Whole Foods and free speech
Been wondering recently why you can’t get The Ecologist in the Whole Foods shops in London? (These include the former Fresh & Wild stores.) The reason is apparently that the magazine printed a feature...
Category: London life
Those Boris Johnson despises
Be very afraid: Zoe Williams on the possibility of Boris Johnson as mayor of London | Politics | The Guardian I know it's a bit late as the polling stations are about to close...
London election is not just about race
The recent issue of Red Pepper contains an editorial, written by Oscar Reyes, about the upcoming mayoral elections in London. Reyes notes that Boris Johnson, the Tory challenger for the position against Labour's Ken...
Snow in April!
Well, it doesn't snow that often in England anyway, but snow in April is really unusual (though I've witnessed snow in Spring in the past, in the early 1990s when I was at boarding...
Next stop, Helsinki?
London buses headed in the same direction as Helsinki’s high-tech transport system – The Guardian The Guardian today had a feature, on the front of its technology supplement, on the recent introduction in London...
The death penalty in light of the recent murder convictions
The last three working days in a row, there has been a man convicted for acts of violence against women. Last Thursday, it was Steve (or was his actual name Steven?) Wright, the man...
Ken, the shaikh, the hard left and the anti-left left
Tomorrow, a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary hosted and researched by Martin Bright (of “The Great Koran Con Trick” fame) is to be aired, and it reveals Ken’s loyalty to a small far-left sect called Socialist Action, and that he has given well-paid jobs in the Greater London Authority and its spin-off organisations to various members of it; its members have also worked for various other left organisations over the years, according to one of them, Atma Singh, in today’s Sunday Times ([1], [2]). In the run-up to this programme, articles have appeared in the New Statesman (by Bright himself), in the Observer (by Nick Cohen, predictably) and in the Sunday Times alongside Singh’s piece.
London’s where we do stuff, innit?
This week it’s appeared that serious consideration has been given to building a third runway, and a sixth terminal, at Heathrow Airport. The project will require the destruction of an entire suburban village, blight...
Underwhelming St Pancras
This afternoon I had the opportunity to take a look at the new, redeveloped St Pancras station, which is now used for the Eurostar trains to Paris and Brussels (and a few other places,...
The Crossrail fares rip-off
This afternoon they are announcing on the radio that Ken Livingstone has announced that fares for public transport in London will rise to finance the construction of the Crossrail scheme. Apparently this wasn’t part of the original plan, but has come to be necessary – a week after the government decided to support the scheme – because they hadn’t taken into account the interest which would have to be paid on the loans.
London’s foxes and hen-houses
Has anyone been watching the programme Meet the Foxes, about London's urban foxes? The film showed a "family" of urban foxes in north London, and their various neighbours, including some who fed them and...
Railroading east London
SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Society Guardian | Laura Holland: Taken for a ride by a train link that we don't need Found in today's Guardian Society supplement: how the authorities are apparently set on forcing a...
No apartheid in Norbury
In this week's New Stateman, Darcus Howe responds to the persistent talk of "segregation" by presenting the situation in his home suburb of Norbury, south London, widely perceived (at least locally) as some sort...
More on Brick Lane saga
There’s been quite a bit of activity on the issue of the filming of Brick Lane, a film based on Monica Ali’s novel of the same name. Monica Ali belongs to a certain set...