Until then we’ve been looking into a new, totally legal tactic that is being used to try to squeeze as much rent as possible from London’s private tenants in the face of the Renters’ Rights Act: the inverse bidding war.

Scroll to the bottom for that story…

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Relight my recycling fire

Tuesday night’s enormous fire at a recycling centre in south London, next to the railway line out of London Bridge, shows the strain that such facilities are facing. No one was harmed in the giant blaze which produced smoke that could be seen across the centre of the capital. But it took 100 firefighters working through the night to bring it under control and the depot was severely damaged. The same facility also caught fire in June. Scaffolding next to the already-beleaguered structure was badly scorched this time around.

It’s too early for a definitive answer on what caused the fire in 50 tonnes of household waste, if it’s ever possible to find one. That said, when London Centric visited the site on Wednesday morning, there was no doubt in the minds of the firefighters on the scene about the most likely culprit.

“It’ll be lithium batteries,” said one firefighter, taking a break. “They get crushed and then combust. I think it started in the recycling then spread.”

It’s one thing not to clean out your plastic pots but Londoners can’t stop chucking rechargeable batteries in the recycling. Which are then destroying London’s ability to recycle.

Is this London’s most-shut-down-for-summer street?

We enjoyed the, ahem, “robust” comments under our piece questioning whether London should shut down for August. (For the record, we haven’t taken a day off.)

But it’s clear some parts of the capital have already given up. One London Centric reader nominated Roman Road in east London, where at least five shops and cafes are closed for most of August, with signs saying the owners are on holiday.

Any advance on that?

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The VAT of the land: More London dodgy shops raids on the way

Treasury minister Dan Tomlinson has responded on X to a piece we wrote for the Financial Times about London Centric’s reporting on dodgy shops. Our reporting has consistently concluded the quickest way to fix the capital’s high streets is for HMRC to conduct spot checks on whether dodgy shops are paying their taxes rather than have politicians fiddle around the edges with planning laws or run around shouting “money laundering”.

Tomlinson wrote that, behind the scenes, things are already changing: “Jim is under-doing the transformation HMRC has been through in the last year. In the year I was minister for [HMRC] we did something radical and stopped only focusing on going after the biggest tax losses, but instead started looking at *where* tax losses were happening - with a laser focus on High Streets. Thanks [to] investment from Rachel Reeves, HMRC had the resources to expand its small business tax evasion work - and I and senior leaders in the department decided that half of that team - something like 350 people - would now be solely focused on High Street tax dodging.”

Referring to the tax raids on central London gift shops we reported on at the start of the summer: “The raids Jim mentions are not one-offs. But the first of, I hope, many in the years to come.”

Sadiq Khan has welcomed the impending launch of a legitimate Harry Potter shop on Oxford Street. One of the great mysteries (and one that Warner Bros has never responded to us on, to the annoyance of law-abiding gift shop retailers in our inbox) is why legitimate Harry Potter merchandise has consistently been supplied to the tax-evading “generic boy wizard with a vintage Ford Anglia in the window” shops across the centre of the capital. Could this end now they’ve got competition from an authentic outlet?

The heat’s over. Is London about to have flash floods?

After weeks of dry weather, the Met Office has finally said that parts of the UK can expect to see the “first meaningful rain for a long time”. Could that mean floods?

Dr Linda Speight, a hydrometeorologist at the University of Oxford, explained that the drier the summer, the greater the risk of flooding once rain finally does arrive.

That’s because the summer’s heat has dried out the ground, leaving it hard and cracked. “What normally happens when it rains is that the water fills all the gaps between the soil,” she said.

“To do that, water needs to be able to get into the soil’s surface. But at the minute, the surface is sealed with dust and is really hard, so there’s no way for the water to get into those gaps to move through the soil. It will just run off the top.”

Traditionally, the city’s vegetation has helped to slow the flow of water by soaking it up. “It’s not going to do that because it’s already dead.”

This means even fairly standard rainfall could trigger flooding, while drains and gutters could be blocked by material that has gathered during the dry period.

Flooding isn’t the only problem that the sudden change from dry weather to wet weather creates, explained Speight. It’s also an issue for London’s water quality: “There’s now two months’ worth of dirt sitting on the streets and in the sewers. As soon as it rains, that first flush of contaminants out of the system is going to cause a real spike in pollutants in the rivers.”

It’s also an issue for a system that’s used to having shoulder seasons, where the emergency services can reset. “Fire brigades are at their wits’ end,” said Speight. “They’ve already used up all their resources dealing with the fires and the hot weather. Now we’re going to have this sudden flip to wet weather, but they haven’t got months to reset and regroup before the floods start happening.”

Just how likely is flooding? “If rain happens slowly over several hours, the ground’s got a chance to soak it up,” said Speight. “If we get a thunderstorm, that’s when we have problems.”

“The problem with London is people don’t realise they’re at risk. They can’t see the water. They assume that the built environment will deal with nature, that there are big sewer systems that will drain the streets. So when it does happen, people are often caught unawares.”

One is a bloody historic epic fought between warring factions for reasons no one can quite decipher. The other is Lambeth local politics. So congratulations to Lambeth’s Green mayor (and actor) Paul Valentine, who has spent recent weeks filming House of the Dragon with Simon Russell Beale.

Our best stories come from our readers. If you’ve got a story you’d like us to look into, send us a WhatsApp or an email.

Welcome to London’s inverse bidding wars

By Polly Smythe

Over the last few months, the London Centric inbox has filled up with readers reporting a new trend for the capital’s private renters: inverse bidding wars.

In May, the Renters’ Rights Act finally came into force, bringing with it the biggest changes to the capital’s rental market in decades.

Among the practices banned by the new law were bidding wars, where landlords and letting agents advertise properties at an unrealistically low rent then, having created interest, encourage prospective tenants to competitively bid up the amount they’re willing to pay each month.

London’s landlords briefly took a bloody nose. But, in their quest to keep rents as high as possible without falling foul of the legislation change, they have found a new way to fight back.

How does it work?

Sick of renting from a landlord who refused to fix the constant issues in her house, Lucy Giles, 23, started looking for a new place to live in May, just after the new act came in.

She told one letting agent she was shocked by the massive increases in advertised prices: “[The agent] said to me that landlords were putting the rent higher, either expecting a lower offer or just taking a stab in the dark and hoping that people would pay.”

How high the advertised rent went depended on the landlord, with the agent telling her some were “going crazy and putting the rent really high, and some were doing it just a little bit higher than what their current tenants were paying”.

Giles had just experienced one of the unintended consequences of the Renters’ Rights Act.

Prior to the passage of the new law, a landlord might publicly list a two-bed London flat for £2,000 a month.

Then, when a prospective tenant put in an offer at that level, they’d be told that someone else was willing to pay £2,100 a month. The estate agent would try to create a bidding war. That left the potential tenants with the option to either up their offer, or risk losing the flat.

These upwards bidding wars are now illegal.

The intention was that renting a flat would instead become like walking into a supermarket — the advertised price would be the price you paid.

What wasn’t made illegal was accepting an offer beneath the advertised price.

As a result landlords and estate agents have responded by enormously increasing the advertised prices for flats.

The landlord’s initial hope is that a potential tenant is panicked enough to pay over the odds.

If not, prospective tenants are encouraged to view a property out of their price range then told to put in a bid below the asking price — creating a inverse blind auction where the objective is to try to work out how low your rival bidders have gone, then bid slightly above that.

London Centric tested this theory this month by ringing up more than a dozen letting agents to inquire about renting. We were repeatedly encouraged to view properties advertised as being well out of our stated price range. Time and time again letting agents told us that the landlord would definitely consider offers under the asking price.

But are people really paying that much?

You might think that landlords would have a hard time finding tenants happy to pay such a high rent. But a mix of desperation to find a property, inexperience in London’s rental market, and a desire to escape the tedium of flat-hunting is proving enough to push renters into paying far more than what a flat is worth.

“They might put the asking price to £4,000, but they don’t really mean £4,000,” said Giles. “But if several people are looking, you’re going to have to put the asking price. You know the way estate agents say, ‘I’ve got viewings all day,’ and you don’t always know whether that’s true or not.”

Plus, if you’re not aware that landlords are hiking the rent with the knowledge that they’ll accept a lower bid, then hundreds of properties that are in your price range look like they’re outside your budget. “I’m very much someone who will only look for what I can afford and won’t look beyond that,” said Giles. “So I just found there was way less on the market.”

Alice Bathurst, 24, is currently looking for a two-bed flat with a friend. She said she worried renters would end up paying more with the new system: “For so long we’ve been in the mindset that to get somewhere good you have to offer above the asking price, and that you wouldn’t even think to drop below. It’s so culturally ingrained that the rent that’s being offered is the starting point for you to then bid upwards.”

“I suppose it’s technically not illegal”

Michelle, 25, started looking for a flat all the way back in February: “I was looking at the market months before the Renters’ Rights Act came in, and I noticed on 1 May [when the act came in] that the properties that were coming up were automatically more expensive.”

Having finally found a flat near her price range, she went to a viewing in June. The flat was advertised at £2,900 a month.

“We offered £2,500, because that’s what the property would have been worth six or seven weeks before.”

That’s when, in her case, the process reversed direction and became an old-fashioned upwards auction, with the condition that every offer had to remain below the £2,900 asking price.

“We went back and forth twice, and eventually maxed out at bidding £2,700.”

She thought she had a deal. But two weeks later the letting agent said somebody had come in and offered more: “I suppose it’s technically not illegal, so there was nothing we could really do about it, though it was disappointing.”

Having worked in housing policy, Michelle was frustrated with how the Renters’ Rights Act is playing out: “When I saw this legislation come in, I thought, this is really good. I just never really thought about the unintended consequences that mean the market is functionally acting the exact same.”

Rather than creating pricing transparency, the act has essentially just put a formal upper limit on the amount that can be charged in an old-fashioned bidding war, she said: “Landlords can list something for much more than it’s worth, hope people are desperate and bid against each other, and keep bidding up, and they’re still doing nothing wrong, legally speaking.”

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How else are landlords trying to get around the act?

Several readers also spotted listings that require tenants to make a one-off payment for their bills to cover the “entire tenancy period”.

This immediately raises a problem. The act did away with fixed-term tenancies, instead turning all rental contracts into rolling agreements with only a two-month notice period. So why ask for a flat fee up front?

Just like inverse bidding wars, it’s not specifically prohibited. Landlords are allowed to ask for payment for utilities but they have to be able to prove that the money is actually going towards utilities.

When we called one landlord who’d adopted this policy, he said that he’d been charging fees of this nature before the introduction of the Renters’ Rights Act. He said that they allowed tenants to make a one-off payment that could cover their bills indefinitely, no matter how long the tenancy lasted.

Mairi MacRae, director of policy and campaigns at housing charity Shelter, said: “With the Renters’ Rights Act finally in force, gone are the days when landlords could demand tenants cough up huge sums of rent up front, or hit the road.

“Seeing the back of these ludicrous upfront costs is hugely welcome, but the government cannot leave room for loopholes. Unscrupulous landlords must be prevented from flouting the law or finding cynical workarounds to continue cashing in on tenants’ basic need for a home.”

But one group of tenants are the big winners: students.

Although university courses tend to finish around May, many student housing contracts have historically lasted for 12 months. This leaves students stuck paying rent over the summer months, even if they don’t want to stay in London out of term time. The Renters’ Rights Act abolished fixed-term tenancies, giving students the power to quit early — leaving landlords with empty properties over the summer months and ruining their financial planning.

(University-owned accommodation and purpose-built student accommodation are largely exempt from this rule.)

Last month, the London-focused estate agent Foxtons said that following the introduction of the act, it had seen “elevated levels of tenancy terminations during May and June, particularly in student rentals”. As a result, around £3m in rent that Foxtons would have booked if the contracts had continued to their expected date was lost.

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“It would be a culture shock if you lived in Paris and moved here,” said Jasmine Gray, a French PR worker now living in London. “All of my friends working in Paris would definitely be like ‘what do you mean you work in August?’”

Walk through parts of London this month and it can feel as though, tourists aside, the city is less crowded than usual. But even with a slowing of the city’s tempo due to the temperature, it’s a far cry from our European neighbours. Italians and Spaniards regularly down tools and head to the coast in July and August, while Danish workers are legally entitled to take three consecutive weeks' holiday over the summer.

Anyone who has visited Paris in August will be familiar with closed shops and restaurants displaying handwritten signs explaining the owners are away until September. Jules, a French cultural worker, explained: “Everything shuts down and people just want to get out.” In contrast almost all of London’s bars and cafes continue to operate all year round.

But if you’ve been receiving endless Out of Office replies at work, or are reading this having already fled the city, you might be wondering about the benefits of this particular strand of British exceptionalism.

This year’s summer is currently on course to be consistently hot in a way London hasn’t previously experienced. It has caused serious disruption to city life, with everything from schools to restaurants having to spontaneously shut, construction projects pausing, and workers told to stay at home.

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Time for Le Big Holiday?

When Sadiq Khan launched “Heat Ready London”, the city’s heat plan in the middle of June’s heatwave, it was about adapting the city rather than shutting it down. Its policies focus on finding ways to keep people working, such as “supporting businesses to adapt facilities, working practices and supply chains”.

As London’s climate starts to resemble that of France, Spain, and Italy, where deserting the city over the summer to return with a fresh sense of vigour in September has long been the norm, we’re asking: should London also shut down for August?

Before you dismiss the idea outright, with a dewy-eyed pride in the Anglo-Saxon work ethic, let’s unpack how we got here. The reason Parisians flee for “les grandes vacances” while Londoners stay chained to their desks in the summer isn’t simply because English bosses are less benevolent than their European counterparts.

It comes down to a mix of legal protections, cultural norms, and labour traditions. In some countries, especially in Scandinavia, workers are actually required to take a portion of their holiday over the summer holiday window.

The nearest equivalent in the UK were ‘wakes weeks’, where factories, mainly in the north west of England, would shut down en masse and machinery could be serviced while workers took a holiday. Victorian factory owners, who gave their workers very little rest outside of this time, often took entire communities to the seaside, with different industrial towns shutting down at staggered times through the summer.

“Even the European Union basically shuts down. All emails are out of office, they shut down for weeks,” said Antonello Guerrera, UK and Ireland correspondent at Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

Send a work email to someone in Rome during August and you might get a variant on the reply “ne parliamo a settembre”, meaning “we’ll talk about it in September”.

All of this is made easier by deeper differences in working culture, said Guerrera: “In Italy there is a very different approach. Lewis Hamilton was taken aback that every one of his mechanics at Ferrari had a proper lunch and left the factory at 1pm. Everyone. He came from a country that has a ‘sandwich culture’. He was astonished.”

The collective dimension, where leave is taken simultaneously across a city or country, creates the feeling of safety in numbers – and arguably it’s easier for businesses to focus when everyone is working to the same September reset.

Will Stronge, director of the Autonomy Institute think tank, said that part of the reason European workers have long simultaneous holidays is because bosses historically found it cheaper to shut a factory down for a set time period than to keep it running at reduced capacity while workers staggered their holidays.

The same phenomenon could become true in London due to the extreme heat, he argued, with unproductive workers fighting London’s unbearably hot public transport: “It becomes in the interest of employers to take the leap and say ‘In August or July, it’s going to be extremely hot and you’ll be extremely unproductive,’ and to try and find a way to gain from that.”

Who’s left behind in the city?

Not everybody is a fan of the mandatory shutdown. Jasmine Gray said her home country’s approach removes choice from French workers, especially those without children.

“It’s kind of put on you that you have to not go into the office. August is the most quiet month in terms of work load for everyone. So you would kind of prefer to be in the office and [then] take holidays when it’s super busy and you need a proper holiday.”

And it’s one thing for larger businesses to build their year around periods of higher and lower productivity, but could an August lull be financially realistic for smaller companies?

“I suspect if you said to most businesses in London, close for a month, they'd say we wouldn't be able to pay the rates,” said Tony Travers, a professor at the LSE and veteran London-watcher.

But a month off doesn’t have to mean a drop in overall productivity, it’s just a different approach to structuring the working year, said Guerrera: “It’s also a very different culture to divide the working months from the season where you try to switch off.”

One of the biggest shifts towards a strictly standardised summer break in the UK came in 2012, when then education secretary Michael Gove announced strengthened sanctions against parents of state school kids taking holidays in term time, introducing higher fines for anyone who broke the rules. Prior to that, there was a discretionary two weeks of leave that headteachers could grant parents to take kids away outside of the school holidays, when flights were significantly cheaper.

The policy remains controversial, and is the bugbear of many parents who see eyewatering holiday price rises within 24 hours of the end of the state school term, while their private school counterparts continue to benefit from cheaper flights and hotels.

What many people don’t remember is that the Gove reforms were brought in as part of a review of school attendance after the summer riots of 2011 – which shut down London in a different way during August. The then mayor of London, Boris Johnson, was famously heckled when he was slow to return from his far-from-London summer holiday to deal with the clean up from that event.

Email for you, serving drinks for me

There’s another big reason why London doesn’t really empty out. Unlike other European cities, where tourists tend to understand that a lot of the city isn’t open in August, London is swarming with visitors in the summer months, many of whom are Europeans escaping their own cities and spending money here.

A spokesperson for the Mayor of London cited the appeal of major music and sporting events, while pushing against the proposal of a partial shutdown: “London is a year-round global city, and summer in the capital offers an unrivalled experience for visitors and residents alike.”

Regardless of cultural norms, has London’s relatively new extreme heat already changed the reality on the ground? Rather than take annual leave, this summer’s heat left people operating at lower capacity, with many office workers told to stay away from buildings that couldn’t hack the temperatures, and left in overly hot homes trying to do Teams meetings in front of a fan.

Elizabeth Robinson, the director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at LSE, found productivity collapsed during June’s heatwave, leading to 24 million lost hours of working and a nationwide £1.15bn hit to economic output. Still, she suggested British businesses would struggle to cope with pre-planned shutdowns: “Many companies would not be able to afford it; there would likely be supply chain consequences; and there would almost certainly be essential services that could not simply stop for a month.”

Instead, she suggested London needs to consider “heatwave furloughs” where everyone is sent home from work, along with greater flexibility on both location and hours for their staff, plus investment in protections for people who have to continue to work through the heat.

Because as with all shifts in working patterns, much like the pandemic, there’s a sharp divide between the haves and the have-nots. A de facto slowdown might mean office workers are able to benefit from a pause but that’s not an option for the city’s transport workers, gig economy staff, and NHS workers.

In recent days London bus drivers represented by the Unite union have gone on strike over the temperatures in their cabs topping 40C during the heatwave. Meanwhile, freelancers and those running their own businesses also suffer; this summer a survey by ATA, Spain's national self-employed federation, found a third of self-employed Spaniards don’t expect to take any time off in July or August.

Jules, 28, who works in the theatre industry in Brittany, explained that’s also the case in his home corner of France, where workers have to be on hand to entertain the tourists fleeing Paris: “The hospitality field won’t be on break. It’s only the offices and administration roles. Basically ‘email jobs’ are on break in August.”

And while most of the capital’s parents (and teachers) are stuck with the August holiday premium, Londoners who don’t have to abide by school terms may prefer to take holidays in cheaper periods.

There’s already something of a two-tier summer shutdown in the capital, with parliament closed for the summer recess, many courts taking a break, and remote working allowing many of the wealthier residents to either take the summer off or work from holiday homes.

Will the last French deli owner in London turn out the lights?

So are we facing a New York-style summer, where wealthy Londoners are able to head to the Devon coast and those left behind remain stuck sweating it out?

Robinson, the director of the Grantham Research Institute, said we are already seeing a summer “shutdown by proxy” for white collar workers. Lower paid workers or those in jobs that can’t be done remotely are working in conditions that could be harming their health over the short and longer term: “The planet will continue to warm for decades to come, even if we do manage to reach ‘net zero’ by 2050. Working conditions in London will continue to worsen during this time, unless we take both emissions reductions and adaptation much more seriously.”

Another key difference between London and some other European capitals is where people head to for the summer. In Italy, for example, it’s much more common for a family to have had a second home for generations, and people often head to the coast or the mountains when the city gets too hot rather than paying over the odds for high-season flights. These properties, sometimes fairly basic and shared between multiple family members, are not the status symbol they are in the UK. Only around 3% of Brits own a second property, and only half of that tiny minority say it’s a holiday home.

As Tony Travers said, “there's definitely a tradition in France, aided and abetted, I think, by a phenomenon which is present in Britain but less so — families in big cities, particularly Paris, having a second home somewhere in La France profonde, rural, or wherever they came from, somewhere they go to for a month at a stretch.”

And London arguably does close down once a year, albeit not in summer.

“Christmas in London is like Paris in August,” said Travers.

Still, some people are already embracing the future. While reporting this story, we were eager to ask a French business owner toiling in London’s August heat how they felt about being at work while their fellow countrymen were on the beach.

We popped into L’Eau à la Bouche, a French deli on Broadway Market in east London. However, we were told the owner wouldn't be able to comment. The reason? They were on holiday, and wouldn’t be returning until the end of August.

Bonnes vacances!

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Rather than taking a break, the London Centric team is spending August beavering away on some of our biggest investigations yet. We can’t wait to share them with you.

Our best stories come from our readers. If you’ve got a story you’d like us to look into, send us a WhatsApp or an email.

PS… Andy Burnham spent last week talking about his plans to rid British high streets of dodgy shops. Long-term readers of London Centric know we’ve been fascinated by the mechanics of how these make money.

Thrillingly, we were able to write about what we’ve learned from our investigation for this weekend’s edition of the Financial Times.

If you’re reading this on Sunday you can still pick up a print edition of FT Weekend featuring the piece, or click here to read it online. It’s also part of Saturday’s FT Edit, a selection of the outlet’s best pieces, which can be accessed with a free trial.

Our reporting, funded by our paying subscribers, has been praised by Treasury ministers and led to raids on central London’s Harry Potter shops. We’ve previously shown how high street businesses can unilaterally opt out of paying taxes, confident in the knowledge they are unlikely to face any effective punishment. This, in turn, means they can afford to pay higher rents than legitimate businesses.

Ultimately this leads to an endless downward cycle, as tax-evading shops crowd out legitimate enterprises.

Today, in collaboration with the Edinburgh Minute, we’ve been trying to track down a Londoner who was operating a series of gift shops in one of Scotland’s most prominent buildings when it burned down last month. In the process we uncovered her connection to a Leicester Square gift shop, rented from the same landlord, which went bust and left a London council out of pocket.

Scroll down to read that, or first enjoy the rest of today’s edition.

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The “vertical drinking” vanguard

Westminster Council has found itself at the centre of a national row over its draft alcohol licensing policy.

What happened? On Thursday, the Guardian picked up on lines in a technical policy document that suggested the central London council would put limits on “vertical drinking” in Soho, suggesting there could be a future ban on people standing up for a pint.

London mayor Sadiq Khan quickly weighed in, tweeting that “you can’t run a world-famous nightlife district with a village-hall mindset.” Before long, Downing Street also piped up, with the prime minister’s spokesperson saying that “busy pubs full of people talking to each other” is just “British life.”

Westminster Council hit back, issuing a ‘mythbuster’ press response. Tim Barnes, Conservative council deputy leader, said the Guardian story was “utterly ludicrous” and it is a “wilful misreading of the policy proposals” to suggest there was any plan to ban people standing up in Soho pubs. The guidance, he said, was not new and in any case is aimed at new openings, not existing pubs.

Probably the most telling part of the whole debate is not whether the impact of a technical document has been overstated. It’s that Sadiq Khan and Downing Street have been delighted to have a very public fight over the story, signalling their support for more drinking in Soho and a more permissive approach to the hospitality trade.

Very soon, Khan will gain the power to overrule London’s local councils on licensing decisions as part of a two-year pilot scheme. He has a big incentive to show that he’s willing to use these powers. Picking battles with the Conservative-run Westminster council on specific issues would be a good way to flex them.

As the mayor indicated in his statement, the direction of travel is clear: “London's hospitality and nightlife support jobs, culture and growth. New powers for City Hall will help ensure decisions consider the wider benefits for our city.”

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In Gunnersbury Park, nothing changes…

A vote on whether or not to grant blanket five-year planning permission for festivals in west London’s Gunnersbury Park was deferred on Thursday, following an almost four-hour debate by Hounslow Council. This summer’s planned series of gigs by the likes of Lenny Kravitz and Jimmy Eat World has already been cancelled.

Gunnersbury Estate CIC put in an application to run up to 22 live event days a year – 115 days total once you include build-up and breakdown – across the park. The debate is all part of the legacy of the battle over south London’s Brockwell Park, as a result of the legal precedent set by last year’s legal challenge to events there.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on what Hounslow Council decides. Reform councillor Adrian Page questioned what “cultural benefit” a festival held by private members’ club Soho House “had to the residents of Hounslow, being that most of us aren’t members of Soho House.”

In the meantime, London Centric is looking into the state of London’s park festivals and whether the biggest threat to London’s day festivals is locals objecting to planning permission — or increasingly apathetic music fans put off by the cost.

Do you have intel on ticket sales for the capital’s festivals? Are you involved in the capital’s live music industry? We’d love to talk, please get in touch by email or WhatsApp.

Remember our piece where we spent a day watching prolific shoplifters in the Brixton branch of Greggs? One London Centric reader sent in this picture from the same branch, where a remotely monitored security pod is now guarding the sandwich fridge.

Its introduction comes as the Met police’s new shoplifting reporting mechanism is expanded to cover more of London. It’s designed to streamline the process of high street shops sending CCTV and evidence directly to the authorities.

What will local newsrooms look like in the future? That’s a question we tried to answer on last week’s episode of the BBC’s Media Show. The whole thing is worth a listen but if you just want to hear our thoughts on the changing news landscape, as well as speculation about how many reporters can fit round a kitchen table, aka the very glamorous London Centric office, listen from 27 minutes.

Wayve hello, say “private hire”

You might have seen the news that self-driving car operator Wayve has won a minicab licence from Transport for London and will offer self-driving taxi rides to customers “later this summer”.

(For those struggling to keep up… Wayve is a British company which has partnered with Uber in London. It is competing with both Google-owned Waymo and Chinese firm Baidu’s Apollo Go. All three companies want to be the first to roll out self-driving robotaxis to paying customers on central London’s narrow roads this year.)

So what’s really going on?

Given that a big part of this competition is about winning the PR battle, it’s important to unpick what TfL has actually granted Wayve here.

Wayve now has permission to operate its cars on the condition that a human is in the driver’s seat during all trips. This human will be legally responsible for the vehicle, even if it is in self-driving mode. By placing the legal burden on the driver and gaining a private hire vehicle licence from TfL for 15 of its vehicles, Wayve can launch earlier than its rivals using the existing rules that govern all minicabs. The company is understandably keen to chalk this up as a victory in the step-by-step battle to carve out control of the market.

But rival Waymo has cried foul. It is still waiting for full approval from both TfL and the Department for Transport under the specific legislation governing self-driving vehicles. Waymo told London Centric that it won’t be applying for a private hire vehicle licence as a stopgap and “intends to welcome public riders into our service with nobody behind the wheel”.

Londoners, get ready to hear about plenty of self-driving “firsts”.

Get in touch if you’ve got a story you’d like us to look into. Send a WhatsApp or send an email. No tip is too small.

“Fundamentally unfair”: On the trail of a London gift shop owner with a curious Edinburgh connection

Our award-winning investigation into London’s dodgy gift shops began with an attempt in December 2024 to find the owner of the knock-off Harry Potter shop near Leicester Square. It’s now become a global investigation trying to trace millions of pounds lost to flagrant tax evasion by retailers operating in plain sight in the heart of London.

What starts in London is felt around the world. So far it’s taken us to India, Dubai, and Oxford. And now Scotland is getting in on the act.

If you visit Edinburgh this summer you will find the centre of the Scottish capital has been brought to a standstill, with no trams running and the main shopping street by Waverley railway station cordoned off.

That’s because of a fire that swept through a historic building on Princes Street while it was awaiting development. The former Debenhams, owned by London landlord Criterion Capital, burned down last month. It had been due to be converted into one of Criterion’s windowless Zedwell hotels. Police and firefighters are continuing to investigate the cause of the fire, which gutted a historic building on the Scottish equivalent of London’s Oxford Street that may now have to be demolished.

Prior to the fire, London Centric and the Edinburgh Minute had already revealed how this building was being occupied by a series of tax-evading gift shops run by a rotating cast of Londoners living in squalid shared accommodation, from Hoxton to Uxbridge.

We showed the businesses genuinely did sell a substantial amount of real souvenirs. They just didn’t pay their taxes.

Every few months a new company would pop up and the shop would “phoenix” overnight to a new legal owner, while looking largely identical to the passer-by.

We now know, thanks to the Herald’s Josh Pizzuto-Pomaco, that our reporting may have encouraged the Scottish authorities to raid the Edinburgh building earlier this summer, just before it burned down.

One detail caught our eye about the raids. After spending years staring at the web of business owners involved in the gift shop networks, we spotted a clear London connection.

The raided Edinburgh gift shops were run by a company called Bwn Beverage Ltd. This firm is legally controlled by a 28-year-old Bangladeshi national from Wood Green in north London called Rumi Chowdhury.

We checked our records of dubious shop operators and found that Chowdhury had a history in the London gift shop trade, as she also runs a company called Fort Traders Ltd. It operated a prominent gift shop in Leicester Square next to the Empire Cinema, until it was wound up by the high court this summer for failing to pay its taxes to Westminster Council.

In both London and Edinburgh, Chowdhury’s gift shops rented units from landlord Criterion Capital.

How had Chowdhury ended up in the retail trade and where did she find the money to rent all these gift shop units? Did this young Londoner notice anything notable about the state of the Edinburgh building prior to the fire? How did someone with no clear business record repeatedly secure leases on some of the UK’s most prominent retail units? And why does she keep failing to pay her taxes?

We got on our bike and travelled around London to ask her.

Step one: the house in Wood Green that Chowdhury gave as her personal address.

When we visited Chowdhury’s registered home address in Wood Green, London Centric discovered it was occupied by an unrelated family who said they had never heard of the woman or received any post addressed to her.

Step two: the block in Dagenham where Chowdhury registered her gift shop company headquarters.

When we visited her company’s registered headquarters, in a one-bed council flat in Dagenham, we found nobody was at home in the run-down block.

The same flat had previously been used by other young, unrelated Bangladeshi nationals as the headquarters for a separate tax-evading American Candy Shop called ‘Kingdom of Treats’ based in the Trocadero building at Piccadilly Circus, another Criterion-owned property.

Step three: a house in Leyton previously connected to Chowdhury’s gift shop business.

When we visited a third and final address in Leyton that was previously connected to Chowdhury’s gift shop business, we found a temporary accommodation unit on a quiet residential street used by the council to house vulnerable tenants. The current occupants had never heard of a retail operation that might have been run from their property. We asked if it was possible that anyone came to pick up the post for a gift shop business. They said the only regular visitor was a Polish woman who came to the house every day, as her family had been temporarily housed there and they moved without telling her where they’d gone.

None of the addresses we visited gave the impression of being the base for a major retail business running some gift shops in some of the most prominent locations in the UK.

In previous cases London Centric has repeatedly found that people with limited financial means, often international students who don’t plan to stay in the UK long term, are paid small sums to sign legal paperwork and claim to operate the shops. They then vanish when things go south, leaving behind a load of unenforceable debts. Britain’s wafer-thin checks on the people running companies, which is turning London into a scammer’s paradise due to lack of basic enforcement activity, mean the real operators are never chased down. We don’t know if that’s the case here.

There is also zero suggestion that Criterion Capital has any responsibility for the tax affairs of its tenants. When a landlord leases a shop unit to a company, paying property taxes becomes the tenant’s problem. The landlord’s responsibilities are limited to collecting rent and maintaining the building.

Out of interest and without any implication of wrongdoing, we wanted to know why Criterion Capital had decided to rent prominent retail units in both London and Edinburgh to companies run by a woman with no clear source of funds, who didn’t seem to exist at any of the addresses she provided, and who had a track record of running companies that failed to pay their taxes.

We asked:

1. What checks Criterion carried out on Chowdhury before letting shops to her newly-formed companies? Did it verify she existed at the addresses provided?

2. Why it rented the Edinburgh shops to her new company, given Criterion had previously had to deal with her Leicester Square gift shop going bust over unpaid taxes?

3. Whether Criterion received rent on the shop units, even if the tenant was not paying its taxes?

4. Whether Criterion is concerned it is being targeted by an organised group leasing its properties to run tax-evading gift shops, given we have now identified more than twenty such businesses that have operated out of Criterion-owned buildings in the last four years?

The company declined to respond on the record.

That said, Criterion’s lawyers have previously told London Centric they’d be more than happy to help HMRC with any inquiries into the tax affairs of gift shops that occupy any of their buildings.

Echoing the complaints of her London counterparts, Edinburgh council leader Jane Meagher said deliberate tax evasion is “fundamentally unfair on the thousands of honest Edinburgh businesses who play by the rules”.

She told London Centric her council needed support from all levels of government: “These rogue businesses are not welcome in our city, and we’ll continue to target and disrupt them using all the enforcement powers at our disposal, alongside working with our partners in government and the police. Clearly though, this is an issue that stretches far beyond Edinburgh, and I raised this with the Deputy First Minister during our meeting yesterday. A concerted effort across local authorities, devolved governments, and the UK Government is needed to properly tackle this.”

We left notes at Chowdhury’s registered addresses, but she did not respond to requests for comment.

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Today’s main story was produced in collaboration with the Edinburgh Minute, your best news source for updates about the Scottish capital, especially if you’re heading up for any festival events this summer.

Yes, there was the briefest of showers in some parts of the capital during July. But the big picture is clear. We’re approaching the point where the capital will have to face large chunks of the year without even a drop of rain, a situation that London was not designed to cope with.

Meanwhile, the London Centric team have been hiding from the sun and working on a bunch of forthcoming big investigations.

Until then, here’s a selection of stories we’ve been looking into. Scroll down to read them.

Get in touch if you’ve got a story you’d like us to look into. Send a WhatsApp or send an email. No tip is too small.

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Welcome to Hot Devo Summer

When Labour won the 2024 general election, the expectation in London politics was that this would finally unblock a series of projects that had been put on hold amid political rows that left Transport for London operating on month-to-month funding deals.

Money would surely start flowing from central government into the capital!

Then London’s political leaders waited.

And waited.

And waited.

The clear message from the top of the Starmer government, led by a Camden MP who had just won a massive parliamentary majority on the back of buckets of votes from Londoners, was that London was not its priority. Big infrastructure projects that had been expected to be funded, such as the Bakerloo extension (a tube, in south east London, as a treat?) or even the ambitious Crossrail 2 from Wimbledon to Tottenham, were given no love.

By last autumn Sadiq Khan was left publicly complaining to the FT’s Peter Campbell about being sick of “anti-London chancellors” when it became clear that, once again, the capital had been overlooked for funding by Rachel Reeves.

Which is why it’s strange to hear the much more positive noises from London’s leaders about the devolution plans of Andy Burnham, a man who has defined his recent political career by publicly attacking “London-centric” attitudes (and causing chaos with this outlet’s Google results in the process). Last year Burnham sat down with London Centric for an interview about how the central government’s focus on growing the capital’s economy has caused “overheating” in London and warned this approach “takes the soul” out of the capital.

Now he’s prime minister, Burnham has pledged to give mayors a share of both business rates (the equivalent of council tax charged on commercial properties) and income tax (paid by individuals) raised in their areas.

The exact details of how this would work and how much money London would get to keep remain to be seen. The capital’s relative wealth means it massively cross-subsidises the rest of the UK. Retaining even a small percentage of income tax could be a game changer. For instance, according to our analysis of HMRC figures, the 119,000 residents of Camden who pay income tax contribute more (£4.7bn) than all the residents of Birmingham and Glasgow combined (£4bn).

At the moment Sadiq Khan has fewer powers than most of the capital’s residents assume. Giving the mayor financial control could make the job substantially more interesting and influential. The mayor of London would then be able to unilaterally take out big loans to pay for projects, secured against this future income, rather than begging central government for money on a project-by-project basis.

The new powers will come in just ahead of the May 2028 mayoral election. In theory, if London’s economy grows, London will get more of the financial upside. In theory, this might also incentivise everything from housebuilding to, say, crackdowns on business-rate-evading dodgy shops.

That’s the theory.

The reality? We’ll be keeping a close eye on it.

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Have you considered being buried in Bromley?

We’ve been reading this extensive and fascinating report on the lack of graves in the capital after it was flagged by Liberal Democrat London Assembly leader Hina Bokhari.

The boroughs in red have no place to bury your body, if that’s what you desire. Orange areas are running out of space. Green boroughs have plenty of cemetery space if you want your remains to be stored six feet under.

London is becoming an older city, with a lower birth rate and fewer people moving out of the capital to south east suburbia as they enter middle age. This is having implications for all sorts of aspects of London life and death, whether it’s transport demand, school closures, or where to put the deceased.

The report found that burial is a rich person’s option. Camden is the most expensive place to be buried, with the only available spots being in the ultra-luxe Highgate Cemetery, where prices start at £32,580 per plot. Reservations can only be made once you hit 80 or are terminally ill. Hammersmith and Fulham charges £8,033 for a burial versus £816 for a cremation.

Some faiths also face supply constraints, with Newham running out of Muslim-specific graves. Several boroughs are unable to provide graves that face Mecca.

When the report was being written earlier this year Sutton had just four vacant graves, which are probably already occupied by the time you read this.

Plans to reuse graves remain controversial. At the moment boroughs have to wait 75 years before reusing a grave; in the future this could be extended to 100 years, exacerbating the problem. Demand is increasingly being met by private cemetery operators and burial grounds outside London.

Given the competition for land use in the capital it’s hard to argue for a new cemetery over extra housing. Some councils are still trying.

Southwark is in a particularly bad state, even though it has a large potential cemetery site that was bought for burials way back in 1901. The problem is that while waiting for more deaths to happen, the land was allowed to become the Honor Oak Recreation Ground. Now, the nearby residents quite like their open playing fields and don’t want it turned into a field of graves. There’s a similar row in Richmond, where an allotment site is being closed to provide an extension to Teddington Cemetery. All of which raises the question of whether London should be a city for the living AND the dead.

The Victorians recognised the risk of running out of burial space and built the London Necropolis Railway, with special coaches from near Waterloo to an out-of-town cemetery at Brookwood in Surrey. The railway’s headquarters was recently sold for around £3m, with planning permission for conversion into flats. Perhaps it’s time to bring it back into use?

What’s going on with the great air conditioning switch-off?

Last week we looked into how air conditioning had been “switched off” for residents living in council-funded temporary accommodation in the Britannia Point tower block in south west London, sending overheating residents to hospital. It’s all part of our multi-award-winning investigation into the business empire of Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital and its influence across London.

Criterion Capital, which acts as the freeholder of Britannia Point through its complex web of offshore Isle of Man companies, has understandably been keen to distance itself from the treatment of tenants in the building. Especially after it launched “mass evictions” of private tenants in the building earlier this year.

The company’s crisis communications representatives at DRD Partnership told media outlets that all questions about the air conditioning switch-off must be directed to the unrelated temporary accommodation providers that sublet the flats from Criterion.

DRD Partnership said Criterion Capital should not be wrongly named in the press as being responsible for the decision to switch off the air conditioning.

(They also asked us to reiterate Criterion Capital’s position that to describe the issuing of section 21 notices to private tenants as “mass evictions” was “misleading and inaccurate” as “fewer than 5% of tenants across Criterion Capital’s residential portfolio”. “There was no programme of ‘mass evictions’,” they said.)

London Centric pointed out that one of these temporary accommodation providers that must take the blame, called People First Housing, is run by a 23-year-old named Numan Umar Farook. He listed his job on LinkedIn as an “asset manager at Criterion Capital”. He is also a director of a number of other Criterion-related businesses based at Criterion’s Trocadero headquarters at Piccadilly Circus, including a company related to Criterion’s windowless Zedwell hotel chain.

Within hours of our story being published, Farook had wiped his LinkedIn profile from the internet without replying to our emails about his company, which is in the process of being struck off at Companies House.

We asked Criterion Capital’s crisis communications representatives if Farook had gone rogue and was taking decisions as a temporary accommodation provider without permission from his main employer. They still haven’t responded.

Even some of the councils that have been paying to place homeless residents in overheating temporary accommodation within the block told us in on-the-record statements they were operating under the impression that they were renting directly from Criterion. No doubt they will also be receiving a request for a correction in due course.

This piece has been updated to include further comment from DRD Partnership, denying that Criterion ever engaged in “mass evictions”. We have also removed a statement that DRD confirmed the leaseholders were responsible for the air conditioning switch-off. They merely said that the leaseholders were the ones who should answer any questions about it.

The wet Wodge

London Centric recently wrote about the plight of those in the capital forced to go without showers because Thames Water decided to turn down their pressure. But at 22 Bishopsgate — a gargantuan skyscraper in the City of London nicknamed The Wodge for its girth – they’re having the opposite problem.

Last week, the 62-storey tower sprang a leak, resulting in the whole building having to be shut down. The flood meant that companies based at the City’s tallest office building, such as Apple, had to order employees to work from home. The building also hosts Horizon 22, London’s highest (and completely free) viewing platform, which remains closed at the time of writing.

A spokesperson for 22 Bishopsgate said that “having experienced significant water leakage in certain parts of the building, we have made the decision to close 22 Bishopsgate until we are able to fully operate all our life safety systems,” and that they are “working to rectify the issue and to reopen the building as soon as possible.”

Hopping mad

Last weekend saw the launch of Transport for London’s updated “hopper fare” which allows passengers to make unlimited bus and tram journeys for the price of a single fare at weekends. We’ve done a video explainer about it on our Instagram, as we edge reluctantly into a multimedia future.

TfL said that, on the first Saturday, almost half of all bus and tram users in London qualified for extra free travel, collectively saving customers £2m. That said, the aim of the capped fares is to attract Londoners back onto the city’s buses, which are suffering from declining passenger numbers.

TfL said that combined numbers for Saturday were “up 0.4 per cent compared to the same weekend last year” but this was largely because the tram was shut down on the same weekend last year. At the moment, it doesn’t seem people are flocking to take extra free bus rides for fun in a heatwave.

So when will Dry Summer end?

Back in February, London Centric wrote about the phenomenon of the city’s never-ending rainy spring and asked a meteorologist if London would ever be dry again. We didn’t realise how much we’d miss the rain.

While we await formal confirmation that July was technically a rain-free month (see the start of this newsletter) the Met Office told us that the previous driest months on record for Greater London are:

1. June 2018, when just 0.6mm of rainfall was recorded

2. February 1891, when just 0.9mm of rainfall was recorded

3. March 1929, when just 1mm of rainfall was recorded

We asked the Met Office if London would ever be wet again. They said that, while there are “indications of a more changeable pattern” this week, which would bring “a greater chance of some rain or showers to areas that have seen prolonged dry weather”, the amount of rainfall was “likely to be fairly modest for many.”

They continued: “There is currently little sign of the widespread, sustained rainfall that would be needed to make a significant difference to areas most affected by the dry weather.”

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PS… Coverage of our recent stories…

London Centric had a nice mention from Jennifer Williams, the country’s chief Andy Burnham watcher, in the Financial Times about the need to beef up local news coverage to cope with the devolution of power. We agree! We are trying to work out how to fund the required beefing-up!

Talking of which, our look at Andy Burnham’s strange copy-and-paste devolution pledges is mentioned in the current edition of Private Eye. We were also referenced by Piers North, the chief executive of local news giant Reach (drop us an email Piers!) in a perceptive interview with Ros Atkins on Radio 4’s The Media Show. Our long read from last year on London’s mudlarking scene was cited by Sam Knight in the New Yorker. But perhaps most exciting of all, our Euston station rebuild story was given a full-page follow-up in a recent edition of Rail magazine, the train enthusiast’s magazine of choice, where it sat alongside a big read on the state of the charter train hire industry.

All of which is due to original boots-on-the-ground reporting made entirely possible by our subscribers — thank you! We’re working on some really exciting stories at the moment that we can’t wait to bring you.

When this month’s sweltering heat brought much of London to a standstill, Magdalene was unable to turn on the air conditioning unit in her flat.

The 45-year-old, who lives on the 15th floor of a plate-glass high-rise block, had all the necessary equipment installed but still found temperatures topping 40C inside her home.

“On those days when it was very hot, we had both windows open, but there’s no breeze,” she said. “It’s like an oven.” But across the hallway in the same block, her neighbour told London Centric his air conditioning had been working all summer long.

Magdalene wasn’t the victim of shoddy wiring or an electrical fault. Unbeknownst to her, air conditioning in the 19-storey Britannia Point tower block in south west London had been “switched off” on a flat-by-flat basis – but only for residents who were being housed there in publicly funded temporary accommodation. Residents say the heat in the affected flats sent children to hospital, with one woman telling us her two-year-old son collapsed.

The switch-off came during an ongoing heatwave that is transforming the experience of living in London. Tuesday was the 24th day of this year in which the temperature in the capital hit 30C. By comparison, according to weather writer TheSnowDreamer, there were just 21 days in the whole of the 1980s when London was that hot.

On Tuesday night Sadiq Khan waded into the growing row over the treatment of tenants inside the Criterion Capital-owned building, with the mayor’s spokesperson saying the situation was “completely unacceptable”.

“The mayor expects temporary accommodation to meet basic standards for decent living,” the spokesperson said. “We are assured the local council are doing all they can to hold the building management to account and protect vulnerable residents.”

Got a story we should be looking into? Send a WhatsApp or an email.

“It’s a tale of two temperatures”

When London Centric knocked on doors in the building in Colliers Wood, we kept hearing the same story. Private tenants who paid their own rent had no problems with their air conditioning units. Their neighbours, living in temporary accommodation after being made homeless, instead said their in-built air conditioning units stopped working in May, with building management reluctant to say why.

Families talked of days spent anywhere but inside their flats in an attempt to escape the heat, desperately ordering fans that failed to cool them down, and of sleepless nights in stifling bedrooms.

Merton Labour councillor Stuart Neaverson said: “It’s a tale of two temperatures with a clear message: if you’re poor, you can sweat.”

News of the air conditioning switch-off was first broken by Peter Walker of the Guardian.

London Centric has been reporting on the situation for residents of Britannia Point over the last year. We’ve previously revealed how the block, which is owned by a company connected to billionaire landlord Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital, was subject to what one councillor dubbed the “mass eviction” of long-term private tenants. The belief was that they were being moved to make way for more profitable temporary accommodation tenants, whose rent is paid by London councils with a legal obligation to house some homeless people.

We also spent weeks proving that electrical safety certificates issued by Criterion Capital to tenants in Britannia Point had been signed by an electrician that didn’t exist, prompting an investigation by the local council.

Magdalene said the heat in her flat was unbearable once the air conditioning had been switched off: “On the last bank holiday of May, I’d gone to have a shower, and when I finished having the shower and I sat down with my towel, I was drenched. I was sweating, pouring. You’d think this was another shower I was having.”

Living on one of the highest floors in the tower, she said that the building’s two lifts kept breaking during the heatwave, meaning she’d have to climb more than ten flights of stairs to reach her overheating flat: “It’s very frustrating. I’ve never been in a property that literally wants to kill you.”

London Centric’s reporting on Criterion Capital and Britannia Point won this year’s Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness. We really appreciate every paying subscriber who funds our journalism.

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“Not been offered as an amenity”

Earlier this month, mayor Sadiq Khan unveiled his plan for adapting London to protect the capital against extreme heat, which includes taking steps to address overheating in London’s existing housing stock.

But for the dozens of families in temporary accommodation at Britannia Point, the problem was not that their flats had no way to cool down. Instead, it’s that they weren’t able to use it.

When one resident complained to the building management that their air conditioning was broken, they were told in an email that, for tenancies managed by temporary accommodation providers, the built-in air conditioning had “not been offered as an amenity” and that “the units cannot be switched back on as a result.”

“You are welcome to use a portable fan or portable air conditioning unit at your own arrangement in the meantime, subject to any fire and electrical safety requirements in your occupation agreement,” the email continued.

Resident Afomia Mussie took up this suggestion in a bid to fight the heat. She had been trying to use portable fans to keep herself and her five children — ranging in age from three months to 12 years old — cool, after their air conditioning unit was switched off.

A few floors down, Perla Feliz, 34, had also been without air conditioning all summer, despite having an air conditioning unit in her flat. “I can’t spend too much time at home,” she told us. “It’s too hot.” She’d written to the building’s management eight times on WhatsApp, and sent four emails, all seen by London Centric, but said that nobody had come or explained to her why it was no longer working.

One mother told London Centric that her two-year-old son collapsed in the heat this month. Another said her child had been taken to hospital, where doctors told her the illness was heat-related.

The off-shore owner

Land registry documents show that the building was bought in October 2013 for £36m by an Isle of Man-based company called Colliers Wood Investment Limited. This company’s ultimate owners and financial backers are obscured by its offshore location but Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital acts as the freeholder and responded to press queries.

Criterion Capital then leases flats in the tower to Aura Assets Management and People First Housing, which in turn sign valuable leases with London councils to house homeless people requiring temporary accommodation.

Criterion Capital’s representatives at communications agency DRD Partnership said all questions about the air conditioning should be sent to these two temporary accommodation providers: “It is not correct that Criterion has switched off, disabled or directed the disconnection of air conditioning in any units in Britannia Point or any other building that it owns and that are let to tenants.

“Any suggestion that Criterion has deliberately deprived occupiers of air conditioning, or is responsible for any such decision, is materially false and to assert otherwise is incorrect and would be providing readers with misinformation now that the facts of the situation are clarified to you. Decisions made by a leaseholder relating to their sublets is a matter for them and they should be your first and only point of contact for this enquiry.”

Following these instructions, we contacted Aura Assets Management and People First Housing, the latter of which is in the process of being struck off the companies register. Neither company responded to our requests for comment.

We also asked Criterion Capital about its relationship with the two temporary accommodation providers that sublet the flats in question. For instance, on LinkedIn the sole director of People First Housing describes his main job as being an “asset manager at Criterion Capital”. We did not receive a response to this follow-up question.

Although Britannia Point is in the borough of Merton, households have been placed in temporary accommodation there by a host of different London councils. The majority of people London Centric spoke to were being housed by Croydon Council, with Tower Hamlets, Sutton, and Wandsworth also having residents in the building.

Sutton Council told us that “following previous reports earlier this year about Britannia Point, the council made a decision not to place any new residents into this block”. Tower Hamlets said it expected “all accommodation providers and managing agents we work with to maintain properties to an appropriate standard and to respond quickly when concerns are raised”. Wandsworth and Croydon did not respond to our request for comment.

“Today it’s on. Maybe tomorrow it’s off”

On Tuesday afternoon residents received an email from Aura’s maintenance coordinator: “If your air conditioning is working, please do feel free to use it. We would just gently remind you that running it constantly can lead to higher electricity bills, and we don’t want anyone to find themselves in financial difficulty as a result.” It said that “on a summer usage for 3 months for example this would typically equate to £150 so £35 - £50 per month extra.”

But residents said they believed it had only been switched on following questions from news outlets, and expressed fears it would go off again when media interest subsides.

“Today it’s on. Maybe tomorrow it’s off,” said Mussie.

In March, London Councils, the body that represents all local authorities in the capital, wrote to Criterion Capital boss Asif Aziz to explain that they were considering refusing to use his company’s buildings for temporary accommodation. They said they had previously stopped working with housing providers that engage in poor practices

A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: “People living in temporary accommodation must be treated with the same dignity and respect as any other resident.

“Private temporary accommodation providers who don’t address serious health and safety problems face enforcement action including civil penalties of up to £40,000 and court action.”

As for the residents themselves, they have lost faith in the building managers. When asked what she thought about only those in temporary accommodation losing access to air conditioning, Magdalene said: “This is very, very wicked.”

Following the publication of this story, we heard from two further councils. Wandsworth Council told us that it was “immediately” making arrangements to move the four households it had placed in Britannia Point to alternative accommodation.

Croydon Council told us that it had “been in contact with the landlord, Criterion Capital, who have confirmed that the air conditioning system has now been switched on” and that it would “continue to be in contact with the landlord to seek assurances that the appropriate checks are in place and our residents are being kept safe.”

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Today, as reports swirl that the prime minister is considering nationalising Thames Water, we bring you the unreported story of the thousands of Londoners who are unable to take a shower or wash the dishes in their own homes due to the measures being taken to reduce leaks by the stricken water supplier.

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The London Cable Car that never was

More exclusive details on the “second London cable car” proposed during Boris Johnson’s time as mayor (reports former London Standard City Hall editor Ross Lydall).

London Centric last month told how, shortly before the 2012 Olympics, the then Transport for London commissioner Peter Hendy received a possibly tipsy call from Boris Johnson, during which the then mayor of London suggested a successor to the newly opened Royal Docks to North Greenwich “dangleway”.

“Why don’t we build another cable car?” Johnson was said to have asked, as he wobbled home on his bike from an evening engagement.

Now a well-informed source has told London Centric about a proposed route for a cable car that was floated during that period – linking Oxford Street with Knightsbridge, via rooftop stations on the top of John Lewis, Selfridges and Harrods.

However, the new route was apparently not the work of TfL nor the mayor. Instead, the proposal is thought to have come from a consortium that included a cable car manufacturer looking for new business away from Europe’s traditional alpine slopes.

TfL says its archives contain no documentary proof of the proposal. But London Centric was told the proposal was for the cable car to have started from Tottenham Court Road and carried passengers the length of Oxford Street, before traversing Hyde Park to Knightsbridge.

When a mocked-up CGI image was presented to TfL, sources say an order went out internally: on no account was Boris Johnson to be told about it or shown the picture in case he became even more enamoured with the idea. Having wasted vast amounts of time and money on “Boris Island” airport and the ill-fated Garden Bridge, the last thing TfL wanted was to engage more brain power on another hugely challenging project.

London Centric has spoken with numerous key figures from Johnson’s mayoralty. One former Boris top aide said: “The original cable car was viewed as a potential part of a new network of cable car lines – working their way down, criss-crossing the Thames.”

Do you have any documents relating to abandoned plans for cross-London cable cars? Get in touch!

The new Weekend Hopper bus fare comes in this weekend, meaning you can make unlimited bus journeys around London for £1.75 a day on weekends this summer. Here’s an explanation of why Transport for London is having to try new things to convince people to even consider taking the bus.

The Palantir dispute dividing the mayor and the police

There’s an extraordinary row brewing between Sadiq Khan and the Met Police after the mayor blocked a £50m contract the police had agreed with the US data firm Palantir.

The tech company, founded by American Trump-supporter Peter Thiel, had been due to use its technology to automate analysis of criminal investigations, similar to the work it already does for the NHS. But Khan’s team blocked the deal on procurement grounds, having previously raised concerns with the Guardian’s Robert Booth about the Met signing contracts with companies that “act contrary to London’s values”.

Palantir is now suing for the contract to be reinstated, arguing it won the contract fairly only to be blocked for political reasons. Met Police boss Mark Rowley is publicly furious with Khan that the deal has been blocked and said the mayor’s decision will cost the police money and force him to cut officers.

Now, details of the legal defence by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, which oversees the Met, are coming out. London Centric has been told that City Hall will claim a senior member of the Met’s commercial team was instructed to ensure that Palantir got the £50m contract and that the police’s procurement process was formulated specifically to hand the data contract to Palantir.

The mayor’s team will also claim that the Met Police provided inaccurate data to the deputy mayor for policing and crime about the extent to which other companies were in the running for the contract when, it is alleged, Palantir was the only game in town. The mayor’s office will also argue that the deal was really blocked because the police’s supposed desire to give the contract to Palantir had made it impossible to confirm whether the deal was value for money, rather than for ideological reasons. This has the potential to get very messy.

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Talking of Sadiq Khan… he has lost his longstanding head of communications, with Sarah Brown leaving City Hall to run Andy Burnham’s Downing Street media team. Her departure inevitably adds to the speculation that Khan’s team are preparing for life after the mayoralty.

Sorry children, the water fountain is cancelled

What will Thames Water’s hosepipe ban, which came into effect on Thursday, mean for the city’s overheating children?

In east London, Newham Council has said due to restrictions on “non-essential water in public places” the water play areas in Central Park, Plashet Park and Plaistow Park will remain closed for the duration of the ban.

But in the borough of Waltham Forest, fountains in Fellowship Square, Troubridge Square and Coronation Square will remain open, as their water fountains operate using recycled water. A council spokesperson said the fountains “are designed to be environmentally friendly, using a fully recyclable, recirculating water system that is safely treated and chlorinated.”

Tower Hamlets council said it would be keeping open its splash pools in Victoria Park and Mile End Park as they recirculate water, rather than drawing on a fresh supply: “The social, health and wellbeing benefits they provide to residents significantly outweigh their relatively limited water use.”

…and good luck finding a swimming pool

Meanwhile, the sudden closure of the York Hall leisure centre in Bethnal Green has been a source of frustration for east Londoners looking to cool down.

No reason was given but London Centric has learned that it’s due to the discovery of traces of legionella bacteria within the centre’s hot water system. A spokesperson for Tower Hamlets council confirmed: “We have closed York Hall as a safety measure and to allow specialists to clean and flush out the hot water pipes and then retest the hot water system to ensure it has completely gone… We expect this process to take a week or so and we apologise for the inconvenience this has caused.”

Lowering the bar: The Londoners who can’t shower after Thames Water turned down their pressure

By Sophie Wilkinson

Aversano Jacques lives on the top floor of 1950s-built Barwell House by Weavers Fields in Bethnal Green. For the last five months he has been unable to get more than a trickle out of his tap, forcing him to fetch water from a courtyard: “I used to get up at 5:30am to collect water to fill this tank,” he said, pointing to a kitchen bin.

Going all this time without water has taken its toll: “It was humiliating. I’m from India. My family used to laugh at us. ‘You are living in London, you don’t have water for five months?’”

Down the road, we met a single mother who lives on the top floor of a low-rise block of flats in Tower Hamlets with her 13-year-old son. For months, every time she turned her kitchen tap on, only spits of water came out.

“Each morning, I have to pour my kettle from the bathroom handbasin, and then I make tea,” she said. “I’m just fed up and I’m working, I’m a single mum, it’s so stressful, I cannot manage.”

Her son “used to change his uniform two to three times a week”. Now, she says, he has to make one uniform last a week due to the time spent handwashing.

According to Thames Water staff, it’s because the company has turned to a completely legal but extremely frustrating tactic in certain areas of the capital to reduce leaks from ageing pipes: cutting the water pressure.

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But today we want to bring you something a little different. It’s a personal, fascinating reflection by a former Met police officer on the challenges Andy Burnham will face with his day one pledge to eliminate rough sleeping.

With thousands of rough sleepers in London who will need to be housed under the prime minister’s policy, it sets out one person’s frontline experience of why the pledge can be met but only with a lot of hard work

Scroll down to read that. But first, a few quick updates…

Hampstead Heath’s Parliament Hill Cafe finally reopens

The long-running saga of who should run four cafes on Hampstead Heath and in the surrounding area occupied a lot of London press coverage last year, including in this newsletter. There were claims of dodgy dealings by the City of London which controls the sites, a campaign endorsed by Benedict Cumberbatch to save the cafes, and promises to boycott the new operators. It’s all part of a plan, first revealed by London Centric, to run the City of London’s parks on a more commercial basis.

Three of the cafe sites are still subject to a legal dispute with the previous operators. The other is Parliament Hill Cafe on Hampstead Heath, which this week reopened as a branch of the Daisy Green chain.

When London Centric visited it was relatively busy, with lengthy queues for takeaway coffee. Most people we spoke to were unaware of the controversy over who should run the cafe site but were keen to tell us how delicious the ice creams were.

A Hungarian couple, visiting their four-year-old granddaughter, said she preferred the new cakes. The girl gave London Centric a thumbs up as she devoured a Tim Tam.

Many of the old staff had been kept on in new roles, while the menu retained some Italian dishes in a nod to its former operators.

Derrick Aston, 75, fulfilling his yearly grandfatherly duty of taking his two granddaughters out for ice cream, said the refurbishment was a “vast improvement” on the old cafe: “It’s nice, light, and bright. It feels a lot fresher and better.”

Thames Water is imposing a hosepipe ban from Thursday, saying water consumption is 7% above normal in London. If you’re lucky enough to have a garden, you’ve got until the end of Wednesday to water it, fill up a paddling pool, clean your car using a hose, or have a sprinkler on your lawn.

The Knightsbridge car rental scammer

A pervasive theme in a vast number of London Centric stories is that it’s so easy to scam people and open dodgy shops in the capital because no one actually enforces existing laws. You can start a company in London from a PO Box address, steal money from the public, fail to file any accounts, unilaterally opt out of paying taxes, then immediately “phoenix” the business and start again. Your chances of getting punished are small and you can always find someone else to sign the legal paperwork.

So it’s worth highlighting what happens when the law is actually enforced. Classic Parade describes itself as the UK’s “number one chauffeuring and supercar hire service” but was really a scam operation registered to a serviced office in Knightsbridge by founder Andrew Brown.

Members of the public were charged thousands of pounds to rent Ferraris and Lamborghinis for fun, for weddings, or as bucket list experiences for people with terminal illnesses. Then, at the last minute, the booking would be cancelled for unspecified reasons. Refunds would be promised but never returned. If a customer left a negative review, they would be threatened or find their own business received a tit-for-tat negative review.

Classic Parade’s only substantive connection to west London was the director’s trips to luxury boutiques such as Harrods, Gucci, and Prada where almost £30,000 of company funds was spent on “apparent personal expenditure”.

The Insolvency Service did enforce the law in this case. After dozens of victims complained over many years, it prosecuted. Classic Parade Ltd was wound up in court last week. The issue is there, as yet, there are no consequences for the people involved. Brown, who also ran an online course called “University of Crime”, failed to turn up to an interview with the Insolvency Service or answer their questions. He has yet to face any personal charges, although he could be disqualified as a director at a later date. At the moment all that’s left is an abandoned office in Knightsbridge, an abandoned limited company, and a lot of people out of pocket.

Photographer Megan Taylor has been taking pictures of mothers at her child’s London primary school while fellow parent Leonora Haig interviews them about their lives. The chats are delightful snippets of life in the capital. And someone who you might not expect pops up.

One in the eye for journalism

Each week, London Centric strives to publish the best and most curious stories about the capital. What you don’t see as a reader are the stories we check out that never make it to print.

One of our favourite recent tips (send them in here, we read them all, nothing is too small!) was that the British Museum had hired a team of movers, all of whom were of exactly the same height, to ensure there was no damage to the Bayeux Tapestry as it was unboxed.

Eager to discover what the optimum height for an embroidery mover might be, we contacted the British Museum. Sadly, a spokesperson quickly put us back in our level place, insisting that “none of the activity at the British Museum has required the team to be at a set height or to all be the same height.”

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I was a Met police officer: This is what I’d tell Andy Burnham about rough sleeping in the capital

By , a writer and police officer, who served as a Met Police Special Constable in west London between 2020 and 2025.

“As long as you get someone’s name and address in your pocket book, everything else can be worked out later.”

Words of wisdom I remember from one of my first days at Hendon, the Metropolitan Police training school. The question can blunt the shock for a victim, make a suspect begin to understand the implications of what he has done, and give the courts some hope of finding a witness two years later.

It becomes such a matter of routine that it stops being a question and turns into a rhythm. People often answer in the same rhythm before you’ve finished asking, because some people have been giving their details to the police all their lives.

So I’m crouched next to Michael on the corner of a high street. Sleeping bag, back against the window of a closed bank, gone midnight. Name. Date of birth. Address, because it’s what I ask everyone.

And the homeless man tells me his address. Street, flat number, postcode. He isn’t lying. It’s his flat, the council gave it to him years ago, and I could have walked there from this corner in about ten minutes. So could he.

On Monday, Andy Burnham stood outside Number Ten on his first day as prime minister and announced that his government will end rough sleeping. I was a police officer in inner London when this was last tried, and the trouble is that ending rough sleeping and giving everyone somewhere to sleep are not quite the same thing.

I. The flats

On paper, Michael was housed. He had been housed by the local council for 18 years. His tenancy agreement said so, so did his housing officer and so did the forms we filled out every time we met him.

I even went into his flat once. It was on the second floor of a Victorian terraced house in Notting Hill, along a hallway that smelt of damp, behind a fire door. I went there when Michael failed to turn up to a doctor’s appointment and a welfare check was requested. His front door was wide open and I noted the following contents of his bedsit of 18 years: an unmade mattress on the floor with a hoodie as a pillow, a flat-screen TV teetering on a cardboard box, a pile of letters from the National Health Service, and 35 frying pans, all dirty. The TV was on, but no one was home.

Michael was by no means unusual. Over five years I dealt with plenty of people the government or newspapers would call homeless but who held longstanding tenancies. Some flats stood empty, and some were full of the wrong people.

The official term for when a group occupies another person’s flat is cuckooing. This is one of those words used by police, councils and safeguarding teams that sounds almost quaint until you have stood inside a cuckooed home. There was a house we were endlessly called to. In theory, its tenant was a middle-aged man with learning difficulties named Simon. Simon was lovely, but he was lovely to everyone. A gang in the borough had taken advantage of his kindness and set up shop in his home.

Simon would sit watching daytime television while drug addicts smoked crack on his sofa, sold to them minutes earlier by a 15-year-old. I asked Simon once if he wanted these people in his house, and he said he did: “They’re my friends.” After a dozen safeguarding referrals, the courts placed a closure order on the house, preventing anyone other than him from being there. The gang just moved on and found someone else, leaving Simon in a wrecked house that smelt of crack.

Both Michael and Simon were housed. It said so on every system I ever looked at.

II. The hotels

During Covid, London went Q - police refuse to say “quiet” as it summons grief. Volume crime vanished, leaving us with a carousel of mental health and domestic violence calls. Streets that had been filled with tourists and workers were empty, and with no tourists there was no one to beg from. With no emergency calls to respond to, we played hide-and-seek in marked cars, concealing ourselves down alleys and behind council estates while the rest of the team tried to find us. For a job you navigate through by incident, there were no incidents.

But one place the volume never went down was hotels. In the early weeks of the Covid pandemic the government launched a scheme called Everyone In, designed to remove rough sleepers from the streets. With tourism dead and thousands of rooms sitting empty, London councils block-booked hotels and moved thousands of rough sleepers indoors, more or less overnight.

I remember a disturbance at a three-star hotel off the Cromwell Road, the kind of place that used to take coach parties visiting London from regional England. The lobby still had a stack of West End show leaflets by the door, under the shadow of a rapidly installed hand sanitiser station. A support worker in a lanyard and hi-vis vest met us at the lifts and said two men were arguing on the fourth floor about a £10 Tesco voucher, issued to residents as part of the scheme, which had allegedly been stolen. The corridor smelt of microwaved food and every door handle had a bag hanging off it, meals delivered like room service and half of them from the day before, untouched.

The two men were screaming at each other, and while I knew both from previous incidents on the streets, I realised it was the first time I had seen either of them inside. Every few sentences, a door would open and a third character I recognised would poke out like a cuckoo clock and himself scream at the pair of them to shut up. If handled badly, this would end up with a report for burglary and a trip to the cells with a man who had once tried to bite me.

We had staff issue a second Tesco voucher, and both men retreated into their rooms.

Some of these hotel guests had been sleeping rough for years. Others were like Michael.

There was also a Scottish man who lived in a council flat in a nicer part of the borough. I remember him because he had no teeth and a thick Glaswegian accent that made him almost impossible to understand when he was sober. I had arrested him once for kicking his neighbour’s door in, mistaking it for his own. So I was confused to find him in a hotel off Portobello Road. I knew his address; I’d written it in my pocket book during a previous incident. But the volunteers doing homeless outreach had worked off what they could see. They had walked the borough late one night, found him in a sleeping bag, and informed him the council had booked him a hotel room. A volunteer doesn’t think to ask whether the man sleeping rough on the street has been a long-term council tenant. I asked him where his dog was, a Jack Russell he was rarely without. “At home,” he gummily replied. “They won’t let her in.”

III. The rooms

“Can we have a unit make their way to St Mungo’s.” Then nothing. The radio, which was usually a bunfight of officers cutting each other off whenever a suspects-on burglary came out, went silent. Everyone waited for someone else. Eventually a sergeant would assign the nearest car by callsign, and whoever it was would key up and say “All Received, Skip,” in the voice of a man accepting a sentence.

Homeless hostels like St Mungo’s were run by charities and were where the system sent people when it worked. We attended most weeks anyway.

A bedsit is quiet. For some of the people I dealt with, quiet was the enemy. Out on the streets there were people who knew their name, and a routine. These men who lived on the streets, because they were almost all men, would find a pitch they liked and somewhere to eat, a soup kitchen, a church hall. Usually a dog. Indoors there were four white walls under fluorescent light, and a desk manned by officious people in lanyards who stopped you bringing in whatever you used to keep the trauma at bay. It gets louder in the silence.

There was a man who had lived his whole life on the streets before the council decided that he would be placed into a room at St Mungo’s off King Street in Hammersmith. He was in a room he didn’t want, with a neighbour he didn’t want. The two fell out and assaulted each other, so the police were called. He pulled a syringe, and my colleague pulled a Taser. He tried to jump out of the second-floor window and we stopped him. He kicked, spat, scratched and assaulted everyone on the way to custody, and the courts decided that he would be returned to the community because of his mental health. I couldn’t tell you what prison would have done for him either.

I’m not going to pretend I fully understand it. I made tea in a lot of kitchens and stood in a lot of doorways and I can tell you what people did, not always why.

IV. It sometimes works

There was a man who used to have a pitch outside a bank on Earl’s Court Road. At some point I stopped seeing him. It took months to notice; absence isn’t a call the police answer. Usually, such a disappearance is bad news and so one slow night, I ran his name in the computer. Nothing for over a year, no arrests, no welfare checks or sudden death reports. For the average person, no contact with police is unremarkable, but for someone like him it was an anomaly.

Then one day we were called to an address in the borough that I hadn’t been to before. A clean, semi-detached Edwardian red-brick in a nice part of Fulham, where the council puts the better-behaved tenants. It was a report of anti-social behaviour, and we didn’t look at who our informant was before knocking on the door of the downstairs flat. The man I still thought of as the beggar from outside the bank answered, minus the matted hair, and behind him was a hallway of framed pictures.

He wanted to report a man who’d been shooting up by his bins.

Someone on another team said later this man had gone through detox and come out the other side of a charity’s transition programme. Nobody had given him just a flat with no support. The flat came last. In five years I never once saw it work the other way round.

Read more of Ned Donovan’s writing at Terra Nullius.

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Today we’ve got a report from the courtroom where Thalha Jubair, the teenage Transport for London hacker who was the subject of last week’s long read, was jailed for five and a half years. Scroll down to read the incriminating messages he exchanged with his co-conspirator as they dived deeper into the capital’s transport network.

But first, what does Sadiq Khan’s peerage mean for London?

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A beginner’s guide to Sadiq Khan, the Lord, who is mayor of London

Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan will soon become Lord Khan, mayor of London, with a seat in the House of Lords, after Sir Keir Starmer appointed him to parliament’s upper chamber on Thursday.

As he is the first Lord to also be a mayor of London, it’s very important not to confuse Lord Khan, mayor of London, with the Lord Mayor of London, a largely ceremonial position appointed by the entirely separate City of London. The City of London is, of course, a quasi-medieval institution that, when it’s not involved in battles over who gets to serve coffees on Hampstead Heath, runs the bit of the capital where gilet-wearing finance bros mix with wholesale butchers and people who live in brutalist tower blocks with unusual kitchen waste disposal mechanisms.

Lord Khan, as the mayor of London, which in this case actually means Greater London, does have some power over the City of London. But Lord Khan, despite being a lord who is mayor of London, will not get to ride in the ceremonial coach at the annual Lord Mayor’s Show. The seat in the carriage is reserved for the previously-mentioned Lord Mayor of the City of London, a job which, at the time of writing, does not exist. That’s because for the first time in 800 years the holder of the position of Lord Mayor of the City of London is Susan Langley who, while the third woman in history to hold the job, is the first to rebrand it as Lady Mayor of London during her year in office.

Hope that clears things up.

OK, but is Khan giving up on being mayor?

Khan’s elevation to the House of Lords is another point in favour of the theory that he won’t run for a fourth term as mayor in 2028, although there’s nothing in the rules to stop him double-jobbing in parliament’s upper chamber for as long as he wants. (That said, following a recent change in the law, the mayor of London can no longer do what Boris Johnson briefly did and be mayor while also sitting as an MP in the House of Commons.)

The official line from City Hall remains that Khan has no intention of becoming a government minister while he is mayor, will continue to attend all the same meetings as before, and will use his seat in the Lords to speak out on behalf of London. As a City Hall source put it: “Sadiq has not yet decided whether he is standing again for mayor, and will definitely serve out this term.”

Yet as we pointed out in a previous edition, Khan’s political ally Dawn Butler has recently started to fundraise for a mayoral campaign that can’t officially be announced yet but definitely looks a lot like a mayoral campaign that is ramping up. Others gearing up for a run at the Labour mayoral nomination include Tooting MP Rosena Allin-Khan. There’s also the possibility that big name Labour politicians, who might lose their government jobs when former Herne Hill resident Andy Burnham takes over as prime minister on Monday, could be tempted to dip into City Hall politics.

When could Khan make an announcement on his mayoral future? Well, he’s said he’ll make his decision public in “year three” of his term, which we’re currently in. His long-promised pedestrianisation of Oxford Street in September might be a good moment.

Talking of Andy Burnham, Bloomberg News is reporting that the future prime minister has “tasked the civil service with preparing an announcement on the public control of Thames Water” which is likely to see London’s water operator nationalised, at least on a temporary basis, as early as next week. Which is potentially bad news for Thames Water chief executive Chris Weston, who has just seen his pay rise from £869,000 to £995,000 a year.

For services unrendered

Our piece earlier this week on why London is suddenly embracing service charges went everywhere from the Financial Times to Czech-language Reddit. The debate raged in the internet’s best comments section below the line. We had a flurry of emails pointing out the spread of service charges, including some London hotels that now add an “optional” 20% on checkout to pay staff.

(If you missed the piece you can read it here – due to a fat-fingered editor working late it arrived in inboxes just before midnight on Tuesday night, further proof that London Centric is written by real people, not AI).

A lot of people appreciated understanding the tax advantages of shifting to a tipping system, even if it didn’t make them like it any more. And Andrew Marr had us on his LBC show to discuss it, adding: “It was a story that caught my eye, as so much on London Centric does... anyone listening please check it out.” Thanks Andrew!

“Fuck the railways n shit”: In court for the sentencing of the TfL hackers

In the middle of conducting one of the worst cyberattacks in British history, Tower Hamlets teenager Thalha Jubair sent a message to his co-hacker Owen Flowers: “Everyone in irl [in real life] is [p]robably mad as fck”.

On Thursday, Jubair was proved correct. At a two-day sentencing in Woolwich Crown Court, packed with press and the police officers who’d tracked the pair down, he and Flowers were both jailed for five and a half years for the 2024 attack on Transport for London that cost £39m and saw millions of Londoners’ data stolen.

The pair pleaded guilty to offences under the Computer Misuse Act last month, with Flowers, who had never been to London before hacking the capital’s transport network, also pleading guilty to hacking two US healthcare companies. Even though vast sums of cryptocurrency flowed through their online wallets, Mr Justice Turner said that the duo had been “primarily motivated by selfish bravado heedless of the severe consequences to others”.

The public gallery in Woolwich Crown Court was packed for the sentencing, with the families of both Flowers and Jubair smiling at the young men as they sat in the dock. Jubair’s father, who works as a care assistant, was there with his mother, who had given up her job to look after her only child. She was the last person to file out of the courtroom after sitting with her head bowed.

London Centric published a deep dive into Jubair’s story earlier this month but the sentencing further laid bare how two then-teenagers had been able to gain access to the “keys to the kingdom” of London’s transport system. TfL only realised the hack was underway 24 hours after it began, following an alert from the National Crime Agency. The court heard that the pair were “highly skilled with computers” and “capable of wreaking havoc.”

“Fuck the railways n shit”

Despite the sophistication of the attack, the sentencing hearing also revealed the immaturity of the two young men behind it. In addition to ordering takeaways to their home addresses using cryptocurrency linked to other crimes, they were incriminated by Flowers’ decision to record the process of conducting the hack.

They also used their temporary access to TfL’s systems to search for the travel history of celebrities and exchanged messages that were reminiscent of the abusive language of a gaming chatroom.

Their chats contained incredibly offensive terms, with Jubair at one point calling Flowers an “autistic mong” after he typed the wrong command.

Later on, Flowers responded to Jubair and said “u won’t be laughing when ur sat in prison”.

When TfL eventually kicked the hackers out of the system, Jubair asked Flowers if “bro wanna [...] go hack tfl [...] again [...] and just lock it [...] fuck the railways n shit.”

An “online upbringing” in London

On behalf of Jubair, Paul Keleher KC told the court that the young Londoner had an “online upbringing,” learning how to use a smartphone when he was four, owning his own laptop at six, and writing computer scripts by the age of nine. At 13 he was then “groomed and exploited” by older hackers, who “obviously recognised his potential.”

The court heard he went to school near his family home in Tower Hamlets, has a number of GCSEs and had attempted to enrol at colleges. However, extreme bullying led to Jubair seeking isolation in his parents’ Tower Hamlets two-bed flat for long periods, which made him vulnerable to “seeking validation from online users who give him kudos for his online hacking.”

London Centric previously reported how neighbours had seen him being arrested while in his school uniform in relation to previous offences.

Keleher said “there is clearly an unequivocal link between [Jubair’s] development disorder of diagnosed autism spectrum disorder and these offences.” However, the prosecution noted that there are “thousands of young people with autism and ADHD who do not choose to undertake this kind of criminal activity.”

Details of a single unnamed TfL employee were used to gain the initial access. The hackers also relied on social engineering techniques, placing calls to support centres where staff were convinced to reset passwords and bypass two-factor authentication.

Jubair and Flowers were caught by a joint operation between the National Crime Agency, the City of London police, and US authorities.

The City of London police’s Olly Shaw said the case showed the need for a type of “digital prison” to protect society from hackers such as Jubair and Flowers. Under the system they would be monitored in a similar way to the registers used for sex offenders.

When London Centric asked about some of the young neighbours we had spoken to who found Jubair’s technical skills and sudden accumulation of cryptocurrency to be aspirational, Shaw responded by warning about the impact on the convicted duo: “The life chances of these two defendants are now heavily restricted.”

Jail might not be enough to stop the pair from delving into the darker corners of the internet. While in prison awaiting trial Jubair was found to have mobile phones in his cell featuring cryptocurrency wallets and encrypted messaging tools.

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The Soho House founder, Transport for London, and the eviction of the world’s only women-only sculpture garden

If you go to the roof of Temple tube station on the Embankment in central London, you’ll find The Artist’s Garden, the world’s only women-only sculpture park. It’s an outdoor art gallery that makes use of a Victorian public space that had been neglected for decades before an enterprising group seized on its potential in 2021. Yet after five years the art gallery has been given notice to quit by October.

It’s all because Transport for London’s property arm Places for London, which owns the building, says it needs to conduct rooftop repairs for the benefit of the vacant unit underneath, which could attract a new tenant.

“We’re in the middle of a power play and we’re being steamrollered,” The Artist’s Garden founder Claire Mander told London Centric.

London Centric understands that Soho House founder Nick Jones has shown an interest in taking on the lease of the parts of Temple tube station that aren’t required by London Underground. The building, which is opposite Jones’ forthcoming St Clement hotel, was previously occupied by Australian theme bar Walkabout and the lease is currently held by an organisation called The Vinyl Factory.

But is Jones in any way responsible for the looming eviction of The Artist’s Garden? Or is Transport for London being overzealous in its approach to repairs when other solutions might be possible?

Mander, who runs a charity called theCOLAB, said her organisation fought for years to bring the rooftop back into use as a free art gallery after the area had struggled to find a purpose during its 150 years of existence.

“It is de facto public land,” she says. Westminster council eventually gave the go-ahead to open the gallery during the pandemic as part of an effort to get people back into London, with planning permission later secured and a series of “gentlemen’s agreements” covering the gallery’s ongoing use of the site.

Her organisation then began commissioning original works by women artists: “They are desperately underrepresented in the art world. Only 13% of public sculptures in London are by women. Women do not see themselves reflected in the sculpture of the city.”

It was going well until 4 October last year, she said: “I got a call from Westminster saying TfL had sold the roof terrace and you have to vacate. To which we said ‘no’.”

Since then she has been putting pressure on those involved and seeking public support to stay: “Westminster needs to step up and say ‘we control this space’. The Artist’s Garden needs to be part of the deal and part of the future of the roof terrace.”

Jones, one of London’s leading hospitality figures, was recently spotted on the roof terrace alongside his friend, the London designer Thomas Heatherwick. He did not respond to a request for comment but is thought to be interested in the building underneath, rather than the area containing the sculpture garden. The question is whether it’s possible to fix up the former without removing the latter.

Mander said she felt as though, having brought the terrace back into use, her charity was being stitched up: “I think probably Places for London have just done something they can’t back out of, and everyone’s trying to cover each other’s back.”

A spokesperson for TfL’s Places for London said: “The Artist’s Garden has been a valued and much-loved use of the terrace at Temple, and we recognise the contribution it has made to artists, young people and the local community. However, the terrace and station roof may now require essential repair and safety works, and the space needs to be cleared for the assessment of the extent of the works required.

“The terrace is legally protected public open space and will always remain publicly accessible. We are working with Westminster City Council and local stakeholders to explore alternative locations nearby for The Artist’s Garden, while also developing future plans for the terrace at Temple.

“The leaseholder of the adjoining commercial space at the station is Vinyl Factory, a cultural operator already active locally. Any future proposals for the terrace will protect public access, support the area’s cultural character and be subject to approval, including from TfL and Places for London.”

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In the past, default service charges in the UK were limited to sit-down restaurants. Tipping culture, where you’re expected to add an extra payment on top at the moment you place your order, was a strongly resisted American affectation. If you were having a good night out, you might offer to buy a drink for the bar staff, or leave some money at the end of a meal, but that was the limit.

Now, in the space of just a couple of years, that has completely changed. What began as a trickle has become a tidal wave. Service charges are being automatically applied to pints served in historic pubs, cocktails in bars, and takeaway coffees in cafes where your interaction with the barista lasts a few seconds.

Paying by card? Then you’ll increasingly be asked to choose which percentage you want to add on top, while the staff member looks on awkwardly, or just find that a service charge has been added by default.

But why?

It’s always tax

London Centric has been talking to hospitality operators and workers across the capital. They say there’s a holy trinity of factors which have combined to bring automatic tipping culture to London.

Firstly, and by far the biggest reason cited by operators, is increased taxes on employers. The key moment was chancellor Rachel Reeves’ decision to substantially increase the rate of employer national insurance from April 2025. She also, in a move that attracted less attention, massively reduced the exemptions for part-time staff, hitting many pubs and cafes.

Secondly, a law introduced in late 2024 means all tips and service charges must go to staff rather than being swallowed up by a venue’s operator. The flipside of this is that, provided a service charge is genuinely optional, operated independently, and can be removed by the customer on request, the service charge money can go directly to employees with only a 20% deduction for income tax.

This means staff earn far more from increased service charges than they do from increased wages.

Thirdly, the introduction of new technologies and touchscreen credit card machines made it feasible for a venue to prompt for a tip even if you’re in a fast-moving queue.

Essentially, at a time of ever-increasing wage demands, all these factors have combined to push the capital’s struggling hospitality trade into a mass outbreak of (entirely legal and logical) tax avoidance.

Service charges are a way of getting more money to staff and giving less to the government

Vicky Chiriga, 36, is the managing director of hospitality company Quiet Enjoyment. She told London Centric that one of her venues was an early mover and introduced a default 5% service charge on bar orders in 2022: “It was a way for us to generate more funds for our staff. We were really struggling at that time to afford our team, as there’d been multiple minimum wage increases. It was a way for us to stay competitive without having to increase our menu pricing directly.”

Traditionally, if a venue wanted to pay their staff higher wages, they simply put up their menu prices. But price-sensitive customers increasingly object to these headline price increases. There’s also the tax issue.

“If we increased the drinks prices by the same amount, which is what a lot of people say you should do, that would be taxed very differently by the government, and then there’d be less to give to the staff,” said Chiriga.

In simplified terms, putting an extra £1 on the headline price of a drink will enable an employee to receive 52 pence in their bank account. But if you put £1 on the price of a drink via a service charge then that will give an employee 80 pence in their bank account, as it removes all the deductions for VAT and national insurance charges.

Matt Paice, the co-owner of Michelin-starred central London restaurant Chishuru, said the shift to service charges was a sign of strain within London’s hospitality industry: “It’s a move of desperation in the face of relentless wage increases.”

He said staff and operators now consider ubiquitous default service charges to be a reliable alternative form of salary that sidesteps the tax system: “Labour is now by a long way the principal cost of running a food and drink venue. It used to be ingredients, not any more.”

Rapid increases to the minimum wage rates are pushing up salary demands across the board. As a result, wages for London bar staff are increasing rapidly, exacerbated by a shortage of cheap European staff post-Brexit.

Rebranding part of an employee’s salary as a “service charge” also means owners get to engage in “menu engineering” to keep headline prices low.

The employee receives more money. Both sides pay less tax. And the customer? They can be left feeling a bit miffed, especially if they don’t understand the reason for the sudden proliferation of service charges.

London goes American

“For me it’s good, it adds a few hundred on a month, so I obviously like it,” said Ben Smith of The Black Penny in Covent Garden. “But as a customer it’s frustrating, I can see both sides. For the customer the bills are already very high… it’s becoming a bit too much like America.”

Harriet, who works in one central London coffee shop, said moving to an establishment that applied a service charge had made a massive difference to her take-home pay: “It’s way busier in Costa and you get paid much less.

“It works like this: the money you lose in tax, you basically get back in tips now.”

Card payment systems that automatically prompt for tips also mean people don’t have to manually input the sum they’re willing to give.

Chiriga said she asks her bar staff not to apply the service charge when someone is just buying one or two pints, or if the order is less than £10, because “everyone is going through the same economic challenges”.

She said there’s enormous pressure to keep headline prices down: “I go out myself and I’ll buy a pint and it’s £8.20, and I’m shocked because it feels so expensive. So that is always really my last port of call to put the prices up.”

In turn this is pushing Londoners out of bars and communal spaces: “People will come, they’ll buy the more expensive drink, but they might have one instead of two. Or they might come once a month, instead of two or three times a month, because it’s just too expensive for them.”

London’s hospitality industry is going through a tough period, with some operators lobbying the government for a reduction in VAT. It’s also competing for high street locations with dodgy shops that unilaterally opt out of paying taxes. These dubiously run stores have substantially lower operating costs, because they choose not to pay taxes, meaning they can afford to pay landlords higher rents than legitimate cafes. All of this incentivises legitimate outlets to find new ways to pay staff while reducing their tax burden.

Chiriga said she completely understands why people are anti-tipping and why a small number of customers ask for the service charge to be removed. But she wants the public to understand that a standardised service charge is replacing the big cash tips that used to be common pre-Covid: “London bar culture has changed over the years. When I was a bartender at 18, I used to earn more in tips than I did in my basic wages. This was before card machines were the default way that people paid, and more people paid with cash. I think it’s worth reminding people that tipping has always been a big part of hospitality wages.”

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Dawn Butler raises money ahead of her mayoral run that may or may not be happening.

So far, our reporting on the 2028 London mayoral election has been dominated by unknowns: who within Labour could replace Sadiq Khan as the party’s candidate? Will Khan run for an unprecedented fourth term? Does anyone want to stand for the Greens?

Amid the speculation, only one thing has been guaranteed: despite the absence of a formal vacancy, Dawn Butler MP has repeatedly and publicly said that she’d like to be the next Labour candidate for mayor when a vacancy arrives. And she’s been campaigning as if there will be a vacancy ahead of the 2028 election which, as she is close to Khan, would indicate his time as London mayor is coming to an end.

At the end of May she denied a story by Ava Santina on PoliticsJOE that she was about to turn her informal mayoral campaign into a formal, public campaign. (London Centric has heard this didn’t go down especially well at City Hall.)

Yet despite the denials a quick look at Butler’s recently released parliamentary register of interests shows that she received more than £11,000 in donations, the sort of money that would be helpful for a mayoral campaign, around the same time that she was denying it. Two of the donors are Felicity Minton and Jacquie Lawrence. They’re former television executives who now run Jackdaw Media, which focuses on creating women-led stories. The company created a documentary about Linda Riley, the founder of Lesbian Visibility Week, who also recently donated to Butler. Back in 2017, Butler appointed Riley as the Labour party’s LGBT Diversity Lead. The rest came from Supreme Creations, a company that manufactures reusable bags and eco-friendly packaging.

Butler’s spokesperson told London Centric: “Faced with increasing pressures on workload, the donations received by Dawn’s office are to support the running of her office and its campaigns. Dawn has never hidden the fact that it would be her dream one day to serve as mayor of London, and will put her name forward to stand when there is an opportunity to do so. London is currently served by Dawn’s close friend the brilliant mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.”

Meanwhile, the clock is starting to tick for Khan to make his mind up on a potential fourth term. The mayor, who outpolls his party in the capital, would have a clear run if he wanted to aim for 16 years in power. But if Khan has had enough and stands aside too late, his replacement as Labour candidate might not have time to bed in and introduce themselves to the public. Based on previous political cycles, Khan would be expected to declare his hand by Labour party conference at the end of September.

Did Andy Burnham really pledge to cut Londoners’ transport fares?

We keep getting emails about this Standard story, in which former Herne Hill resident and future prime minister Andy Burnham appears to have committed to cutting the cost of travel in London. The headline is clear. The detail of whether this was actually Burnham’s intention is not. Everyone actually involved in London transport policy seems a bit baffled by it.

What appears to have happened, as per WalesOnline, is that someone on Burnham’s campaign team wrote an opinion piece on the need for Manchester-inspired devolution across the UK, changed a few place names, then sent subtly different versions to news outlets in Scotland, Wales, and London.

All of the different pieces carried vague pledges with the placenames changed to fit different regional audiences.

The London version went to the Standard and told Londoners that they could learn from Burnham’s Greater Manchester bus model. This is strange, as it’s essentially a copy of the system London has had since the 1980s.

For instance, in the Scottish version, Burnham described how he has an economic plan based on devolution:

“For Scotland, that means energy, housing and transport. It means taking the cost of bills, rents and buses seriously. It means making sure people are not left overpaying for the basics while their wages stand still and their communities are asked to accept less.”

With a quick copy and paste, this became a new version for London readers:

“For London, that means housing, energy and transport. It means taking the cost of rent, bills and fares seriously. It means making sure people are not left overpaying for the basics while their wages stand still and their communities are asked to accept less.”

This quote then became the basis of the headline, seen by millions of people, that Burnham would definitely be cutting London fares, even though a bus fare in the capital remains below the Manchester rate.

The same kept happening. Scottish audiences were told by Burnham that moving part of Downing Street to Manchester would improve their lives:

Number 10 North will be the nerve centre of a rewired Britain. It will be the conduit through which we redistribute power and resources across the UK. Its job will be to make power flow into places like Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Paisley and Easterhouse, not hold it back.

For London, with a quick Ctrl+F to find some London place names, this became:

Number 10 North will be the nerve centre of a rewired Britain. It will be the conduit through which we redistribute power and resources across the UK. Its job will be to make power flow into places like Lewisham, Enfield, Ealing and Harrow, not hold it back.

This continued throughout, with Scottish place names switched for London boroughs. It remains to be seen if moving parts of Downing Street out of London really is a boost for London.

Talking of Burnham, at the last count he had the backing of 369 Labour MPs in the ongoing leadership election. Then, on Tuesday afternoon, it was announced that London MP Neil Coyle, who represents the Bermondsey and Old Southwark seat, had nominated Hornsey and Friern Barnet MP Catherine West. No one is entirely sure why.

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PS… We’ve failed to order a kids’ meal

Back in May, London Centric covered the possible tax implications of Rachel Reeves’ decision to slash VAT on “children’s meals” this summer, which covered any dish that is smaller and cheaper than normal and marketed as part of a 'children's meal', even if it isn't ordered or eaten by a child.

Since then, the adults at London Centric have been trying and failing to find a restaurant brave enough to actually explore/exploit this tax loophole. We contacted restaurant Kitty Fisher’s, which two months ago had announced a kids' menu featuring oysters, offal, and “all the other good stuff KIDS love”. They disappointingly told us this “sadly was a joke.”

Is there any restaurant in London that will let us order a luxury meal off the kids’ menu? Get in touch and we’ll send our best people there.

PPS… Note from Jim: If this landed in your inbox very late at night, apologies. I’d just finished editing this edition when I accidentally flicked a switch and started the process of emailing it to tens of thousands of readers. I couldn’t stop it being sent. But I was able to add this note at the bottom. Please take it as proof that London Centric really is a non-stop operation run by exhausted humans rather than by a soulless AI.

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There’s a minor problem: the onboard computer that’s controlling our progress knows it has right of way. But an aggressively driven SUV feels otherwise and shoots across the mini-roundabout in front of us, causing our AI-driven transport pod to abruptly brake.

The technicians on board explain that the autonomous vehicles are too well behaved. They insist on following the Highway Code, which is sometimes incompatible with making rapid progress on the capital’s streets.

Once we negotiate the junction, progress is smooth. The electric-powered vehicle drives at a steady 15mph in fully autonomous mode from Barnes High Street to Hammersmith Bridge. It traces the bend in the River Thames at a steady pace, albeit with an uncannily conservative approach to driving that feels more like being on a tram than a bus. There’s no steering wheel, just two wide benches at both ends of the vehicle. It feels like you’re at the back of the Docklands Light Railway, just facing the wrong way.

It has ramps for wheelchair access and giant screens showing the mapping of potential risks for hundreds of metres around using LIDAR sensors. While passengers are currently required to sit down and wear seatbelts, in the future it could hold 14 people and operate without onboard staff. Despite our test ride taking place in 35°C heat there is incredibly effective air conditioning. Passersby and schoolchildren all want to have a look. So do the human bus drivers parked up and having a rest between shifts.

London Centric was the first news outlet to be invited on board the Ohmio vehicle during its visit to the capital this week. While self-driving pods have been tested over the last decade in the Greenwich Peninsula and the Olympic Park, this is believed to be the first time that an autonomous bus has been tested on London’s public roads in real conditions, alongside human drivers in their private cars and vans.

“This is the future of transport: autonomous vehicles,” said Charles Campion, a local architect and member of the Barnes Hammersmith Electric Light Transit group. “It’s the future of taxi transport, of personal transport, but also public transport.”

Campion is part of a community group in south west London who are trying to solve a problem. This week local government officials finally gave up on plans to allow cars or buses to return to Hammersmith Bridge, which links Hammersmith to Barnes over the River Thames in west London.

The Grade II* listed Victorian bridge, which has been closed to motor traffic since 2019, is now too weak to carry the weight of modern vehicles without vast investment. As a result it is set to become a permanent walking and cycling bridge.

But what about the elderly, disabled, or less able who can’t walk or cycle over the bridge to and from the transport hub of Hammersmith?

That’s where the proposal for the self-driving pods comes in. A standard TfL single-decker bus weighs around 15 tonnes. Unlike robotaxis, the pods follow a fixed route and only weigh three tonnes, which the community group says would fit within the bridge’s weight limits.

“There isn’t a business case for the government to fund the rebuilding of Hammersmith Bridge,” argues Campion. “We’ve got to be real, and accept where we are now.”

These vehicles also don’t need as many staff, he says, although it’s not entirely clear how you’d convince people to tap their payment card: “Once you take the operator, the driver out of the equation, costs come tumbling down.”

In recent months Londoners have got used to the sight of driverless taxis from the likes of Waymo and Wayve circling the capital on test drives while covered in sensors, ahead of their launch to paying customers later this year. But Campion, along with a group of local activists, wants to convince Transport for London that a network of lightweight self-driving AI buses can fill a gap in the capital’s transport networks, starting with Hammersmith Bridge.

The initial proposal is for a service from Hammersmith transport interchange to the Barnes side of the bridge. This could then be extended all the way to Barnes railway station, says Campion: “We’re looking at a fleet of maybe 10 vehicles, eight running, with one pod across the bridge at any one time. We can carry thousands of people a day.”

It would require some specialist infrastructure, with a total cost estimated at around £10m. While there wouldn’t be drivers, there would need to be a control centre with permanent staffing in the local area to respond to any incidents.

The Hammersmith Bridge closure has changed the area. The residents of Barnes, one of London’s wealthiest enclaves, have lost the miles of traffic that used to blight their area, as residents of south London no longer drive through Barnes to get north of the river.

Not everyone’s happy with this. Some local MPs have campaigned for the bridge to be reopened, with Putney’s Labour MP Fleur Anderson leading a campaign on the basis it causes congestion elsewhere and leaves “Roehampton effectively cut off”. But responsibility for the bridge was given solely to Hammersmith & Fulham council in 1986 when the Greater London Council was abolished. And they don’t have much interest in paying the enormous cost of sorting it out for the benefit of residents south of the river.

As the FT’s Stephen Bush put it, it’s a microcosm of London’s bodged devolution deal: “The people of Hammersmith and Barnes mostly get what they want, a beautiful bridge free of cars. The drivers of Wandsworth will have to take longer journeys.”

Transport for London, for its part, put the kibosh on the suggestion it would back the driverless buses proposal.

“We have no plans to introduce these vehicles on Hammersmith Bridge and no plans to introduce driverless buses elsewhere on the network,” a spokesperson for the transport authority told London Centric.

Oh, and the unions that represent bus drivers aren’t necessarily going to be happy.

The Barnes group aren’t giving up though. A solution will eventually need to be found, they believe. And they are going to keep making the case for autonomous pods.

“If I was looking at a place where I used to run several bus services across seven days a week and now I can’t, to me it’s natural to start looking at an alternative,” says Campion.

If you want to see the vehicles in action, pop along to the Barnes Fair on Saturday or walk across Hammersmith Bridge to Castelnau Road.

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Thanks to everyone who enjoyed our big read on teenage hacker Thalha Jubair who brought down TfL. The comments section was fascinating, as usual.

Professor Peter Sommer, who spoke to us for the piece, said a major issue is the “social element in the motivations of this class of cybercriminal”. The vast sums of money gained are not really the point:

“They meet people who are similar to them in interests and outlook, help each other out within the various groups but also want to be better than anyone else. The ransoms they collect are trophies - in most cases turning crypto into fiat cash without being traced is very difficult. But the ransom money is of course still lost to the victims.”

There’s a case to be made that the teenager Jubair was, on paper, one of the capital’s richest people, all while living in his parents’ Tower Hamlets flat.

But is the Berlin Wall art?

We had a lovely chat with Steven Thorpe, the property developer who decided to install a piece of the Berlin Wall in his south London garden.

It’s been widely reported that he’s now in a planning battle with Southwark council, after a neighbour complained that the concrete slab is too close to their garden and ruins their view. Thorpe insists it’s an artwork and has pledged to fight the case and open up his garden to community visits so locals can learn about the wall’s history and the end of the Cold War.

Thorpe showed us around his garden and pointed out how he’d raised the fence to screen the piece of wall from his neighbour’s garden: “He said it was spoiling his view. I don’t know what his view was.”

He handed us the letter from Southwark council which concludes that he does not have the right to put up a giant slab of reinforced concrete in his garden. The planning officer wrote: “I consider that the works you have carried out are unacceptable and result in a planning harm. I will recommend that a planning enforcement notice is served. That notice is likely to require the removal of the works.”

In the worst-case scenario, Thorpe risks a £20,000 fine for failure to comply. He disagrees with Southwark’s interpretation: “If it’s considered a piece of art or a historical artefact it shouldn’t be dealt with in the same way as if it was a wall or a building. There are two sides to every dispute. I would argue it’s a historic artefact.”

The story of how Thorpe came to purchase a slab of the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall is a tale in itself. A German farmer took large lumps of the concrete when the wall came down in 1989 and used them to build farm sheds. Decades later, the farmer realised he owned a supply of priceless art. Thorpe won’t say how much he paid for the slab of wall, although he says the farmer chucked in a free box of pig’s ears for his dog to eat as a thank you. He also sent us video of him transporting it to Dulwich from Germany.

Sad news from Scotland

Long-term London Centric readers will remember that our ongoing investigation into central London’s tax-evading gift shops uncovered a linked network of shops in Scotland. Last summer we published our findings in collaboration with the wonderful Edinburgh Minute because stories that begin in London often shape the rest of the UK. The Scottish government took our findings seriously, just as the Westminster government has been reading our reporting on dodgy shops.

Sadly, in the early hours of Thursday morning, part of the historic Edinburgh building that housed the tax-evading gift shops caught fire and suffered “extensive damage”. The building’s owner is billionaire London landlord Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital, which had planned to turn the unit into a branch of its windowless Zedwell hotel chain.

Criterion said in a statement: “There have been no reported injuries and we are very grateful to the emergency services for their swift response and professionalism. This building is an important and historic part of Edinburgh’s city centre and we continue to liaise with the emergency services and relevant authorities.”

Positive cinema news from central London

Restrictions on Picturehouse Central’s rooftop members’ bar, one of central London’s best-kept secrets, have finally been lifted. For the last year or so members have been unable to enjoy the full benefits. We covered this baffling situation at length last summer. Officially, both sides blamed Westminster Council for the restrictions. All of this was news to the council, who kept telling us it was nothing to do with them and referred questions to the landlord, Criterion Capital.

Picturehouse had been in a messy legal dispute which resulted in a judge ruling that Criterion unlawfully overcharged Picturehouse hundreds of thousands of pounds for the cinema’s insurance. An appeal in the case was recently abandoned and a truce appears to have broken out, suggesting the future of this central London cinema is now secure. Negotiations over the Prince Charles Cinema, another Criterion-owned central London cinema, are understood to be continuing.

Preposterous property of the week

At first glance from the street this Grade II listed London home doesn’t meet our usual high standard of ridiculous London properties. Then you notice the underground car lift.

Concealed behind its normal facade is a winding labyrinth of glass and marble. With a floor plan that we can’t quite get our heads around, this £17.95m six-bed in Notting Hill takes up 9,561 sq ft of space, and features a swimming pool, gym, and cinema.

There’s Norway they’d make a joke that bad

World Cup fever continues to hit London during the heatwave. Aside from the disturbances following Morocco vs France, there’s the fact that transport operators are competing against each other to rename their stations. Thameslink has turned Bellingham station into Jude Bellingham, while Canary Wharf is currently Kaneary Wharf. Could Reece James’ Park follow next?

On Saturday night it’s time for Norway vs England. It’s not one of football’s biggest rivalries but if you look long enough you can find Norwegian influence in London. There’s the docks in south east London where Norwegian timber used to be unloaded, which is why there’s the beautiful Norwegian church next to the Rotherhithe tunnel. There’s the annual Norwegian Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square. There’s the name of Tooley Street near London Bridge. And there’s London Bridge itself, which was supposedly (let’s not check the facts too much) pulled down by a Norwegian king a thousand years ago.

We did our best to prove on Instagram that all news is local if you try hard enough.

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PS It was the 21st anniversary of the 7/7 bombings earlier this week. Quite a few people linked to our piece from this time last year on how the capital’s (human, non-AI) bus drivers got people home that night. If you missed it last year, have a read now.

It was the takeaway order to his family’s Tower Hamlets flat that proved to be Thalha Jubair’s undoing.

Last month the young Londoner pleaded guilty to taking down Transport for London’s computer systems in one of the worst cyberattacks in British history, an event which brought months of chaos to the capital’s transport network in late 2024.

Jubair thought he had covered his tracks through an elaborate system of amnesiac operating systems and virtual private networks. These not only allowed him to cause mass chaos in his home city of London but also allegedly enabled him to extort tens of millions of dollars in ransom payments from US companies.

Then he got hungry.

According to US prosecutors, the then-teenage Jubair made the mistake of deciding to order a takeaway. To do this, he bought gift vouchers for an unnamed food delivery service using a cryptocurrency wallet. This wallet hosted on the same server he and his fellow hackers allegedly used to store tens of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin they’d taken in ransoms paid by major US companies.

Jubair then had the takeaways delivered to the flat where he lived with his parents, which is located in a high-rise block next to a Met Police call handling centre near Bow Road tube station in east London.

This was one of the clues which led to Jubair’s arrest last September, after a major investigation by the National Crime Agency, City of London Police, and the FBI. He was charged with committing unauthorised acts against TfL under the Computer Misuse Act, causing at least £39m in damage to TfL and months of disruption to the capital’s transport network. London Centric was in Woolwich Crown Court last month as the unassuming 20-year-old, who appeared awkward in glasses and a badly fitting grey suit, unexpectedly changed his plea to guilty at the last minute, alongside his Walsall-based co-defendant Owen Flowers.

So who is the TfL hacker? By attending court appearances, reviewing Telegram messages, and interviewing cybersecurity experts, London Centric has pieced together Jubair’s journey from a Roblox-playing east London child to a criminal mastermind who allegedly extorted tens of millions of pounds from his bedroom as part of the Scattered Spider cybergang.

His is the story of a very modern London adolescence.

The flight risk who took down a transport system

It was by compromising the account of a single employee that Jubair was able to hack into TfL’s systems in late August 2024, catastrophically damaging the transport authority’s ability to manage its own systems. At an early court hearing last September, the prosecutor said that the “ultimate objective of the attack was to install ransomware”.

Although buses and tubes were kept running, one TfL executive described the behind-the-scenes situation to London Centric as “an utter shitshow”, with hundreds of thousands of holders of discount travel cards affected.

The booking system for the Dial-a-Ride buses used by people with disabilities was shut down, and data on live tube times for apps such as TfL Go and Citymapper was taken offline.

Hundreds of thousands of Londoners were overcharged for using the network, and many of the capital’s teenagers were unable to access free travel, leaving some without the means to get to work or college. Sadiq Khan later told London Centric that some passengers would never be refunded.

TfL commissioner Andy Lord described the incident as a “highly sophisticated” cyber attack that could have been much worse. Staff at TfL’s HQ were unable to log on to the IT network, WiFi was taken down, and office-based staff were sent to work from home for the whole of September. When they returned, every TfL staff member had to travel into the office to have their login details reset. City Hall had just outsourced its IT to TfL meaning everyone from the mayor downwards had their work systems affected. Projects ranging from the extension of the contactless payment scheme to commuter stations to the rebranding of the London Overground lines were delayed.

Flowers, the teenager from Walsall, was arrested soon after. But it took another year for Jubair, who was portrayed in US court documents as a mastermind of the group, to be charged. We now know that the incident, which cost TfL £39m, and in which 10 million people’s data was stolen, was in part orchestrated from the bedroom of Jubair’s east London flat.

Paul Foster, the head of the National Crime Agency’s cyber crime unit, said the “profile of offenders like Flowers and Jubair demonstrates the increasing threat from cyber criminals based in the UK and other English-speaking countries”.

At a pretrial hearing last September that London Centric attended, the court heard Jubair had been asked to hand over his PINs and passwords but had declined. It was also said that, despite being ordered to hand over his travel documents, including his UK passport, he was found to have retained a Bangladeshi passport, raising concerns he was a flight risk.

Despite this, on the first day of what was scheduled to be a six-week trial, Jubair and his co-defendant Flowers pleaded guilty to the TfL hack, on the lesser basis that they had not “intended” to cause damage. Instead, the duo accepted they had been “reckless as to whether damage was caused”.

In court, it was difficult at points to believe that the awkward young person with greasy hair seated behind a glass screen was a crypto multimillionaire who’d been able to terrorise some of the biggest companies in the US and extract massive cryptocurrency ransoms, sometimes using the username @autistic.

Unlike Flowers, who often had no family present in the public gallery, Jubair’s parents appeared at every court hearing, sometimes even waving to their son. His father had the same thick-rimmed glasses and black hair as Jubair. His mother and father stuck together in the court waiting area, speaking softly and anxiously to each other, while his mother was at points openly emotional.

This article took more than a year to report, with journalists on the ground across London. Want more original investigative like this one in your inbox? Join the London Centric mailing list for free. No spam.

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“He kept to himself”

Born in 2006, Jubair first entered the world of cybercrime while living with his parents in the family’s east London flat. The 22-storey tower block where he grew up is typical of many London local authority neighbourhoods, overlooking a park and play area, and opposite a primary school. It is an unlikely headquarters for a millionaire cyber criminal.

“He went to school, came home, and that’s it,” said one neighbour. “You wouldn’t see him in the park. He kept to himself.”

He might have lived in east London, but his real home was the virtual world he accessed inside his bedroom. Like many hackers, he came through gaming, where he began winding up fellow players and stealing their usernames.

“It’s common [for hackers] to be recruited in their early teens on gaming platforms like Minecraft and Roblox,” Brian Krebs, a cyber security reporter who has traced Jubair’s hacking career, told London Centric. Jubair ultimately joined the Scattered Spider hacking group, which has been linked to last year’s hacks on M&S, the Co-op, and Harrods that left shelves bare in British supermarkets. This is in turn part of a broader loose-knit underground network of children and teenagers known as “The Com”, an online term short for “community”.

Authorities believe Jubair was 14 years old when he began offending, moving away from gaming into what was to be the initial hallmark of his career as a cybercriminal: SIM-swapping. This is when an individual’s mobile phone number is redirected to a hacker, enabling authentication codes to be sent directly to criminals.

The approach was so successful that by 2022, Jubair was allegedly helping to run a channel on the messaging app Telegram called Star Chat selling SIM-swapping services to other hackers, with a focus on targeting employees at US phone network T-Mobile. Over seven months in 2022, Star Chat gained access to T-Mobile over 70 times. Similar tactics were used on British operators.

Keen to get their hands on other people’s cryptocurrency, teenage hackers such as Jubair realised that they didn’t need to rely on sophisticated coding to hack into someone else’s crypto account. Instead, they could simply talk their way in by taking control of the person’s phone number and resetting their password.

Looking at cryptocurrency conference attendance sheets, crypto investors in the news, and leaked lists of crypto holders, they’d draw up a list of targets whose accounts they planned to take over. Then, someone in the hacking group would play the role of “caller,” which meant ringing up a phone company and convincing them to transfer a target’s phone number to a phone in their possession, enabling them to then intercept incoming two-factor authentication and password reset links.

Internal messages uncovered by Krebs show Jubair allegedly asking other hackers not to share the T-Mobile logo in messages to him, as it would make his parents suspicious if they saw it on his screen: “Parents know I simswap. So, if they see [that] they think I’m hacking.”

Jubair and his associates later moved on to social engineering tactics and ransom work, allegedly targeting some of the biggest companies in the world while working with Russian hackers. This often involved phoning up IT helpdesks and requesting passwords to be reset, gaining access to accounts, then demanding vast ransoms to be paid in Bitcoin to allow the company to continue to function. Many paid vast sums in order to get their businesses back up and running.

The total proceeds of crime allegedly attributed to Jubair are astonishing. US prosecutors linked him and his associates to at least $115m (£86m) in ransom payments. In one example cited in US legal filings, the teenage Jubair allegedly negotiated a $25m (£18m) cryptocurrency ransom payment from a single unnamed US company, while promising to pay a co-conspirator a share of the proceeds. Millions of pounds in ransom payments following a major hack of Las Vegas casinos were linked to Jubair, who also operated under usernames such as “EarthtoStar”, “Brad”, and “Austin”.

In total, prosecutors told the UK courts more than £200m had at some point flowed through cryptocurrency wallets controlled by the Tower Hamlets resident during his teenage years.

When fellow Scattered Spider member Noah Urban was in US custody awaiting trial, court documents allege that Jubair hacked the US federal court system by contacting the help desk, impersonating the relevant judge, asking for a password reset, then gaining entry to the judge’s email account.

The trial alongside the Grand Theft Auto 6 hacker

Even before the TfL attack, Jubair had a criminal record in the UK for hacking as part of the Lapsus$ hacking group and was well known to the authorities.

One neighbour told London Centric that he’d seen the police conduct a raid on the family’s flat around four years ago at 4pm, when school finished for the day, with police taking Jubair away in his school uniform.

In 2023 Jubair sat alongside Arion Kurtaj in Southwark crown court as part of the Lapsus$ hacking case, which involved attacks on tech companies including Nvidia and BT. Kurtaj became notorious for hacking into Rockstar Games and leaking unreleased footage of the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 computer game.

At the time Jubair could not be identified due to his age but it can now be reported that at the end of the trial he was handed an 18-month youth rehabilitation order in December 2023, which he was still subject to when he hacked TfL. According to a contemporary BBC report by reporter Joe Tidy, Jubair was given a three-month intensive supervision and surveillance requirement, and a ban on using VPNs online. Jubair was also sentenced for what the judge described as an “unpleasant and frightening pattern of stalking and harassing” two young women. In total he had 22 previous convictions, including 13 for fraud and one for blackmail.

Professor Peter Sommer, who gave expert evidence in the Lapsus$ trial, told London Centric that the “puzzle” is that Jubair “embarked on this further round of hacks” after sitting through proceedings.

“During his trial [...] it must have been abundantly clear the capabilities of law enforcement investigations. It must have been obvious that in any similar future events he would be under suspicion and surveillance.”

This did not faze the young Londoner, who within a year of the court case was trying to bring down the capital's transport infrastructure.

“Even his neighbours didn’t know what was going on”

As many of the building’s inhabitants were heading out for Friday prayers, London Centric knocked on doors in the block where Jubair grew up. Most neighbours, even those who’d lived there for decades, didn’t know the Jubair family, with some only learning about the multiple police raids that had taken place in the building through London Centric’s enquiries.

Younger residents were more aware of his story, with one 17-year-old telling us he used to go swimming with Jubair.

“It’s a building where everyone knows everything,” said one resident who’d lived there his whole life. “But even his neighbours didn’t know what was going on, even though they saw he got raided.”

Unlike other members of Scattered Spider, who used their stolen cryptocurrency to purchase a $35,000 diamond-encrusted Rolex and Louis Vuitton trainers, neighbours said Jubair looked normal and unassuming. He is autistic and also suffers from depression. The only remark on his appearance was that he always wore a hat. In addition to buying food delivery vouchers he also allegedly made the mistake of topping up his gaming account using funds from the same server as the ransom proceeds.

On another occasion around two years ago, one neighbour said he saw four older boys wearing Gucci clothing snatch a laptop from Jubair in the carpark outside the tower block: “His mum must have called his dad, because he skrrted up in the Prius. The dad was chasing after [Jubair].”

Despite the magnitude of Jubair’s crimes, which affected many of the residents of the block who were unable to travel due to the TfL hack, several neighbours expressed astonishment at his skills. One resident described him as a “genius” while another said they believed Jubair was probably only a “runner” for a larger criminal network who were using him as a “fall guy.” Others said the family have now moved out, with suggestions that “fake police” had previously been sent to their door in a potential bid to extort cryptocurrency.

After learning Jubair got into cybercrime through gaming, one resident mused: “I’m going to get on Roblox.”

Jubair will be sentenced on 16 July, alongside Flowers, for his role in the TfL attack. Although he still faces multiple serious charges in the US, there is no indication as yet that the US authorities are actively pursuing extradition proceedings against him.

Drawing on his own experiences of the youth justice system, one resident of the block told London Centric the judge would give him a lenient sentence, given the age at which he’d become a hacker.

One big question remains. What happened to the proceeds of Jubair’s crimes?

The server used by Jubair to buy his takeaway voucher held $36m (£27m) in cryptocurrency when the authorities seized it in mid-2024. A further $8.4m (£6m) had been moved while the authorities were in the process of taking control of the server, much of which has yet to be traced. This means that somewhere out there, yet to be identified by the police, is cryptocurrency linked to Jubair that is worth millions of pounds.

On hearing the vast sums of money Jubair allegedly controlled while living in the east London block, one teenage neighbour jokingly expressed admiration: “Allah, can he not get us all out of the hood.”

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When Callum turned up to collect the keys for his new flat in Stoke Newington he was excited to move in.

He’d viewed it a few weeks previously, when he was shown around by a chatty young woman from Islington’s Anchor Gate lettings agency. Aware of the risk of London’s increasingly infamous rental scams, he’d first checked the letting agent was a member of a government-approved scheme, carrying the royal coat of arms, to ensure he was dealing with a legitimate operator.

Anchor Gate passed every test. Suitably reassured, he paid the agency £3,500 to cover his deposit and first month’s rent for the east London property.

Yet when he arrived to move in he discovered his new flat’s door was open. Inside was a group of baffled tourists who had rented the Hackney property for a lads’ holiday to the capital.

The young woman who had shown him around the flat was unreachable. The email for Anchor Gate had gone dead.

Rather than being a flat available for a long-term tenancy, he had actually been shown around a property rented from Booking.com by scammers for a weekend and used to dupe people looking for a place to live into paying deposits.

Callum realised he had been robbed of thousands of pounds: “Immediately I felt sick, I knew then this was a scam. While I was still in the flat I called the police and called the bank.”

What baffled him was this: how had a fraudulent estate agent been able to gain real membership of government-approved schemes designed to protect renters from dodgy estate agents?

After weeks of reporting across the capital in a bid to hunt down those responsible, London Centric can reveal just how sophisticated the capital’s rental scam industry has become – and how official systems designed to protect renters have instead been infiltrated by scammers.

Like many of our best stories, this one came from our WhatsApp inbox. Callum is a London Centric subscriber who wanted us to track down who was responsible. Please do drop us a line if you have something you want investigating.

Callum shared many personal documents, including his passport and address, with these criminals during the scam. To protect his identity he asked that his name be changed.

How the scam plays out

Callum found the property, a one-bedroom flat, in March on listings website OpenRent. The young woman who met him at the property handed over a business card featuring two contact numbers and a company number, the unique code a business gets when it’s incorporated at Companies House.

In a classic estate agent trick to drive up competition in London’s overheated private rental market, Callum was shown around at the same time as another couple who were also prospective tenants.

Worried the other couple would put in an offer, he messaged Anchor Gate’s head office immediately following the viewing. An agent called Grayson Elliot-Reed replied to say it was Callum’s flat if he wanted it. Callum now wonders how many other would-be tenants were told the same thing about the same flat that weekend and whether the couple were also duped.

Ironically, Callum told London Centric that the only remarkable thing about Anchor Gate Lettings was just how professional, thorough, and responsive they were for a London estate agency. Anchor Gate head office asked for Callum’s work references, his current landlord’s contact details, bank statements, and a copy of his passport. They even sent him legitimate-looking gas certificates and electrical safety paperwork.

He was mildly confused when Anchor Gate asked to take the discussion off OpenRent’s in-house platform and onto email. But there was one thing that gave him complete confidence. For the last decade, all letting agencies have had to join a government-sanctioned scheme to deal with complaints about their behaviour.

The government authorises private companies to operate these registers under licence, which can then carry the logos of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and National Trading Standards.

One of these companies is called the Property Redress Scheme. It makes millions of pounds a year in profit by charging an annual fee to letting agents, who are effectively paying for the government stamp of approval. The more agents the Property Redress Scheme signs up, the more money it makes for its owner, major US insurance company Brown & Brown.

As rental scams become more commonly reported across the capital, London tenants have become more savvy. In response, it seems the scammers have now realised that, for a few hundred pounds, you can repeatedly set up fake lettings agencies with all the hallmarks of a legitimate business and stamps of approval from the British state.

Last November the scammers who targeted Callum paid £50 to register Anchor Gate Lettings Ltd at Companies House.

Then they paid £190 to join the Property Redress Scheme’s public register of letting agents. The scammers also paid £27 to insure a deposit with the separate government-backed protection scheme MyDeposits. For less than £250 they were able to repeatedly highlight their legitimate use of government-endorsed registers as evidence that people could trust them with thousands of pounds.

Tracking down the scammers

The paperwork Callum was sent was fake but the money he transferred was very real – to a Revolut bank account in the name “Gemma Gascoine”, his supposed new landlord.

He was also given an address for Gascoine in Chigwell, at the Essex end of the Central Line, which London Centric visited in May. On the doorstep we were greeted by a confused man. He said we weren’t the first visitors who had turned up asking for their money back from the mysterious Gascoine, who didn’t live there.

We asked the Property Redress Scheme what checks it carried out to verify that Anchor Gate, a newly formed company, registered to a shared office address on City Road in London, was a legitimate lettings company before putting it on a government-approved register. Neither they nor the government responded to multiple requests for comment.

The Anchor Gate website is no longer live after scamming Londoners out of thousands of pounds. Despite this, the company still appears on the Property Redress Scheme’s public register. That’s despite London Centric repeatedly telling the Property Redress Scheme more than a month ago that it is still endorsing a scam estate agency.

The final clue

We attempted to put all of our findings to the scammers behind Anchor Gate but failed. Everything bounced back and its registered office on City Road refused to take our physical right of reply. Anchor Gate’s sole registered director, a British national called Vladimir Kuzmin, could not be traced.

But there was one final clue.

A copy-and-paste error in the emails sent by the scammers suggested the same group had, a few months earlier, pulled the same trick using a different fake estate agency name.

Just like with Anchor Gate, this second fake estate agency is still registered with the same government-backed scheme. It also has a single named director, who we tracked to an address in Bushey, a Hertfordshire town just inside the M25.

After some consideration, we’re choosing not to name this individual. He didn’t answer his door and his social media posts reveal a string of recent misfortunes including briefly being made homeless and suffering severe health challenges that led to him desperately appealing for money on GoFundMe. We also don’t have any evidence he was involved in running the actual rental scam.

Instead, he fits the pattern we’ve seen with other dodgy London businesses, where a struggling individual is paid a token sum to sign the legal paperwork and take the blame on behalf of the scam’s real operators.

“They’re doing everything except for actually having a flat”

We contacted MyDeposits, which said that rather than handing over Callum’s full deposit, the scammers had posed as a private landlord and paid just £27 for an insurance product, which was enough to produce an authentic link they could send to victims. The company said private landlords “are able to register deposits directly with the scheme in accordance with tenancy deposit legislation”.

Proof that the deposit was protected in a government-approved scheme was used by the scammers in emails to convince Callum that they were legitimate and should be sent more money. While MyDeposits stresses that the existence of a deposit registration is “not designed to operate as property ownership or tenancy verification” it was enough to silence any of Callum’s doubts.

Callum was lucky. In the end he was able to get his rent and deposit back through his bank after it accepted he had been a victim of fraud. But many other victims across London may still be out of pocket. He remains frustrated that London scammers have gained access to the systems meant to protect renters and wants the government to take action.

He’s also now wary of lettings agents that seem professional, given the slickness of the Anchor Gate operation: “When I called their number they even had a message which said the call would be recorded for training and monitoring. They’re doing everything except for actually having a flat. That’s the one bit they don’t have.”

In its emails to scam victims, Anchor Gate stated “we are proud members of the Property Redress Scheme (membership PRS055369)”. Even though their entire business was a fraud, they were telling the truth on this point. It’s just that the guardrails put in place by the authorities to protect tenants are now aiding the criminals in duping the public.

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PS…. We’ll be back next week. In the meantime, word reaches London Centric that one person who might have to deal with London estate agents soon is media baron Lord Lebedev, the owner of the London Standard, longevity podcaster, and a big supporter of London Centric.

We’ve spotted that he’s put his eight-bedroom Stud House in the grounds of Hampton Court Palace up for sale with Knight Frank at a cool £25m. The property has been owned by the Lebedev family for almost two decades and is known for being the site of garden parties featuring everyone from Boris Johnson to Rupert Murdoch and Tracey Emin to Joan Collins. Property records show that in 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, a loan was secured against the property by Lebedev, who has reduced the scope of his London media interests in recent years.

PPS… FIFA has U-turned on its plans to move England’s World Cup match against Mexico earlier in the day and will stick with a 1am BST kick-off. Expect to see a lot of bleary-eyed and/or teary-eyed people on the streets of the capital on Monday morning. One east London primary school has pre-emptively announced it won’t open until 10.15am on Monday. The headteacher told parents: “To support our students, families and staff following what is likely to be a late night for many, we have decided to take the decision to introduce a late start to the school day on Monday 6th July.” As one parent told us, the school didn’t adjust its hours during the heatwave and battled through. But the football is too much.

Scroll to the end for that.

But first, an update on our dodgy gift shop investigation.

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Why’s your London high street full of dodgy shops? It’s the tax evasion, stupid.

Our award-winning investigation into London’s dodgy high street gift shops, which has already helped prompt HMRC raids on some of the capital’s Harry Potter shops, was raised again in parliament at the Treasury select committee on Tuesday.

We’ve spent 18 months travelling across the capital investigating this topic. It’s led us to conclude that, while money laundering and other illegal activities play a part, the biggest reason for the explosion in the number of dodgy shops in the capital is the collapse of high street tax enforcement.

If a shop is raided by trading standards, or sued by a local council over nonpayment of business rates, the punishments can be absorbed as a cost of doing business. In any case you can ‘phoenix’ by shutting down your company with your tax bill unpaid and reopening the following day with another unfortunate patsy director signing the paperwork. It’s only a visit from HMRC that strikes fear into the actual operators.

In parliament Siobhan McDonagh, the Labour MP for Mitcham and Morden, cited London Centric’s reporting on dodgy gift shops and asked the witnesses about “one of London’s most prominent landlords, Criterion Capital, letting shops to people on student visas”.

She told parliament how we’d uncovered that the supposed legal operators of some of London’s most prominent retail units were people living in car parks or overcrowded shared accommodation. McDonagh said: “It’s impossible for anybody to rationally believe that that the individual [legally running the business] has the access to funds and all sorts of support that a company running a business like that would actually have”.

(Criterion’s lawyers previously told us they have no responsibility for the tax affairs of their tenants but would happily assist HMRC with any investigations into the shop operators.)

Witness Paul Monaghan, of the Fair Tax Foundation, told MPs that accountants and shop operators have clocked they usually won’t suffer any substantial punishment if they opt out of paying taxes. He said this realisation that paying taxes is optional is contributing to the state of local high streets:

“It’s so in-your-face, so pervasive, that at some point it’s going to weaken tax morale in this country.”

“Sanctions work backwards. Accountants will tell their clients, ‘If you do this, this will happen,’ and they’re less likely to do it. But if the sanction is, ‘If you get caught, ask your sister to sign it’ — it’s nothing.”

“People have to think, if they’re fraudulently doing this year after year, that their car is on the line, their house is on the line.”

“The sanctions, when you’re caught, are less than if you’d been caught littering.”

Monaghan also told the MPs that London is a national innovation centre when it comes to tax evasion. Many high street tax scams, such as dodgy American Candy Stores, start in the capital before rapidly spreading throughout the rest of the UK. (One exception is snail farms, which started in Lancashire and then slithered south.)

“Once a scam is invented and people see it, it’s like wildfire, it goes through the country.

“I met [an accountant] at a conference last week... he was literally crying, saying every one of my clients asks me to do this, this and this, which is fraudulent, because… they tell me they’ll move if I don’t.”

What if the little guy is the problem?

All of which can pose a moral challenge. Investigative journalism into tax evasion has traditionally focussed on big corporations doing clever offshore planning using expensive lawyers. This provides easy hate figures and someone prominent to blame.

What’s becoming apparent, as we continue to dig into this, is that vast numbers of small businesses unilaterally opting out of paying tax is now a far bigger financial problem for both the national government and local London councils. It’s also one of the main reasons some high streets and large parts of central London are in a mess.

There was one moment in Tuesday’s hearing that made this particularly clear, especially in the context of London’s struggling hospitality businesses.

Labour MP Yuan Yang asked if dodgy shops opting out of paying tax is “actually inflating the commercial rent on high streets.”

Witness Alistair Townsend, a fellow at the Institute of Revenues, Rating and Valuation, told MPs: “I’m afraid that is the case.”

In short, if your local legitimate independent shop, restaurant or cafe plays by the rules and pays its taxes then it only has a limited amount of money left in its budget at the end of the month to pay rent.

Your local dodgy shop, which has fewer customers than the legitimate business but has chosen not to pay its taxes, has more money left to pay a higher rent.

This way, MPs were told, over time the dodgy shops will almost always have a competitive advantage when it comes to bidding for new retail units and swamping the high street.

If HMRC continue to feel pressure from politicians, the public and the media to take this seriously then this tide could be stopped. With your support, we’re going to keep reporting on it.

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Quick updates

💷 Former Herne Hill resident Andy Burnham dubbed London “the world’s greatest capital city” this week. The likely future prime minister is committed to moving part of the Downing Street operation to Manchester and downgrading London’s importance to national government. But his broader devolution plans could result in London’s underpowered mayoralty gaining substantially more control over the city. As a start, Burnham said this would include giving Sadiq Khan (or his successors) more control “over education and housing”.

🌉 Plans to reopen Hammersmith Bridge to cars and buses have been formally abandoned by Hammersmith & Fulham council on cost grounds. The Victorian suspension bridge has been closed to motor traffic since 2019 due to structural weaknesses and any money available will now be used to maintain it as a walking and cycling route. A community group is now arguing the council should introduce lightweight self-driving vehicles from Ohmio (artist’s impression below) to enable access for those less able to walk across the river.

⚖️ Data firm Palantir had threatened to sue after Sadiq Khan blocked a planned £50m contract with the Met police, to the open fury of police commissioner Mark Rowley. London Centric can now confirm that Palantir has made good on this threat and formally filed a legal case against the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime. To help, Palantir has hired a public affairs specialist with experience of battling City Hall, in the form of Hal Stevenson, who spent the last five years running lobbying operations on behalf of Lime bikes.

🦊 Google hasn’t formally announced it yet but staff began to move into the company’s giant new Platform 37 headquarters in King’s Cross this week, sources at the company told London Centric. We had our fun with the fox invasion on its roof garden but the much delayed completion marks the end of an era for the giant building site. The epic project was first announced in 2013 when the city was still basking in the legacy of the Olympic Games.

🥪 Ever since we brought you the explosive era-defining scoop that Pret’s Jambon Beurre sandwich was off the shelves due to a “temporary shortage of cornichons,” we've had Pret Truthers sliding into our DMs. They’ve claimed that there is no shortage, given the wide availability of mini gherkins elsewhere in the world. With our tin foil hat on, we put this to Pret, who told us that they are “still working hard” to bring the sandwich back, and that their “priority is finding a supplier who can match our quality and very strict allergen requirements.”

Who wants to be the Green mayor of London?

By Polly Smythe and Jim Waterson

With May’s local elections out of the way, political parties are turning their attention to the next big electoral battle in the capital: the 2028 mayoral election.

We’ve previously documented the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring within the Labour Party to replace Sadiq Khan, who may or may not contest a fourth election, with different Labour politicians gearing up for a selection battle that has yet to begin. (As an aside, speculation has been circulating in City Hall that Sadiq Khan and Dawn Butler had a frank exchange of views in May over whether the mayor would run again, following a news story that Butler was preparing to formally launch her succession bid. Neither Khan’s spokesperson nor Butler commented on the claim when we approached them.)

Most of London’s mayoral elections have ended up as straight Labour vs Conservative fights. Yet this time Labour could face a challenge from the left. Buoyed by its performance in May’s local council elections, Zack Polanski’s Green Party is now eyeing up the capital’s top job. But whose name will be on the ballot paper next time around?

London Centric has learned that the Greens’ selection process will formally begin in September, with internal discussions about potential candidates and eligibility rules already well underway.

Here are the internal discussions from within the Greens…

Want to read the rest of this story and support original reporting on the capital? Click here for 25% off a London Centric subscription, or take a free trial by clicking the link below.

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We also commissioned photographer Jennifer Forward-Hayter to try to capture the city as our brains and bodies fried. Her photos of this week are scattered between today’s stories.

Normal service has been disrupted after the editor’s children were sent home from school, so we’re in the trenches with lots of the rest of you. We’re working away on some more big investigations that we will be publishing soon.

We won an award!

On Thursday night London Centric won the Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness. It was for our work on the “mass evictions” carried out by Asif Aziz’s property business. The judges said it was the work on the topic of homelessness that “best met George Orwell’s ambition to ‘make political writing into art’”. (This is the second award we’ve won in recent weeks for our investigations into Asif Aziz’s business activities and it’s fantastic to see multiple sets of judges agree that our journalism is clearly in the public interest.)

Our separate investigation into fake TikToks stirring up anti-London sentiment for cheap views was also runner-up in Orwell Prize’s Exposing Britain’s Social Evils category.

All of which… isn’t bad for a tiny start-up newsletter funded by readers! Thanks to all the subscribers who made these stories possible.

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Will the rest of the UK pay to cool down London?

London is the worst affected part of the UK for the extreme heat that is becoming our new normal. Billions of pounds will need to be spent to make the city liveable in the coming decades, or else school closures and hospitals sweltering with failed aircon will become an annual blight. So who’s going to pay for it? And for once, should the capital be receiving a bailout from central government to cope with its unique heat island situation, rather than cross subsidising the rest of the country?

Sadiq Khan’s long-awaited London Heat Plan launched on Thursday. It concludes that London’s economy is set to take a major hit if action doesn’t come soon. Yet making the city compatible with a hotter climate is “a public benefit with low financial returns”. The costs of coping with climate change are eye-watering: “Retrofitting the most heat-exposed homes in London could require upfront investment of between £9 billion and £45 billion, depending on the interventions and level of overheating reduced.”

Will central government cough up? Former Herne Hill resident Andy Burnham has spent part of this week experiencing the London heatwave as he returned to parliament as Labour heir-presumptive, but he has repeatedly promised to rebalance government spending away from the capital.

There are also signs that air conditioning is going to become a politically contentious topic. The report suggests it should be retrofitted to hospitals and other public buildings but is less enthusiastic about it for domestic properties. City Hall guidance strongly discourages its use in new residential buildings, but people are voting with their feet. Walk around the capital and you’ll find a vast number of flats with mobile air conditioning hoses poking out of their windows.

The City Hall report accepts residential air conditioning might be necessary but only as a last resort when other methods, such as increased shade and ventilation, fail. The stated concerns are a combination of technical and moral reasons. One issue is it could overwhelm the capital’s electricity network. The other is that richer Londoners might be able to afford air con but their poorer neighbours could be left unable to afford the costs.

Kentish Town City Farm has paused handling of its goats, guinea pigs, and donkeys “to allow our animals to rest.”

The farm told London Centric: “We have frozen treats for the animals, such as carrots, watermelon, apples, peas etc, frozen water bottles for the small animals.” Staff will be “hosing down” larger animals.

Similar techniques are likely to work on humans.

Deliveroo offers heat bonuses to riders

Many Londoners have been avoiding the heat by using food delivery. But what about the couriers paid to deliver those orders?

As riders are classified as self-employed and not as workers, gig economy platforms can’t control when they choose to log on, or how long they stay logged on for. Extreme heat causes a spike in demand from customers looking to stay indoors, and these platforms worry that couriers will opt not to work.

One way to ensure enough riders are available is by offering temporary pay boosts. This week Deliveroo did just that. Branded as a World Cup-style “hydration break boost,” the company sent a message to riders earlier this week promising them £2.20 extra if they completed two deliveries between 11am and 3pm on Wednesday or Thursday: “Just like players get a hydration break at 22’, riders can take a hydration break whenever they need one.”

The email informed riders that they could put this extra income towards “the cost of water, electrolytes, or a drink and snack in a comfortable place out of the heat.”

Official NHS guidelines for coping in a heatwave recommended, “If you have to go outside, stay in the shade especially between 11am and 3pm, wear sunscreen, a hat and light clothes, and avoid exercise or activity that makes you hotter.”

Deliveroo said the additional payment was not a pay incentive to encourage people to log onto the app, but instead was meant to encourage couriers to go at a “slower pace and take a hydration break between any orders they choose to accept.”

Deliveroo also stopped offering orders to riders using traditional bicycles, not e-bikes, between 11am and 3pm in areas covered by the red weather warning.

One food delivery courier told London Centric that riders would take the offer of extra pay but not slow down: “Riders will work more in a heat wave to earn more incentives. An incentive doesn’t work to make riders stop and get hydrated. Instead, they’ll think, ‘I need to work to earn.’ So they don’t stop. If there’s an order, they’ll accept it, even now it’s summer.”

A Deliveroo spokesperson said that they had temporarily reduced order distances, made sure water is readily available and that “no rider is under any obligation to go online.”

But the courier said that while they might not be under a formal obligation, if they choose not to work they’re not paid: “They don’t say ‘don’t work today, and we’ll pay you to stay at home.’ They want couriers working for them in a heat wave, or whatever the weather.”

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Exclusive: Après poo, le déluge

The new giant Tideway super sewer has dramatically reduced the amount of untreated sewage floating down the River Thames through central London over the last year.

Yet it seemed unable to cope with the giant two-hour thunderstorm in the early hours of Tuesday morning, which marked an all-too-brief respite before the heatwave really got going, leaving vast amounts of untreated human waste entering the river through overflows, just like in the bad old days.

London Centric was contacted by rowers who reported a toxic combination of extreme temperatures and floating effluent creating a stinking river earlier in the week.

What went wrong? Have we already overwhelmed the new giant pipe?

Not quite, says the company that operates the tunnel. Instead, it blamed the unpredictable side effects of climate change, where tropical-style storms can come out of nowhere.

Thames Water had scheduled maintenance on part of its sewer network this week, timed to take advantage of the hot, dry weather. This involved disconnecting overflow pipes from the Tideway and temporarily pointing them back into the River Thames.

All of this would have been totally fine… as long as it didn’t rain heavily.

At which point London was hit by a biblical downpour.

A Tideway spokesperson told London Centric:

Earlier this week, the London Tideway Tunnel was in the process of being taken offline to allow Thames Water to undertake some planned maintenance activity in the Lee Tunnel. This work was carefully scheduled with regard to weather forecasting. However, on Monday a ‘convective’ thunderstorm developed over London, and as a result, there were some discharges of storm sewage into the River Thames at CSO [combined sewer overflow] locations that had been taken offline.

They were confident the system would have coped… if it had actually been connected.

Beef(eater) dripping

While plenty of London’s offices have relaxed dress codes to stop staff sweltering, that’s not an option for those in the capital working in ceremonial garb.

While the army chose to suspend ceremonial guard changes on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week, the Beefeaters at the Tower of London are still being required to work in full uniform.

The Historic Royal Palaces told us that they’ve changed staff rotas for the Yeoman Warders to allow for more breaks, and that they’re wearing their summer uniforms.

Rental e-bikes are offering an alternative to getting on sweaty buses or tube trains without air conditioning. But it seems their inner tubes are struggling to cope with the heat, with vast numbers of them deflated after being left in the sun too long.

Bins out for summer

Climate change is coming for our councils, one wheelie bin at a time. As refuse collectors have no choice but to work outdoors, councils are temporarily asking residents to put their bins out earlier, so that crews can avoid the worst of the sun.

We counted Redbridge, Barking and Dagenham, Camden, Westminster, Barnet, Brent, Hounslow, and Havering as the councils that have brought collection times earlier.

But not everybody is on board with the new timetable. One refuse collector, who asked to remain anonymous, told London Centric: “This week, a lady came out of her house and said that we’d missed her bins. I kindly explained to her that because of the weather, we were working earlier so we could finish before the heat gets to its peak. She said ‘That’s a poor excuse.’”

Even with early collection times, the cab of his refuse lorry reached 39°C earlier this week: “It was cooking and because of the age of the lorries, the air-con just can’t handle it.” And whether he starts early or not, there’s the smell of rubbish in the heat to deal with. “And maggots. Lots and lots of maggots.”

London empties

People really are staying away from central London due to the heat, according to analysis of people’s mobile phone data. (Not that they’d have got a signal anyway.)

O2’s Motion division, which examines anonymised aggregate usage data, shows there was a spike in people heading into central London on Monday as they went into the office or got their shopping done before the heatwave hit.

But by Thursday morning the number of people heading into central London dropped by 13%. Numbers in the King’s Cross area were down even more, suggesting regular commuters are staying at home.

Breaking bread

If you feel hot, spare a thought for London’s bakers, toiling away next to 250°C ovens. As spots across the city struggle to keep both their staff and their dough chilled, the heatwave is creating a shortage of baked goods in the capital.

Camberwell’s Toad Bakery has reduced its hours and its menu, with fewer pastries and no bread or sandwiches for much of the week … Dusty Knuckle has changed opening hours and reduced orders … Banook Bagels, a newly opened spot in Peckham, reduced bagel quantities and stopped offering toasted bagels as the toaster “acts like a furnace next to the sandwich line”… and Hackney’s E5 Bakehouse is offering a smaller selection of bread and pastries than usual.

London’s food wholesalers are also struggling to adapt. Chocolate Trading Co, a key supplier to London’s patisseries, has paused deliveries this week to ensure chocolates are “delivered in good condition”, hitting supplies of high end chocolate pastries.

From our “London, it’s getting hotter” archives: Why London flats are really hot, Why London doesn’t have air con, the growing wildfire risk to London’s parks.

The Londoners who can’t turn off the heat

While most of us are busy lamenting the lack of air con, some of London’s residents are stuck with the heating permanently switched on.

Heat networks supply heat to flats from a central source, often a communal boiler, through pipes that carry hot water. But in many London blocks this is impossible to switch off.

A resident of the mid-century Gilesmead estate in Camberwell told London Centric that Southwark Council fitted a new heating system back in 2014.

But he said that the system installed was designed for a five-bedroom house, not a one or two-bed flat. “We have a 220 litre hot water tank in every flat. And that is kept at a temperature of about 80°C, 24/7.

“At any time, there’s about 8,000 litres of hot water in the building. And that emanates an enormous amount of heat, which needs to be there at all times, because otherwise we don’t have our water.”

His heating unit sits in a cupboard that once housed a wardrobe: “I open that door, it's hot like a sauna.”

Can it really only be 35°C?

While the weather app might be showing you 35°C, we can collectively agree that it feels much, much hotter. But is that scientifically true?

In May’s heatwave and the last time the 40°C barrier was broken in 2022 the air was dry. This time it is very moist. The more humid the weather is, the harder it is for our sweat to evaporate and cool us.

Kirsty McCabe, meteorologist at the Royal Meteorological Society and editor of MetMatters told London Centric that this means that “even if the number on the thermometer isn’t as high, it will feel much worse. Especially at night. If we can’t cool down overnight, the risk of dehydration, heatstroke and death rises, especially in the elderly and very young.”

What makes this worse is the urban heat island effect. McCabe says that “all that concrete, tarmac and brick absorb heat and only slowly release it – that’s really noticeable at night when cities can be 10 degrees warmer than the countryside.” This effect means that Londoners get little respite from the heat.

And with more industry, cars and trains adding to the heat the general busyness of the capital is to blame too. Couple that with less greenery and large buildings blocking the chance of a cool breeze giving you relief and there’s no wonder you’re hoping to work from home all week.

McCabe explained that when meteorologists talk numbers they use shade temperatures. “So we can compare like for like around the world, we take air temperature measurements in the shade. In direct sunlight those numbers can be much much higher. And even worse on an underground train without air conditioning!

“Add in moisture and it puts extra stress on your body as you can’t cool down by sweating. If the air is already saturated your sweat won’t evaporate. That will send your core temperature soaring.”

To understand how hot it’s going to feel she suggests looking at the humidity, ideally the dewpoint temperature or the wet bulb temperature. She says “These measurements give an indication of how much moisture is in the air, and can be used to calculate the heat stress – such as the one used during Wimbledon.”

But what’s the answer to a boiling, moist London? For McCabe it’s long term steps rethinking the way our homes are designed as well as adding more green spaces and shade to our streets. She also says that schools need heatwave measures in place and exams should be moved to earlier in the year.

For now she recommends keeping your curtains closed and try to limit going out at the peak of the heat during the mid to late afternoon.

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London’s schools are supposed to remain open in all temperatures. They’re closing anyway.

When temperatures top 30C, farmers are advised to stop transporting cattle and other livestock as part of their legal duty to protect animal welfare.

As one London headteacher pointed out to London Centric on Monday, there’s no equivalent upper temperature limit on when you should stop putting children in classrooms. Instead, the guidance remains that it is better for young people to attend lessons in extremely hot weather than suffer the academic and social impact of missing out on education.

What we’re seeing in London this week, with temperatures heading towards 40C, is that this approach of compliant muddling through is breaking down. Without clear political leadership on how to respond, headteachers are having to take unilateral decisions on what they think is best for their pupils in the heat.

Dozens of parents contacted London Centric on Monday to say their schools are shutting down entirely for the rest of the week, instituting partial closures after lunch, or offering parents the voluntary opportunity to collect their children early. As more and more schools follow suit, leaving parents unable to work, the impact on London’s life and economy this week will start to spread, with momentum heading towards more closures.

“We just heard our child’s secondary school will close from Tuesday midday to Friday: 2.5 days of lost learning and impact on our ability as parents to work,” said one London parent. “Offices have budget for air con; often schools do not.”

Regardless of the exact solution, many of the capital’s headteachers are conceding that effective teaching will be nearly impossible this week.

“We’re expecting to have loads of kids off,” said one teacher in south London. They said actual academic lessons are being abandoned with staff reduced to “babysitting”.

Comedian Alistair Barrie told us he is voluntarily taking his kids out of school on Tuesday and Wednesday: “Whole school only has two rooms with air con. The headteacher is looking on Amazon Prime for affordable fans. Good job it’s all a hoax.”

One problem for headteachers is that if they send children home then it will impact attendance statistics, a key measure for regulator Ofsted. This can influence the decision to encourage pupils into school, even if it then sees students sent home early.

Attempts to keep standards high and pretend everything is normal also result in strange outcomes. Children at one secondary school in east London were told: “Students must still bring their blazers to school every day. However, they do not have to wear them this week.”

Other London schools are improvising. Shacklewell Primary School in Hackney responded by shifting the entire school day forward, starting at 8am and then shutting down completely by 1pm.

While the British stereotype is of classrooms that are horrendously cold during winter, increasingly the problem in London might be brutally hot teaching environments in summer. Sitting an exam on a 32C day carries around a 10% lower likelihood of passing than on a 22C day, according to a recent report by the Climate Change Committee, suggesting future GCSE and A-level students could be affected by more heatwaves in June.

One London secondary school teacher said “there is no way existing school budget have the ability to absorb the cost of installing air conditioning and other potentially necessary interventions”.

The Department for Education on Monday reiterated that “children are unlikely to be seriously affected by hot conditions”, encouraged school attendance and reissued guidance on dealing with heatstroke.

Official government guidance also recommends turning off mechanical fans in schools when temperatures top 35C on the basis that they can actually cause harm above this temperature.

One parent with a child in a London special school said the headteacher had taken the decision to shut the whole site down completely on Wednesday and Thursday: “I think it’s the right decision as the children are incredibly vulnerable and need a high level of adult support… Also there is a huge risk of children getting ill and having seizures due to the heat which would put extra pressure on the school.”

Yet she doubted that the children would find it cooler to be at home with their parents: “Some are in two bed flats with limited ventilation… [the government] definitely needs to focus on helping keep all children at school in a heatwave.”

This was echoed by the teacher in south London, as they weighed up whether to close: “If we shut then kids will be in even hotter and unsafe flats.”

Parents looking for alternative ways to entertain their children could struggle, with the Young V&A museum in Bethnal Green among the attractions announcing it is closing due to the heat.

Some of the impacts of the heatwave hit harder than others, especially at Weston Park school in Haringey. One message in the London Centric inbox informed us that its sports day had been cancelled due to the weather: “Parents mainly upset because Mr Motivator was going to do the warmup.”

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Even office air con isn’t enough to keep the city running

Bosses who struggle to get work-from-home staff back to the office might find desks are unusually full this week, as employees try to take advantage of air conditioning. But some workplaces such as the BBC are suggesting staff in London work from home for fear of the impact of the heat on the journey into the office. Buildings built in the last couple of decades fare no better. Kings Place by King’s Cross, where the air conditioning system has to be shut down whenever it tops 35C, has long tormented the Guardian journalists who work inside it.

Yes, this week’s heat really is unprecedented

“London has never seen three consecutive days above 37C,” said TheSnowWatcher, one of our favourite weather accounts, who suggested the record might not be standing at the end of this week. They added: “The intensity of heat on Wednesday is definitely going to feel worse than 40C in 2022. Back then we had very low relative humidity and more of a breeze.”

What’s making this heat particularly unusual is that this is happening in June, rather than at the traditional height of summer. The previous June high was 35.6C, recorded in Camden in 1957. That record is expected to be smashed multiple times this week, along with the potential for the highest overnight London temperature on record.

Good luck getting any sleep.

“Competitive” community bid for Brixton Market

There was a good debate in the comments beneath our weekend piece on the sale of Brixton Market. We also had some interesting direct correspondence, with one former restaurant owner suggesting the site is now overloaded with food and drink businesses and the market infrastructure needs substantial investment if it’s going to cope. Others pointed out that the site had been struggling financially in the 2000s and it was a previous for-profit landlord that had rebranded part of the site as Brixton Village and turned it into a different type of food destination.

The Advocacy Academy, the south London youth charity spearheading the campaign to take control of the site on behalf of traders, confirmed it met the deadline to submit a bid yesterday to the estate agents handling the sale. The group was hoping to raise pledges of £15m by Monday, towards a headline purchase price of £50m.

A spokesperson for The Advocacy Academy told London Centric that it cannot “provide any further details on the bid itself” but it is “competitive”. They said the traders are “currently going through due diligence with a significant number of major institutional donors” to back their plans for a community purchase.

Manchesterism with Peckham characteristics

In the second most important national news story this week after the hot weather, former Herne Hill resident Andy Burnham arrived in London by train on Monday afternoon to be sworn in as MP. His Avanti West Coast train was more than 20 minutes late into Euston, entitling him to a 25% Delay Repay refund on his ticket. As he was whisked away into the bowels of the capital’s station, news helicopters showed the stalled mess of a rebuild site, which won’t currently even connect to Manchester.

What would Burnham mean for London? Well, the probable future prime minister told London Centric last year that “London needs to be more liveable, for young people particularly” and warned that the government’s focus on growing London’s economy risks “overheating” the city (not literally) and making it an unpleasant place to live for its residents.

He also bemoaned the high rents charged to the capital’s residents by landlords, compared to when he lived in the capital during the 1990s: “It was common that four or five people from my old college would be in Greenwich in a house together. I just don’t think they could do that now, could they?”

Defining Burnham’s “Manchesterism” ideology has been hard. One of the people trying to do it is Miatta Fahnbulleh, the Labour MP for Peckham, who has been advising the likely next prime minister on economic policy and is even being tipped as a potential chancellor. Could a Burnham leadership be a return to his south London roots?

Transport for London hackers plead guilty at the last minute

Two individuals have admitted carrying out a cyberattack on Transport for London that saw around 10 million people’s data stolen, cost £39m, and caused widespread chaos to the capital’s transport system in late 2024.

London Centric spent Monday watching in a very hot Woolwich Crown Court as Thalha Jubair, 20, from east London, and Owen Flowers, 18, from Walsall, West Midlands, took responsibility for the 2024 hack that disrupted TfL services for three months.

The pair had been charged with conspiring to commit unauthorised acts against TfL under the Computer Misuse Act, with a trial expected to last between four and six weeks.

Instead, the prosecution accepted a last minute guilty plea on the basis they had been reckless as to whether damage was caused by the hack and had not intended to cause damage.

The National Crime Agency previously said it believed the attack had been carried out by hackers from the cyber-criminal group, Scattered Spider.

In a development that can only now be reported following his guilty plea, Jubair has separately been charged by the US Justice Department with extracting more than $115m (£87m) in ransom payments following a spate of cyberattacks on 47 separate American organisations.

Flowers, who wore a blue sweater and grey tracksuit bottoms, also pleaded guilty to two separate attacks on American health care companies, SSM Health Care and Sutter Health.

Jubair, who wore a grey suit and striped tie, had pleaded not guilty at an early hearing in November after refusing to provide login details for his devices. That plea remains unchanged, with the prosecution indicating that the charge would lie on file.

London Centric previously reported that despite the fact that TfL’s operational systems remained largely unaffected by the cyberattack, one senior executive told us that behind the scenes it was “an utter shitshow.”

The duo will be sentenced on 15 July.

Can you solve the mystery of where Boris Johnson wanted a second cable car?

Boris Johnson wanted to build a second cable car in his time as mayor (reports Ross Lydall, former City Hall editor at the Evening Standard).

Johnson opened the capital’s first cable car across the Thames – linking the Royal Docks and the O2 arena in North Greenwich – shortly before the start of the 2012 Olympics. The £44m project had to be heavily subsidised by its first sponsor, Emirates, and has remained little more than a tourist attraction.

This apparently did nothing to dampen Mr Johnson’s enthusiasm for a second “dangleway”, according to the TfL commissioner at the time, Peter Hendy.

Lord Hendy last week recalled receiving an unexpected late-night call from the then mayor when both had been out (separately) one evening.

“I was walking home after having a few glasses of wine in a restaurant near my flat in Pimlico, and suddenly the phone rings, and it was Boris wobbling about on his bike,” Lord Hendy said. “He had also had a few glasses of wine.

“He said: ‘Why don’t we build another cable car?’ [I thought:] ‘Oh shit.’ I said to him: ‘How about we not do that? Why don’t we do the next thing in the transport strategy?

“He said: ‘What’s that?’ I said: ‘It’s Crossrail 2.’ He said: ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea!’

“The point of that story was that I knew what the next best thing to do was. We had worked it out. We had a strategy which said, if you want London to grow, this is the best thing to do.”

Lord Hendy is now the rail minister. (He recently told a transport select committee that he read a London Centric story in the morning “over my toast”, which is the only way to do it.)

Hendy was speaking at a Campaign for Better Transport conference on Friday and said he could not recall exactly where Mr Johnson had wanted to build the second cable car.

But he said another legacy of his time working for Mr Johnson was that he always answered his mobile when it comes up as “unknown number”.

Two years ago, this paid huge dividends. “I was sitting in my study at home,” Lord Hendy said. “The phone rang. It said: ‘Unknown number’.

“Now, I always answer unknown numbers on my mobile phone because, when I worked for Boris, he didn’t know how to put the number into the phone. It always came up as ‘unknown number’. And it was either him or an insurance salesman.

“The caller said: ‘This is the Number 10 switchboard and the Prime Minister would like to speak to you. Would you take the call?’ [I thought:] Yeah, OK…

“I got Keir Starmer on the phone. He said: ‘Would you like to be the rail minister?’ And I thought: ‘Well, I would.’ I didn’t tell Sue [Lady Hendy] until afterwards, but she was very understanding.”

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PS It’s hard to beat this Reddit thread of lightning pictures from the early hours of Monday morning, so we won’t try to compete.

Today we’re looking at an issue that has been requested by many subscribers this week: What’s really going on with the threat to sell Brixton Market?

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Do you have a spare £15m to buy this market?

On Wednesday a stark call to arms was issued on social media: “Brixton Market as we know it could disappear.”

The campaign, launched by the south London youth charity The Advocacy Academy, warned that the site is about to be sold to “private equity bidders”. This, they said, could result in evictions, increased rents, and a market “filled with faceless multinational chains”.

Brixton Market’s reputation spreads beyond its south London location. It’s home to hundreds of independent businesses and has become a food destination in its own right that’s a short trip down the Victoria line from central London.

The latest events comes on the back of a string of evictions that have hit London’s largely indoor markets hard, with traders battling closure at Brixton Plaza, Dalston’s Ridley Road, and Bayswater’s Queensway Market.

The Advocacy Academy is proposing a radical solution to head off that possibility: a community buyout, led by the traders currently in situ, that gives them control of their site. They have opened a petition, signed by almost 25,000 people. They’ve started a crowdfunder, which has raised more than £20k from small online donations in a matter of days, topped up by a combined £130k from two offline donors. They’re trying to convince philanthropic trusts and “high-net-worth individuals” to pledge a further £15m by Monday towards a headline purchase price of £50m.

The issue has filled Instagram feeds, flooded WhatsApp groups, and received national coverage. On Friday night Martin Abrams, the new Green leader of Lambeth council, and local Labour MP Helen Hayes pledged their backing at a public rally in Brixton.

Yet what has been thin on the ground are the actual details around the sale, whether we really know who the rival bidders are, why it’s come to a head now, and whether it’s possible for a small team to raise millions of pounds in a matter of days. So London Centric decided to try to establish the facts.

It takes a village…

The area of central Brixton behind the Victoria line tube station has long been a battleground for competing visions of what London should be about and who it should be for. Brixton Village — as part of the market was rebranded in the 2000s — has also gained a following well beyond its local area. Over the last fifteen years it has acted as a testing ground for restaurants that would later take over London, such as Franco Manca and Honest Burger.

Following this transformation, in 2018 the wider Brixton Market site, which includes several arcades, went up for sale. Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct lost a bidding war and it was instead bought for £37.3m by a joint venture between investors Angelo Gordon and DJing Texan millionaire and businessman Taylor McWilliams. He had grand plans for redeveloping the site. Instead, he got a bloody nose from community activists , the media, and politicians.

His attempts to evict the longstanding wholesaler Nour Cash and Carry attracted a local outcry during the pandemic. His plans for a 20-storey office block in the heart of Brixton were even more controversial. After that planning application was withdrawn in 2023, ahead of an expected intervention by Sadiq Khan, the owners threw in the towel and put the whole site up for sale.

As things stand the freehold for the majority of the site is owned by a company called Ag Hondo Market Row, registered in the Netherlands. This holding company is in turn controlled by TPG, the giant US private equity firm that has invested in a vast number of businesses, ranging from major US telecoms businesses to Cirque du Soleil and the media company Vice. It now owns Angelo Gordon, one of the original investors, and they want out of the troubled site.

While the sales pack was never made public, briefings to the press in late 2024 suggested the current owners wanted £80m, more than double their original investment, for the Brixton site.

Then everyone went publicly silent. Until now.

How long have they got?

The Advocacy Academy, a charity which works with young people in the local area, started organising with the Brixton Traders and Community Association two years ago. Their initial plan had been to help occupants of the market in the short term with leases, securing contract renewals on favourable terms, and improving working conditions at the market. The longer-term aspiration was to help them take control of the whole site.

“For a long time it was just kind of quiet,” Hiba Ahmad, community director at the Advocacy Academy, told London Centric. The charity’s remit is training young people with “lived experience of injustice to drive systemic change” from its Liberation Centre headquarters near the market.

At the start of this month the charity employed a property agent to formalise their interest in the site and indicate they were in the early stages of planning a community buyout. This was their first contact with the owners.

The agent soon got back with bad news: there were other interested bidders in the property, which had been for sale for almost two years. What’s more, within days of The Advocacy Academy’s initial approach, the estate agents said all potential purchasers had until Monday 22 June to show they have a “credible amount of money” to move to the next stage of the process.

This was a shock, said Ahmad: “We didn’t know at the time that there were other buyers. We were hoping to have a year or so to put our ducks in a row. We’d be very able to raise the money if we had a year. We’d got 12 days.”

She got to work with her colleagues, before going public with the plan on Wednesday: “It’s been like late evenings, early mornings, leaving no stone unturned because we really, really believe that this asset is too big for us to fumble. This is a generational opportunity and we don’t want to waste it.”

But is it “viable”?

The group is trying to arrange firm commitments of £15m by Monday from “high-net-worth individuals within and outside of the community who understand the importance of Brixton’s markets”, while also appealing to charitable funds. The idea is that these cash pledges could then be used to unlock loans to buy the whole site for around £50m in a leveraged community buyout.

Some trusts and potential investors are holding emergency board meetings to decide whether to back the buyout by the Monday deadline, said Ahmad: “The bulk of the donations are going to be coming from philanthropic institutions and they take a lot longer to come through, as we have to show that we are viable to them as an asset.”

The identity of the rival bidders interested is not public, although the charity has publicly claimed they are “private equity”. Its petition states it was urgent to act now as “our corporate sale window has been narrowed from six months to just days”.

A source close to the site’s existing owners pushed back on this, saying that “at no point” had they promised a six-month sale window to any of the bidders.

Ahmad confirmed this: “It was an assumption we were working off because we thought we were the only people interested in buying. We didn’t know about any other buyers and usually when you start the process, it takes about six months or so to just be nominated as the buyer. So we were working with the assumption that we had about six months to raise the money that is needed to take on this level of debt, essentially.”

The Gail’s question

The finances of the market could be healthy for any potential buyer, especially if they prioritised rent increases. London Centric understands bidding material states that the site currently makes £3.3m a year in rent from the current leases and that it had the potential to increase this to £4.5m, adding to suspicions that any new owner would introduce substantial rent hikes.

A planning application, approved in February 2025, also gave permission for the first floor to be refurbished to fit out an office and restaurant, as well as a second storey roof extension. Council consent for the plans adds value to the site, as prospective purchasers know that the site’s expansion has existing approval.

One of the traders who is concerned about the direction of travel is Simone Ogunbunmi, who was born and raised in Brixton. After trading for half a decade in the area, she decided to move to the market and open Haus, a plant and vinyl store. Two years on from its opening, she told London Centric “it’s turned into a space where everybody feels at home.” She’s served everyone from elderly people stopping in for a chat after they’ve finished their shopping, to Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, who bought a plant, and Hollywood actor Michael B Jordan, who browsed her record collection.

Things aren’t perfect with the existing operators, she said. The “rent is high,” with traders also paying service charges and insurance. There has been a substantial turnover of tenants in recent years.

Yet Ogunbunmi fears things would only get worse with new owners: “If rents rise significantly, which is what will happen if it’s bought up by equity developers, many traders simply won’t be able to afford the higher rent, and some would have to leave.”

The chance that independent businesses would be able to take over empty units is low, she argues, linking it to wider discussions about chain shops in the area. “We’re going to have a Gail’s,” she said, referring to the bakery’s recently announced plans to open in a former branch of Starbucks next to Brixton station. “If we manage Brixton Market ourselves, the profit that is made goes back into the market. Whereas if you have these large corporations, they’re looking to pocket that money.”

There are still no details on who else is interested in buying the market site, whether a political intervention could influence the sales process, and what any rival bidder plans for the site. Yet in just a few days a local political consensus has been built around the potential community bid.

For Hiba Ahmad, who is helping to run the campaign, it will all come down to what happens over the weekend and on Monday, as potential backers decide whether to get behind the plan: “There is a huge appetite for community ownership within the philanthropy sector as of now. But there’s so much work that needs to go into it to ensure that it’s legally viable, that it’s sustainable as a business and, in the long term, that there is actual democratic infrastructure to support it.”

By Monday, they will know if they’re in the running.

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Scroll to the end to read the story of how Stratford in east London was sent into panic by an AI-generated viral post and how London can deal with this in the future.

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Exclusive: Would you want your bus driver sleeping in this box?

Late nights, irregular scheduling, long unbroken periods driving, and the need to pick up extra shifts and overtime due to low wages have contributed to a crisis of bus driver fatigue, according to Unite the union. They found nearly half of drivers had experienced a ‘close call’ as a result of exhaustion in the past 12 months.

In 2019, when the union first raised the issue, Transport for London allocated £500,000 in funding for bus companies to find innovative ways to reduce driver exhaustion and protect passengers.

Where did that money go? Bus operator Metroline, owned by the Singapore-based ComfortDelGro, used it to buy two “Rest Space” sleep pods at Willesden bus garage in north west London. The box beds – which lock from the outside and retailed for £10,000 – are now being used for storage after drivers refused to enter them, although the pillows remain in place for those wanting to nap at work.

The union’s general secretary Sharon Graham told London Centric that making drivers “take a nap in a cupboard in their depot won’t cure the problem” and “bus drivers are being overworked to the point of extreme fatigue by the bus companies”. She said “long hours, terrible shift patterns and the poor workplace conditions” pose safety risks. Metroline did not respond to a request for comment.

Other experiments with the money have also struggled to take hold. One of them involved installing experimental eye-scanning fatigue detection technology in buses, which would vibrate a seat if it found drivers to be fatigued. The kit was removed after the provider stopped supporting the technology during the pandemic.

Why hasn’t the man arrested on suspicion of being the Putney Pusher been named by the media?

On Monday it was confirmed that a 44-year-old man had been arrested on suspicion of being the ‘Putney Pusher’, the jogger who shoved a woman into the path of a bus on Putney Bridge back in 2017. No one was ever charged and it became one of the most notorious cold cases in the capital.

News of the man’s arrest, for potential attempted grievous bodily harm, was broken by the Daily Mail, which described the arrested man as being a “banker” who previously served in the army and has “ties to the royal family”.

On Tuesday morning, a Met spokesperson confirmed a man had been “bailed pending further investigation”.

Several London Centric readers have been in touch asking why the man hasn’t been named.

A decade ago it’s almost certain the suspect’s identity would have been published in the media. But following a legal case brought by the singer Cliff Richard, news outlets rarely name people who are subject to an official investigation but have not been charged with any offence. In this case, the arrested man’s identity is known to newsrooms but his right to privacy is considered to outweigh the public interest case for naming him.

Ironically, it was the Putney Pusher case that showed one of the problems with the old system that prioritised the media’s right to publish. The last person arrested in relation to the case had his name all over the newspapers, despite having a solid alibi. That man was later released without charge.

X marks the spot

Sadiq Khan has committed £7m to an international tourism and investment campaign to promote London and fight back against what he terms “false narratives” caused by viral videos.

City Hall said its in-house analysis concluded one of the biggest threats to London’s global reputation was Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter. Research by the mayor’s office found that the financial incentives introduced by Musk, where accounts with blue ticks can get paid small sums of cash for going viral, have substantially exacerbated the problem in recent years.

“Verified X accounts can be a particular challenge as they pose as news outlets and spread false posts that will create high levels of engagement to make money,” the mayor’s office said.

They said these posts on X then seep into other languages, with Japanese and Chinese-language accounts “mirroring and amplifying narratives originating from the UK’s extreme right-wing” about London and undermining the capital’s tourist market.

Despite this, a City Hall source told London Centric that, after weighing up the options, there are no plans for Khan to stop posting on X or boycott Musk’s site: “It’s where thousands of Londoners get their information and news, whether from media or politicians. We continue to communicate with Londoners wherever they are, across multiple platforms.”

OK, London’s getting self-driving cars. But what about self-driving buses?

London’s self-driving taxi battle is heating up, with paying members of the public set to get in the vehicles by the end of the year. But could other vehicles be next?

On Monday morning, London Assembly members gathered at the King’s Cross headquarters of Wayve, just behind Egg nightclub, to take a test run in the company’s self-driving cars.

Not to be confused with Google-backed Waymo, Wayve is a British startup that’s been testing self-driving cars in the capital since 2018. Unlike Waymo, which operates its own fleet of cars, Wayve licenses AI software to other operators. It’s launching rides in collaboration with Uber in the coming months, albeit with a driver still behind the wheel.

Given Sadiq Khan’s stated goal of getting people out of their cars and onto public transport, there’s a real risk that new robotaxis flood the roads and add to the congestion on the capital’s streets. But what if the self-driving technology wasn’t reserved for taxis but opened up to bigger vehicles that aid the public transport system?

Caroline Russell, the leader of the Greens at City Hall, told London Centric: “Wayve are really interested in getting their technology used on buses, on public transport, on big lorries and delivery vehicles.”

She added: “At the moment, the autonomous passenger vehicle model is where the money is. Wayve are trying to get hold of a huge amount of money to keep developing this technology. The government needs to be thinking, why are we allowing the public purpose of this technology to go off to the private sector?”

Russell suggested minibuses in the capital’s “public transport deserts” could be fitted with the technology: “Why isn’t the government or TfL investing in this to make buses safer?”

Missed Saturday’s piece on the raids on Harry Potter gift shops? Read it here.

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“Drinks and food will be provided”: Stratford Westfield and the AI-generated riot that didn’t happen

Last Wednesday afternoon, Stratford Westfield shopping centre in east London was set to be the scene of a bloody riot. Local offices in the venue, which was the scene last year of a viral video of a teenager narrowly missing shoppers as he threw a chair from an upper floor, let staff leave early to get home safely. Warnings were issued to nearby residents. Extra security was drafted in.

What prompted all this was an image that had been circulating rapidly across local WhatsApp groups for the previous 48 hours, declaring that an “East London War Link Up” would take place in the shopping centre at 5pm.

Over a dystopian illustration of motorbikes in an urban hell, it boldly instructed: “Bring machines. Bring ammunition. Bring swords.”

Somewhat improbably — and possibly added automatically by an overenthusiastic AI design package — the advert also promised riot attendees that “drinks and food will be provided”.

More than a dozen concerned members of the public forwarded it to the London Centric WhatsApp number as it pinged around the area’s group chats. Children were warned by their parents to stay away. Some versions we saw appeared to be the original image; others were photos of the poster printed out and stuck to a wall.

In the end, nothing happened.

When London Centric visited Westfield on Wednesday evening, there were extra security staff and dog teams, plus additional checks at the entrance, searching the bags of confused shoppers. A security guard told us, “Something was put on social media… we’re expecting it to be young boys, juveniles.” But perhaps due to parental anxiety, there appeared to be even fewer teenagers hanging around than usual. The Metropolitan police later confirmed there had been “no disorder and no arrests.”

Once again, a corner of London had briefly held its breath in fear of an imagined turf war, which appeared to be the concoction of someone with access to AI and WhatsApp. But where is the line between imagined and real disruption to the capital from bored teenagers’ social media networks? Which threats should be taken seriously and which ignored? And how do Londoners deal with all this?

“Forwarded many times”

Journalism, understandably, tends to focus on the things that might happen or did happen. It doesn’t spend much time analysing the things that didn’t happen.

Last week’s Stratford non-incident was what might once have been a schoolyard whisper campaign. Instead, it prompted a multi-agency response that diverted resources from elsewhere in the city. It’s impossible to say how many people saw the call-to-arms in the 24 hours it circulated, but based on the sheer number of messages, it could plausibly have reached hundreds of thousands of Londoners, or even millions. Many of them will have felt less safe in their city as a result.

Despite the relatively low-key nature of the threat, even large businesses didn’t know how seriously to take it. Some of the big employers based in offices in nearby Endeavour Square, home to the likes of the Financial Conduct Authority and Transport for London, issued warnings to staff. And those warnings served to inadvertently lend credence to a threat that had previously remained unsourced.

Dive London, an aquatics club based in the former Olympic swimming pool in Stratford, sent an email to members saying Westfield staff, the Olympic Park security team and the Metropolitan police were all aware that “a violent disruption” involving weapons was being planned. The email said similar events had been mitigated by security in the past, but nonetheless advised people to avoid the Stratford area.

That Dive London email was then screengrabbed and went viral in local WhatsApp groups – with the “forwarded many times” tag that the app automatically adds to viral content. This second email was then held up as evidence that the original AI-generated posters had legitimacy.

Whether there was ever going to be a riot, or whether local teens were ever planning to turn up, is hard to judge. It could be that the drizzly weather and the substantial security presence made would-be attendees turn straight back around. It could be that they were never coming in the first place.

We have been here before. Earlier this year London Centric was the first news outlet to visit the location of a supposed “red vs blue” school war meeting. What we found was a group of younger teenagers milling around outside a McDonald’s, ready to film content in case anything happened. Nothing did. But this is a generation for whom recording online content can be the whole purpose of an activity, rather than simply applying a lens to it.

Within weeks, similar red vs blue posts had spread across the rest of London and then the nation, with coverage across mainstream media raising fears among both children and parents. In some cases the school wars became a self-fulfilling prophecy and scuffles broke out. Whispers of real fights and stabbings spread fear among teenagers. A few weeks later came the very public chaos in Clapham, which went viral around the world and disrupted Sadiq Khan’s work with the Foreign Office to convince the UK’s ambassadors to sing the praises of London as a safe place.

“Some skater kids”

It’s not easy to work out who is responsible for these viral calls-to-action — and whether anyone should, or could, be held to account for what is becoming a pattern of panic-stoking images. It’s relatively easy to arrest someone for shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre. It’s harder when the person shouting fire is an anonymous teenager with little risk of being caught – and when the message is spreading far beyond the place they first set it going.

On 1 March, the police arrested a man in his 20s and a 15-year-old boy on suspicion of encouraging or assisting a crime in connection with the red vs blue school wars trend. But the force has now told London Centric that both have been released pending further investigation, as there was not enough evidence to charge them.

Similar efforts to crack down on the young people involved in the more serious chaos in Clapham, which we covered at length, resulted in a handful of individuals being charged. The case of a 17-year-old girl charged with assault on a police constable, which we reported on recently, is due to return to court next month.

The skill required to work out what’s a real threat, what’s a joke and what’s AI slop is finely balanced. The Met has the task of distinguishing the bad pastiche of a bored 13-year-old, or a viral content-filming opportunity by an influencer, from a genuine safety risk.

Back in Stratford on Wednesday night, the security guards earning overtime at Westfield were among the few people benefiting from this cautious new normal, in which a viral post can cause low-key chaos and paranoia.

As one security guard put it, as they looked at the sparsely attended shopping centre: “Some skater kids put on social media that they may come here in large groups. We’re just here for added safety.”

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PS… Who doesn’t want London Centric’s reporting about them to appear on Google?

Over the last few weeks, something curious has been happening. An unknown person has been asking Google to remove London Centric’s reporting about them under “right to be forgotten” powers. Until relatively recently, Google would have told London Centric which pages were being blocked from search rankings.

But a 2024 court decision in Sweden means the only information we get is that someone, somewhere, isn’t a fan of our work appearing when you search their name. So we’re flying blind. If you’re Googling the subject of one of our stories and can’t find the link, do let us know.

Over the last 18 months we’ve exposed the dubious ownership of many of the capital’s gift shops, highlighted how billionaire landlords collect their rent, and traced their dodgy profits all around the world.

One of the people who read London Centric’s reporting was Dan Tomlinson, the Labour MP for Chipping Barnet and exchequer secretary to the Treasury. He is the government minister in charge of HMRC and chairs the board of the tax authority.

This week Tomlinson oversaw a series of raids on six central London gift shops, including those stocking “wizarding” goods. He said this will be part of an ongoing campaign targeting the tax affairs of the capital’s souvenir stores. The raids found several criminal offences had taken place and HMRC officials are now examining detailed financial data from the businesses.

In a statement the government minister said: “I want to thank Jim Waterson and local campaigners for highlighting the issue of dodgy shops in London. To dodgy shop owners and landlords turning a blind eye everywhere: we are coming for you.

“Too many high streets have been blighted by illegal activity that harms local communities and undercut honest businesses, and we’re determined to fix this. We’re increasing our action across the UK to target the criminals using shops as a front for tax evasion, money laundering and fraud.”

How the gift shops actually make money

London Centric’s reporting has tried to bust the myth that dodgy gift shops in the centre of the capital are empty money laundering fronts without any real customers.

Instead, we’ve explained how many Harry Potter shops, American candy stores and other similar souvenir operations are high revenue businesses that target popular tourist areas and sell substantial volumes of goods to real people. The shops can make millions of pounds a year in illicit profits thanks to their decision to unilaterally opt out of paying taxes, paying the minimum wage, or employing staff with the legal status to be in the UK.

A core part of this business model involves paying small monthly stipends to individuals, usually recent immigrants or overseas students who do not intend to remain in the UK long term. These individuals then sign the legal paperwork at Companies House stating they run the shops.

These patsy directors, including one who gave their home address as a location that we tracked down to an abandoned car park, often have low incomes, live in precarious housing situations and are willing to take the blame on behalf of the people really running the operations.

When anyone in authority starts to question a specific shop’s failure to pay business rates, VAT or corporation tax, the operator “phoenixes” the unit. This means the shop sheds its existing legal identity, only to reopen within days under a new name, with a new legal owner, often with the same stock.

Gift shop businesses that actually pay their taxes, or other legitimate companies that want to rent central London retail units, cannot compete with the higher rents that a tax-evading outlet can afford. The end result is a sea of highly profitable tat shops enveloping central London and Oxford Street.

Our reporting is based on talking to dozens of people directly involved in running London gift shops over the last two years. All requested anonymity due to fear of the individuals and criminal organisations involved in the trade.

“Magic and wizarding products”

In the past, many raids on London’s gift shops were led by trading standards staff. Officials focused on seizing fake or dangerous goods, such as chocolate that doesn’t meet food safety standards. These raids sometimes resulted in fines, which could be written off by the shop owners as a cost of doing business.

Thanks to the support of paying London Centric subscribers who fund our journalism, we’ve been able to make the case to politicians that, if they want to clean up central London, they instead need to follow the money and treat this as a tax enforcement issue.

This week saw a new approach. HMRC officials were present at the central London raids and seized full downloads of all the till data at the gift shops. In a statement, the tax authority said it will now analyse the data and conduct “detailed tax compliance enquiries” before deciding on any further action.

HMRC said the raids targeted “shops selling royal family, London and UK-themed gifts, along with magic and wizarding products”. They were a coordinated operation with Westminster Council, the Met Police and the Home Office.

This week’s gift shop raids have already resulted in three arrests for immigration-related offences and a £40,000 civil penalty issued to one shop for employing an illegal worker. Trading standards officials also seized goods worth £5,433, including 289 disposable vapes, 173 squishy toys, counterfeit bags, hats, scarves and unsafe travel adapters.

It is not known which specific central London gift shops were raided by HMRC officials, due to taxpayer confidentiality pending any prosecutions.

Magic away the tax bill

At least one major landlord that has hosted tax-evading gift shops has previously stated its willingness to cooperate with authorities. Last summer we informed Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital that the company had repeatedly rented units in the Trocadero building near Piccadilly Circus to tax-evading gift shops that had engaged in “phoenixing”. The company’s lawyers said that while a landlord is “entitled to let to tenants who will pay a market rate for the property”, it would assist HMRC with any investigations.

What’s clear is that there does seem to be a change in attitude underway at HMRC, recognising that the sight of blatant tax evasion on some of the country’s most prominent streets undermines faith in the entire system.

As Kensington and Bayswater MP Joe Powell, a longtime campaigner on this issue, put it when he raised our reporting with Treasury ministers in the House of Commons last summer: “An increasingly common issue on our high streets is phoenixing. That is where a shop unit continues to trade while cycling through multiple limited companies every few months, none of which pays corporation tax, VAT or business rates.

“Can the minister encourage officials at His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to walk along Whitehall, just a few hundred metres from this chamber, and take a look at whether the series of Harry Potter-themed gift shops across London - which have been accused by London Centric of doing exactly that - are playing by the rules? Will they ensure that tax enforcement supports legitimate small businesses on our high streets?”

Now it appears the tide is turning.

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This isn’t the end of the gift shop story…

In recent months, London Centric has had reporters working on this story in distant locations such as India, Dubai, and Oxfordshire. Our aim is to finally identify the people who are really profiting from the capital’s dodgy gift shops.

Our reporting on these shops won the Wincott Award for best regional financial journalism in the UK. But we want to go further.

Reporting this story has cost London Centric more than ten thousand pounds and the bill is continuing to rise, alongside the substantial legal risk. We’re funded by our readers, we have no financial backers, and we’re not afraid to take on vested interests. If you’re able to become a paying member and support original investigative reporting about the capital, your subscription will help fund this work.

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Preposterous property of the week

Are you desperate to simultaneously channel Henry VIII and a James Bond villain from the 1990s? We’ve got the property for you. Mottisfont Hall, an eight-bedroom Victorian mansion, is on the market for £9.5m.

Situated in south east London, the house is on the historic site of a medieval Royal Jousting Yard and next door to Eltham Palace, where the Tudor monarch spent his childhood. It’s fair to say that it is a unique combination of old and new.

Not only does it come with the standard mansion amenities, such as a cinema room, wine cellar, and gym, but it also features a frigidarium plunge pool, orangery, and a cottage for staff.

Is London’s iPhone theft era really coming to an end?

Following increasingly angry accusations that the Metropolitan Police is failing to tackle phone theft – including by allowing thieves to use the capital’s flowerbeds as holding areas – the force has launched a very public campaign to promote its efforts.

We’ve previously highlighted figures from former Liberal Democrat campaigner Rob Blackie that show the abysmally low chances of a prosecution of anyone who steals a phone. The Met has now released figures claiming substantial falls in reported phone thefts this year, especially in central London.

The Met has also repeatedly complained that the main reason phone theft is out of control in the capital is because it’s so easy to flip the phones for a quick profit.

In March, Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley gave tech companies until this summer to come forward with “concrete commitments that make stolen phones unusable anywhere in the world”, or else he would ask the government to legislate to force them to improve their technology.

This week the Met announced it had reached a deal with Apple to brick more phones. iPhones are the main target of London criminals, with Samsung devices often dumped by thieves due to their relative undesirability to criminals.

What’s actually changing?

Part of that deal relates to increased data sharing, with Apple pledging to tell the Met whether or not a stolen device reconnects to a phone network once it’s been stolen, which allows the police to better understand where handsets go after they’ve been snatched.

The other part relates to the new safety precautions that Apple has introduced, which Rowley said means “rather than the vast majority of phones being factory reset after they’re stolen, it’s now a small minority, maybe around 20% of Apple devices.”

What is the Met saying is new?

Apple devices have a tool called Activation Lock, which is designed to prevent thieves from using a device once it’s been reported stolen. But criminals have designed software able to bypass this feature.

While this doesn’t give thieves access to the phone’s data, it does enable them to factory-reset stolen iPhones and sell them on. Apple says it will now block software that enables this factory-reset bypass, billed by some media outlets as a “kill switch.”

But is it really that simple?

Jake Moore, an advisor for cybersecurity firm ESET, told London Centric that while the idea of a kill switch “sounds incredible, conjuring up this idea that we’ll just press a button and the phone will never work again,” the reality is much more complicated.

“Criminals have increasingly relied on software tools and workarounds to bypass protections,” he said. The problem is that a lot of phone theft is not done by petty thieves, but by “structured criminal organisations” that can “start at a bus stop in London and it goes all the way over to China”.

The game of cat and mouse between law enforcement agencies and criminals has a long history. Moore, who used to be in a police digital forensics unit, said: “We used to get a phone, and sometimes we wouldn’t be able to crack into it because the encryption was too strong.”

Rather than giving up, Moore’s team would “sit on it for six months” and wait for new unlocking software to come out.

He said that “what criminals are also going to potentially do is still steal your phone” then work out a way to crack the devices: “I can’t see how they will ever be able to fully protect this.”

Talking of phone networks… TfL this week doubled down on its pledge to have phone coverage on all the underground sections of the tube network by the end of the year. It now has 60% of the network live, with new stretches of the Bakerloo line, Metropolitan line, and Circle and District lines gaining coverage in recent weeks. The Northern line will also see a major upgrade in the coming weeks.

If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of this enormous technical challenge, we’ve previously explained how a single joined-up, successful infrastructure programme led by Boldyn Networks has resulted in the strange situation of Londoners now having better phone signal while moving at speed deep underground, compared to when they pop up onto the capital’s streets.

We’ll be back with more original investigative journalism next week.

Get in touch if there’s a story we should be looking into. If you want to follow London Centric on Instagram, that is a thing you can now do.

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Scroll down to read that piece, which looks at how fire safety reports were rewritten at the request of Aziz’s company, meaning it took eight years for the hotel to be shut down and the public to be made aware of the risk.

London Centric is funded by our paying readers. If you’re able to support original investigative journalism about the capital, every subscription makes a massive difference to what we can achieve.

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Asif Aziz, the Wembley hotel, and a fire safety test gone very wrong

This article is the subject of a legal complaint from lawyers for Asif Aziz. They say it is defamatory of him and that it does not fairly and accurately report the Essendi UK Hotels 2 Limited v London Property Company Limited high court judgment, which can be read in full here.

Billionaire landlord Asif Aziz has been personally criticised by a high court judge over how his company handled dangerous Grenfell-style cladding on a high-rise hotel it owns next to Wembley Stadium.

Hundreds of thousands of people stayed at the Ibis Wembley hotel over an eight-year period without knowing they were inside a tall building coated in material that had “no flame-retardant properties”.

London Centric has spent the last year investigating Aziz’s companies. We’ve revealed how they have a history of hosting tax-evading gift shops in their buildings, conducting mass evictions of tenants, and issuing fake electrical safety certificates to residents. We’ve also looked at the billionaire’s ownership of the Prince Charles Cinema and the purchase of the world’s oldest YMCA.

Now, in a damning high court judgment, His Honour Judge Stephen Davies raised a series of concerns about how one of Aziz’s companies handled the “intolerable fire risk” posed to people staying in its Ibis hotel next to Wembley Stadium.

The judge spelled out:

• The personal involvement of Aziz, a Labour donor and self-styled philanthropist, in the response to fire safety concerns at the Wembley hotel.

• Details of a “mystery” incident in which a piece of cladding supposedly from the hotel was provided for fire safety testing by an unknown person, even though it could not have actually come from the building.

• How Aziz’s company had a fire safety report rewritten to remove suggestions that more detailed checks should be carried out.

Although safety concerns about the Ibis Wembley were first raised in the wake of the Grenfell disaster it took until late 2024 before a proper fire safety test was carried out. In that time vast numbers of people slept there after attending football matches, gigs, and other events at Wembley Stadium.

The building suddenly closed for remedial works last summer after checks were finally carried out by the hotel operator, which had come to doubt the evidence provided by Aziz’s company that the building was safe. The decision left hundreds of people attending that summer’s Oasis gigs with nowhere to stay and the hotel remains closed.

The “mystery” of the wrong testing sample

The Ibis Wembley is operated on a day-to-day basis by hotel firm Essendi but the freehold of the building, which comes with responsibility for maintaining its structure, is owned by London Property Company Limited. This is one of many offshore companies used by Aziz for his financial interests.

In late 2017, following the Grenfell disaster, Aziz’s company was warned that the cladding on the Ibis Wembley was “similar to that used on Grenfell Tower” and advised to refer the 210-bedroom, 16-storey building to the fire service.

This did not happen. As a next step, according to the court, Aziz’s company hired a different fire safety consultancy called Clarke Banks to investigate the cladding.

This check would normally involve cutting away a piece of the building’s outer wall and subjecting it to a fire test.

“What then happened is something of a mystery,” said the judge.

In most circumstances an external fire safety consultant would travel to the hotel, cut a chunk of cladding off the building, then inspect it to see if it met the required standards.

In this case, the judge said, an unknown individual instead obtained a piece of cladding and showed it to the consultants at Clarke Banks.

They concluded the specimen would have passed a fire safety test because it was made of pure aluminium.

There was one problem: the pure aluminium cladding sample didn’t come from the Ibis Wembley. It was a completely different material to the flammable cladding that was actually on the hotel, which was “similar to that used on Grenfell Tower”.

The judge suggested there were three possible explanations for what had gone wrong with the test and he could not definitively conclude which was correct.

One explanation was “someone positively misleading [fire safety consultants] Clarke Banks by providing it with a sample which could not have come from the hotel building”. The second was “an inexplicable error” by the fire safety specialists. The third was “some other unexplained reason”.

Aziz’s solicitors at law firm Ronald Fletcher Baker told London Centric it would be wrong to suggest London Property Company Limited “deliberately provided a wrong sample, knowingly misled anyone, or deliberately concealed the cladding issue”.

They continued: “On the contrary, the judgment records that what occurred during the 2018 sampling process remains a ‘mystery’ and that there was insufficient material to make a findings [sic] of deliberate concealment by any party. Any suggestion to the contrary would be false and highly defamatory. London Property Company maintains that Clark Banks [sic] had the correct sample.”

Missed opportunities

Even accounting for the “mystery” of the initial testing mistake, the true severity of the fire safety situation at Aziz’s Wembley hotel could have been resolved back in 2017 with a second, more thorough, safety check of the building.

Yet when the fire safety consultants at Clarke Banks wrote a draft report recommending further inspection of the cladding, the judge found they faced pushback from Aziz’s company, which demanded multiple rewrites to the report.

The intention, the judge said, was to remove the “caveats contained in the first version” which recommended additional testing.

Instead, a sanitised version of the report, giving the building’s cladding a clean bill of health, was then supplied to the operators of the Ibis, which the judge said potentially endangered people staying overnight in the hotel after events at Wembley Stadium.

If further checks had been carried out, it would have quickly revealed the cladding was dangerous and the hotel would have been likely to shut immediately, potentially leaving Aziz’s company with a vast bill for remedial works.

Clarke Banks did not respond to London Centric’s requests for comment on why it rewrote its fire safety report to remove the suggestion of further checks following pushback from its client.

The judge said he did not have enough evidence to “make a positive finding of deliberate concealment” by Aziz’s company. But it was clear to him that, having obtained a favourable report, the business “displayed a firm reluctance to have any further invasive investigations undertaken by any independent consultants”.

“Somewhat unconvincing and unreliable”

Amid growing concerns, the operator of the Wembley hotel finally carried out its own fire checks in 2024, which swiftly concluded the building was dangerous. This led to a messy court dispute over who was responsible and who should pick up the bill for remedial works. Aziz’s London Property Company lost, has to remove the cladding, and now faces paying substantial damages.

The judge was critical of the two witnesses put forward by Aziz’s company in the court dispute, calling one of them “somewhat unconvincing and unreliable”.

He also said he believed Asif Aziz was personally involved in the discussions regarding the cladding on the hotel as one of his employees had to “obtain instructions from Mr Aziz for all major matters”.

The judge said: “Although both [witnesses] were keen to describe Mr Aziz as a ‘big picture’ man... that is belied by the documented extent of his involvement in the case from start to finish, which shows that on occasions (although I accept not always) he was directly involved in the details.”

Why didn’t Asif Aziz personally put his case across in court?

Aziz styles himself as a major philanthropist in London, owning the Trocadero building along with vast swathes of central London and residential towers. Through his family foundation he has donated to Labour MPs and also funds journalistic internships in many major newsrooms.

The billionaire left the UK in early 2025, relocating to Abu Dhabi, with the media attributing his decision to leave to the tax burden of the new Labour government. He occasionally returns to the UK and this year met mayor of London Sadiq Khan at the switch-on of London’s Ramadan Lights, which are funded by Aziz’s family foundation.

The judge was critical of Aziz’s failure to give evidence at the trial and said the billionaire could have given evidence by video: “My strong suspicion… is that much of the evidence in this case in reality emanates from… Mr Aziz, who in my view plainly could and should have been called as a witness, unless there was some very good reason for not doing so.”

Aziz will soon become one of the biggest hotel operators in London, as his company rushes to open thousands of windowless rooms in buildings operating under his ‘Zedwell’ branding, many of them in underground basements.

Although the judge concluded that Aziz has “control of” the company that owns the hotel’s freehold, his lawyers said: “Mr Aziz is not a director of London Property Company Limited and is not involved in the day-to-day management relating to the cladding. The decision as to which witnesses to call was a matter for the legal team and was based on which individuals had direct operational involvement in the relevant issues. Unfortunately, the key witness and a valued employee passed away shortly before the trial. London Property Company Limited disagrees with the judgment and intends to appeal.”

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Updates on previous stories… our story on Lime’s removal of speed limits for Deliveroo riders was raised with the company by Paul Swaddle, the leader of Westminster City Council… we’re hearing that the office in Hackney where goat sacrifice may be taking place has possibly already been cleared out….

Self-driving taxis are (sort-of) coming to London this summer on Uber

Is a self-driving taxi truly a self-driving taxi if it still has a human in the driving seat in case the self-driving fails? It’s a thought experiment that is about to become reality in London, after driverless taxi firm Wayve confirmed plans to start carrying paying customers around London by the end of the summer, attracting substantial media interest.

Wayve, for those struggling to keep up, is a homegrown startup that has been testing its cars on the streets of London since 2018. It is completely separate from the similarly named Google-backed Waymo which has also been flooding London with self-driving taxis in recent months and is planning to launch later in the year.

While Wayve plans for future operations to be fully driverless, at first all trips will have a licensed operator behind the wheel in case anything goes wrong.

Rather than build its own app, Wayve is launching in conjunction with ride-hailing company Uber. People requesting an Uber might find themselves being assigned a Wayve self-driving vehicle at no extra cost. If you want to increase your chances of being matched then go into your Uber account settings, tap on ‘ride preferences’ and register your interest in the ‘autonomous vehicles’ section.

We’ve been obsessed with who owns The Holme in Regent’s Park, formerly London’s most expensive home, since it was sold to an unknown purchaser for £139m in 2024. Now, the FT reports, the owner of the 40-bedroom house is close to flipping it to another unknown purchaser for £190m. Due to the UK’s unreformed property transparency laws, the owner is obscured by a trust and we’ll never know who stumped up the cash.

Would you like an unlicensed HMO with your pizza?

London Centric has reported on its fair share of dubious landlords. But we were surprised to see Pizza Pilgrims pop up on City Hall’s Rogue Landlord checker. It shows the proponents of Neapolitan pizza were fined £10,000 after being prosecuted for failing to ensure a house in multiple occupation was “safe and in good condition”.

A spokesperson for the pizza chain told us the breach of the law relates to a “historic administrative oversight” regarding a flat above the company’s Camden branch: “The issue was fully resolved as soon as the issue was brought to [Pizza Pilgrims’] attention and the property is now fully compliant. It did not relate to the operation of the restaurant itself, and there are no ongoing issues in relation to this matter.”

Lambeth Walk of shame

Despite the local elections taking place over a month ago, Labour in Lambeth is continuing to take a kicking. The former Labour stronghold now has a Green Party leader for the first time, after Zack Polanski’s party formed a coalition with the Lib Dems.

Now, former Labour councillor Andrew Collins is suing the party for deselecting him, after he was barred from standing in May’s local elections following what he claims was a “corrupt and unlawful process”.

First elected in 2022 to represent Clapham East, he saw his bid to stand again as a Labour candidate blocked by the party, which cited attendance issues. Collins has already defected to the Greens but told London Centric that he’s still bringing the case against his old political party for the “benefit of future Labour Party members whose rights we must safeguard.”

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PS We’re baffled and delighted to learn that London Centric has been mentioned in a novel. Thanks to reader Rebecca Elliot, who encountered the mention in Losing the Plot by Mia Page, described as a new “uplifting bookish rom-com” .

We have never, to our knowledge, linked to a ranking of olives, but there’s a first time for everything.

At 10.22pm a man drags the animal by its horns through double doors into a rented office, a rope trailing from the goat’s neck. A second man quickly follows, carrying a folded-up cage.

The goat is never seen again. Instead, the CCTV records the same men leaving the room at 4.31am without the animal. One man is carrying a black rubbish bag, while another man hands over a transparent plastic container, containing an item that resembles horns, to a third participant.

The day after the CCTV footage was recorded, a video posted to the men’s Instagram account shows what appears to be the same goat inside the office, its horns being tightly gripped. Another video on the same account shows the same goat motionless on the ground. A man kneels over it with his hands raised in the air and chanting. The office’s walls are painted black and red.

We asked Ben Dustan, the president of the Goat Veterinary Society, whether he had encountered anything like this before. “Only in horror stories,” he said.

The man on the CCTV who dragged the goat into the office has a record of similar activity. London Centric has found years of Instagram posts featuring him holding dead birds by the legs, posing with a severed goat’s head, or pushing animal hearts wrapped in leaves into the earth with his bloody hands.

What’s more, when not operating from the Hackney office, in a building shared with business tenants such as viral political campaign group Led By Donkeys, the man appears to carry out similar rituals in the capital’s public cemeteries.

In recent weeks London Centric has uncovered videos of his organisation conducting elaborate ceremonies involving animal body parts, explosives and the burning of replica coffins by graves belonging to unrelated individuals.

But who is this man running a “black magic” temple a few minutes’ walk from Hackney town hall? What is he doing in there? And how does it all come back to a chef called Hugo who used to work for Marco Pierre White?

Read more and watch the CCTV footage below:

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