Bankruptcies, fraud investigations and servants of the devil on the Loughborough Estate

Dear Londoners — Welcome to this week's Monday briefing, and our first missive of December. We're properly in the festive season now (the hordes of tourists I had to fight through to get a coffee at Monmouth attest to this), and the city is looking extremely twinkly and beautiful. We hope you've got your Prince Charles Cinema viewing of The Muppet Christmas Carol booked...

In other festive discussion, drop your favourite Christmassy pubs (open fires are de rigueur, of course) in the comments below, and our favourites will get a shout-out next week. I recently enjoyed the White Horse on Rupert Street, which boasts both the classic Sam Smith's Dickensian vibe and a terrifying life-size mannequin of Father Christmas holding a large stick. Season's greetings indeed!

Before we launch into the best news and goings-on this week, we wanted to say how grateful we are to our new (and old!) paying supporters. Our appeal this weekend brought dozens of members, and we really are so grateful that you decided to back both The Londoner and a different form of media. Together, we can lead a resurgence in high-quality journalism. So from us to you: thank you.

Big story: An update on the Loughborough Estate

Topline: The management body of the Loughborough Estate, which The Londoner investigated in October, has been referred by the council to the Financial Conduct Authority after a damning internal audit. But that’s just one of the twists and turns of the story that have occurred since our piece was published. 

Our piece: We started investigating the Loughborough Estate Management Board (LEMB) after a reader emailed us a picture of a cheap pleather man bag that they said the board had bought as gifts for the estate’s residents, at a cost of £374,000. After digging into it, we found there was a growing civil war over LEMB’s management: a saga of rampant disrepair, ambulance call-outs and barrels of chemicals that risked a “catastrophic and potentially fatal” explosion. At its centre was the board’s chair, the self-styled “Rt Hon Dr” Peter Shorinwa, who previously accused the council of attempting to assassinate him. But in the months since our report, things have only gotten weirder.

Man-bags at dawn on the Loughborough Estate

Alleged assassination attempts, hazardous chemicals and £374,000 of gifts

The LondonerAndrew Kersley

HMRC: It started with a HMRC winding up petition, a process where someone you owe money (usually the taxman) files for your company to be pushed into liquidation. These petitions are heard in a court before a judgement is made. 

LEMB faced this — and one tenant we spoke to was so angry at the management board that he went to the court and waited through dozens of other cases to try and attend their hearing… Only to find that it’d been cancelled at the last minute, as the board had made a last minute deal with HMRC to settle their outstanding debts. We’ve since been pushing HMRC to release more details on what the outstanding debts were and what agreement they reached, but they refused, citing “taxpayer confidentiality law”.

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The letter: For months, local residents angry at LEMB’s management have been pushing for a general meeting for all residents. The thinking is that they can try and vote out Shorinwa and the rest of the board — or at least air their frustrations. But a few weeks ago, residents received a letter. In it, Shorinwa claimed the estate was in a “state of anarchy” due to the tenants who were campaigning for his dismissal, and argued that such a meeting would be impossible and unsafe. His critics, he said, were a “militant group” in league with the “devil” and threatening locals with “machetes”. "We don't want any stabbing or gunshot in our estate through the actions of some Lambeth [council] staffs and it's [sic] cohort," it added.

The council comes for LEMB: His invectives against Lambeth council could well have had something to do with the local authority’s long-awaited audit into the group's finances, released at the end of November. Its findings were as wide ranging as they were damning: £14,840 was spent by LEMB for its board members to visit the Canary Islands for a “strategic planning trip”, despite the board being in an “overall deficit”. Bank accounts, meanwhile “were observed to be in overdraft”. Money was being paid to suppliers without proper approval of contract awards and payments were made where supporting documents “did not fully evidence the expenditure incurred”. Meanwhile, around £19,000 of petty cash was paid out in the last year, despite the spending “not being managed in line with the petty cash policy”.  

The findings are contested by LEMB, but the council nonetheless took the unprecedented step of referring the group to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

What’s next: The Londoner had hoped to attend the next general meeting for the estate, but we understand that LEMB has declined to hold one. After all, despite the pushback against Shorinwa’s letter and the council’s offer for the board to use its own offices as a safe neutral territory, only the board has the authority to choose if and when to hold a meeting.

Your news briefing

🎶 Something’s happening in west London. Well specifically, something is happening on the social media feed of Ealing Council. In the last few weeks, the otherwise banal Instagram posts from the council have started to descend into insanity — think thumping EDM played at unthinkable volumes over footage of fly tippers and amateurish graphics about how many fines the council have issued. You can get a taste of the absurdity here. What makes things odd is that all the strange, meme-attempt posts exclusively relate to fly tipping and nothing else. Do you know any more as to the thinking behind it all? Get in touch, we’re desperate to understand what’s going on.

🦍 The head of London Zoo has quit ahead of the publication of an internal investigation into his “unacceptable workplace behaviour” was published. In a letter to staff, ZSL’s chair of trustees said that the investigation had found that the conduct of Matthew Gould, a close friend of George Osbourne, former Downing Street staffer and ambassador to Israel, had fallen “below the standard we expect”. The Guardian has the scoop, but no details yet on what that behaviour entails.

⚽ An employee of Chelsea FC has pleaded guilty to defrauding the football club of over £200,000 over the course of four years while working as its assistant treasury manager. Full story in the BBC here. 

🦞 London’s restaurant scene has been aflame with gossip about the so-called “Langoustine Lifter” (bravo to whichever tabloid thought that one up). If you’re not familiar, let us get you up to speed: an unknown woman was caught on CCTV stealing a box of langoustines worth £300 from outside the Michelin-starred Elystan Street in Chelsea. Since then, the reports from other fine-dining restaurants have come in thick and fast: Spitalfields’ Galvin La Chapelle said they had £800 of sirloin beef swiped and Notting Hill’s 104 Restaurant also had a box of langoustines pilfered. A high-end florist has even been targeted, claiming that the thief made off rare orchids worth £400. (Are they holding a thief's’ supper club?) As always, if you know more — however small! — please do get in touch.  

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🚇 The Londoner solves a mystery: last week, a reader (thanks again, Alan!) emailed us wondering why hundreds of tiles from the walls of their local tube stations in Belsize Park, Hampstead and Camden Town appeared to be disappearing. It was particularly worrying as the stations, and the tiles in question, are Grade II listed, with some dating almost a hundred years earlier to the original opening of some of the stations. He’d called TfL and spoken to staff to no avail, as yet more tiles seemed to disappear. Well a little bit of badgering from The Londoner later, and it turns out TfL confirmed to us that the tiles were removed as some were coming loose and it was posing a safety hazard. Their listed status has meant it’s taking a lot more admin and council coordination (and as a result time) to fix them up.

🏠 Such is the state of London’s housing market that £925,000 for a three-bedroom mews house on one of Camden’s most desirable streets seems, if not a bargain, then at least a relatively reasonable deal. But, as always, if something (and by “something” we mean, a house in the capital) seems too good to be true, then it probably is. We won’t spoil the surprise, but take a look at the photos and make up your own mind… 

Quick hits: Barnet, Brent, Enfield, Hackney, and Lewisham councils have joined calls to ban gambling ads on the tube; the 7am Manchester-to-London train service has been axed, but bafflingly will still run (just with staff-only allowed on board); a committee has found that power-hungry AI data centres are delaying the building of new homes. 

In case you missed it…

• On Saturday, we delved into the world of central London’s fruit sellers. Once everywhere, they’re now a dying breed. We spent a day with the survivors. 
• Our Thursday read was all about Greenwich’s Sea Shanty Festival 2025 — meeting people in pirate costumes filling the bowels of the Cutty Sark to try and find out if viral social media fads around sea shanties have changed this age-old tradition.   
• The RSPCA wants to phase them out, while defenders claim they’re a sanctuary for abandoned pets. We went inside the strange world of the capital’s cat cafes, in a saga of workplace abuse allegations and retired oil executives.

One perfect pub

Did you know that Fulham FC have ultras? It was certainly news to me, but something I learned on my first visit to the Bricklayer’s Arms, a quiet backstreet pub just across the river in Putney, that I was informed takes on a new form on Fulham match days. But if you don’t have a militant relationship with Craven Cottage, there’s a lot to love about the place. It’s the oldest (and in our opinion best) pub in the area, and it’s also got some of the neighbourhood’s best beer: cheap independent lagers, perfectly poured Guinness and enough cask ale that they have a certificate from the brewery Timothy Taylor’s on the wall for being one of their most reliable customers. Its secluded location also means it’s rarely overfilled, and means it gets the best customers — ones who have actively gone looking for it.

Our favourite reads and watches

I just want to show you some weird stones — Chris Spargo, YouTube

If you’re a fan of explainer content on all the capital’s weirdest idiosyncrasies, then Chris Spargo is well worth a watch. His latest video gives the history on some of the capital’s strangest stones, from the mysterious, missing Ossulstone that once sat next to Marble Arch and the “Weald Stone” for which the area in northwest London is named.

What happens when a restaurant critic eats her way around Winter Wonderland — Charlotte Ivers, The Sunday Times (£)

In what I assume has to be some form of punishment assignment, The Sunday Times sent their chief restaurant critic to eat their way around the rammed Hyde Park tourist attraction Winter Wonderland, spending dozens of pounds on an array of “sloppy” pasta and “Dubai chocolate churros”. 

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To Do List

1. The secretive enclave of creatives on eel pie island — an islet in Twickenham — is hosting one of its rare open weekends on Saturday and Sunday, giving the general public access to the artists studios (and their works). Once home to the famous Eel Pie Island Hotel, where acts like The Who, The Yardbirds and Pink Floyd played, the island has a reputation for 1960s rock stars and bohemian artists. Book your free visitation slot here. 

2. There are tours for just about everything in this city. Jack the Ripper, Chinatown, Harry Potter; you name a tourist attraction, and there’ll be a guide quipping about it to a crowd of chortling Canadians. But for those really in the know — and for those who spurn the usual tourist trail — the only option is The Gentle Author’s tours (he’s also the writer of the fantastic Spitalfields Life blog). Rich, fascinating and unconventional deep-dives into the city and its inhabitants, they’re a perfect weekend jaunt regardless of whether you’ve been a Londoner for six weeks or 60 years (the Spitalfield’s tour was one of the highlights of my year). Take his tour of the City of London on 28 December, or ring in the New Year with his Spitalfields tour on 1 January 2026. Book here.

From the archive

We’re a couple weeks late for Remembrance Day but in the spirit of memorials, there’s this archive footage of life during the blitz that captures not only the devastation but how people go about day to day life in the aftermath.