Climate wargames: London officials prepare for extreme heat
Plus: a Brick Lane icon reopens, culture wars in Bloomsbury, and Tube-themed swimwear
Morning — City Hall is now properly worried about extreme heatwaves in London. That’s in large part due to what happened in the summer of 2022, when 40C temperatures hit the capital, overwhelming the fire brigade. This week, we learnt just how serious preparations are for another spell of blazing heat, with news dozens of officials have taken part in a climate wargame. Operation Helios leads your Sunday round-up below.
Plus: a Brick Lane icon reopens, culture wars in Bloomsbury, and Tube-themed swimwear.
In case you missed it: we published our Tube map of London rents on Friday, and we’ve been blown away by the response. It’s now been viewed more than 60,000 times as of writing — thanks everyone for the kind words. What’s been particularly striking is how many people have shared screenshots of the map to express shock at what’s happened to their local rent. “To stay in the area I’ve called home all my life I have to have £2,100 for just rent,” was one such take.
60,000 views, but just one new paid supporter: for all the map’s virality, we’ve only seen one new person sign up for a paid subscription to the Spy off the back of it. It’s not a surprise to be fair — we consciously chose to make the map viewable for free, because we think it could be genuinely useful to a large number of people, and that’s the goal of our journalism after all. But nonetheless, building these kinds of tools to help Londoners navigate the capital’s unaffordability takes time and resources on our end. So if you like our work and want it to continue, please consider signing up for a paid subscription to the Spy.
What we’ve spied
🔥 London’s emergency services wargamed an extreme heatwave hitting the capital on Thursday, as part of efforts to improve the response to the 40C temperatures seen in 2022 and to prepare against further climate change. The planning exercise, dubbed Operation Helios by City Hall, saw more than 80 people from the fire brigade, local borough councils, TfL, utility companies, environment agencies and community groups participate in a full-day drill, where a “developing scenario” of extreme heat was simulated. Attendees were presented with updates and warnings from the Met Office and the UK Health Security Agency and explored how to respond. The drill was organised as part of a wider City Hall response to the brutal heatwave that hit London in 2022, which caused wildfires and damaged homes, particularly in Wennington, east London. Specifically, the exercise was recommended by the independent London Climate Resilience Review, which was commissioned by mayor Sadiq Khan in June 2023. The review published an interim report in January and a full report is expected next month. In the meantime, the capital experienced a mini-heatwave this week, with a yellow heat alert in place from the Met Office and the fire brigade warning Londoners to “think carefully” about swimming in waterways to cool off.
🗳️ LONDON VOTES 🗳️ Here’s what to know about the general election in London this week:
It’s not looking great for Jeremy Corbyn’s independent run in Islington North, as a new poll shows he’s trailing behind his Labour rival. The poll, conducted by Survation and commissioned by Novara Media, puts Labour’s candidate Praful Nagrund on 43% and Corbyn on 29% – a 14 percentage point gap. The sample size was on the small side though — Survation asked 514 adults in Islington North their voting intention via telephone, between June 20 and 25 — but it’s acted as a “wake-up call” for the Corbyn campaign. Several local Labour members resigned this week to join his independent campaign. While we’re on independent London campaigns: here’s a profile on the British Palestinian candidate trying to unseat Wes Streeting in Ilford.
Rishi Sunak was interviewed by the Evening Standard this week, with the prime minister outlining his vision for London. Sunak promised to axe “red tape” facing bars, pubs and theatres and conduct a major review of licensing laws, citing the capital’s recent spike in venue closures. On London’s housing crisis, Sunak said his solution would be raising housing density in inner London to the likes of Paris and Barcelona, while continuing with projects to redevelop Euston, Old Oak Common and Thamesmead. He also criticised Sadiq Khan’s record on knife crime as London mayor.
The Green Party’s Battersea candidate is facing claims he advocates a ‘climate Nuremberg’, in which those responsible for the climate crisis would face trial. The allegations come in an article published by the Spectator this week, which reports on Joe Taylor’s previous social media activity as well as comments he made at a recent hustings event in Battersea. In one tweet from March, Taylor says Conservative politicians have “already cast their die and booked their places at the climate Nuremberg”. In response to the Spectator’s reporting, Taylor posted a lengthy thread on X in which he pointed out groups were already using international law to prosecute “those who cause mass death, mass suffering and annihilation of low-lying states through climate destruction”.
A Labour councillor for Tower Hamlets has quit the party over leader Sir Keir Starmer’s recent reference to Bangladesh when answering a question about the deportation of illegal migrants. “I can not be proud of the party any more when the leader of the party singles out my community and insults my Bangladeshi identity,” wrote councillor Sabina Akhtar in a statement announcing her resignation from Labour. On Monday Starmer had been answering questions from an audience of Sun readers when he said: “At the moment people coming from countries like Bangladesh are not being removed”.
South east London voters are concerned that they’re still waiting for their postal votes, less than one week before the election. Residents of Lewisham West & East Dulwich have told the BBC and their local parliamentary candidates that they’ve yet to receive their postal ballots, a particular problem for those with accessibility requirements or holiday plans. Southwark council, which is responsible for processing postal votes locally, says it’s raised concerns “at a senior level with the Royal Mail”, with the postal service in turn telling the council it is “confident they will be able to deliver all outstanding ballot papers in time”.
BBC Radio London held a general election debate on Thursday with London representatives from the main parties. You can listen to the whole thing here — topics included the capital’s housing crisis, the ‘war on motorists’ in London and policing.
🥯 The yellow Beigel Shop on Brick Lane reopened on Wednesday, ending a months-long hiatus we’ve now learned was due to a family dispute. The 24/7 shop suddenly closed in February in mysterious circumstances, when a court repossession order was put up in the window, then replaced with a refurbishment notice, leaving it unclear what exactly had happened to an icon of the Jewish East End that first opened in 1855. The Beigel Shop team have now explained it was because of “long-standing family dispute” over the shop’s ownership and rent, which came at the same time as serious health problems for its owner since 1987, Aron. But as of this week, the shop is back, with a new generation taking over the business — Aron’s 22-year-old quadruplets as well as their three cousins. More details here on this GoFundMe page set up by the Beigel Shop to raise cash for replacing some of its vintage equipment. Also: here’s a cute TikTok montage of the shop’s first day back.
⚖️ An inquest jury has found failings by the police and prison and probation service contributed to the death of Zara Aleena, who was raped and murdered as she walked home from a night out in east London in 2022. Jordan McSweeney had been freed from prison nine days before murdering the 35-year-old law graduate in Ilford — in that time he missed probation appointments and then eluded police attempts to arrest him. Probationers also hadn’t graded McSweeney as high risk, resulting in a delay to his recall to prison. It led a jury to find on Wednesday: "Zara's death was contributed to by the failure of multiple state agencies to act in accordance to policies and procedures - to share intelligence, accurately assess risk of serious harm, [and] act and plan in response to the risk in a sufficient, timely and coordinated way".
🗿 Virginia Woolf’s great niece is among those criticising a QR code placed on a statue of the author by Camden council that explains her “unacceptable” views. “You couldn't make it up,” Emma Woolf posted to X on Wednesday, “The wokerati of Camden Council have decided that this statue of my great-aunt Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury needs a QR code to explain her 'offensive' attitudes”. As reported by the Telegraph, the statue of Woolf, in Tavistock Square, is part of a scheme introduced by Camden council and backed with National Lottery funding in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests to address the connections between local monuments and “racism, slavery… and imperialism”. When scanned, the QR code explains that Woolf’s “diaries and letters also present challenging, offensive comments and descriptions of race, class and ability which we would find unacceptable today”. Emma Woolf has gone on to write a column this weekend saying the QR code has “ruined” and that her great aunt “was no bigot”. A spokesperson for Camden council said the project, RePresenting Bloomsbury, “was a pilot project to help our communities and visitors develop a greater understanding of statues and memorials in the borough”.
🚨 The chief executive of Lambeth council has been charged with drink driving and drug possession. Bayo Dosunmu, the most senior unelected official at the south London council, was arrested in the Westminster area on Sunday after the 46-year-old allegedly failed to stop at the scene of an accident. Lambeth council says it’s put “interim leadership arrangements” in place, but is unable to comment further amid an ongoing police investigation.
🏥 A further update on London hospital cyber attack: patients are now being warned they could face delays of up to six months for a blood test. It comes as figures show 3,400 appointments and 1,250 operations have now been postponed at King’s College and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS trusts since the hack took place on June 3. Meanwhile, NHS London has said it’s so far found “no evidence” blood test results have been compromised in the stolen data released by hackers — though investigations are ongoing, and patient names, dates of birth and NHS numbers do appear in the data dump. There’s also been more info on the hackers, a group called Qilin, published this week via an investigation in the i paper, which reveals they “are part of a wider cyber army working under the Kremlin’s protection to try to destabilise the UK ahead of the election”.
🏚️ Rough sleeping in London has hit its highest level in a decade, new statistics published by the Greater London Authority show. A total of 11,993 people were seen rough sleeping in the capital by outreach workers between April 2023 and March 2024, a rise of 19% on the previous year and 58% higher than the number seen ten years ago. 7,974 were new rough sleepers — people who were sleeping on the street for the first time — with 27% telling outreach workers they had been evicted and 17% saying they had arrived on the streets after departing asylum support accommodation. Reacting to the figures, homelessness charity Crisis said London was in “a perfect storm: sky-high rents, a dire shortage of affordable housing and increased living costs”. Sadiq Khan, who pledged to end rough sleeping during his recent re-election campaign for mayor, pointed to the government’s failure to ban no-fault evictions, saying: “Rising rough sleeping shames us all, and Tory ministers most of all”.
🔍 And finally, we leave you with: