The London Minute ⏰ Tuesday 29 October 2024
The London Minute ⏰ Tuesday 29 October 2024
School teachers to strike, East London Gymnastics Centre fights closure, station protest, new London theatre podcast + the £1m banana
⛅️ Good morning London. Thanks to subscriber Adam Tachauer for inviting loads of new sign-ups to the newsletter yesterday. Adam is speeding up the reader-referral leaderboard and has a year’s free subscription for his effort! Here’s Tuesday’s London Minute.
🚇 Severe delays on the Piccadilly and District lines this morning due to the ‘late finish of engineering work’. - Check TfL’s live status updates.
⮑ The Waterloo & City line has been suspended this morning due to ‘flooding’. - Lydia Chantler- Hicks, The Standard.
🚇 Kentish Town and Colindale stations both look like they are set to reopen soon, according to recent details released from City Hall. - Katherine Gray, MyLondon.
🤸♂️ East London Gymnastics Centre is facing closure. The charity was told it must be ‘out by Christmas’ after its building was sold to a housing developer in a deal reportedly worth more than £2m. - Anna Timms, The Guardian.
⮑ More than 7,000 people have signed a petition calling on Newham Council and the Mayor to save the Beckton centre. There’s more background in this Instagram post.
✏️ Teachers from Holy Trinity and Fenstanton in Lambeth will go on strike against potential school closures on 4 and 5 November. Parents, children and teachers are also set to protest outside Lambeth council on Monday 4 November ahead of the local authority’s cabinet meeting. - Claudia Lee, South London Press.
🚨 A man has been arrested after two people were reportedly stabbed at Bermondsey Spa Gardens yesterday afternoon. - Isabel Ramirez, Southwark News.
🚔 Clapham nightclub Dirty Blonde Club on Wandsworth Road has been shut down after a fatal stabbing outside in September. - Robert Firth, Local Democracy Reporter, MyLondon.
🚉 Protesters staged a ‘die in’ at Liverpool Street Station yesterday at 5pm to protest the British government’s involvement in Israel’s attacks on Gaza. - Katherine Gray, MyLondon.
🚔 Three Just Stop Oil activists have been banned from protesting in London ahead of their trial for allegedly throwing soup at two Vincent Van Gogh paintings at the National Gallery. - BBC London News.
🧀 Cheddar worth £300,000 that was stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy may have been shipped abroad to be sold on, a supplier has told the BBC’s Aurelia Foster.
⮑ The theft of 22 tonnes of ‘rare’ cheese has even made The New York Times.
🥩 It was fun while it lasted, but The Standard has reported on a series of Reddit threads that were deliberately talking-up Angus Steakhouses in Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square ‘in a bid to stop their favourite eating spots being swamped by tourists’. - Lydia Chantler- Hicks, The Standard.
✈️ British Airways is scrapping all of its flights from London Gatwick to New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport until next year due to a shortage of planes. - Amy Houghton, Time Out.
🍌 A banana taped to a wall that caused uproar at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019 is expected to fetch up to £1.16m at auction. On show at Sotheby’s auction house for just one day today, Maurizio Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ will go under the hammer (sounds messy) in New York in November. - Eddy Frankel, Time Out.
⮑ Entry is free and the first 50 visitors will receive a free T-shirt.
“If at its core, Comedian questions the very notion of the value of art, then putting the work at auction this November will be the ultimate realization of its essential conceptual idea - the public will finally have a say in deciding its true value.” - David Galperin, Sotheby's head of contemporary art.
📆 Here’s a list of ‘Things to do in London to brighten up the dark nights’ by Laura Reynolds in Londonist.
🗣️ The Hidden Tracks live storytelling show returns to the Southbank Centre on Friday. - Read more about what’s planned here.
🎭 A new independent podcast on London theatre has launched, hosted by three respected local culture writers; Nancy Durrant, Nick Clark and Nick Curtis. The London Theatre Review will have weekly reviews, interviews and news from across the city’s theatre landscape. The first episode features reviews of Oedipus and Waiting for Godot, and a chat with Rufus Norris, the outgoing artistic director of the National Theatre. - Thanks to a subscriber for sharing this. You can listen to it here.
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Thanks for sharing the podcast!