Just hours before the zombie knife ban, a stabbing in Woolwich
Just hours before the zombie knife ban, a stabbing in Woolwich
Plus: how the capital ranks on late-night venues, returning oysters to the Thames, and a simulation of a nuke hitting central London
Morning — at the start of this week, zombie knives were added to the government’s list of prohibited weapons. It’s a move that’s been welcomed by many of London’s knife crime campaigners, given how many young lives have been lost to the long, serrated blades. But just hours before the ban came into force on Monday came a grim reminder of the weapon’s deadly impact. The fatal stabbing of a schoolboy in Woolwich leads your Sunday round-up below.
Plus: how the capital ranks on late-night venues, the return of oysters to the Thames, and a simulation of a nuke hitting central London.
In case you missed it: on Thursday we took a look inside Get Stuffed, a taxidermist in Islington that’s been stuffing London pets for 40 years. Owner Robert Sinclair had plenty of stories to tell writer Joshua Taylor about , like this one:
A particularly memorable example of such commemoration that Robert mentioned was a cat he taxidermied in a sleeping position for a customer. "They went on holiday and asked a friend to pop in whilst they were away. When the friend went in and saw the cat, she was horrified that their cat had died in its sleep. To save the owner being upset, she promptly buried it in the garden. When the owners came back from holiday and asked where the cat was, she was equally horrified and quickly dug it up. After a serious clean, the cat was back in its place in the house."
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What we’ve spied
🚨 "I'm 15, don't let me die," is the haunting plea of Daejaun Campbell, a schoolboy who was fatally stabbed with a 'zombie-style knife' in south east London on Sunday. Campbell's final words were shared with the Guardian by a witness who had found the boy wounded on Eglington Road in Woolwich and tried to save him. Campbell died at the scene a short time later despite the witness’s efforts and the arrival of paramedics. As of writing three people have been arrested in connection with the stabbing — 18-year-old Jacob Losiewicz, who has been charged with murder and appeared in court on Wednesday, as well as another 18-year-old man arrested on suspicion of murder and a 15-year-old boy arrested on suspicion of perverting the court of justice. Campbell's family gathered for a vigil on Eglington Road on Friday where his mother, Jodie Taylor, read out a statement: “The brutal manner in which my baby Daejaun was taken away from us is sad — and he's not the first young person and he won't be the last — the senseless killing needs to stop”. Early reports suggest Campbell was stabbed with a zombie knife, a type of long blade often with a serrated edge that was officially banned by the government on Monday, just hours after Campbell's death. Campaigners like pastor Lorraine Jones-Burrell, whose son was stabbed to death with a sword in Brixton in 2014, have welcomed the ban, though stressed the 'root causes' of knife crime must be addressed. The Met's chief of policing in Greenwich, detective chief superintendent Trevor Lawry, said: "The fact that a 15-year-old teenager, who had his whole life ahead of him, has been taken from his family in this way, is a stark and sobering reminder of the danger of ‘zombie-style’ knives. We are committed to doing everything in our power to take these weapons off our streets."
💀 Not first, not second, not even third — London has come 10th in a ranking of how many venues in UK cities are open after midnight, in a damning sign of the state of the capital's nightlife. Just 23.4% of all bars, pubs and clubs in the city are open past 12 on a Friday night, and 23.8% on a Saturday, according to an analysis of venue opening hours in the UK's 12 biggest cities published by the Times. That's far below the likes of Manchester, Brighton or Cardiff, where at least 32% are open that late, or Edinburgh, which came top with 44%. Only Leeds and Sheffield have fewer late-night haunts than London. The full table, compiled by data journalist Matilda Davies, is below. Davies also created an interactive map of all the late night venues in London she identified, viewable here. As to why London is ranked so low — punters and venue owners tell the Times it's a mix of fewer Londoners being able to afford a night out after the other costs of the city as well as concerns about crime, like sexual harassment and petty theft.
🕺 While we're on nightlife: a popular east London club and gig venue, the MOTH Club, has asked regulars to oppose a new flat block proposed next door. "To any Hackney based MOTH Club lovers out there," wrote the venue in a recent Instagram post, "we're calling for your support to object to a recent planning application for new flats being built opposite the venue on Morning Lane". The post goes on to ask regulars to write to Hackney council opposing the plans, which consist of a six-storey building on the site of a former restaurant. The club's general manager, Edie Andrews, later explained to Time Out that they're essentially worried about noise complaints: "We put real effort into communicating with residents and try to keep our noise proofing as up to date as we can, but without disrupting the integrity of the space, we wouldn’t be able to completely noise-proof that section". MOTH started out as an ex-serviceman club in the 1970s, but in the 2010s it started hosting club nights and gigs from the likes of Lady Gaga. A spokesperson for Stephen Davy Peter Smith Architects, which is involved in the plans for the flats, said: "As far as we are aware, the planning application is with the local planning authority and is currently going through their consultation process where local residents and businesses will be given the opportunity to comment on the application."
🎭 More on culture: a theatre in west London is preparing to close down at the end of the year due to a funding dispute. Beck Theatre had been subsidised by Hillingdon council, but the council says it's now "seeking new operating arrangements" when the lease expires in December 2024. In Chelsea, the council has installed anti-graffiti protection on a Banksy piece on the side of a house depicting two elephants that was part of the artist's animal series in the capital in August. One of the two elephants was defaced, but it has now been restored with a special coat to protect the artwork. And finally, Time Out has this year picked Leyton in east London as one of the 'coolest neighbourhoods in the world for 2024'. Time Out explains:
Leyton is not like Clapton, just across the Hackney marshes. It’s fresh out of boutique cake shops, mid-century vintage furniture stores, or parody Instagram accounts. But for what it lacks in £30-a-plate pub roasts, baby-chariot buggy-jams and towering townhouses, it makes up in friendly faces, cheap eats and authentic local businesses. There’s a historic football club that loves newcomers and plays in the borough, a growing food scene, lively nightlife and a wealth of proper boozers that still feel like living rooms, not just boutique hotel lobbies.
🚅 We'll know very soon if HS2 is coming to central London or not — sources have told the Times that the government has until the end of the year to decide on approving the Euston leg. The high-speed rail project's London terminus has been shrouded in uncertainty since last year when then prime minister Rishi Sunak said the original plan of taking the line to Euston could only go ahead with private investment. At the moment, HS2 is only definitely being brought as far as Old Oak Common in west London — a prospect that's frustrated many, given the resulting impact on journey times and extra passengers in the area. The UK's new transport secretary, Louise Haigh, has offered vague hints of the new government's thinking, telling the Standard last week: “Clearly Euston is going to be part of the wider picture but we will be making a decision soon on the tunnelling and the development.” But as chancellor Rachel Reeves has repeatedly stressed since entering office, money is tight. More on transport: TfL still hasn't restored online services after the cyber attack, and then this week several London stations operated by Network Rail suffered a hack that saw Islamophobic messages displayed on public wifi. Also: new trains for the DLR have been delayed indefinitely, work has begun on a new segregated cycle lane on Putney bridge, and TfL has seen its income from driving fines rise by 57% in the past year.
🏗️ PLANNING CORNER 🏗️ City Hall approved the expansion of Wimbledon on Friday, giving the All England Club the green light to build 39 new tennis courts, including an 8,000-seat stadium. Permission was granted by London deputy mayor Jules Pipe, who decided that "significant" community and economic benefits of the scheme outweighed the opposing arguments of locals, who feared the area would become a "huge industrial tennis complex". It's not completely over for the campaign against the expansion though, which could still apply for a judicial review. Up north, controversial plans for a high-end shopping pavilion in Kings Cross have been shelved. This week the Camden New Journal revealed that developer Argent, which has been overseeing the regeneration of the Kings Cross area since 2001, has 'paused' its plans for a pavilion at Coal Drops Yard, after a fair amount of backlash from local residents, including from Angel of the North sculptor Anthony Gormley. One resident summed up their case against building the structure on top of the old Victorian railwaylands as: “Can you imagine if someone dropped a shopping mall in the middle of Trafalgar Square? That is basically what was planned. Where is the public benefit in having what is essentially a 20,000 square foot coffee shop?”
Other planning bits: a developer has been given permission to convert an old MI6 school in Pimlico into luxury residential flats; a 26-storey office block built in the 1970s near Liverpool Street station has been slated for demolition to make way for a new skyscraper; and a leading group of housing associations has warned the new Labour government that £54bn is needed to build enough affordable homes in London.
🦪 Oysters could return to the Thames as part of plans to clean up London's rivers, Sadiq Khan has said. This week the mayor has been in New York for an environmental conference, and as part of the trip he visited a project to bring one billion oysters to the Hudson river that started in 2014. The scheme makes use of the fact oysters help to naturally filter water and can help protect against flood damage. It follows Khan giving more details last week about his 10-year plan to clean up the capital's rivers, including making the Thames swimmable. Aside from oysters, Khan has also said he wants to reintroduce more eels, otters and water voles to London's aquatic habitats. The mayor's trip stateside hasn't gone down well with everyone though — London Tories have been criticising Khan for missing the Labour party conference in Liverpool and turning down the chance to lobby for more cash for the capital. Khan brushed it off though, telling the BBC that he also needs to "bang the drum globally ... I need to bring in more foreign investment to London". New York has also provided inspiration for the mayor on his other big project — he posted a video from Times Square, saying it gives "a glimpse of the future for Oxford Street", which Khan is now trying to pedestrianise. One last thing from the mayor's office: Khan's deputy mayor for the environment has pledged to curb his plane trips after being called out for flying 40,000 miles in two years.
🍽️ Two London restaurants are in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons this week — first, the infamous Wong Kei in Chinatown, which has been fined more £40,000 for food hygiene offences. The case against the restaurant on Wardour Street started back in 2022, when inspectors from Westminster council found mice and cockroaches, raw and pre-cooked food being mixed and other poor hygiene practices. Having failed to make changes and then falsifying a few documents, Wong Kei's owners have now pleaded guilty to 11 food hygiene offences and racked up fines worth £42,306. It's another shady chapter for a restaurant already part of the capital's dining folklore. Before a change of ownership in 2014, the restaurant and its waiting staff earned a reputation in the 1980s and 90s as the 'rudest in London'. The other eatery under fire this week is an unnamed restaurant in Camberwell that asked a man with a facial disfigurement to leave because he was 'scaring customers'. Oliver Bromley, who suffers from Neurofibromatosis Type 1, has shared his experience with Southwark News, explaining that he'd been told by a member of staff behind the counter: 'Unfortunately there’s been some complaints about you – the way you look, you’re scaring the customers'. Bromley's condition is a genetic condition that causes tumours to grow on nerve endings. Bromley reported the incident to Southwark council, who then passed him on to police, but officers said they couldn't do anything other than categorise the incident as a hate crime. However, Bromley has insisted he does not want a witch hunt against the unnamed restaurant and instead hopes to raise awareness of discrimination against his condition.
👮 The Met Police has set out plans to try to rebuild trust with London’s black community, which the force acknowledges has been “let down” over several years. Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley launched the London Race Action Plan on Monday, which includes a new stop and search charter designed with the help of black communities as well as an overhaul of the force’s policy of intimate searches of children and measures to help black victims of crime. The action plan comes after several high-profile incidents that have damaged trust in the Met, including the treatment of Team GB runner Bianca Williams and her partner during a stop and search in 2020 and the strip search of a 15-year-old black girl known as Child Q at her school in Hackney in 2020. Just this Friday, new figures from the Home Office show that black people in London were four times more likely to be stopped and searched by police than white people in the year to March 2024. Elsewhere for London’s finest: several officers are facing a gross misconduct hearing next month for accessing files related to the case of Sarah Everard, the 33-year-old woman murdered by Met officer Wayne Couzens in 2021.
🔍 And finally, we leave you with:
A simulation of a nuke hitting central London that aired on Russian television (Daily Mail)
Hoarding TfL stickers (TikTok)
The insanity of Brick Lane (TikTok)
Wearing your Zone 1 outfit in Zone 4 (TikTok)
Dermot O’Leary outside the Barfly pub in Camden in 2000 (TikTok)
Inside Lord Alli's Covent Garden penthouse (Telegraph)
Bad reviews of the Standard’s AI imitation of its former art critic (Guardian)
An overgrown house in Hampstead (Reddit)
The secret life of a London taxi driver (Telegraph)
Photos of the transformation of the London Docklands (TikTok)
The London Marathon raising a record £73.5m for charity (Guardian)
A London flat seen in Fleabag and Killing Eve put up for sale (Times)
Four Londoners setting the Guinness World Record for a pickleball marathon (Standard)
The first gig of a former Tory Camden councillor turned stand-up comedian (Camden New Journal)
Poor beetroot and courgette recognition at Borough Market (London News Online)