London's new £13,000 logo
Plus: TfL's e-bike ban, permanent facial recognition cameras, and David Bowie's childhood home for sale
Morning — City Hall is getting a glow-up, 1980s style. Pictured above is the old coat of arms for the Greater London Council, which used to be the capital’s city hall back in the days of Margaret Thatcher. But, according to documents we’ve uncovered, it’s going to be dusted off for the first time in 38 years — for a price. The story behind London’s ‘new’ logo leads your round-up below.
Plus: TfL's e-bike ban, permanent facial recognition cameras, and David Bowie's childhood home for sale.
In case you missed it: for years, Westminster council and local residents have been trying to quieten down central London. Now, they’ve got a powerful new tool at their disposal: artificial intelligence. On Saturday, we published an investigation into new AI noise cameras that are being installed around central London.
What we've spied
⚔️ City Hall is spending £13,000 on a new logo — or, more accurately, on reclaiming an old logo lost to time. Documents published by the Greater London Authority (GLA) reveal that it has authorised the purchase of the right to a coat of arms once used by the Greater London Council (GLC), the old top-tier political body for the capital. The coat of arms (pictured above) features blue waves at its bottom, meant to represent the Thames and the Port of London, while the crown up top is Saxon and represents the historic Middlesex counties that were incorporated into Greater London in the 1960s. It was used as the logo for the GLC until 1986, at which point the council, then led by Ken Livingstone, was abolished by the Thatcher government after a series of political run-ins. Since then, it’s lain dormant in the archives.
London Assembly members have been planning the logo-grab for a while, having voted unanimously to get the coat of arms in 2020 for the GLA’s 20th anniversary. Mayor Sadiq Khan had initially pushed back against the plans over concerns about the costs, but the cash has now been approved in time for the 25th anniversary. £5,000 is being spent on a transfer fee to the College of Arms, a royal corporation dating back to the 1400s that deals with coats of arms and other heraldic matters in England on behalf of His Maj. Another £3,000 is being put aside to create versions of the coat of arms that can appear at the top of GLA letters and documents, while £4,900 has been allocated for architects' fees, so a physical version can be put up somewhere in City Hall at the Royal Docks.
As to why, GLA documents state the coat of arms will "further entrench the identity of the GLA within London, and amongst the public, and will help to build the fabric of new City Hall as a civic space for London with strong roots and connections to London's proud devolved history". Nothing like a nostalgic rebrand.
💸 A west London council claims it's saved over £10m this year through a crackdown on fraud, begging the question: how did it get duped out of that much cash in the first place? The Spy has discovered that, at a recent meeting of Hillingdon council's cabinet, officers reported that the borough’s newly beefed up counter fraud team "had achieved savings of £10.1m in the current financial year, with notable success in areas such as housing tenancy, temporary accommodation, business rates and social care". That figure jumped out as high to us — £10.1m would be enough to fund the borough's library services for three years, or its waste and recycling service for one year. And just three years ago, the Conservative-run council was handed a £25m bailout by central government to stave off bankruptcy. When we got in touch to ask how the £10m-a-year budget leak had only now been discovered, a spokesperson gave us some more examples of the crackdown:
“The type of fraud uncovered by the team includes tenancy fraud, such as subletting and non-occupation of council housing, homelessness fraud which includes non-occupation of B&B accommodation, revenues fraud which covers discounts and exemptions, and social care which covers financial assessments and direct payments.
“Uncovering cases of tenancy fraud can result in savings of around £72,000 per property, while homelessness fraud can save £19,000 per case. Others vary on a case-by-case basis.
Take those figures, apply some back-of-the-envelope maths, and it turns out that Hillingdon had been paying for up to 138 empty council properties or 526 empty B&B rooms until this year’s crackdown. As to how the fraud was finally spotted — “tireless commitment and stakeholder engagement, along with a proactive and reactive risk-based approach to fraud,” said the spokesperson. Better late than never, we suppose.
📹 Police facial recognition cameras are being permanently installed at a location in south London, in a UK first for the technology. Until now, the Met Police have been using live facial recognition (LFR) on an ad hoc basis, deploying camera-mounted vans that check faces of passers-by against a watchlist, but the Times reports that the force is now installing permanent cameras on two roads in the centre of Croydon. In a letter to local community figures, Mitch Carr, the Met's neighbourhood policing superintendent for south London, reportedly wrote:
“I am currently working with the central team to install fixed LFR cameras in Croydon town centre. This will mean our use of LFR technology will be far more embedded as a ‘business as usual’ approach rather than relying on the availability of the LFR vans that are in high demand across London.
“It will remain the case that the cameras are only switched on when officers are deployed on the ground ready to respond to alerts. The end result will see cameras covering a defined area and will give us much more flexibility around the days and times we can run the operations.”
We can't say we're surprised — as we reported last year, the Met has been significantly ramping up its use of LFR recently, seeing the tech as a cost-effective way to catch criminals on the run, people wanted for arrest or even witnesses sought for questioning. That's despite concerns from privacy campaigners that the tech and associated stops by officers are invasive and prone to error. Data compiled by City Hall Greens shows that the Met have now scanned more than 1.9 million faces using LFR across London since 2020, and made 804 arrests after stopping potential matches. Westminster has seen the most LFR deployments at 42, but Croydon is a close second with 39. Every other London borough has seen 14 or fewer deployments since 2020.
In the view of City Hall Greens and some locals, the Met’s focus on using LFR in Croydon represents a high-tech form of racial profiling, given the area's high non-white population. Indeed, this week, the London Greens produced an analysis that found most LFR deployments in the capital last year took place in areas with a higher-than-average share of Black residents. Zoë Garbett, Green London Assembly member, said: "The Met’s decision to roll out facial recognition in areas of London with higher Black populations reinforces the troubling assumption that certain communities, such as those in Croydon, Lewisham and Haringey, are more likely to be criminals". Meanwhile, the group Big Brother Watch described the permanent LFR cameras as a "steady slide into a dystopian nightmare". The Croydon cameras are expected to come online this summer, according to the Times.
A Met spokesperson said: "We continue to engage with our communities to build understanding about how this technology works, providing reassurances that there are rigorous checks and balances in place to protect people’s rights and privacy."
👀 While we're on Croydon: Zodiac House, the flat block featured in the Channel 4 comedy Peep Show, has been turned into homeless accommodation by the council. Last month, the first new residents moved into the 1960s Brutalist block, which had been purchased by Croydon council for £21m and converted into 73 units for those in need of temporary accommodation. The project was funded through Right to Buy receipts plus a grant from central government, and the council estimates it will knock £1m a year off its temporary accommodation bill. There are currently around 3,500 homeless families in the borough, many of which will be booked into expensive hotels due to a lack of more permanent options. Zodiac House was featured in Peep Show as the home of main characters Mark Corrigan and Jeremy Usborne, fictionalised as Apollo House.
🚲 TfL has announced a ban on most e-bikes on its services, amid concerns over exploding batteries. From March 31, non-foldable e-bikes will be banned from the Underground, Overground, Elizabeth line and DLR “to ensure the safety of customers and staff,” according to a TfL statement released on Wednesday. It comes after several cases of e-bikes igniting on London’s transport network, such as an incident last month where an e-bike caught on fire on a Tube platform at Rayners Lane. The ban covers purpose-built e-bikes plus any bike featuring a conversion kit — TfL says it has conducted analysis that suggests the latter “pose a greater fire risk”. That’s why foldable e-bikes are exempt from the ban, given that they’re harder to convert. The London Fire Brigade welcomed the move, with a spokesperson saying: "While we recognise the sustainable benefits e-bikes, and micromobility generally, bring to our city, the reality is that across London we have been seeing an e-bike or e-scooter fire every other day, on average, and we have particular concern about the risk posed by conversion kits or modified e-bikes". More transport news: the government has approved the Lower Thames Crossing linking Essex and Kent, which some say will alleviate traffic in east London.
🎨 As the Tate Modern gears up for its 25th birthday in May, new data has somewhat soured the celebratory mood: the Bankside gallery has seen visitor numbers plunge by 1.5m over the past five years. The 25% fall was revealed by figures published by the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (Alva) last week, which reported 4.6m visitors to the Tate Modern in 2024, down from around 6m in 2019. It comes as Tate prepares to cut 7% of its workforce across the UK, citing the fall in visitor numbers as well as “real-terms decline” in public funds. Tate says the footfall drop is almost entirely down to “a shortfall in international visitors” since the pandemic — though other London attractions haven’t suffered a similar fate. The Alva data also shows that both the British Museum and the Natural History Museum have seen visitor numbers rebound since 2019, with a 4% rise to 6.4m and a 16% rise to 6.3m respectively.
👶 A maternity unit is shutting in north London, with NHS managers blaming a dramatic fall in the local birth rate. On Wednesday, NHS North Central London announced it will be closing Royal Free Hospital’s maternity unit in Hampstead, despite campaigners’ efforts to save its specialist services. The number of women having a baby in the area has fallen by around 30% in the past five years — you can read more in our feature piece on the closures published last year.
🏗️ PLANNING CORNER 🏗️ The 55-year-old Euston Tower near Regent’s Park is set to be partially demolished to make way for a 36-storey laboratory and office block. The revamped building is being developed by British Land, which said it was “delighted” to have received planning permission from Camden council this week. But locals had attempted to argue the new building would spoil views from nearby Kensington Gardens and Primrose Hill.
Elsewhere in Camden: the local council has had to issue an apology after windows were installed inside-out on two tower blocks in Swiss Cottage during works to remove Grenfell-style cladding. And elsewhere in planning: a £73m plan to turn an abandoned gasworks site into 2,100 homes and green space in Bromley-By-Bow have been approved, and plans for a £1bn data centre in Park Royal have been unveiled. Also, at the time of writing, a controversial plan to demolish a food hall in Elephant & Castle and replace it with skyscrapers was due before Southwark planning committee. We’ll have an update on the decision in our next issue.
🍞 The founder of bougie east London bakery Dusty Knuckle has spoken out against recent anti-gentrification vandalism. Max Tobias, one of the bakery’s three founders, spoke with the Guardian at the weekend, giving his take on the graffiti that targeted Dusty Knuckle Haringey earlier in the month. “GENTRIFRYERS-EW-SHIT BREAD,” the graffiti read. "We're in an impossible situation," was the reaction of Tobias, who said the gentrification accusation was “complicated” given the bakery’s efforts to employ local people.
🚨 One of the killers in the 1993 racist murder of Stephen Lawrence reportedly now admits he was involved. David Norris, who was part of a gang who murdered Lawrence while he was waiting for a bus in Eltham, south east London, now accepts “he was present at the scene and punched the victim”, according to a report by the Parole Board. Norris was jailed for life along with Gary Dobson in 2012 for Lawrence’s murder, but Norris denied his involvement at the trial. Others suspected of involvement were never charged after a bungled police investigation.
🇳🇴 Norway's sovereign wealth fund has bought a quarter of Covent Garden real estate. In the deal, valued at some £570m, Norges Bank Investment Management has bought a 25% stake in the Covent Garden real estate portfolio of Shaftesbury Capital. Some aren’t too happy — Andrew O’Brien in UnHerd says the sale of London’s “proverbial family silver” to foreign investors is “another sign of Britain’s declining power”.
🔍 And finally, we leave you with:
David Bowie’s childhood home in south London is up for sale (Time Out)
'Help, my historic London pub has turned into a brasserie' (Telegraph £)
The rejected London Overground line names (London Centric)
A highly detailed cycling route map of London (Londonist)
A new warehouse gig and club venue opening in east London this week (www)
An ‘illegal party’ at the Ministry of Sound turning out to be a publicity stunt (TikTok)
The rise of the London plub (TikTok)
The cast of Severance appearing at a pop-up near Tower Bridge (TikTok)
How an iPad dug up from the Thames solved museum thieves' murder plot (BBC)
How Gen-Z Londoners helped save an Italian social club in Clerkenwell (Times £)
The oldest man-made object on the streets of London (TikTok)
On Aussies in London (TikTok)
On the removal of graffiti around Brick Lane and Shoreditch (TikTok)
Wishing for Tube Girl’s confidence (TikTok)
A vigil for the student killed on the Strand last week (Standard)
Putting a telly in different places in London until someone steals it (TikTok)
A correction: In a story about the Blackhorse Beer Mile in last Thursday’s email, we incorrectly reported that Beerblefish brewery was among the venues closing as part of a council crackdown on rent arrears. In fact, Beerblefish were not council tenants, and their owners say the closure was taken as a personal decision.
I started my career at the GLC - it was a council trying to make London a better place. Great to have the logo back!