000Z

Barely a week seems to go by without a mention of the Thames estuary airport plans and lo, we have a report that the government will hold a consultation on it later this year.

Architect Norman Foster outlined some fairly ambitious plans for the fabled Boris Island while the mayor has long been an enthusiastic supporter of the idea, presenting the economic case for it last November. But as the estuary region falls outside the mayor’s control, government backing would be necessary to push ahead and, despite the Prime Minister’s admittedly cautious committal to consult, it remains a huge project in terms of cost and environmental impact.

Read my full post on Londonist

Olympic Home Rental Rush

2012-01-15T16:38:00.001Z

According to the Evening Standard, footballer Sol Campbell has kicked off a 'gold rush' to rent out homes in central London for the Olympics.

I can't work out whether the rental estimate of £75K (four times its value) for his house is a typo or if it's meant to refer to the usual rent per week for such a house. If someone can show me where you can get a Chelsea townhouse for under twenty grand, then I'll probably be right up there letting my house out to travelling VIPs too.

That would be one hell of a deposit - if you consider that the majority of landlords ask for six weeks' rent up front as a deposit, plus another month's rent in advance, that's a cool £750,000. Having said that, they'd probably only want to rent Sol's gaff for the couple of weeks that the Olympics is on, maybe with a few days for shopping and sightseeing either side. So let's say three weeks all in. That's still £225,000. Or in words, two hundred and twenty five thousand pounds. Eek. Rents aren't cheap in London but that's just silly.

What do you get for your £75K per week? Again, thanks to the Standard, we know that the lucky tenant will be able to avail themselves of a cinema, gym and spa, seven bedrooms and secure underground walkway into a mews house for two residential staff. So they'll even be able to bring their own servants with them (presumably the rent doesn't include domestic staff).

According to this article in the Graun last year, 'a power shower, Wi-Fi, flatscreen TV and a high standard of decoration are a must', so if you happen to own a dodgy flat above a shop in Leyton which hasn't seen a paintbrush since 1976 and smells of cat pee then you might struggle.

EDL March Leads To Whitechapel Brawl

2012-01-15T16:05:00.000Z

Photo by jocat1980

An English Defence League (EDL) protest march ended with 15 arrests yesterday after members of the far-right group clashed with local residents outside a Whitechapel mosque.

The protest outside Barking Town Hall, allegedly held because now-banned extremist group Muslims Against Crusades disrupted a local regiment march in Barking in 2010, was described by opposition group Unite Against Fascism as having a ‘miserable turnout’.

Read my full post on Londonist

New East London River Crossing ‘Within 10 Years’

2012-01-13T15:35:00.000Z

Photo by n.a.

Boris Johnson has pledged a new road tunnel under the Thames between Greenwich Peninsula and Silvertown, with a new ferry between Beckton and Thamesmead.

A river crossing in east London has been sorely needed for some time; congestion in the Rotherhithe and Blackwall tunnels is severe and often exacerbated by breakdowns or accidents in the tunnels which force temporary closure.

Read my full post on Londonist

RBS To Axe 3,500 Investment Banking Jobs

2012-01-12T14:43:00.000Z

Photo by firstnameunknown

Royal Bank of Scotland is poised to make cuts to its investment banking division which could see more than 3,500 jobs lost in London.

The bank, which has been 84% owned by the government since 2008 when it received a £45.5 billion bail-out to prevent a Lehman-like failure, will be exiting cash equities, corporate broking, equity capital markets and mergers and acquisitions businesses.

Read my full post on Londonist

Brian Paddick Announces Fares Policy

2012-01-10T14:48:00.000Z

Photo by IoanWilliams

Tube and bus fares are under scrutiny as the mayoral race enters the electoral new year.

Lib Dem candidate Brian Paddick has outlined three policies which he believes will make ‘fares fairer’ (let’s face it, Ken was never going to be the only one to use the fair/fare line).

Read my full post on Londonist

Follow Londonist's election coverage

What I Read In 2011

2012-01-08T12:40:00.001Z

By 'eck, lad.

I realise this probably should have been posted on new year's eve or something but it's taken a metric age to write. It's also been a pain trying to decide which books to include because I read a lot and this post would be enormous if I listed everything. Thankfully, Amazon allow you to list everything you bought by year and... oh giddy Christ, did I really buy 60 books on my Kindle in 2011?

The latter part of the year was dominated by George RR Martin's Game of Thrones. Having missed this on TV the first time around when everyone was raving about it, I watched the repeat and after the first episode went straight off and bought the first book. Epic is probably the word which comes most to mind when talking about Game of Thrones. It's simply gigantic. For anyone unfamiliar with the books, some of them are so gargantuan that they're split into two separate books. This is one of my dreams come true - an amazing book which never ends! I kind of grew out of fantasy novels after Dragonlance when I was about 14, but Game of Thromes is fabulously well-written, utterly gripping and intricately-plotted.

Last year also saw my introduction to Jonathan Franzen with Freedom and The Corrections. All the hype about Freedom when it first came out put me off a bit. I thought it was going to be one of those worthy but ultimately tedious books about self-discovery or whatever but a work colleague kept telling me how great it was until the day came when I was choosing holiday reading for two weeks in Thailand. When I got around to reading it, let me tell you, I have never spent so much time in a hammock. The only time I stopped reading it was when the Kindle battery ran out or I had to go and eat. In this and The Corrections, Franzen has a wonderful knack of creating utterly dislikeable characters which the reader actually sympathises with. In The Corrections, I thought Chip was the biggest twat alive but somehow I wanted his dreadful book to be published and him to get back from exploiting Lithuanians in time for Christmas.

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver remains one of my favourite ghost stories ever. Written from the point of view of the rather downtrodden and nihilistic Jack, it unravels a sparely-written tale of an unlucky expedition to the Arctic in the 1930s. It's short, but it manages to be creepy, intriguing and psychologically unsettling. It's beautifully atmospheric but my lasting impression is the 'wet round head' silhouetted against the moon.

For those of you who thought this was going to be a post consisting entirely of me rhapsodising about booked I liked, here's one I didn't like. Tigerlily's Orchids by Ruth Rendell. I have kept buying Rendell's books over the years because I knew pretty much what I'd be getting and out of a sense of trust that I probably wouldn't be let down. I think the time may have come to stop. Rendell's books for the last few years seem to be fixated on political correctness and highlighting examples of it. The dialogue has been old-fashioned and clunky and there's a sense of trying too hard to make younger characters trendy. In Tigerlily's Orchids, the main character Stuart is vapid and idiotic, his paramour Claudia is a cliche on legs and the exaggerated characterisation of the hippies and the alcoholic just make it a difficult reading experience and not even a particularly rewarding one.

More film-inspired reading came in the shape of Red Queen: The Authorised Biography of Barbara Castle by Anne Perkins about the Labour MP of the same name. The film that inspired this was Made In Dagenham, for the uninitiated, MID was a film about the female workers at the Dagenham Ford car factory who went on strike in 1968 over equal pay and Barbara Castle pops up in this film when she intervened in the strike which led to the Equal Pay Act 1970. I had only been vaguely aware of her existence before this film and it made me want to find out more. It's a fascinating read about an outspoken female MP in an arena where few women worked.

Having previously read Michel Faber's dark Under the Skin, the very gothic TV adaptation of The Crimson Petal and the White obviously appealed. Narrated by the well-read and articulate Victorian prostitute, Sugar, the book is by turns mesmerising, grubby, unpleasant yet irresistably voyeuristic as the reader follows the twists and turns of Sugar's life. Class divides and sexual politics are at the forefront of the story, but never in a way that overtakes the story itself.

Financial meltdown hasn't been far from our consciousness for the last few years and Robert Harris's The Fear Index goes behind the scenes at a hedge fund who have developed an algorithmic trading system. For those whose job isn't to know what that means, it's a computer which identifies where profits can be made from trades rather than relying on coked-up City boys. The book's title refers to a financial index, VIX, which represents market expectation of volatility which basically means it relies on human reaction to price-affecting events in the markets. Some bits of this book are great and it's a gripping read, though it occasionally dips into the ridiculous but then it's supposed to be entertainment so one can't be too hard on it. Without giving too much away, an alternative title could have been 'When Computers Go Bad'.

John Connolly's tortured private detective Charlie Parker saw his eleventh tour of duty in The Burning Soul this year. I am a huge fan of Connolly, especially the Charlie Parker series, which I discovered by way of an Observer book review of The Unquiet a few years ago. One of my literary weaknesses is detective novels but Connolly has added a dimension of the supernatural into his books. In the hands of a less sympathetic author this might turn out badly - supernatural is hard to do convincingly - but in his hands it's chilling and done in a way which merely hints at what is hidden from our view. Dark, violent and frequently terrifying, I can't think of anything else out there that's similar.

I'm also a bit of a sucker for stories where someone runs away and gets a new identity. That probably says something psychologically-analysable about me, but whatever, I like that sort of thing. In Monica Ali's Untold Story, the new identity belongs to none other than the late Princess Diana who somehow managed to fake her own death and start a new life in smalltown America after the pre-requisite plastic surgery etc. To be honest, I bought this less because it was about Diana but because of the premise. It had quite a few negative reviews and I can see why. The characters are two-dimensional and it just doesn't live up to what it should have been. That said, it's an intriguing story and surprisingly made me want to read that Diana biography, which I haven't got around to yet but there's a whole 11 and a half months of 2012 ahead of me so there's still time.

Other notable mentions include Serena Mackesy's Hold My Hand, another running-away story, this time a battered wife and her daughter escaping the violent husband to a spooky Cornish manor house. Again, I am a big fan of Mackesy, who also wrote The Temp (one of my all-time favourites). Hold My Hand is eerie and beautifully gothic. Rivers Of London by Ben Aaronovitch draws inevitable comparisons to Neil Gaiman's excellent Neverwhere, but manages to combine a police procedural genre with magic, history and murder in a way that's always engrossing. This was another holiday read and I think I read it pretty much in one day.

Finally, having read Hilary Mantel's wonderful Wolf Hall and Beyond Black, I'd left A Place Of Greater Safety mainly because I wasn't sure how interesting I'd find it but I'm pleased to say I was utterly wrong. Set during the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton are linked by Camille Desmoulins and their story shows the Revolution in the out-of-control way it must have felt like to those living through it. Mantel's skill at combining history and fiction makes for fantastic readability.

Aaaanyway, these were just a few of the books I read in 2011. Having received some Amazon gift vouchers for my birthday (thanks Dad!) I'm currently devising my next list of purchases though the way Game Of Thrones is going, I'll be reading that for... oooh, at least the next eight months. Possibly nine.

The Annuals Of Time

2012-01-05T15:56:00.002Z

Going through some photos on my laptop recently, I came across this spread of three girl's comic book annuals from the 70s. I don't think comics are such a big thing now unless it's the original superhero ones which are traditionally kept in plastic bags by enthusiasts or grown-up arty gothicky ones, but when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, comics were huge.

There was a very definite gender divide between the boys (Whizzer & Chips, Beano & Dandy, Beezer) and the girls (Mandy, Bunty, Judy). The covers of the boys comics generally featured exclamation marks, masked villains, boy heroes and possibly a dog. The girls comics usually had a girl doing something vaguely sappy on the front, like feeding a small dog or pouring tea. My sister, who bought Bunty and I, who bought Mandy had a long-running debate (back then it was known as an argument) about which one was better.

Both comics featured common themes; boarding schools, orphans, ballet, horses, though I remember Mandy having some stories which gave me nightmares at the time. Dorinda, the Doll of Doom featured a girl who owned a rather unpleasant doll which told scary prophecies when a string in its back was pulled. Needless to say, she tried to get rid of the doll but it kept coming back. Simon was about a three-year old boy who was being controlled by aliens who kept doing awful things which got blamed on his sister, the same sister who was the only person that knew something was wrong with Simon. Quite why aliens would choose a toddler to represent them on Earth by doing things like smashing TVs is a mystery to me now though at the time it seemed perfectly rational. Aliens were obviously on the lookout for unlikely hosts - they also took control of a girl's grandmother in That's Not My Gran!

Bunty was, according to its Wiki entry, aimed at 'working class readers', despite the fact one of its main stories, The Four Marys, was about four girls at a boarding school, one of whom was an Earl's daughter. I don't remember the four Marys ever doing anything particularly interesting apart from struggle with homework and the odd bully or two. The Comp was presumably a way of balancing out the public/private education issue.

The storylines in both comics were fairly moralistic, the long-suffering heroines finally achieving their desires, while the bullies, cheats and liars got their comeuppance. One storyline, which I can't remember the name of, featured a series of seven plots around that nursery rhyme, Monday's Child:

Monday's child is fair of face
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for a living,
But the child who is born on the Sabbath Day
Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.

The heroine of each story got their comeuppance in some way apart from Sunday's Child, obv. I think one particular comeuppance even included a post-apocalyptic wasteland caused by the protagonist who had put making money above everything else.

The annuals came out every Christmas and featured heavily on our lists to Father Christmas. They would often have new stories with existing characters or stand-alone stories and were a vital part of Christmas along with the chocolate selection pack. I wish I'd kept mine, as a quick look at eBay reveals I could have made a whole £5 from a couple of them though my brother with his Beano annuals would have been considerably better off.

Once I got past the age of about 11 I started to want to read something a bit more grown-up and moved on to photo-strip comics such as Jackie. These type of magazines seemed to generally deal with fraught teenage boy/girl relationships, not something I could identify with at the time, being a lanky bespectacled bookworm. So Smash Hits took their place and I discovered a new obsession; music. This went naturally hand-in-hand with trivia and thanks to Smash Hits I knew who had their hands insured for £1m (Mark King from Level 42), all the words to Jesus and Mary Chain's Sidewalking and who Uncle Disgusting was.

Cream horns and cups of tea all round.

I'm A Blogger, Not A Journalist

2011-12-29T14:14:00.000Z

A few months ago, I was interviewed in my capacity as contributor to Londonist, in which I was asked some questions about my background as a writer and how I perceived the writing I do. Namely, why I don't consider myself to be a journalist.

There's a couple of pretty sound reasons for that; firstly I have never trained as a journalist and secondly that I've never worked as one either. Calling myself a journalist would be a bit like donning some overalls and calling myself a mechanic just because I know a bit about cars. As a blogger, I can write about pretty much I like (unless it's for Londonist in which case it obviously has to relate to London). If I write for them, there are two superb managing editors who would prevent any ghastly errors from reaching a wider audience, but if I write for myself then I'm my own editor. This is great in some ways - I'm not put under any pressure to write about handbags or any other crap which I'm not interested in - but it also means there's no-one to give me any direction or contructive criticism.

Various people I know often tell me I undervalue my writing and sure, everyone's their own worst critic. The thing is though, I always think I can and should write better. There's lots of talent out there; Simon John Cox, who's written some fabulous short stories not to mention a couple of novels, the ever-brilliant Diamond Geezer, who never seems to be short of something to write about and the many, many hyper-local bloggers who have pretty much replaced the traditional local newspaper in the role of keeping residents informed - 853blog, Brockley Central, Shepherd's Bush, to name but three.

The whole blogging vs journalism debate has been pretty much done to death so I'm not going to revisit it here. If you want to see an interesting post on the subject, see Sarah Ditum's blog. But I do think there's a disconnect in how bloggers are viewed by other people. Barnet council famously tried to prevent Derek Dishman of the Mr Mustard blog from reporting on council activities. Fortunately, the Information Commissioner wasn't having any of that nonsense and put a stop to it. In June 2011, a blogger in Wales was arrested after filming a council meeting while in the US, another blogger was fined $2.5m basically for not being a journalist. So on the one hand the lack of accountability in blogging is perceived as a threat, although the Leveson inquiry has demonstrated that the same could be said of actual media and news organisations. On the other hand, bloggers are also perceived as being 'inadequate, pimpled and single', tapping away at keyboards in darkened rooms in lieu of a life.

Me? I'm neither. I've written various bits of fiction pretty much all my life though these days I confine myself to the odd bit of flash fiction (kudos to Simon Cox again for introducing me to the genre) which is great if you occasionally need an outlet for something more creative but run out of words very quickly. Then a few years ago I wrote some terrible sub-Daily Mash satire before moving to writing about news and current affairs. I've also been asked if I'd like to be a journalist as my day job and I did once apply for a job as a financial reporter as well as a half-hearted attempt to go freelance. The former would have been ace but I didn't make the grade and the latter is way too competitive. At least this way I get to write about cartoons if I want to.

Cartoon Linkety Link

2011-12-24T16:37:00.002Z

The Perils of Penelope Pitstop

Plot: Damsel dressed as 1920s racing driver frequently in distress from arch nemesis, the Hooded Claw who is actually her guardian Sylvester Sneekly who's plotting to bump Penelope off and pinch her fortune.

Say: 'Help! Help! It's the Hooded Claw!'

Modern remake: Tough, independent female racing driver struggling to make her mark in a man's world is threatened by jealous male rival but is ultimately saved by a handsome yet chiselled man.

Link to: The voice of Penelope Pitstop, Janet Waldo, was also the voice of Princess in Battle of the Planets.

Battle of the Planets

Plot: Five saucer-eyed animes dressed as birds protect Earth from attack by aliens, particularly the bat-eared Zoltar who takes his orders from a floating luminous head.

Say: 'TraaaaaaaaansMUTE!'

Modern remake: Troubled teens plucked from a life of crime are drafted into Space Army by a grizzled commander who recognises their potential. They overcome SAS-like training and existential dilemmas to come through when it really matters and save the Earth from certain destruction.

Link to: The voice of G-Force leader Mark, Casey Kasem, was also the voice of Shaggy in Scooby-Doo.

Scooby-Doo

Plot: Talking dog helps four teenagers known as the Mystery Inc. gang solve what at first appear to be supernatural mysteries which are later revealed as a villainous hoax and the criminal unmasked.

Say: 'Scooby-Doo, where are you?'

Modern remake: The Mystery Inc. gang have split up but two years later each receive an invite to Spooky Island, an amusement park which affects visitors in strange ways. What? It's already been done, you say? Oh!

Tube Strike To Go Ahead

2011-12-23T08:46:00.000Z

Photo by C.G.P Grey

LU’s legal bid to stop Aslef members staging a four day series of walkouts failed today, which means the Boxing Day strike will go ahead.

London Underground’s attempt to scupper the strikes was based on the fact that all union members were balloted, even the ones not scheduled to work on Boxing Day, a state of affairs LU claimed made the ballot invalid. A High Court judge didn’t agree.

Read my full post on Londonist

Rioters Named By Met

2011-12-23T08:43:00.001Z

Photo by Matteo Tessarolo

66 people convicted of of criminal offences during the London riots have been named by police and their pictures posted online.

The move is the latest in a series of actions against those who took part in the riots; yesterday 100 homes in London were raided to arrest more suspects while earlier this month, further CCTV images of people wanted for questioning were released.

Read my full post on Londonist

Things To Do While Waiting For HMRC To Answer The Phone

2011-12-20T15:03:00.000Z

Paint toenails (five minutes)

Empty dishwasher (two minutes)

Find that CD I've been looking for (six minutes)

Put up Christmas cards (one minute)

Write an email to a friend (eight minutes)

Put makeup on (eight minutes)

Fish out Spooks DVD promised to colleague (two minutes)

Peruse BBC news on the internet (five minutes)

Pace up and down (three minutes)

Stare out of window (one minute)

= 41 minutes

LU Issues Legal Challenge Over Tube Strike

2011-12-19T14:52:00.000Z

Photo by vintagedept

London Underground have begun legal action over transport union Aslef’s plans for a series of walkouts beginning on Boxing Day.

The High Court challenge is based on LU’s claim that the strike, announced last week, is invalid.

Read my full post on Londonist

Labour Petition Aims To Halt Parking Plans Permanently

2011-12-19T14:49:00.000Z

Photo by theboybg

Westminster’s Labour councillors have launched a new petition to put a permanent end to plans for evening and weekend parking charges.

The charges have already been postponed twice, first in October and then last week over concerns that jobs and revenue of west end businesses would be affected. The council was ordered to delay the charges until after a judicial review in March but the council announced that it would wait until after the Olympics.

Read my full post on Londonist

Lies, Damned Lies And Statistics

2011-12-18T12:36:00.001Z

Photo by BethPH

Seeing as it's the end of the year, I thought I'd post some stats and decorate it with an unrelated picture. It's a constant source of amazement to me that anyone at all reads this blog given how much internet there is out there but it looks like some people do, unless they're spambots.

This blog was originally intended to be a kind of filing cabinet for everything I wrote but for one reason and another that's changing. For example, if I write something about tube line closures over the Christmas period it's pretty pointless to copy and paste that onto here as there's a high probability that no-one will ever read it again ever. Quite a lot of what I write (oh alright, probably about 90% of it) is for Londonist but I've been trying to write more general posts and put pictures and stuff up too. It's more difficult than I might have imagined, partly because I'm usually pretty busy in my day job and partly because I struggle to think of anything that will be interesting or that I won't get ridiculed for.

Top Six Visitor Countries

Not many surprises here. The vast majority of you are in the UK though clearly OCE is popular in Brazil for some inexplicable reason.

United Kingdom
United States
Brazil
Canada
Australia
Germany

Top Six Traffic Sources

That's sites which have links to my blog where people have clicked through for a look-see. Leaving out the Google variations obv, Diamond Geezer (another London blogger) very kindly linked to my post about Aldwych tube station so I got a big spike in the graph there.

Review: Hamlet @ St Andrew Holborn Crypt

2011-12-17T13:00:00.003Z

It's not that often I get to spend a Friday evening in a church crypt watching one of Shakespeare's most famous plays being performed less than three feet away so when that opportunity came up I didn't hesitate. Having written a preview for Londonist, I was unable to attend the press night but managed to get tickets for the penultimate night.

The Actors' Temple company chose an unusual venue - the crypt of St Andrew in Holborn - a warren of stark brick arches and rooms we were ushered through in darkness accompanied by a menacing drum beat. For the opening scene where the ghost of the late King of Denmark makes its first appearance to Francisco, Barnardo, Horatio and Marcellus, the tiny audience of 50 people were arrayed on a platform in the shadows as we watched the men plead with a silent ghost illuminated only by cold moonlight.

The eponymous Hamlet played by Actors' Temple founder and owner Mark Wakeling, responds to Gary Condes King Claudius's demands that he cease his 'unmanly' mourning of his dead father with the barest assent over his shoulder as he fusses over Ophelia, his scorn for his uncle insultingly apparent. Meanwhile, Tim Duthie's Laertes is the straight-up-the-line perfect son, taking the time to warn his sister not to pay too much attention to Hamlet's flirting. For the scene where Hamlet finally meets the ghost of his dead father, we are lined up against the wall of the crypt, watching the catalyst of his descent from grief-stricken son to scheming prince under a pretence of madness. His anger is palpable, he fights off his friends when they try to prevent him leaving with the ghost.

Company co-owner Ellie Zeegan's Ophelia seems to suffer the most at Hamlet's desperation for revenge and is the misplaced focus of his anger at his mother, Gertrude. She's played with a lovely and touching innocence; her father, Ron Sudhir Scala as Polonius, has forbidden her from seeing Hamlet but he visits her 'with a look so piteous in purport/As if he had been loosed out of hell', a frightening and confusing experience for her. This doesn't stop Polonius and the King later using Ophelia to spy on Hamlet which leads to a brutal scene between the two former sweethearts. Ophelia's terrified sobs as Hamlet by turns screams at her, insults her, throws her to the ground and manhandles her are heart-wrenching and seeing all this happen right on the floor in front of you is both discomforting but compelling. When he finally leaves her crying in fear and panic I realised I had been holding my breath and watching through my fingers with tears in my eyes.

Hamlet’s friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (themselves the stars in Tom Stoppard’s play of the same name in which the two characters meander about pondering the reason for their existence while the play of Hamlet happens around them) are played by James Alexandrou and John Pickard respectively – both of whom dedicated Eastenders fans may be familiar with. The former also does a cracking stint as a gravedigger, flinging bones about with abandon.

The players, used as a device by Hamlet to expose his uncle’s guilt, are a free-wheeling painted bunch whose enactment of his father’s death and his mother Gertrude’s betrayal complete with much squealing, cross-dressing and drama, raises more than a few giggles from the audience. Hamlet himself lurks at the very back of the crypt, watching Claudius’ face avidly for signs of guilt. There was so much to look at in this scene that it was hard to know whether to watch the play-within-the-play, Hamlet virtually exploding with excitement at being right or Gertrude and Claudius bethroned and looking on in horror and slow dawning of realisation at the scene in front of them. Gertrude’s subsequent summons of Hamlet to her room to discuss events leads to his murder of Polonius and his exile to England.

The scene where Ophelia’s madness following the death of her father is exposed is haunting – she’s led in on the end of a rope to speak with the king and queen, handing out herbs and flowers to all present, muttering and singing to herself. Her later drowning is announced by the queen just as a furious Laertes (who does a nice line in sentences beginning with quiet menace which finish with rage-filled shouts) is demanding to know what happened to Polonius and plotting Hamlet’s death.

The famous ‘alas poor Yorick’ scene is handled brilliantly with a drunken Hamlet swathed in a cloak and hood crawling around on the floor bantering with the gravediggers. Mark Wakeling delivers what’s probably one of the best-known theatrical quotes while giggling hysterically and clutching a bottle. His reappearance sparks another fit of rage from Laertes who holds him responsible for Ophelia’s death. The final scene in the court swirls around us, Hamlet and Laertes duel while Gertrude inadvertently drinks the poisoned wine meant for her son. Claudius’s anguished shout as she dies is truly spine-chilling.

It was an amazing and compelling performance, the whole thing felt raw but beautifully executed and with real emotion. Many of the audience (myself included) were brushing away tears at the end of the play. The actors manage to get under our skin in a way that’s facilitated by the surroundings – the audience is so close it’s more like being part of the play than a spectator. Despite being over three hours long, the time rushed past and I can honestly say I’ve never enjoyed a play so much as this one. The Actors’ Temple are definitely on my list of must-see-agains.

Visit their website for details of future performances and their page on Facebook.

Songs For Winter

2011-12-15T14:40:00.000Z

Hazy Shade of Winter - The Bangles
Fire and Ice, Salwa Azar

California Dreamin' - Mamas & Papas
Frozen Lake - Buffalo Tom
No Blue Skies - Lloyd Cole
Umbrella - Rihanna
Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground - White Stripes
Ice Ice Baby - Vanilla Ice

2011: A Year Of Protests

2011-12-15T09:06:00.000Z

Photo by Sean Batten

This year it’s been all about the cuts. Not since the heady days of the millions-strong turnout against the war in Iraq have we seen such a plethora of people ripping up their bedsheets to make banners and taking to the streets to express their discontent. The image of the Swampy-style demo-pro with unusual piercings and a dog on a bit of string is in the past. From Crouch End to Croydon, people have laid aside their political apathy, stopped moaning about the government while failing to vote, and started to speak up for the changes they want. Here’s a roundup of just a few of the protests we’ve seen this year.

Occupation

The movement in possession of tents, a ferociously efficient publicity machine and notoriously little in the way of demands have firmly pitched their London operation, both in the physical sense and in the consciousness of the city. On 15 October, a group of protesters made camp next to St Paul’s Cathedral in lieu of being denied entry to their original destination of Paternoster Square, home to the London Stock Exchange. Within a few days they created a second camp at nearby Finsbury Square, shortly followed by a third occupation, called the Bank of Ideas at a former UBS office building on Sun Street. Using the slogan ‘we are the 99%’ (which alludes to the concentration of wealth among the top 1% of income earners compared to the other 99%), the Occupy movement’s objections range from climate change to the banking crisis to government cuts.

See the rest of my protest round-up on Londonist

Police Release Riot Suspect Photos

2011-12-14T15:55:00.000Z

Photo by teddave

A further 213 CCTV images of people wanted for questioning over the August riots has been released by the Metropolitan Police today.

The gallery of mugshots can be found on Flickr and is the result of 200,000 hours of officers viewing CCTV footage to identify suspects.

Read my full post on Londonist

Hammersmith & Fulham Cuts Council Tax

2011-12-14T15:52:00.001Z

Photo by O.F.E

Hammersmith & Fulham council made headlines this week by cutting council tax bills by nearly 4% next year, in a move which will mean the borough has the third lowest council tax in the country.

This translates as just over £30 off a band D property, leaving an annual bill of £781.34. But how have the council achieved this in an era of cuts, cuts and more cuts? H&F say that combining children’s services, adult social care and library services with neighboring boroughs Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea will reduce management and overhead costs by 50%, saving taxpayers £33.4 million over the next four years.

Read my full post on Londonist

Book Swap Wins Ideas4Mayor Competition

2011-12-14T15:51:00.000Z

Photo by Annie Mole

Next year you could have the opportunity to swap your books at your tube station.

A few weeks ago we asked Londoners to Tweet their ideas for the capital to Ideas4Mayor, with the winning brainwave to be presented at the London Policy Conference.

Read my full post on Londonist

Today I Built A House

2011-12-11T20:53:00.000Z

Well, I helped a seven year old girl build a house. It was pink and surprisingly complicated.

It consisted of a floor, four walls and two roof sections intended to fit together by way of notches but one of the roof sections didn't fit and even 15 minutes of dedicated headscratching from a qualified electrician, a financial data analyst and a head of IT couldn't make it fit. The seven year old was looking decidedly unhappy as she sat back in her chair, arms folded, with that air of 'FINE'. So we broke out scissors and glue and we made it fit.

We asked her for the instructions but she told us with an air of contempt that she'd thrown them in the bin and her friend Emily could put it together. There was no actual end to that sentence but the implication was clear. Another seven year old had assembled the very thing that we had spent 15 minutes scratching our heads over. We were fail. Our efforts were impeded in a minor sort of way by the seven year old's younger brother who was determinedly using the glue that their grandfather had probably unwisely given them to glue the flowers and letters meant to decorate the pink house firmly to his fingers.

Finally, the seven year old and I got the two final roof sections stuck on, complete with tiles and soffits. The electrician shook his head, tutted and said; 'Building control would never pass that.' But at least it was in one piece and I'd managed to prevent the siblings jabbing amendments laced with gobs of glue onto it. It was bourne proudly into the kitchen to keep it safe from the marauding hands of their two year old younger brother.

So today I helped build a house. Though I have a sneaking suspicion it may have suffered some subsidence since then.

(picture to follow)

Westminster By-Law To Remove Parliament Square Camp

2011-12-10T12:55:00.000Z

Photo by chrisjohnbeckett

Parliament Square’s Democracy Village camp could face removal if Westminster council’s plan to introduce a new by-law goes ahead.

The camp was established a decade ago by the late peace campaigner Brian Haw but moved to the pavement after a successful eviction bid under trespass laws. The council now plans to introduce a by-law to control the use of tents and sleeping equipment in the square and surrounding areas.

Read my full post on Londonist

Mushroom!

2011-12-10T12:50:00.001Z

Iranian Embassy Closed, Diplomats Expelled

2011-12-02T10:17:00.000Z

Photo by zoubin

The Iranian Embassy in London has closed and its diplomats were asked to leave the UK by 2pm today after attacks on the British Embassy in Tehran.

Protesters stormed the Embassy on Tuesday after Britain imposed sanctions on the Iran central bank last week, following a UN report which suggested Iran may have worked on developing a nuclear arsenal.

Read my full post on Londonist

No Indian Boycott Over Dow Wrap

2011-11-30T16:45:00.000Z

Photo by D1v1d

The Indian Olympics Association has backed down from a proposed boycott of the 2012 Games over chemical company Dow’s sponsorship of the stadium’s wrap.

The sponsorship deal, announced earlier this year, caused some consternation over whether it tallied with the environmental and ethical message the Olympics was striving to maintain.

Read my full post on Londonist

Olympics Could Get Own Spooks

2011-11-28T21:05:00.001Z

Photo by mikekingphoto

The 2012 Olympics are shaping up to be the best defended ever, with former MI5 agents apparently being drafted in to beef up security.

Not content with missiles, US security agents and a secret SAS base, the retired spooks will be keeping an eye out for any potential terror threat at the Games.

Read my full post on Londonist.

Aldwych Station Tour

2011-11-27T13:10:00.005Z

All photos by me from my Flickr pool

Every now and again, TfL dust off the disused Aldwych tube station and throw open the doors for guided tours and I was lucky enough to find out about it in time to grab some tickets. It's a not-to-be-missed and rare opportunity to see a bit of London that you would never normally get to visit so needless to say, the tickets sold out pretty quickly.

It wasn't the first time I'd been to Aldwych - last year the station was opened up as part of a series of events across London commemorating the Blitz and we got a chance to experience a taste of what it must have been like for people who used tube stations and tunnels as shelters during air raids.

First opened to passengers in 1907, Aldwych never received the volume of traffic expected to use it. As a branch station, trains were infrequent and the proximity of busier Holborn station meant people shunned poor old Aldwych. Services changed to peak hours only, then the station finally closed its doors in 1994. During its 87-year history, it saw service as an air raid shelter (as mentioned above) and safe storage for treasures from the British Museum. There are tons of websites going into way more detail than I'm prepared to so I won't bore readers with it all. Aldwych does remain a popular filming location - scenes from Atonement, Die Another Day and Neil Gaiman's fantastic Neverwhere were filmed here, as was Prodigy's Firestarter video.

Other bloggers have complained that the tour, which is operated by the London Transport Museum, is excessively concerned with imparting H&S rules and bans on digital SLR cameras. I went armed with a compact camera rather than my SLR and the lighting conditions are obviously not ideal so my photos were a bit disappointing but hopefully enough to give readers an idea of what the station is like.

After having our bags searched, we were shepherded into the ticket hall where we were welcomed by a staff member from the museum. The talk was primarily about health and safety, the reasons why visitors aren't allowed to wear open-toed shoes or high heels (in case an evacuation requires us to walk down the tracks to Holborn) and pointing out the fact that there are 160 steps down to the platforms and 160 steps back up. On the eastern platform we were chivvied rather annoyingly along to listen to a talk about the station's history before being given three minutes to take pictures - yes, we were told three minutes. A staff member then walked up the lovely, empty platform, thus ruining any shots we might have liked to take of it curving away into the distance. In fact, throughout the tour, staff managed to position themselves in the most obstructive and inconvenient places possible between bouts of pushing us along like recalcitrant schoolchidren, also ensuring we didn't get nearly enough time to take decent pictures or fiddle with camera settings.

Given that the majority of people who would visit a disused tube station are going to be tube geeks, London bloggers like me, transport bloggers and history buffs, it should be fairly obvious that we'd want to take as many photos as we could. The ban on SLRs is irritating but understandable as it's for commercial reasons, but then making it awkward to even use a compact is ridiculous. A prime example of this was on the western platform where an old Northern line train was sitting (unfortunately closed so we couldn't fling ourselves onto the seats). They had put up a barrier just a few feet from the front of the train, presumably to prevent us launching ourselves onto the tracks enthusiastically and with wanton disregard for the gods of H&S. Not only was there a barrier but a man guarding the barrier which meant we couldn't take pictures of the front of the train. This is just infuriatingly niggardly. We asked if we could go through the barrier just to take one picture and the staff member refused, though did take a picture for us with our camera.

The whole thing felt rushed and for £20 per ticket I expected it to be better. Even allowing an extra 15-30 minutes per tour would have made it better. Although it was great to see both platforms, the Blitz tour was fascinating, colourful and informative whereas this tour was lifeless and hurried.

If you missed out this time, keep an eye on the London Transport Museum's website for future tours. Londonist also have a video from when Aldwych was a working station, complete with LU staff blithely ignoring H&S rules to jump onto the track.

See all my Aldwych photos on Flickr. I've also included some from the Blitz tour.

Click here to see the PDF of the booklet about the tour.

Met Cracks Down On Crime While Boris Looks On

2011-11-25T09:15:00.000Z

Photo by TerryWillard

A series of raids across London took place this morning in a one-day crackdown on crime – accompanied by a special guest.

Boris Johnson was in attendance at one raid in Peckham, although police apparently refused to allow him into the property thus denying its occupants a unique opportunity to be rudely awoken by the mayor of London.

Read my full post on Londonist

Top 10 Things To Do In The City Of London

2011-11-24T13:30:00.000Z

Photo by Jason Webber

Our tour of the London boroughs reaches the borough that’s not really a borough: the City of London. Finding things to do in an area which is largely closed for the two leisure days of the week proved to be something of a challenge. Fortunately, we love a challenge, especially when it involves sampling pubs. Here’s our top ten things to do in the City of London, which incidentally also contains some of the most amusing street names.

1. Best pub: The Hoop & Grapes, Aldgate

As well as a decent selection of real ales, the Hoop also has some history; it’s the oldest continuously licenced drinking establishment in the City. It also shares the distinction of being one of only three remaining timber-framed buildings which survived the Great Fire of London. The H&G is not really on the tourist trail, nor is it conveniently situated for the traders who turn so many of the pubs and bars in the Bishopsgate vicinity into seething hell holes. The Spitalfields Life blog goes into more detail about the history. Nearest tube: Aldgate.

Want to see the other nine? Read my full post on Londonist. And don't forget to check out the Top 10 Things To Do In The Borough Of Redbridge and the Top 10 Square Mile Alleyways.

Fare Deal Rally: Ken Campaigns For Cuts

2011-11-23T13:10:00.001Z

Photo by mikekingphoto

Ken Livingstone announced on Monday ahead of today’s Fare Deal Rally his intention to bring back the zone 2-6 travelcard abolished by Boris Johnson.

The former mayor has been stepping up his campaign to be re-elected as mayor of London and transport is high on everyone’s agenda, especially with fare rises predicted for 2012 and the Olympics putting the squeeze on commuters.

Read my full post on Londonist

Londonist Out Loud

2011-11-22T18:37:00.000Z

The Londonist Out Loud podcast produced by N Quentin Woolf went weekly earlier this year and he very kindly invited me back for another interview.

The venue was the Mad Bishop and Bear pub in Paddington station so instead of our musings being punctuated by jumping cats and road drills like last time, we had the dulcet tones of the station announcer. My fellow interviewee was Ruairidh Anderson, East End troubadour, compiler of the Folk Olympics and composer of Londonist Out Loud’s closing theme music.

We talked about lots of London news, including cycling, blue plaques for strippers (or burlesque performers depending on your point of view), London transport projects that never were and Olympic missiles amongst other things.

Off you go and subscribe to Londonist Out Loud via iTunes or RSS. It's got me on it!

Oh yeah, and sorry for that thing I said on it. I didn't mean it really.

Autumn

2011-11-19T18:11:00.001Z

Hope you like

Mark Duggan Investigation Raises New Questions Over Shooting

2011-11-19T15:00:00.001Z

Photo by HoosierSands

An investigation into the shooting of Mark Duggan by police has raised new questions. His death was the catalyst for the riots in August which started in London and spread across the country.

Initial reports, which originated from the Met but were amended by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), suggested that Duggan was shot after firing on a police officer who had stopped the minicab in which he was a passenger, a statement that they had to correct.

Read my full post on Londonist

Update: This article has been edited in light of recent developments. Previous reports from mainstream news sites suggested Mr Duggan was ‘unarmed’ when shot by police. It now appears that there is no evidence for this assertion.

Financial Tax Threatens London, Says Cable

2011-11-17T20:21:00.000Z

Photo by Jon Game

Business secretary Vince Cable has rejected calls for a financial transactions tax in the EU, claiming it would be damaging for London.

The Tobin tax, named after the late US economist James Tobin, originally proposed a tax on currency market transactions. The idea was to curb potentially damaging exchange rate speculation by increasing the cost of those transactions to decrease the volume.

Read my full post on Londonist.

OccupyLSX: Eviction Back On

2011-11-16T13:13:00.000Z

Photo by Spencer Wilton

The Occupy camp at St Paul’s is again facing eviction after talks between the protesters and the City of London Corporation broke down.

The Corporation’s initial offer to allow the camp to remain until the new year, with the provisos that part of the camp was scaled back to improve fire access and that tents would be cleared from Corporation land by 2012, were rejected by OccupyLSX who turned out to have some demands of their own...

Read my full post on Londonist

Take Public Transport, Olympic VIPs Told

2011-11-16T13:09:00.000Z

Photo by firstnameunknown

Sponsors and other VIPs attending the Olympics next year have been told to avoid using the Games Lanes and take the train instead.

The controversial traffic lanes intended to whisk athletes, officials, sponsors and various visiting VIPs to the stadium in super-quick time have caused furore amongst Londoners. Especially those who cycle, drive taxis, use taxis, walk, drive private cars, live in Wapping or er… break down.

Read my full post on Londonist

Ghost Bikes: Memorial, Raising Awareness Or Cycling Deterrent?

2011-11-11T16:23:00.000Z

Photo by mikekingphoto

The recent spate of tragic cyclist deaths in central London have brought ghost bikes to the attention of many road users, but what effect they do they have on would-be cyclists?

For the uninitiated, ghost bikes are white-painted bicycles fixed near the scene of a road accident where a cyclist has been killed or injured. Recently, the death of Min Joo Lee was marked by a ghost bike in Kings Cross and led to an accusation of corporate manslaughter against TfL.

Read the full post on Londonist

May Bans Muslim Anti-Armistice Protest Group

2011-11-10T15:07:00.000Z

Photo by Ruby Tuesday

Home secretary Theresa May has banned Islamist group Muslims Against Crusades (MAC) who planned a repeat of last year’s pretty much universally-condemned poppy-burning stunt.

Read the full post on Londonist.

London Anti-Cuts Demonstration

2011-11-09T22:09:00.001Z

Photo by BethPH

Thanks to working in the City and a spot of convenient managerial absenteeism, I made it down to the anti-cuts protests before dark.

I had planned to walk directly up London Wall and meet the protest march head on but given the fact there were 4000 police in attendance, I wasn't sure this was a great strategy. So after a couple of hours of following Twitter (great), the Metropolitan police website (rubbish) and the Guardian live blog (pretty good) to find out where the protesters were and what was going on, I headed down to the Museum of London roundabout on King Edward Street, St Martin Le Grand, Aldersgate Street and London Wall and waited.

The City was a weird mixture of excitement, anticipation and vague fear. The police had decided to stop the protesters branching off towards Bank and the City proper, presumably because Twitter claimed that some protesters were threatening 'direct action' (read: vandalism) and they wanted to avoid a repeat of last year's debacle.

Waiting at the Museum roundabout, surrounded by riot police and with helicopters hovering overhead, there was a sudden burst of music and the protesters started pouring around the roundabout. I walked up to the junction of London Wall and Moorgate with a large group of protesters. Everyone seemed purposeful yet relaxed, their objective seemed to be to get to London Wall where the march was intended to finish. No-one minded having their photograph taken, even the police.

After about half an hour of people walking up to London Wall, the police set up a kettle between London Wall and Moorgate. I asked why and was told very courteously that they wanted to allow the main body of the protest at London Wall to filter up to Moorgate in a controlled fashion. During this time I heard via Twitter and other protesters that there were disturbances at New Fetter Lane and Trafalgar Square where protesters had earlier tried to pitch tents a la Occupy.

Seeing Moorgate filled with pedestrians was odd - I normally avoid it because the Crossrail works have rended the road awkward and dangerous for pedestrians and the traffic and noise is off-putting. I walked up the middle of a traffic-free Moorgate, exchanged pleasantries with mounted police and watched the young and old protesting against government austerity measures.

After a few walks up and down Moorgate and around the Occupy camp at Finsbury Square, the light was going and I'm a rubbish enough photographer as it is without adding dark into the equation so I decided to call it quits. As I got on the train I saw on Twitter that kettles were in place at Moorgate and the protest had turned violent in places.

Anyway, here's my Flickr photos. Sorry if any photographers amongst you think they're a bit crap. I really need some lessons on using my camera.

Two-Thirds Support Social Media Shutdown

2011-11-09T12:15:00.002Z

Photo by BethPH

First comes the news that the Met have bought technology to allow it to track data from mobile phones within a specified area, now it seems that blocking social media during civil unrest is surprisingly popular. The polled group isn’t huge so one does hope that it’s not too representative of the population as a whole, but seriously, really?

‘A poll of 973 adults carried out for the online security firm Unisys found 70% of adults supported the shutdown of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), while only 27% disagreed.

Three-quarters agreed that governments should have open access to data on social network users in order to prevent co-ordinated crime.’

This is no less than an astonishing and wholly unwelcome return to the climate of fear and paranoia encouraged by the previous Labour government in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7. Remember that tired old adage, ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear’, mainly uttered by people who thought handing up our civil liberties on plate was going to offer them some kind of protection against all kinds of evil. But not only did 70% of people in the Unisys survey support a social media shutdown, 75% believed that government should have open access to data on users in the name of crime prevention.

The problem with this kind of belief is that people apply it only to what they define as criminal acts, in this case the riots in London over the summer, without seeming to understand that ‘civil unrest’ could also be used to define other things. Like protests. In fact, very much like protests. Social media has become a vital part of legitimate protests, not just in terms of logistics, but expressing opinions, sharing information, broadcasting events as they happen and helping people get home. Imagine a country where social media is automatically shut down ahead of protests such as today’s tuition fees demonstration, where mobile phones in the protest area are scanned and users’ private data is picked over by police as they decide whether or not a crime may be committed. Countries such as China, North Korea and Iran are heavily criticised by the UK for doing exactly this (and more) and it’s called oppression and censorship yet somehow when we do it, it’s repackaged as ‘crime prevention’.

Censorship of the internet – because that what it is, let’s not pretend otherwise – is nothing short of insanely draconian. In 2009, David Cameron used his Conservative Party Conference speech to state that he would sweep away the ‘whole rotten edifice of Labour's surveillance state’. After the riots, he told parliament that the government were considering plans to stop the use of social media for criminal activity. Quite how he expected to achieve this wasn’t explained. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, eh Dave?

The worst thing about all this is that so many people seem to have lost the ability to think for themselves, they blindly believe that if they give up their civil liberties and their privacy for some vague promise of reduced crime statistics, that a) it’s a worthwhile exchange, b) it will only apply to other people and c) that if they want the government to change it back again at a later date then they will. Get a grip, people. Knee-jerk reactions do not good policy make.

Bloomsbury To Barbican: Tuition Fees Protest

2011-11-09T09:16:00.000Z

Photo by bobaliciouslondon

Thousands of people are set to march through central London today in protest against tuition fee increases.

The demonstration, organised by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC), is supported by the National Union of Students (NUS) and the University and College Union (UCU), along with a number of trade unions. The route will start on Malet Street near Russell Square at 12 noon and end around 6pm on London Wall in the City, taking in the OccupyLSX protesters at St Paul’s along the way – the Occupy Finsbury Square camp is still in place near the finish point. Some businesses in the Moorgate area have advised staff to finish early due to possible tube station closures.

Read the full post on Londonist

Sweeping Generalisations To Continue

2011-11-04T14:19:00.001Z

Positive discrimination is Not A Good Thing, the Guardian’s Women in Finance article published today as part of their ongoing banking blog reveals. This is kind of non-news in a way because really, who wants to be employed on the basis of their gender rather than their abilities?

It’s a point which seems to be lost on David Cameron as he calls for more women in boardrooms in an attempt to drive down executive pay. This is doubly insulting – firstly that presumably because women are generally paid less than men, directors’ pay would automatically adjust downwards and secondly that women, regardless of any skills or experience they may have, should be employed in order to achieve this. Oh yeah, and apparently, if women had been in charge then we wouldn't have had a financial crisis because due to massive generalisations, women are risk-averse and more careful and just not at all like men.

Unsurprisingly, investors are less concerned about the gender of their board than its ability to see off financial crises but that hasn’t stopped former trade minister Lord Davies from rolling out a ‘target’ of 40% female board members by 2015 – or else. The ‘or else’ is, of course, mandatory quotas. It’s hard to see exactly how these quotas would be enforced; you don’t need a tinfoil hat to be aware that discrimination is rife in recruiting whether it’s tacit or not despite employment legislation designed to prevent it.

Earlier this year, Lord Alan Sugar in his usual sugarless-pill fashion, said that employers should be allowed to ask women during job interviews if they plan to have children. While on one level this makes me cross – would they consider asking the same question of a man? I can also see some sense in it. At the moment, employers simply assume that women will have children then discriminate accordingly and having assumptions made about one is always pretty annoying especially when it’s your career that’s at stake. But where does that end? What if a woman says no, she isn’t planning to procreate but then later changes her mind? Could we see the start of women being sued by their employers for breach of contract? Or lie-detector tests in interviews? That would obviously be insane, but then interviews are beset by people with a fragile grasp of reality.

I remember attending an interview for a Formula One team around 1992, at the time I worked for one team and was looking for a job with a better team. I’d just got married and the interviewer asked me if I was going to be having children. Motor racing is (or was then anyway) very male-dominated and hardly the most progressive of environments to work in but as I’d already been working in it since I left school, I was kind of blasé about blatant sexism, open sexual harassment in the workplace and smutty schoolboy innuendo. When I told people about this interview in later years they were pretty shocked. They were even more shocked when I told them about other interviews as recently as 1999 where an interviewer alternated between staring at my legs and my chest as though he couldn’t decide which was more employable, or another interviewer who told me he wanted a PA with ‘tits and arse to flirt with clients’ (amongst other less-printable things). Or the meeting I had with a male colleague at a well-known consulting firm where the guy we were meeting told me that I was ‘fit as a butcher’s dog’. Er...thanks.You twat.

Anyway, positive discrimination. Introduce mandatory quotas for anything (gender, colour, nationality, chickens, whatever) and all it does is undermine the person involved and leave them open to accusations that they’re not there on merit, it’s because they’re a woman, an Indian, a chicken, whatever (unless the recruiting is for KFC, in which case it would make sense to recruit chickens above, say, fruit bats). Discrimination is discrimination no matter what spin is put on it. Quite why it’s so hard for people to recruit the best person for the job without second-guessing whether or not something might or might not happen in the future remains a mystery, at least to me. I’ve worked pretty hard to get where I am and anyone who wants to tell me I only got there because I’m a woman can fuck right off, frankly.

Now I've said all that, I’m just off to do some washing up.

Mayor Attacks Parking Plans

2011-11-04T11:19:00.000Z

Photo by R4vi

Boris Johnson has criticised plans to introduce evening and weekend parking charges in Westminster.

The council plans to abolish free parking on single yellow lines and parking bays from 9 January 2012 between 6.30pm and midnight Monday to Saturday and 1pm to 6pm on Sundays.

Read the full post on Londonist.

OccupyLSX Wins New Year Reprieve

2011-11-03T11:46:00.001Z

Photo by Julie Ramsden

The Corporation of London have offered to allow the Occupy protest camp to remain at St Paul’s until the New Year.

Just days after threatening legal action to clear the camp, the church and the Corporation appear to have reversed their previous positions following a meeting on Wednesday between the opposing sides.

Read the full post on Londonist

Church And Protesters Once Again On Same Side

2011-11-02T16:11:00.000Z

Photo by BethPH

The church appears to have finally chosen a side in the people vs capitalism debate and called off their impending legal action to remove the protesters from St Paul’s Cathedral as well as calling for a tax (as opposed to a pox) on the banking industry. As increasingly senior members of the clergy started resigning over fears that an eviction of the protesters would lead to a Dale Farm-type scenario with anti-capitalists being tasered on the steps of an iconic religious building, the Corporation of London decided to abandon its court case in favour of actually talking to the protesters.

Now the Archbishop of Canterbury has nailed his colours firmly to the mast in support of what’s being called a ‘Robin Hood’ tax on banks. It’s actually called the Tobin tax after US economist James Tobin but presumably that was too difficult to understand. The idea behind the Tobin tax was to impose a levy on transactions while raising money for developing countries. It’s been proposed before but has never received enough support. So the upshot of all this is that the church and the protesters are once again on the same side against the evil corporates.

Without wanting to go into a boring apologia, the financial industry is a huge and massively complex beast and thanks to a certain amount of dumbing-down and wild reporting over the last three years, an entire industry appears to have been distilled down to one thing: banks. Banks are bad. Banks are stuffed full of people being paid outrageous salaries and six-figure bonuses while taking insane risks with taxpayers’ money and still having time to quaff a magnum of champagne at lunch. Though in light of broker MF Global’s recent demise, it would appear that with all the attention focused on banks, a broking firm can discover an unexplained £700m-shaped hole in their client accounts and get away without Lehman-esque levels of media hysteria.

David Cameron and George Osborne say they support the idea of the Tobin tax, but only if it’s implemented globally, which given the previous lack of commitment from the US and Asian markets could be a long way off. Instead they have the unenviable balancing act of being seen to be tough on any whiff of irresponsibility in the markets while trying to retain London as a major financial capital.

60 Seconds Saved On M4

2011-11-02T12:17:00.001Z

Photo by thechilliking

Scrapping the controversial M4 bus lane has saved 60 seconds on a journey into London according to interim figures from the Highways Agency.

Read the full post on Londonist.

Preview: Regent Street Motor Show

2011-11-01T11:55:00.000Z

Photo from Veteran Car Run Gallery

On Saturday 5 November, central London will play host to over 300 iconic cars spanning the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries for the Regent Street Motor Show. Regent Street will be closed to other traffic, and you can watch for free.

The inaugural event, in conjunction with The Royal Automobile Club, will feature 50 Jaguar E-Types and 50 Mini Coopers, both of whom are celebrating their 50th anniversaries, 100 pre-1905 vehicles participating in the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run on Sunday 6 November and 80 cars from that day’s Brighton to London RAC Future Car Challenge. A variety of other presentations, displays and competitions will round out the show into a must for any vintage-loving petrolhead. Ben Cussons, Chairman of the Royal Automobile Club Motoring Committee said:

‘We are delighted to extend our relationship with the Regent Street Association to present the Regent Street Motor Show, which promises to deliver a truly remarkable spectacle of pioneering motoring through the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.’

Regent Street will be closed to traffic between Piccadilly Circus and Conduit Street for the event. The Regent Street Motor Show is free to enter and opens from 10.30am to 4pm with a formal opening at 11am. Visit the website for further information.

Squatting Protest Ends In Arrests

2011-11-01T09:29:00.002Z

Photo from OffMarket

Londonist

A Parliament Square demonstration over plans to criminalise squatting ended in clashes with police and at least 12 arrests early this morning.

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill will be debated in the House of Commons later today with plans to make squatting a criminal offence in a bid to help homeowners defend their property. The Parliament Square scuffles broke out around midnight last night when police attempted to move on 150 protesters, who in common with their protesting objective, declined to leave.

The plans have been criticised as unjust and a harbinger of a wider move to ‘retrofit’ the bill to criminalise occupation-based protests such as UK Uncut’s occupation of Fortnum & Mason during the summer’s wide-spread protests against government austerity measures. The car-crash epic of the Occupy London protest with its resulting impact on the church, not to mention their likely upcoming eviction by police under the eyes of the world’s media, will only add ammunition to the government’s desire to prevent occupation-based protests in one way or another.

Justice secretary Ken Clarke’s home was targeted in September by a group of protesters campaigning against the criminalisation of squatting, while film director Guy Ritchie and the son of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi both found their home squatted. But as the Evening Standard has recently highlighted, for every community-serving squatting group, there can be a darker side.

With apparently thousands of empty properties being hoarded by councils across London set against rising homelessness in the wake of welfare cuts, is criminalising the dispossessed really the answer?

Christian Activists Plan Support Over Occupy Eviction

2011-10-30T09:39:00.000Z

Photo by virtualbiscuit

Londonist

Christian groups plan to come out in support of the Occupy protesters at St Paul’s with a ring of prayer around the protesters in the event they are forcibly removed.

The protest has become increasingly fraught, mostly on the church’s side, as the Cathedral was closed then reopened and legal steps to remove the protesters started last week. The church’s astonishingly poor handling of the affair was underlined by the resignation of canon Giles Fraser. Cathedral chaplain the Reverend Fraser Dyer has also stepped down in protest at the decisions made by the Dean.

Some groups have also accused the church of being guided by fiscal concerns rather than spiritual ones while another embarrassing revelation today highlighted the suppression of a report by the St Paul’s Institute which criticises bankers’ morals.

The Bishop of London and the Dean of St Paul’s will meet Occupy protesters on Sunday morning where it’s expected they will request again that the protesters leave. They now have the backing of Boris Johnson, who has added his voice to the church’s calls for Occupy to retreat.

The Occupy protesters could hardly have asked for better publicity for their protest. Attempts to discredit their staying power by thermal imaging have been rubbished and made the subject of a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), Liberty have offered to mediate between the opposing sides, Banksy popped down to donate some art (apparently now ‘vandalised’), senior church officials have effectively sided with them and a ring of praying Christian activists protecting them as the bailiffs wade in is pretty much guaranteed headline news. Not bad going for a protest with no real questions, let alone answers.

Occupy’s sense of humour appears undiminished though – a zombie bank run is planned for Monday 31st October.

Occupy St Paul’s Banksy: In Pictures

2011-10-26T15:59:00.002+01:00

All photos by BethPH

The famously reticent artist Banksy presented a topical sculpture to the Occupy group at St Paul’s this week.

In the form of a Monopoly board, it namechecks worldwide locations hosting Occupy protests as well as wall-scrawl compatriot and recently-convicted Tox.

Our pictures were taken during a particularly rainy visit, hence the occasional droplet on the surface. Click here to see the rest.

Bishop Begs Occupy Begone, Banksy Brings Art

2011-10-26T11:57:00.000+01:00

Photo by abhisek0902

Londonist

The Bishop of London has added his voice to the growing requests for the Occupy protest camp to vacate St Paul’s.

The debate around the camp’s purpose seems to have shifted over the last few days as focus has moved to the impact of the protest on surrounding businesses and the Cathedral itself. On Monday night, in an apparent attempt to demonstrate that Occupy tents were unoccupied while their owners were presumably snuggled up in hypocritically-soft capitalist beds, the Telegraph visited the camp armed with thermal imaging cameras. Claims have also been made in the media that evidence pointing to a 10% occupancy rate was gathered by a police helicopter with thermal imaging equipment, a claim refuted by City of London police. The allegation was also hotly denied by Occupy who say their signing-in process is designed to prevent low occupancy.

Not everyone is unappreciative of Occupy’s efforts though – street artist Banksy is claimed to have presented the camp with a sculpture in recognition of their protest.

The latest plea from ecclesiastical quarters comes from the Right Reverend Richard Chartres after similar requests from the Dean and Chancellor of St Paul’s failed; presumably the clergy will have to turn to a higher power for intervention.

Occupy Branches Out To Finsbury Square

2011-10-24T15:10:00.000+01:00

Photo by BethPH

Londonist

The Occupy London protesters have created a satellite camp at Finsbury Square in a bid to reduce numbers at the crowded St Paul’s site.

A group bearing placards marched to the new site on Saturday evening where around 30 tents had previously been pitched. Occupy have issued their own open letter in response to that of the Dean of St Paul’s disputing the claims of health and safety risks but it may not be enough. The Cathedral and other businesses in the vicinity are considering an injunction to move the protesters on, saying their presence is costing £20,000 per day in lost visitor revenue.

UK Uncut have also joined the Occupy protest and at 12.00 today the group marched upon the offices of HMRC to demand the resignation of HMRC head Dave Hartnett. Hartnett struck a controversial deal with Vodafone and Goldman Sachs over reduced tax bills.

Like the St Paul’s camp, the Finsbury Square site is pretty well organised, with signposted recycling points, a Tent City University yurt and a central point for newcomers to report to while on Sunday evening a band entertained the occupants. We visited today and were told that they were in the process of a reorganisation to allow for more tents to be pitched.

When we asked if more protesters were expected, Allan MacDonald of Occupy said ‘there’s a definite sense of things growing,’ though they were unable to say at this point if further green spaces in and around the City may be occupied. If an injunction on the St Paul’s camp is successful, City tent cities could become an everyday scene.

For an inside report on the St Paul’s camp, listen to this week’s Londonist Out Loud, which carries interviews with some of the protesters.

1500 LU Jobs Could Be Axed According To Leaked Document

2011-10-24T10:13:00.000+01:00

Photo by TurnipFarmer

Londonist

London Underground has discussed initiatives that would cut over 1500 jobs and close many ticket offices in a drive to further reduce costs, according to a confidential strategy report leaked by the RMT.

The document, which was leaked to the BBC, claims that new technology could deliver a better service but require 15% fewer staff, making all but a handful of ticket offices redundant. Despite being described as a discussion paper intended to examine the tube over the next decade rather than an actual proposal for immediate cuts, the RMT has condemned the document as a ‘blueprint for jobs and safety carnage’. Only last week, the RMT balloted staff for action over safety concerns and we all remember the strikes occasioned by the previous closure of ticket offices. RMT general secretary Bob Crow said:

‘Every single ticket office would be closed, stations left un-staffed and drivers would be thrown out of their cabs without a single thought for passenger safety. This ill-conceived and finance-led document ignores reality in favour of austerity and would impact on every single staff member. It would leave passengers stranded in tunnels with no means of evacuation and would turn the platforms and stations into a muggers and vandals paradise.’

Crow is obviously no stranger to hyperbole – re-arrange the words in the quote above and you’ll get an approximation of his response to pretty much any whisper of change in the transport system. But change the Tube must, according to LU’s managing director, Mike Brown:

‘New technologies, innovations in maintenance and the changing ways in which passengers use our services mean that London Underground must look ahead. In particular, we need to examine how new technologies can further improve efficiency and how we can respond to the changing needs of our customers.
We remain committed to our established policy of maintaining fully-staffed stations at all times and deploying staff where customers want them – at gate lines, on platforms and in other public-facing areas. As we have said before, the success of Oyster has fundamentally changed the way in which passengers use ticket offices, for example.’

With the transport unions’ finger permanently on the big red strike button yet a deal in place over a no-strike Olympics, could Londoners see walkouts before the end of the year?

Episode The Second: Beaulieu Motor Museum

2011-10-22T18:02:00.002+01:00

Photo by BethPH

I was having second thoughts about posting these pictures, partly due to my incompetence as a photographer and partly as a result of a session cropping the living shit out of the pictures to make them look all arty and hide irritating people standing just in shot, they haven't come out all that well.

But then I decided I didn't care.

So here they are. I've provided a link rather than posting a slideshow this time because they don't look their best in slideshow format.

Enjoy!

St Paul’s Closed, Occupy Camp To Remain

2011-10-22T17:40:00.000+01:00

Photo by Anatoleya

Londonist

The OccupyLSX protest camp celebrates its first week today with a variety of activities. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for St Paul’s Cathedral which was forced to close last week over safety fears.

Although events have remained peaceful, the Dean of St Paul’s has asked for the protesters to withdraw and allow them to continue normal service, citing fire, health and safety issues. Occupy disagree, expressing in a statement on their website that they had done everything they could to accommodate the Cathedral and reiterating their intent to stay put.

Today’s anniversary celebration included an invitation to come and meet the people involved with the protest (an offer already taken up by the Guardian who sent a reporter down to spend the night and exchange witticisms with passersby), a public assembly with updates from Occupiers around the globe, a roundtable discussion on the economic state of the nation and an address by writer and activist Nawal el Saadawi from Tahrir Square. It will not involve donations to St Paul’s though, according to this somewhat nose-thumbing statement from Occupy:

We also understand that some individuals were in the process of arranging for a contribution to be made to St Paul’s in recognition of their hospitality. It is a shame the Cathedral authorities have decided to take this action before those preparations came to fruition, as we expected them to in the next 12 hours.

Boris Johnson and David Cameron have also been issued with an open invitation, though we suspect the protesters may have a long wait. Though taking into account the notoriously enduring peace camp at Parliament Square and the Occupy protesters’ determination to remain indefinitely, time could be on their side.

Met Delivers Crushing Blow To Uninsured Drivers

2011-10-20T11:50:00.000+01:00

Londonist

Over 500 cars were seized by the Metropolitan Police yesterday in an operation targeting uninsured drivers.

Operation Reclaim used 1,000 police officers and Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras to identify cars being driven without insurance. The Met believes that driving uninsured is more likely to be indicative of involvement in other crimes, a belief which netted them 66 arrests for a variety of offences including possession of a knives and drugs, and driving while disqualified.

Uninsured vehicles are impounded and if the driver can’t produce an insurance certificate and a valid driving licence during that time, the car is crushed. The driver is also issued with a £200 Fixed Penalty Notice (FPN). A display of previously crushed and seized vehicles was on display at Horse Guards yesterday. Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe said:

‘Driving without insurance is an offence and this operation will seize the cars of those who ignore the law, while reclaiming the roads for London’s responsible and law abiding drivers.’

The rising cost of car insurance has also been cited as one of the reasons for the greater number of uninsured drivers – the Office of Fair Trading has recently launched an investigation to find out if motorists are getting a fair deal.

See the Met’s very own Flickr pool showing pictures of the operation.

Why Driving Used To Be All Fields

2011-10-18T16:34:00.002+01:00

London General Omnibus Company 1910 - 1920

Why are we driving less? This article in the Guardian a few weeks ago got me thinking and despite regularly lamenting the decline in other people’s driving abilities (mine, of course, are flawless) I hadn’t stopped to wonder if less people were driving or why.

In fact, if anyone had asked me, I’d have said there were more people on the roads, not fewer. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post for Londonist which reported on the Transport Committee’s plans for tackling road congestion. Despite being an official document it actually makes fairly interesting reading, not least because it suggests that bad driving could be a problem rather than concentrating on environmental tub-thumping. Here’s the relevant paragraph:

The overwhelming view from the evidence we received was that aspects of poor road user behaviour lead to increased congestion. Assistant Chief Constable Nick Croft cited road rage, ‘undertaking’ and bad lane discipline as all making incidents and accidents more likely to happen, thereby adversely affecting the general flow of traffic and Nich Brown, of the Motorcycle Action Group gave the example of when vehicle users are told that a two-lane road will narrow into one lane 800m ahead, and everyone attempts to get into the open lane at once, instead of filtering alternatively and keeping the traffic flowing. The Minister, Mike Penning MP, said he was concerned about how to ensure that drivers were taught not just to pass a driving test, but to drive responsibly.

So, driving standards have gone down. But why? There are a couple of reasons why this could be.

Firstly, the introduction of speed cameras and the subsequent push by successive governments to get us to reduce our speed using a combination of carrot (it’s better for the environment, it makes driving cheaper, it’s safer etc) and stick (reduce your speed or get a whacking great fine and penalty points).This is mainly because speed is a very easy thing to enforce – 31mph in a 30 zone is breaking the law – so it’s not subject to the er… subjectivity of what the definition of bad driving actually is.

Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in a concentration on speed rather than bad driving and exceeding the speed limit now appears to be synonymous with unsafe driving. Don’t get me wrong, inappropriate use of speed and/or driving too fast for the conditions is idiotic and deserving of punishment. But a driver doing 46mph in a 40 zone is more likely to get a fine and penalty points than a driver who pulls out of a side turn onto a busy road without looking.

Basically, the message is that it doesn’t matter how badly you drive as long as you do it under the speed limit. There’s no expectation that drivers need to be good drivers – and by this I mean showing courtesy and consideration towards other roads users, using observation effectively, driving according to the conditions, understanding yours and your car’s limitations and all those other things that make people good drivers. Sure, you can probably factor in a whole load of other things like stupidity, selfishness or the pace of life or whatever, but it comes down to the perception that few people take any pride in good driving any more and that’s partly because really terrible drivers can carry on being really terrible largely undetected. Who cares if drivers sit in the middle lane of the motorway at 65mph when they’re not overtaking? Who cares if a driver goes all the way round the roundabout in the left lane to turn right without indicating? Who cares if only about 11 people in the UK understand the concept of ‘merge in turn’ rather than adopting a queue mentality and going batshit if another driver has the cheek to merge in front of them? Who cares if a driver does 40mph on an NSL road and tries to block anyone overtaking them?

Secondly, cars themselves don’t exactly encourage drivers to take responsibility or possess any skill. Despite popular belief, ABS doesn’t eliminate the requirement for safe braking distances. Satnav doesn’t mean you no longer need to look at road signs of any description. Traction control doesn’t mean you can launch your motor enthusiastically at the nearest corner and expect to come out unscathed. Airbags and impact protection don’t mean it doesn’t matter if you crash. They’re driver aids, not driver replacements. The current driving test, as pointed out in the Transport Committee report, only teaches people to pass a test, not to drive responsibly, build their driving skills over time or maintain good driving habits.

What else? Well, the skyrocketing cost of insurance has priced many young drivers off the road. When I insured my first car third party fire and theft in 1991, it cost £350 which was pricey at the time but not unaffordable. Now a new driver would be paying many times that amount. Fuel costs have also shot up dramatically. According to petrolprices.com:

Between 1993 and 1999 there was a rapid increase with duties on fuel increasing by 3% above inflation. This was due to a major change in petrol taxation in 1993 when the Conservatives introduced the Fuel Price ‘escalator’. This was a way of the government making money and also to help protect the environment by discouraging people from using their cars.

This fuel escalator forced prices up from one of the lowest in Europe to now one of the most expensive. When it was first added, fuel prices rose by 3 pence a litre and tax contributed to 72.8% of the total cost. By 1997 the escalator had added 11.1p to the cost of unleaded petrol and was at 75%. It didn’t get any better when the Conservatives left office and Gordon Brown took over, as the escalator increased and 3 pence was added per litre. This took tax up to an incredible 81.5% of the total price of fuel.

The first paragraph contains a key point – ‘protect the environment by discouraging people from using their cars’. This has effectively paved the way for dubious attempts at eco-taxation by encouraging the belief that motorists bear more responsibility for the environment than anyone else (the phrase ‘gas-guzzler’ makes me want to punch someone). Motorists are demonised to the point where simply owning a car let alone driving it can be viewed as almost morally wrong. Drivers feel pressured into justifying their car ownership in terms of practicality or cost-effectiveness while trying to point out the shortcomings of public transport, especially outside cities and liking cars, enjoying driving is seen as an aberration. Someone once said to me by way of an insult, ‘I bet you like Jeremy Clarkson, don’t you,’ as though somehow that encapsulated everything negative about motoring.

Having said that, driving has become a pretty miserable experience. Deliberate attempts to impede traffic flow and force people off the roads have led to increased congestion which leads to more pollution. Abysmal and/or thoughtless road planning makes motoring a trial and cycling or walking dangerous.

Many people cite the fact they live in London (or some other major town/city) as a reason why they don’t own a car. Well, great! Large towns and cities generally have very good public transport systems and there’s always Streetcar, Zipcar et al if you need a car for a trip out of town or something. But there’s kind of two flipsides to this, firstly that not needing to own a car for whatever reason doesn’t automatically make one a better person and secondly that one can’t assume everyone’s circumstances are the same. So are less people driving because urban populations have increased, perhaps because of employment opportunities versus cuts to transport services or other economic factors? I don’t know, ask an economist. Or Jeremy Clarkson.

I just think that a number of factors mentioned above have removed any pleasure from driving, made it too expensive to be a pastime as well as a mode of transport and reduced people’s ability to drive well and safely. Because hardly anyone cares about driving any more. Even the BBC’s coverage of top-level motorsport has been decimated with the shifting of half the Formula 1 season to Sky Sports based on so-called limited appeal to a mass audience, not to mention the annual rumblings about F1 being polluting and elitist.

Flying cars, that’s the answer. Or those pod things that were in Minority Report.

Commuters Face More Delays

2011-10-18T09:46:00.002+01:00

It’s not a great morning for London’s commuters again, the Metropolitan and Piccadilly lines were both suffering severe delays, the Bakerloo line is part-suspended and overhead services into Liverpool Street are disrupted.

Last Tuesday, two broken-down trains and the numerous resulting passenger alarms stopped Central line passengers getting to work on time while Friday on the Piccadilly and Victoria lines was no better; described by Bob Crow in his usual doom-laden manner as ‘black Friday’. Labour have also highlighted increasing delays for passengers, criticised Boris Johnson’s handling of transport problems and the lack of tube performance data.

With all this going on, we thought it might be a good time to remind fellow travellers how to claim refunds on delayed tube journeys.

As always, check TfL’s status updates on their website.

Occupy Protest Enters Third Day

2011-10-17T13:05:00.000+01:00

Photo by Sven Loach

Londonist

The OccupyLSX protests at St Paul’s have spilled over into the working week with anti-capitalist campaigners coming face-to-face with the City’s more usual occupants.

Some protesters appear to be in for the long haul and the Canon of St Paul’s told the BBC he was quite happy for them to stay. Occupy currently remains peaceful, albeit with the odd heated debate (thanks to Paraic O’Brien for the video though we’re not quite sure why it’s upside down), unlike 2005′s invasion by Greenpeace at the International Petroleum Exchange.

Spurious stat of the day – more people like Facebook’s ‘Banking’ page than they like the ‘Protesting’ page though the ‘Occupy London’ page beats them both hands down.

See our photo gallery from Sunday at OccupyLSX.

Brent Library Campaigners Promise Vigils

2011-10-16T19:47:00.001+01:00

Photo by MegMoggington

Londonist

Campaigners from Brent Save Our Six Libraries are planning daily vigils outside Kensal Rise Library to stop Brent Council boarding it up after a High Court appeal to prevent closures failed.

Kensal Rise is one of six libraries in the borough which the council aimed to close as part of a cost-cutting exercise. Local residents have fought the action all the way, describing it as ‘unfair’. Campaigners went to the High Court in a bid to force the council to reverse its decision but were unsuccessful. Brent council weren’t slow to act on last Thursday’s ruling either; within hours the libraries were locked up and residents’ pleas to be allowed to run the libraries on a voluntary basis were rebuffed.

The campaign has attracted a few famous faces – Zadie Smith, Philip Pullman and Alan Bennett have all pitched in, while Phil Jupitus of Never Mind The Buzzcocks fame will be appearing at a fundraising comedy event on Monday 17 October.

For videos and live updates from the front line, visit the Save Kensal Rise Library blog or follow on Facebook. Even better, get yourself a banner and head over to Kensal Rise.

Olympics Organisers Have Branded Streakers Covered

2011-10-15T11:11:00.000+01:00

Photo by firstnameunknown

Londonist

Streakers bearing advertising slogans could find themselves fined up to £20,000 in the increasingly bizarre campaign to clamp down on Olympic ambush marketing.

We’ve had the re-names, the bagsying of ’2012′ and the re-imagining of the European Convention on Human Rights but now advertisers will have to find a new outlet for their naked ambition. The organisers’ determination to ensure that no corporate giant could risk losing revenue to a company resorting to daubing a logo on a naked person is impressively comprehensive.

Unbranded streaking is apparently not covered by the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006.

Jubilee Line Upgrade £435m Over Budget

2011-10-13T11:10:00.000+01:00

Photo by Anthony Dahl Wheeler

Londonist

The final costof the Jubilee line upgrades came in at £721m – more than 2.5 times the original estimate of £285.3m, it has been revealed.

The work was planned under the now-defunct Public Private Partnership (PPP) which was brought back under the TfL umbrella last year. It’s unusual to see a colossal overspend being held up as a good example but in this case, TfL are using it to demonstrate what a massive waste of money the PPP actually was.

TfL are no strangers to the budget over-run – the recent news that the cable car costs have risen to £60m was mitigated slightly by the fact that Emirates sponsorship for the project will partially plug the funding gap, though it will still leave a £24m-shaped hole to be filled by raiding the train budget.

It does seem like the Jubilee line upgrades have been going on since the dawn of time and Boris Johnson has come under fire for ‘broken promises’ over the elastic deadlines for the end of weekend closures. Lest we forget, the work which has been done consists of upgrading the signalling system so frequency of trains could be increased, adding an extra carriage and track work to allow faster journeys.

Anti-Corporate Protest Coming To London

2011-10-12T10:43:00.000+01:00

Photo by Sven Loach

Londonist

Occupy London Stock Exchange (OccupyLSX) plans to follow in the footsteps of the recent Occupy Wall Street protests in New York with a peaceful protest this weekend in the heart of London’s finance district.

A number of campaign groups, including UK Uncut, will highlight what they believe is the ‘social and economic injustice in the UK’ caused by the financial industry and the government’s subsequent austerity measures. Their ire will no doubt be further fuelled by news that investment bank Goldman Sachs has been forgiven £10m tax by HM Revenue & Customs after a failed tax avoidance scheme.

UK Uncut, fresh from Monday’s ‘Block the Bridge’ protest against NHS reforms, said on its website:

‘By reclaiming space in the face of the economic systems that have caused terrible injustices across the world, we can open up and engage our communities into public discussions. Join us at the London Stock Exchange to reclaim space and take part in workshops on topics ranging from Debt and The Spanish Indignants Movement to Fuel Poverty and Climate Justice. Contribute in the Open Assemblies and chant songs of solidarity with Samba bands.’

An OccupyLSX Facebook page currently has over 10,000 followers, with more than 3,500 confirmed attendees for Saturday’s protest. Given the paucity of pretty much anything open in this part of the City at the weekend, we hope they’ll take a packed lunch.

Police at the New York protests came in for criticism after a group of kettled female campaigners were subjected to an allegedly unprovoked pepper spraying. The video made global news – perhaps something of a cautionary tale for the Met as they dust off their riot shields in preparation.

Episode The First: Corfe Castle, Dorset

2011-10-11T22:24:00.002+01:00

I went to Dorset at the weekend. It's the first time I've been there so I did the whole tourist thing. Corfe Castle is a place I've read about a lot as I'm pretty interested in history and it was just a few miles down the road so it would have been rude not to visit. Here's a potted history:

Disclaimer: this is a brief round-up so history pedants should look away now.

Construction on the castle started in the 11th century, though according to legend, Edward the Martyr was assassinated here in 978 by his stepmother who wanted to put her stepson, Ethelred the Unready, on the throne. It seems to have been a belt-and-braces job as the narrative panels at Corfe suggested she handed him a goblet of poisoned wine before stabbing him in the back.

William the Conqueror supposedly built Corfe soon after his victory in 1066 which began its long career as a royal stronghold. Just looking at its position in a gap in the Purbeck hills makes its defensive qualities pretty obvious - the views are astonishing.

It also made a pretty good prison; In 1210 King John (who was not a good man, he had his little ways, and sometimes no-one spoke to him for days and days and days) incarcerated Maude de Braose and her young son after a falling out and starved them both to death.

By the 16th century it was more of a royal residence than a fortress and in 1572 Elizabeth I sold it to none other than Sir Christopher Hatton. In 1635 it was sold again to Sir John Bankes, whose widow found herself in the unfortunate position of defending the castle against the Parliamentarians in the Civil War. It fell, and was subsequently demolished, the stone being carted away to use in building the adjoining village which is why it looks the way it does now.

Today, it belongs to the National Trust, having been bequeathed by a descendent of John Bankes in the 1980s.

In summary, it's an interesting place to visit if you have even an iota of historial interest and there's some pretty awesome views.

Boris Rules Out MP Bid If Re-Elected

2011-10-05T14:38:00.000+01:00

Photo by sinister pictures

Londonist

Boris Johnson has ruled out any possibility of standing for election as an MP – if he’s re-elected as London’s mayor in 2012.

The blond one has frequently been tipped as a potential Tory leader or even a challenger to David Cameron’s title of PM, but his appointment as mayor of London seemed to put paid to that. At least it did until Ken Livingstone emerged as a strong mayoral candidate. Boris’s pledge to put London before any parliamentary ambitions could be viewed as a demonstration of his commitment to the mayoral race but the flip side could be interpreted as an early warning in the event he loses out to Ken.

Boris has often clashed with the PM over his excursions from the Tory line; as recently as this week’s party conference he appeared to support a referendum on Europe – just hours after Cameron had ruled it out. He has since said that his comments on the matter were purely hypothetical. The mayor also used his speech at the conference to advise against transport cuts for political gain.

Fellow mayoral candidate Brian Paddick remained unimpressed:

‘Boris Johnson’s speech was full of waffle because he’s done so little for London as mayor.’

Ouch.

Delays To Hit London’s Roads In 2012

2011-10-03T12:07:00.001+01:00

Photo by thechilliking

Londonist

With an extra 5m visitors expected in London next year, it won’t come as that much of a surprise that journey times by road will increase. TfL have warned that they could more than double.

In August, TfL set out their plans for how they plan to cope with what will be an undeniably heavy demand on the transport system. Road users will also see the network reduced thanks to the Games Lanes but TfL say they are confident they can keep things moving:

‘We have been clear that at certain times and places the transport network will be much busier than usual, which is why we are already working with businesses to ensure they can keep on running and make the most of the great financial opportunities offered by the Games.’

There’s been a fair bit of doom and gloom in the media over the Olympics and transport but will it be quite the kind of transport apocalypse scenario we’re all bracing ourselves for? It’s certainly true that in a kind of butterfly/tsunami effect, one minor delay can lead to big problems; the 1200 unplanned closures of the Blackwall Tunnel caused by breakdowns and motorists running out of fuel last year cost more than 13 days of severe traffic congestion. But all these people should be using public transport, right? Well, the 20% (or 6.5m hours) of delays on the tube don’t exactly make appealing reading either. The Transport Minister urged us all to work from home though we haven’t quite plucked up the courage to ask our managers if we can do so for the whole Olympic period.

The cycling test event in August revealed some flaws in planning, with stewards saying they hadn’t been provided with maps or information about which roads were closed, leading to severe delays. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that someone in TfL kept some notes for future reference.

Thamesis: Landscapes From An Imagined City @ Shoreditch Town Hall

2011-10-01T13:37:00.001+01:00

The Red City by Ashram J Pure

At first glance, Thamesis: Landscapes From An Imagined City, looked like an art exhibition but actually delivered a great deal more. Digital artist Ashram J Pure has taken images of London’s well-known buildings and twisted them together to create a new London which is by turns futuristic and nightmarish.

Sirius Wharf uses skyscrapers manipulated to mimic the sterile corporate regularity of Canary Wharf while The Ward Without and The Black City are the darker side of London; an absorbing tangle of alleyways, bridges and statuary.

The exhibition marks the launch of The Lion and the Unicorn, a trans-media graphic novel set in the alternate reality of Thamesis, capital city of the Kingdom of Albion. Conceived by Ash Pure in 1996, the story has appeared in a variety of guises – from Albion rising; a hand-made poster and mini comic sold in Magma book shop, Clerkenwell to 2007’s Thamesis digi-comic series.

As if art and a book launch weren’t quite enough to be getting on with in the same event, we were offered a mysterious ‘screening’ which took an unexpected turn for the interactive. Shuffled through damp, strobe-lit corridors, we were jostled by members of the Wet Wipez group who put on an extraordinary performance of dance mingled with forays into the audience. Another shuffle down a corridor lined with stuffed crows found us in a claustrophobic cellar while Salwa Azar sang a beautifully haunting and vaguely unreal folk song to an audience so mesmerised that they forgot to look at their iPhones.

Visit Thamesis in the Basement Gallery at Shoreditch Town Hall until Sunday night and get a sense of the underworld. The Lion and the Unicorn website is also pretty diverting.

Ambush Marketers: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

2011-09-29T15:31:00.000+01:00

Photo by Greything

Londonist

Government proposals could lead to anyone suspected of ambush marketing during the Olympics presumed guilty until proven innocent.

Ambush marketing involves advertisers associating themselves with an event without paying sponsorship fees. During the Winter Olympics, Scotiabank fell foul of official sponsors (and business rival) Royal Bank of Canada over an ad which appeared to contravene the organisers rules on marketing. Last year’s World Cup saw the the ejection of 36 identically-attired women staging a marketing ambush for Dutch brewery Bavaria.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is proposing a ‘temporary suspension’ of the European Convention on Human Rights which presumes innocence until proven guilty. Reversal of this could leave anyone suspected of ambush marketing or unathorised trading near the Olympic Park open to legal action. Local traders have already been targeted by organisers LOCOG over alleged copyright infringements and even businesses using the year 2012 in their campaigns have come under scrutiny.

You’d think that suspending established human rights principles even temporarily in favour of profit-making might not be that great an idea, but watering down human rights laws are near the top of David Cameron’s hit list and it appears the government are finding ever-inventive ways to create precedents.

Talking Bins Tackle Littering

2011-09-26T13:47:00.001+01:00

Photo by gritty-but-pretty

Londonist

Disposing of rubbish responsibly could net us a celebrity thank-you from October. 25 talking bins are to be installed in central London as part of the Bin Thinking project from Keep Britain Tidy and arts organisation Sing London.

A variety of slebs have lent their voices to the campaign, including Michael Palin who will amend his famous Monty Python catchphrase to ‘Nobody expects the Spanish binquisition’. Litter is one of London’s least-attractive features and also cropped up in our recent London Annoyances Top 10. The campaign’s organisers hope that the talking bins will encourage us to keep our streets cleaner.

The responses will vary according to the location of the bin – Covent Garden’s will sing opera to the disposee – but what songs would we like to see for specific areas?

Climate Rush Protest Marks Car Free Day

2011-09-22T16:50:00.000+01:00

Photo by Joe Dunckley

Londonist

Environmental campaign group Climate Rush marked World Carfree Day by protesting outside TfL’s offices.

Blackfriars Bridge – itself the scene of protests against the removal of the 20mph speed limit – was the starting point for the convoy of cyclists. The group’s agenda was a car-free London, an overhaul of TfL’s transport policies to prioritise people over vehicles and a 20mph speed limit. TfL’s managing director of surface transport, Leon Daniels, was quick to point out their part in improving things for all road users:

‘TfL has invested millions in improving London’s streets for all road users, especially cyclists over the last decade and will continue to do so. We are only directly responsible for five per cent of the capital’s road network (the red routes), which are primarily the main arterial roads into and out of London, so the vast majority of roads and cycle lanes in London are maintained by the boroughs, who we are working with to improve provision for cyclists through TfL local implementation funding and the Mayor’s Biking Boroughs scheme.’

Climate Rush were also the instigators of a flashmob roadblock protest in July at the Euston Road.

TfL recently urged operators of commercial vehicles to take action to reduce emissions in line with upcoming changes to Low Emission Zone (LEZ) standards.

Met Drop Guardian Court Case Over Sources

2011-09-20T22:02:00.000+01:00

Photo by Che-burashka

Londonist

The Met have abandoned their legal bid to force the Guardian to reveal its sources over the phone hacking scandal.

Scotland Yard claimed that the newspaper could have been in breach of the Official Secrets Act by publishing the Milly Dowler phone hacking story – a story which they believe may jeopardise ongoing investigations. They subsequently demanded that the Guardian disclose their sources, an action which didn’t meet with a great deal of approval in the media with even the Daily Mail springing to the defence of their arch enemy. After a meeting with the Crown Prosecution Service, the police elected not to pursue legal action. A statement from Scotland Yard said:

‘Despite recent media reports there was no intention to target journalists or disregard journalists’ obligations to protect their sources.’

Which is a tad disingenuous when you consider that the Met cannot have been unaware that their success in this case would have set a rather convenient precedent and did, in fact, target journalists and their protection of sources.

News International are reported to have offered a £3m settlement to Milly Dowler’s family which includes a £1m charity donation.

Met Probes Guardian Over Sources

2011-09-17T13:19:00.000+01:00

Photo by yorkshire stacked

Londonist

The Guardian has found itself the latest unwilling participant in the ever-increasing circle of the phone hacking scandal. The Metropolitan Police are attempting to use the Official Secrets Act to force the newspaper to disclose its’ sources.

Lest we forget, the Guardian broke the phone hacking story back in July which led to the demise of the News of the World. It also led to widespread criticism of the police’s failure to investigate the latter’s hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone after she went missing. Scotland Yard believe that the Official Secrets Act was breached by the Guardian’s story and are now demanding information on their sources.

It’s not the first time that police have tried to use the Official Secrets Act against journalists but all previous cases have failed or been dropped. Should this one succeed, a vital tenet of investigative journalism will have been breached. The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) have spoken out against what has been described as an ‘outrageous abuse’:

‘The protection of sources is an essential principle which has been repeatedly reaffirmed by the European court of human rights as the cornerstone of press freedom. The NUJ shall defend it. In 2007 a judge made it clear that journalists and their sources are protected under article 10 of the Human Rights Act and it applies to leaked material. The use of the Official Secrets Act is a disgraceful attempt to get round this existing judgment.’

The Guardian’s phone hacking scandal stories certainly left the police looking less than shining beacons of competence and openness – senior officers tried to dissuade the Guardian from running the story while failing to mention the rather pertinent fact that they had hired former NOTW deputy editor Neil Wallis as an advisor. The resignation of Sir Paul Stephenson and assistant commissioner John Yates over the scandal left Boris Johnson facing some tough questions from the London Assembly.

For those of us who until now were unfamiliar with the Official Secrets Act, the section which the Met are attempting to employ in this unprecedented and unwelcome fashion indicates that individuals can be prosecuted for passing on information which could damage an investigation.

The Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger said in response, ‘We shall resist this extraordinary demand to the utmost.’

Transport Committee Drives Forward Congestion Plans

2011-09-15T11:35:00.000+01:00

Photo by gary8345

The Transport Committee has published its report on tackling road congestion, aptly named Out of the Jam.

Congestion is apparently costing us up to £24bn per year in missed appointments and late deliveries, not to mention the teeth-grinding annoyance of being stuck in a traffic jam. Normally by this point, the words ‘road pricing’ or ‘new road building’ would have been used but this time it appears the government wants to work with what it has rather than reinvent the wheel; the report states:

One option for reducing road congestion—road pricing—has been ruled out by the government. Extensive investment on new roads is also unlikely given the current economic climate.

We were about to emit a cautious ‘hurrah’ until we saw that reinstatement of the M4 bus lane which was suspended last year could be on the cards:

We recommend that the government publish early next year a detailed assessment of traffic flow on the M4 in the year since the bus lane was scrapped. If the evidence shows that the bus lane contributed to faster movement—taking account of all travellers—it should be reinstated.

Leaving that particular fly in the gazpacho aside, the report does acknowledge that there is no single cause of congestion but that a combination of measures including improved driver behaviour, maximising road capacity and providing more reliable information for travellers could reduce congestion. Only a couple of months ago, Boris Johnson was called upon to address London’s congestion problems to which the mayor’s spokesperson said:

‘A wide range of measures have been put in place to ease congestion including the rephasing of thousands of traffic lights, a trial of pedestrian countdown crossing timers, the creation of a roadworks permit scheme and a code of conduct for utility companies.’

TfL backed this up by saying they had seen a 7% reduction in delays at 2,000 sets of lights over the past year and a 32% cut in ‘serious disruption caused by road works’.

Sharing road space more efficiently is also key to reducing congestion – the cycle hire scheme and cycle superhighway in London have gone some way towards this. Many cycle groups feel it hasn’t gone far enough though they can at least rest assured that driver behaviour is under scrutiny too:

The overwhelming view from the evidence we received was that aspects of poor road user behaviour lead to increased congestion. Assistant Chief Constable Nick Croft cited road rage, ‘undertaking’ and bad lane discipline as all making incidents and accidents more likely to happen, thereby adversely affecting the general flow of traffic and Nich Brown, of the Motorcycle Action Group gave the example of when vehicle users are told that a two-lane road will narrow into one lane 800m ahead, and everyone attempts to get into the open lane at once, instead of filtering alternatively and keeping the traffic flowing. The Minister, Mike Penning MP, said he was concerned about how to ensure that drivers were taught not just to pass a driving test, but to drive responsibly.

It’s certainly reassuring to see that bringing back actual driving skills, improving driver education and consideration for other road users rather than a blind preoccupation with speed is part of the Transport Committee’s recommendations.

Roads Minister Mike Penning said in response to the report:

‘We are committed to tackling congestion and improving transport across the country. We are also focusing on making better use of the road network… improving accident clear-up times, providing better information for motorists and tackling road works’ disruption. We will consider the committee’s report carefully and respond in full in due course.’

Read the Transport Committee’s recommendations in full here.

Mayor Confirms 2012 Fare Rises

2011-09-14T15:49:00.000+01:00

Photo by P. Pearson

Londonist

Bus and tube users in London will see fare increases of up to 7% next year to maintain transport investment, Boris Johnson confirmed today.

Oyster Pay As You Go fares on the tube will rise between 10p and 30p with bus fares going up to £1.40. Don’t have an Oyster card? Cash journeys on the tube will go up between 30p and 40p. Commuters using travelcards will be hit with an 8% increase. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the 40% of Londoners who receives concessionary travel, your fares or free travel won’t be affected. The mayor said in his announcement to the London Assembly:

‘I understand that any increase in tough times is difficult. Income from fares is vital to ensure the on-going health of London’s transport network, keeping services running for the billions of passengers who rely on them day in, day out.’

The balance between fares and services is a seemingly never-ending source of conflict; Ken Livingstone was quick to criticise the increases:

‘London already has some of the highest fares in the world, but instead of putting squeezed Londoners first, Boris Johnson is sticking to further stealth-taxes on fares even as he argues for tax cuts for the rich.’

Quite. It’s pretty much a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation; many of the problems which London’s transport users have faced in recent months have made front page news and each year brings an older transport system with the accompanying challenges of keeping it running. But when you throw projects such as the cable car into the mix – which contrary to original promises looks like it will be at least partly funded by public money – it’s not difficult to understand where the backlash against fare rises comes from.

Tally Ho! Boris Sallies Forth

2011-09-13T16:36:00.000+01:00

Photo by ericsnaps

Boris Johnson donned his cape again last night and came to the aid of an injured cyclist who had been knocked off his bike.

The mayor seems to be making a speciality of rushing to the rescue, in 2009 he saw off some ‘feral (we’re getting tired of that word already) oiks’ who had cornered a pedestrian then earlier this year he assisted a shopper who fell off her bike during a Westfield photo shoot. But he’s also come a cropper by falling into a river, nearly getting run over by a lorry and narrowly avoiding a falling glass tile at the Westfield Stratford opening this morning, prompting us to wonder if it’s actually Boris himself who needs rescuing.

The Boundaries Are A'Changing

2011-09-12T18:56:00.000+01:00

Photo by secretlondon123

Londonist

Boundary Commission for England proposals for changes across the UK will leave London with five fewer constituencies, according to their report.

The capital currently has 73 constituencies spread across three sub-regions but this will go down to 68 under the new proposals. This is how it will work:

North East London – reduction from 20 to 19
(Barking and Dagenham, Enfield, Hackney, Haringey, Havering, Newham, Redbridge, Tower Hamlets, and Waltham Forest)

North, West, and Central London – reduction from 25 to 24
(Barnet, Brent, Camden, Ealing,Hammersmith and Fulham, Harrow, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Islington, Kensington and Chelsea, Richmond upon Thames, Westminster, and the City of London)

South London – reduction from 27 to 25
(Bexley, Bromley, Croydon, Greenwich, Kingston upon Thames, Lambeth, Lewisham, Merton, Southwark, Sutton, and Wandsworth)

The government announced last year that they planned to reduce the number of MPs by cutting constituencies and work has been underway to determine where the cuts would occur. According to Parliament rules, a constituency must have an electorate no less than 72,810 and no more than 80,473. London’s boroughs aren’t all quite that conveniently-arranged so the BCE has had to do a bit of juggling.

So, only four constituencies will retain their current form; two in Tower Hamlets and two in Barnet. The others will all cross borough boundaries except for the City of London which will be a single-borough constituency.

To find out more about how your borough could be affected, see the full report here. To add your views on the proposals, visit the Boundary Commission for England’s website.

EcoVelocity @ Battersea Power Station In Pictures

2011-09-11T15:14:00.000+01:00

This weekend saw the EcoVelocity motor show at Battersea Power Station.

We braved the rather threatening weather to take a look at the latest in low emission and electric cars, as well as a curiously awkwardly-laid-out supercar paddock, some sculptures made from car parts and the smallest car in the world. The Westfield iRACER and land speed record challenger the Bluebird Electric also made an appearance.

Retro F1

2011-09-04T18:32:00.002+01:00

I found these while going through some old photos recently and have just got around to uploading them. Sorry about the quality but digital photography was beyond the reach of a 17 year old then! They're all taken at Silverstone either during testing or Grand Prix pre-qualifying (remember that?) in 1991 and 1992. Check out how low-tech the garages are compared to what they look like these days. And check out how different the cars look.

I've gone by what I wrote on the back of the picture at the time but if I've got any driver names or years wrong, leave me a comment and let me know.

Arrests Made At EDL Protest

2011-09-04T12:17:00.000+01:00

Photo by McTumshie

Londonist

Yesterday’s English Defence League protest saw 60 arrests made after altercations with police, local residents and anti-fascist demonstraters.

The BBC described the atmosphere as ‘rowdy’ and reported ‘shouting and incendiary chants’ while the Guardian described racist abuse directed at tourists and local residents. Hundreds of EDL protesters were prevented from travelling when staff at Kings Cross closed the station – RMT members working at Liverpool Street previously said they would close that station if the EDL gathered there.

EDL founder Stephen Yaxley-Lennon attended the protest in disguise before revealing his identity during a speech to the crowd. Despite his presence at the protest being in breach of bail conditions set after he was convicted of leading a street brawl last year, he was not among the arrests made.

Unite Against Fascism are claiming victory after the EDL were prevented from entering the borough of Tower Hamlets.

Oxo Cube Editorial

TfL Olympic Hotspot Data Released To Developers

Police Pay £600,000 To Witness Put At Risk

Rupert Murdoch To Face London Sun Staff This Week

Sandwich Update #1

The Enemy Of Getting Stuff Done

Boris Johnson In St Patrick’s Day Gaffe

Inevitable Snow Pictures

Electric Car Plan Slow To Start

How To Make The Most Annoying Sandwich

Sense The City @ London Transport Museum

TfL Reject ‘Perfect Traffic Storm’ Report

Westminster Scraps Parking Charges Plan

City Win Occupy Eviction Bid

Consultation Planned For Thames Estuary Airport

Olympic Home Rental Rush

EDL March Leads To Whitechapel Brawl

New East London River Crossing ‘Within 10 Years’

RBS To Axe 3,500 Investment Banking Jobs

Brian Paddick Announces Fares Policy

What I Read In 2011

The Annuals Of Time

Top 10 Londonist Articles of 2011

I'm A Blogger, Not A Journalist

Cartoon Linkety Link

Tube Strike To Go Ahead

Rioters Named By Met

Things To Do While Waiting For HMRC To Answer The Phone

LU Issues Legal Challenge Over Tube Strike

Labour Petition Aims To Halt Parking Plans Permanently

Lies, Damned Lies And Statistics

Review: Hamlet @ St Andrew Holborn Crypt

Songs For Winter

2011: A Year Of Protests

Police Release Riot Suspect Photos

Hammersmith & Fulham Cuts Council Tax

Book Swap Wins Ideas4Mayor Competition

Today I Built A House

Westminster By-Law To Remove Parliament Square Camp

Mushroom!

Iranian Embassy Closed, Diplomats Expelled

No Indian Boycott Over Dow Wrap

Olympics Could Get Own Spooks

Aldwych Station Tour

Met Cracks Down On Crime While Boris Looks On

Top 10 Things To Do In The City Of London

Fare Deal Rally: Ken Campaigns For Cuts

Londonist Out Loud

Autumn

Mark Duggan Investigation Raises New Questions Over Shooting

Financial Tax Threatens London, Says Cable

OccupyLSX: Eviction Back On

Take Public Transport, Olympic VIPs Told

Ghost Bikes: Memorial, Raising Awareness Or Cycling Deterrent?

May Bans Muslim Anti-Armistice Protest Group

London Anti-Cuts Demonstration

Two-Thirds Support Social Media Shutdown

Bloomsbury To Barbican: Tuition Fees Protest

Sweeping Generalisations To Continue

Mayor Attacks Parking Plans

OccupyLSX Wins New Year Reprieve

Church And Protesters Once Again On Same Side

60 Seconds Saved On M4

Preview: Regent Street Motor Show

Squatting Protest Ends In Arrests

Christian Activists Plan Support Over Occupy Eviction

Occupy St Paul’s Banksy: In Pictures

Bishop Begs Occupy Begone, Banksy Brings Art

Occupy Branches Out To Finsbury Square

1500 LU Jobs Could Be Axed According To Leaked Document

Episode The Second: Beaulieu Motor Museum

St Paul’s Closed, Occupy Camp To Remain

Met Delivers Crushing Blow To Uninsured Drivers

Why Driving Used To Be All Fields

London General Omnibus Company 1910 - 1920

Commuters Face More Delays

Occupy Protest Enters Third Day

Brent Library Campaigners Promise Vigils

Olympics Organisers Have Branded Streakers Covered

Jubilee Line Upgrade £435m Over Budget