Dear Londoners — Welcome back to a blissfully temperate, slightly cloudy Monday. We hope you’ve had time to cool down after the sweaty hysteria of last week. As for us, we’re going into June feeling incredibly heartened by the community we’re part of. Andrew’s weekend long-read, a heartbreaking exploration of how a mother came to be pushing the decayed corpse of her daughter around Walthamstow market, took a huge amount of time and effort to pull together.
So your comments — both underneath the piece and on socials — mean the world. As reader Jason Smith put it:
“This is the most extraordinary and sad story. It seems almost incomprehensible that such massive failures by the council (and others) can be both unacknowledged and require no accountability. An excellent piece of investigation and reporting.”
Local MP Calvin Bailey noted the similarities to the people he knew in communities around London, and asked for a meeting to discuss the matter further:
“Thank you, Andrew. This is exceptional journalism. Joan reminds me of the great-aunts and great-uncles of East London, people who spent their lives building communities here, only to find themselves increasingly isolated as the world changed around them.”
Over on X (formerly Twitter), @GreenfordBlog called the piece “London journalism at its best”, while on Bluesky @Malkintrash said “The contrast between the care taken over the writing of this article, the evidence of its sustained pursuit of the truth, & the neglect & lies of social services & the council that it reveals, is in itself staggering, beyond the desperate sadness of the story it tells.”
If you haven’t yet weighed in on the piece, you can comment on it here. We’d love to know your thoughts.
Andrew Kersley
Today's briefing is an exciting one: we have an update for you on the fate of the 14 penguins locked in a basement underneath the County Hall and the low-down on why Palantir UK boss Louis Mosley is penning angry articles in The Times about Sadiq Khan. And, as usual, we have our picks of where to go and what to do, including an excellent Highgate honky-tonk bar (a sentence we never thought we'd publish).
This story is free to read. You just need to sign up to join The Londoner's mailling list. And why wouldn't you? You'll get our journalism in your inbox the second we publish, keeping up to date on this and all our stories. No card details required.
Already have an account? Sign In
