Which London borough started building just one affordable home last year?

Dear Londoners — welcome to our Monday Briefing, which is packed with news, restaurant recommendations, links to long reads about oligarchs bullying the authorities in London’s courts and a worrying update about Smithfield Market. 

Big thanks to reader Louis Leeson who tweeted out our weekend read with the very lovely comment: “Finding @_TheLondoner's essays some of the most thoughtful and interesting things I've read these last few months”. Shares like this are a great boost for the team and really help us to grow our list and spread the word, so thank you to everyone who has been doing them. And thanks to Imogen for writing a fantastic piece. 

On Saturday, the Labour MP Bayo Alaba issued a statement on X responding to our story about his property empire, calling our reporting “deeply misleading”. But if you read his statement (an activity reserved for people with zero weekend plans) you will see that everything he says was already reflected in our story, which he and his team had several opportunities to respond to before we published. 

We’ve responded to his statement on X and fully stand by our reporting. If Alaba is proud of his record as a landlord, we would ask him why he never mentioned in his prior writing and statements about housing that he earns substantial rent from his own council? Or that he was evicting a homeless mother of two from one of his flats? We never alleged that Alaba had broken the law here, but it’s our job to put these kinds of things in the public domain, whether or not MPs want them there. 

If you know more about this story or similar ones, please get in touch.

Your news briefing

🏠 In London’s last Mayoral election, the London Liberal Democrats were on a quest to save Londoners from the capital’s housing crisis. Their pledge to “build more houses” was a central plank of their campaign, with the party lambasting Sadiq Khan for his failure to deliver cheap housing. Which makes the new affordable housebuilding figures released over the weekend rather awkward for the yellow party. While the number of new affordable homes that started construction in the city in 2023-2024 had dropped by 88% (factors included poor market conditions for construction firms and a lack of capital funding), there was one borough that stood out. Richmond-upon-Thames started construction on just one affordable home. Richmond is one of just three London councils run by none other than the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, Sadiq Khan has just announced plans for 6,000 new rent controlled properties for key workers — it’s unclear if any will be in Richmond. 

⚗️ Trouble might be brewing for the Science Museum. It’s been criticised for its lucrative partnership with Adani, one of the world’s biggest operators of coal mines and coal-fired power stations. Director Ian Blatchford answered protests and boycotts by saying it was better to “engage and challenge” companies like Adani to try and make them improve. So how has two years of engagement gone? Well, last week, the company’s billionaire chairman Gautam Adani was indicted in New York for his role in an alleged multibillion-dollar government bribery and fraud scheme. If the Science Museum now decides to cut ties with Adani in light of the news, it could pose some major questions about its own financial sustainability going forward, having already cut ties in July with another major funder, oil giant Equinor, over its poor environmental record.

🚨 There’s a lot of things that might prompt a nightclub owner to say, ‘this is the one thing we didn’t want to happen’ when a health and safety officer turns up for an inspection. On that list a full-fledged gunfight has to rank somewhere near the top, just short of a gorilla escape or someone trying to check six tonnes of cocaine into the cloakroom. Enter Ricco Lounge, in Kensington, which now faces closure after exactly that happened. Luckily no one died or was injured in the gun fight, but the Met Police have now called on the council to permanently close the venue. Ricco’s owners, Chelsea Event & Entertainment Ltd, have described the police report as containing “a vast array of factual inaccuracies". 

🥩 The only constant about London is change, a perennial cycle of destruction and renewal. But some things have lasted slightly longer than others. The meat market at Smithfield, the City of London’s last wholesale market, has been there for the best part of a millennium. That was finally set to end when a plan was drawn up by the City of London Corporation in 2021 to move Smithfield to a site in Dagenham, where it would be joined by Billingsgate fish market (relocated from its original location to near Canary Wharf in the 1980s) and New Spitalfields fruit and veg market (moved to Leyton in the 1990s). Now, due to mounting costs, these plans have been shelved — and the continued existence of Smithfield and Billingsgate markets has been brought into question.

Got a story for us to look into? Please get in touch.

New here? Then make sure to go back and read our weekend read from Imogen West-Knights, who tracked down people who had written viral ‘I’m leaving London essays’ to find out if their exodus to the great provincial nothingness was as calming as it seems. While the ensuing feature didn’t deliver the tidal wave of schadenfreude I imagine most city-dwellers were after, it did give the Londoner team an often alien sense of patriotism toward the city we have made an inescapable devilish bargain to cover. 

They wrote ‘Why I’m Leaving London’ essays, but did exiting the capital solve their problems?

Imogen West-Knights caught up with authors of viral leaving London essays and videos, years after the fact

The LondonerImogen West-Knights

From dawn till dusk 

We all know London can be unbearably huge. So every week we’ll take you through an ideal day across the city using our little black book of the best London venues. We hope it’ll be equal parts glitz to spit and Tube-dust.

Breakfast: If for some ungodly reason, you find yourself in Soho early in the morning with some time to kill — you should get breakfast at Koya. The always-packed Japanese restaurant in Soho is mostly known for late night bowls of warming Ramen, which ensure a near permanent queue of hopeful, hungry people out the door each night. But to avoid the queues go for breakfast instead and feast on traditional Japanese staples like grilled fish, miso soup and udon dishes topped with a full-English inspired combo of egg, bacon and shiitake mushroom.

Lunch: There’s a holy trinity of traits that make a good lunch spot in London: delicious food, good ambience and low prices. In central London, many places struggle to cover one. But then along came Thenga Cafe, an affordable vegan Indian cafe, specialising in fresh dhals, Thali, dosa and roti wraps filled with masala-spiced veg, and portion sizes that could feed a small family. The canteen goes largely ignored despite its proximity to King’s Cross thanks to its location on the ground floor of a YMCA building, but may be the best lunch in the area.

Drinks: Earlier this month Time Out awarded London's best pub title to sticky-carpeted Dalston boozer The Army and Navy. But we’re going to recommend somewhere else because that pub is already rammed with Hackneyites and we don’t want to expose our readers to that sheer, unmanageable load of bad mullets. Enter The Railway Tavern — a more intimate pub just a few minutes down the road with all the trappings (fires, wood panelled interiors, etc) of the perfect cosy winter pub.

Dinner: The Londoner has a firm belief that everybody needs, for reasons of ease and practicality, to have a mental list of five places in central London that they can take everybody to: friends, family, the parents of significant others, visiting dignitaries. One such place is Bocca di Lupo, which is pretty much guaranteed to be loved by all. The food — regional Italian, either small or large plates — is unfailingly excellent, as are the service and atmosphere. 

Later: Found yourself in late-night central London on a weekday? Already scarfed a Filet-o-Fish from the Shaftesbury Avenue Maccies? Insistent that you don’t want to get the night bus home just yet? Never fear — thankfully, Simmons isn’t your only option. Head instead to Below Stone Nest, a subterranean bar located beneath an old chapel on the edge of Chinatown. Open Tuesday to Friday, 6pm to 2am, the vibe is post-industrial crypt, with peeling concrete walls and candlelit tables. 

Our favourite reads

A Map Of London Bookswaps — Matt Brown, Londonist

In a city as big and anonymous as London, it can sometimes feel a little difficult to feel a sense of community. That’s why we were delighted by Londonist’s new interactive map of bookswaps around the capital. Each entry has a unique description of the library’s appearance and location (some thorough, some short), leading the project to feel a little like a collection of short stories itself.

How oligarchs took on the UK fraud squad – and won — Tom Burgis, The Guardian

Back in September, Guardian journalist Tom Burgis wrote this bombshell piece about Kazakh mining company Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) and its successful legal onslaught against the UK’s financial crime agency, the SFO (Serious Fraud Office) — and how, in a landmark ruling, UK taxpayers are being forced to foot the bill for the latter’s settlement. It’s a seedy web of London-based law firms, shady billionaires and crumbling public oversight.

To Do List

This week: On Wednesday the Royal College of Nursing is hosting a free-to-attend talk on the history of Black British nursing by Kandace Chimbiri who has just penned a book on the subject. Expect fascinating potted histories of the trailblazing Black nurses (like Asarto Ward, Annie Brewster and Mary Seacole) that shaped the history of British medicine and nursing.

All's Well That Ends Well is often maligned as one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays” – stuck in a hinterland between comedy and tragedy. Enter a new production of the play by Shakespeare’s Globe, but being staged away from the iconic venue, that tries to iron out those inconsistencies in a more modernised adaptation. It has been well received by reviewers thus far and standing tickets for showings in the next few weeks selling for as little as £5 or £10.

And Beyond: If, like us, the arrival of the oppressive, crushing force of corporate Christmas cheer and Winter Wonderland tourists has triggered Vietnam veteran-style flashbacks, then we may have the event for you. The iconic BFI Southbank cinema, in typical BFI fashion, has decided that instead of showing traditional Christmas films, it will air a selection of movies not seen as “festive favourites” but where “at least one scene set during the December holiday period”. Think Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Goodfellas, When Harry Met Sally or, erm, Eyes Wide Shut.

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