Dear Londoners — We hope you had a fun Halloween weekend, and didn’t end up in the house of horrors, i.e. Euston Station during its multi-hour shutdown on Saturday night.
In case you missed it, in our Saturday story we exclusively got the inside scoop on what’s going on at the House of St Barnabas and its £10m Soho home. It’s a story that involves boardroom battles, Mayfair businessmen and an elite members club whose members include Jeff Bezos and Buzz Aldrin. There will be more updates to come (including one in today's newsletter) so you don’t want to miss it.
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The MOTH-er of all parties
It’s confetti canons to the ready over at MOTH Club, where a years-long battle over plans to build neighbouring flats finally tipped in the Hackney venue’s favour last week. General Manager Edie Kench-Andrews said that MOTH Club risked being “attacked on all sides” if the council approved the development, fearing a slew of noise complaints which would ultimately shutter the historic venue.
But last Thursday, council officers rejected developer Ganatra’s plans for seven flats and a commercial unit. It’s the second set of plans Ganatra has seen squished, after earlier plans for six flats were also turned down. Hackney council rejected these plans on the grounds that they offered no affordable housing and lacked the proper noise insulation for future occupants to happily coexist alongside MOTH Club.
So though the borough is in dire need of new housing, that won’t be being built here for the foreseeable. It’s an interesting tradeoff we’re seeing around the capital, where every area needs more housing, but communities fear development could kill the very things that make the area worth living in. A similar standoff is brewing in Hackney Wick, where the Lord Napier pub says it’s threatened by plans for a new block of flats.
Founded in 1972, MOTH Club was set up as a headquarters for the Memorable Order of Tin Hats — an order of ex servicemen and women first founded in South Africa. There have been some big parties in the years since then. But the celebrations now might just top the lot.
2 Lime Bike 2 Jousting
I (Peter) was jogging through London Fields on Saturday afternoon, when I found myself confronted by a crowd of several thousand people and a scrum of unruly content creators. The cause of the melée was immediately obvious to anyone who’s taken even a brief scroll through Instagram lately. It was the latest iteration of Cameron Carnegie Brown and Jack Carden’s wildly viral spectacle of Lime Bike jousting, of course, and it was about to get serious.
Was it fun to watch? Not especially.
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