"Just not acceptable": The council boss and the free Brit Awards tickets
Plus: The Banksy artwork in a TfL cupboard; a £15m property mystery; deploying Soho's bin lorries to fix your mobile phone signal.
Welcome to London Centric, where the response to last week’s edition about the poor quality of phone signal in the capital was overwhelming — at least from those Londoners who could download it.
As one kind reader put it, “I test mobile coverage for a living… and this is really well written and technically correct. Which makes a pleasant change from 90% of media tech stuff”. Another commentator said they’d screen grabbed it at work so they could read it on the train home when they lost their data connection. The Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 hosted a national discussion about the article on this afternoon’s show, following an interview with a chicken.
Well, if you came here for the phone signal coverage then there’s more for you. Read on for an exclusive story about how bin lorries are being used as a secret weapon in the capital’s war on poor data coverage. Subscribers can then scroll to the end for an exclusive story about the London council leader receiving free tickets to watch Dua Lipa at the Brit awards — just after his organisation approved a major property development by the venue’s owners.
Today’s edition of London Centric includes exclusive stories about the capital, shining a light on what others miss. Everything you’re about to read is entirely paid for by reader subscriptions, so if you like what you’re seeing, please tell your friends and do consider supporting a new approach to journalism in the capital.
Hey Banksy, can we have our traffic lights back?
Exclusive: London is about to get another new Banksy. Sort-of. Given the many challenges facing Transport for London (a giant cyberattack, lack of central government funding, people playing music on the bus without headphones) you might think they would be cashing in on an object worth hundreds of thousands of pounds that they have had in storage.
The artwork of a mouse with a clock was stencilled on a TfL-owned traffic light control box in Croydon in 2019 when the world’s most “made you think” artist opened a shop called Gross Domestic Product.
With crowds gathering on the street, TfL staff turned up with a team of heavies to remove the door, wrap it in bubblewrap, and take it away to an undisclosed location. The Banksy has remained in storage for the last five years, steadily going up in value.
With your typical Banksy getting nicked almost as soon as it appears, London Centric has learned that the Croydon artwork is set to be handed over to London Transport Museum. A spokesperson for TfL confirmed that rather than flog the artwork to raise funds they’re working “to transfer the item” to the museum — although there are no confirmed plans as to where or when it will go on display.
Preposterous London property of the week
This recently-listed £15m house caught my eye while browsing RightMove (strictly for journalistic purposes): It’s a giant ten-bedroom 1990s house on the Thames next to Vauxhall Bridge on Grosvenor Road, with staff quarters, indoor swimming pool, and some marble-heavy interior design choices. What I didn’t expect, until I dug into it, was the extent to which it serves as a parable for modern London.
Three things made me want to know more: I’ve cycled past it dozens of times without even noticing it was there, it looks to be poorly maintained, and it’s not clear if anyone has lived there recently.
According to the Land Registry, the property is owned by a company called Achilles Holdings Ltd, registered in the off-shore tax haven of Jersey. After tracking down the accounts for the Jersey company all they reveal is that the business was registered in June 2013 and chose to hide its true ownership behind HSBC’s private banking services.
Except a recent change in UK law to combat money laundering requires such companies to declare their “beneficial owners” if they want to buy or sell property. Which is how, now the property is on the market, it’s possible to find out what the owners have tried to hide for decades: the giant home in central London, apparently left empty during a housing crisis, is ultimately controlled by two relatively obscure Dubai-based royals: 74-year-old Sheikh Manna Al Maktoum and 33-year-old Sheikh Ahmed Al Maktoum.
Do you have another mysterious London property you’ve always wanted to know more about?
A London Centric story — in which Lord Lebedev was asked whether the Saudi Arabian state was funding his newspaper — caused chaos at the Evening Standard, it was reported on Monday. Lebedev publicly responded to the story by insisting the Saudis weren’t gaining influence because they were “closing a newspaper”.
According to the New European, his intervention did not go down well at Standard HQ, where staff have been under strict orders for months to publicly insist that the paper is definitely not “closing” and is simply going weekly.
Meanwhile, the remaining journalists at the Standard have spent the weekend discussing an Instagram post by editor Dylan Jones – who flew to Los Angeles to review a comeback gig by Joni Mitchell for the London outlet.
Exclusive: Westminster council has enlisted its bin lorries in the fight against poor phone signal in central London.
The council got in touch after reading last week’s edition of London Centric to share some details of what they’re doing to combat poor signal in the centre of London — while acknowledging that the current offering isn’t up to scratch.
The sheer number of people in central London — and a chronic failure to provide enough mast capacity to keep up with growing data usage — means that if you’re on a night out in Soho you’ll be stuck with no WhatsApps loading and no ability to unlock that Lime bike for your cycle home.
In an attempt to get a proper view of the scale of the problem, the council has installed mobile phones on four different networks inside its refuse trucks as they trundle around central London, building a realistic street-level picture of what the data strength is really like at different times of the day.
The bin lorries’ findings are damning. In large chunks of Covent Garden and Soho — centres of London nightlife that attract thousands of people and tourists trying to communicate so they can meet up, download event tickets, or share pictures of their night out — the signal is effectively unusable in the evenings, with speeds of less than 2mbps. That’s before you step inside a building, with the extra barriers to good signal.
David Wilkins, who is in charge of transforming Westminster into a smart city, told London Centric that “in the red areas you will really struggle to open Google Maps and use social media”. He said major issue is that central London landlords are redeveloping buildings, with “high demand” for rooftops meaning existing phone masts are being removed and replaced with solar panels, heat pumps, and green rooftop spaces.
He also said an attempt by the government to stop greedy landlords overcharging mobile phone operators had partly backfired, with the annual rental for some rooftop sites collapsing from £50,000 to £5,000 a year, meaning “it is less profitable for property owners to allow telecoms on the roof”. In response, Westminster is trying to install more mini 5G transmitters on lampposts and the rooftops of buildings it owns.
But as always in modern London, it comes back to planning and whether old architecture should take priority over the modern city, according to Wilkins: “Much of the borough is a conservation area so finding suitable locations for sites can be a challenge.”
If you’re at a loose end in London then I’ll be speaking about London Centric on two panel discussions this week: on Tuesday evening at the Frontline Club near Paddington station and on Thursday evening at Goldsmiths in south east London.
London Centric investigates: The council leader receiving free tickets to the Brits from the O2’s owners.
Exclusive by Cormac Kehoe and Jim Waterson
The Labour leader of Greenwich council has received thousands of pounds worth of hospitality from the operators of the O2 Arena – including attending the Brit Awards just after his authority approved a major property development backed by one of the venue’s owners.
Alistair Graham, the former chair of the committee of standards in public life, told London Centric the free gig tickets handed to councillor Anthony Okereke so he could watch the likes of Dua Lipa, Kylie Minogue, and Calvin Harris were “just not acceptable” given the potential for a conflict of interest.
The revelation follows our previous investigation into freebies received by London’s local politicians, including in boroughs where free tickets were handed out to councillors for private festivals held in public parks.
Okereke, who has been in charge of Greenwich since 2022, is a rising star of Labour politics in the capital and runs an area of the city which is seeing vast amounts of property development. Prior to becoming a full-time politician he worked as a consultant advising property companies on how to get planning permission from local authorities.
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