Fancy a swim in the Thames?

It may be brimming with sewage right now, but there’s a plan to make London’s river swimmable by 2034

Morning —  a quick dip along the South Bank, anyone? As we near the end of the London mayoral campaign (polls open on Thursday), Sadiq Khan has saved one of his juiciest pledges till last. In a quite obvious copying of Paris, Khan has said he’ll make the River Thames swimmable within the next ten years. It’s a big ask, given how mank it’s become lately… That leads your Sunday round-up below.

Plus: anti-SUV activists strike in north London, horsing around, and Swifties take over a pub. 

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What we’ve spied

🗳️ FROM THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL 🗳️ Forget London Fields or Tooting Bec lidos — Sadiq Khan has pledged to make the River Thames swimmable by 2034. While on a trip to Isleworth, west London on the banks of the river this week, Khan announced he’d pursue a “moonshot plan” to get the sewage-filled waters fit for swimming “within ten years” if re-elected. It’s a similar clean-up plan to that of his Parisian counterpart, mayor Anne Hidalgo, who’s trying to open the Seine up for public swimming after it’s used for this summer’s Olympics. The state of the Thames has been drawn into sharp focus recently, with figures showing that the duration of sewage spills increased fivefold last year, as well as the discovery of E Coli in the river before this year’s Boat Race. Khan didn’t give a huge amount of detail on how he’d meet his goal though, and it’s unclear if the London mayor even has enough legal powers to fully clean up the Thames, but Khan said he’d “bring together” companies, government agencies and campaigners. A major step forward unrelated to Khan is coming this summer though with the opening of Thames Tideway, a £5bn, 25km-long super sewer that’ll redirect sewage pipes throughout London away from the Thames.

Susan Hall has been flashing her environmental credentials too by, er, denying she’s a climate denier. The Tory candidate launched her manifesto on Monday, reiterating her pledge to scrap Khan’s ULEZ expansion “on day one” alongside promises to remove “unwanted” low-traffic neighbourhoods and review all 20mph zones. She even had a fancy animated billboard on wheels unveiled at the launch event, though, ironically, the vehicle was found to breach ULEZ rules. But try as she might, Hall’s previous social media activity once again came back to haunt her this week. This time it was a Daily Sceptic article she posted in 2022 that said it was “an absolute delusion that humans can control the climate with their CO2 emissions”. LBC presenter Tom Swarbrick raised the post during the station’s mayoral hustings on Tuesday — “Do you believe that?” asked Swarbrick. “No,” Hall replied. “Why did you post it?” “I don’t know”. Hall has previously said she wants to delay London’s 2030 net zero target by up to two decades, and had said earlier in the debate: “Of course I approve of net zero, but not on the backs of those who cannot afford it.”

Elsewhere in the mayoral campaign:

• The mayoral candidates took part in the BBC’s televised mayoral debate on Thursday — Full Fact put out an extensive fact check of all the claims afterwards. Meanwhile, Khan’s has also been doing the rounds on a few podcasts, most prominently featuring in an episode of The Rest is Politics this week.

• Homelessness charity Shelter also tried to host a mayoral hustings — but neither Khan or Hall turned up

• Khan said he wants to bring WrestleMania to London if he wins a third term, in what would be a UK debut for the American wrestling event  

• Hall inadvertently campaigned outside Khan’s childhood home

• The Lib Dem’s might be calling for changes to cannabis policing in London, but one candidate has gone to even greater lengths to woo London’s stoners. Andreas Michli, the independent candidate who heckled Khan earlier in month, was out in force at the 420 event at Hyde Park last week. A particularly classy touch — the corner of the leaflets he was giving out could be ripped off for a roach. 

This our last roundup before polls open on Thursday, May 2 — so a final bit of electoral housekeeping. The Electoral Commission’s postcode tool is your best shout for finding your nearest polling station. Polls are open between 7am and 10pm. And remember — you need to bring voter ID, since last year’s change of rules. And in terms of the actual result, the winner will be announced on Saturday. 

🛞 “We are defending ourselves against climate change, air pollution, and unsafe drivers,” reads the manifesto-like website of an anti-SUV activist group that struck in London this week. “We do this with a simple tactic,” the Tyre Extinguishers’ site continues, “deflating the tyres of these massive, unnecessary vehicles, causing inconvenience for their owners”. Inconvenience they shall — the group targeted SUVs in the streets of Islington on Tuesday, according to owners who took to a local Facebook group to fume. Some posted at great length about the misery brought on by their newly flat tyres — one resident explained they had a big car “because my son uses a wheelchair”, while another, claiming to be a care worker, said they’d been unable to get to elderly patients in Highbury that day. While the exact number of SUVs hit is unknown, it was enough to lead to a notable increase in people visiting auto-repair shops for tyre pumps, the BBC reports. 

It’s not the first time the Tyre Extinguishers have been active in London — in February of this year, the group, which usually leaves leaflets on cars as calling cards, deflated the tyres of Range Rovers and Bentleys in the posh neighbourhoods of Fulham. And in 2022 activists took action in London amid a global day of action. The Tyre Extinguishers say their main objective is “to make it impossible to own a huge polluting 4x4 in the world’s urban areas”, but the group is quite loosely organised. There’s no official hierarchy — “we have no leader” they write on their website — and instead in-depth guides to deflation and printable materials on their website conceivably lets deflators pop up anywhere. The issue of SUVs in London recently went mainstream though, when earlier in the year mayor Sadiq Khan said he was monitoring Paris’s efforts to bring in a new tax on SUVs, equivalent to three times normal parking charges. A spokesperson for the Met Police told the Spy that its local teams in Islington were speaking with residents about Tuesday’s incidents, but also failed to confirm if the force had taken any action in relation to previous Tyre Extinguishers incidents in London.

💍 It’s been revealed one of the old guard of the London underworld — Brian “the Guv’nor” Reader, the mastermind of the 2015 Hatton Garden Heist — has died aged 84. Reader, who was infamous as one of the “busiest crooks” in Britain, had actually passed away in September 2023, a fact relatives and associates had kept secret until this week, when the Sun acquired his death certificate. Reader was born in 1939 in the London Docklands and first fell on the wrong side of the law aged 11, when he was accused of stealing tinned fruit from a shop in east London. His first big heist though came in the 1960s, when he and a team comprised of a safe cracker, lock picker and “alarm man” made off with £500,000 from a post office in Mayfair. Reader acted as the heist planner, and his skill soon saw him rise to the top of the capital’s underworld. He was involved a string of high-profile jobs thereafter, including a heist of a Lloyd’s bank on Baker Street in the early 1970s. Perhaps his most notorious job came later in life when, in 2015, Reader and a gang of other elderly crooks dubbed the “diamond wheezers” by the press stole an estimated £14m from a safe deposit facility in Hatton Garden, Holborn. Over the four-day Easter Bank Holiday weekend, the men drilled through a 50cm wall to reach the vault, stuffed with jewellery, many the entire savings of businesses in the area. Reader was later arrested and sentenced to six years for his part in the heist, though he was released in 2019 on medical grounds. Many believe Reader has gone to his grave with millions still unpaid back to victims — he amassed a fortune of over £200m, by the Telegraph’s estimate. Worth reading: this book on Reader’s life and crimes by investigative journalists Tom Pettifor and Nick Sommerlad.   

🏢 A brewing battle in the City, as a developer’s plans to build a high-rise block near the UK’s oldest synagogue sparks hundreds of objections. Developer Welput wants to build a 43-storey office and retail building on Bury Street in the City of London, but objectors say it’s “wholly inappropriate” and “an obscenity” given it’ll be next door to Bevis Marks synagogue, which relies mainly on daylight and candlelight for worship. “This kind of proposal would never be considered within the vicinity of St Paul's Cathedral, and should certainly not be permitted just metres from British Jewry's Cathedral synagogue,” writes one of the 298 objectors. Welput had originally submitted plans at the site for a 48-storey office block, but this was rejected in 2021 by an independent review because it would result in “significant reduction in sunlight”. Elsewhere in London’s skyline: Lambeth has decided to make the London Eye a permanent fixture, after the attraction’s permit was due to expire in 2028. 

👮 Just one in ten reports of indecent exposure or voyeurism in London ended with a prosecution last year, the Met Police revealed to MPs on Wednesday. The Met’s assistant commissioner Louisa Rolfe told the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee that the force’s charge rate of 10.9% for more than 1,500 voyeurism incidents in the capital was ‘not high enough’. The stat is particularly damning, given evidence that the killer of Sarah Everard, serving police officer Wayne Couzens, could have been stopped if his previous flashing crimes had been dealt with. Elsewhere for London’s finest: the fallout from a Met officer’s attempted arrest of a Jewish man walking near a pro-Palestine march continues, after commissioner Sir Mark Rowley defended the officer’s wider intentions this week. Rowley said that though the officer’s “openly Jewish” remarks were “clumsy and offensive”, he still acted professionally and that he wouldn’t be disciplined. A petition calling for Rowley’s resignation, created by the organisation of the Jewish man who was stopped, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, has reached more than 10,000 signatures as of writing. One last thing on the Met: it’s been announced an independent police force is going to review the Met’s handling of new evidence recently uncovered relating to the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence. Last year the BBC named Matthew White as the sixth suspect in the botched case, which saw Lawrence murdered by a gang of racists while he was waiting to catch a bus in Eltham.  

🐎 HORSING AROUND 🐎 In case you missed all the fuss, here are the best bits from those horses on the loose in central London on Wednesday:

• Probably the most iconic video of the two horses on the loose

• One of the best photographs

• A map of the impressive route they took through London before they were caught

• The British Army’s latest update on the horses’ conditions 

• A petition from Animal Rising calling for the horses to be put in a sanctuary

🔍 And finally, we leave you with:

• London property opportunity of the week: excavate your own ground floor flat  

• Confirmation the squatters have now left Gordon Ramsay’s London pub

• Taylor Swift fans overwhelming a London pub after it was referenced on her new album

• The runner who drank a glass of wine every mile of the London Marathon 

• Cute interviews and footage of the runners who finished last

• St George’s Day protestors clashing with police at a central London rally

• A breakthrough in vulture care at London Zoo

• The huge smoke cloud over Hyde Park for 420

• On how “the right made London the most vilified place in Britain”

• Questions about the little buildings in Victoria