Outrage over Asif Aziz’s newest London hotel

Dear Londoners — People often believe the capital doesn’t have its own folklore (wrongly!). But when it comes to the spooky, ghostly and downright diabolical, it’s generally accepted that we’ve got it by the bucketload. Looking for hell hounds? Try the Black Dog of Newgate. Weird jumping devils? That’ll be Spring-heeled Jack. Evil buildings? Try sleeping a night at 60 Berkeley Square. Green Park is even said to have a haunted tree. That’s how serious the city is about its chills. Coming from near Pendle Hill in Lancashire, the site of 17th century witch trials, I’m particularly fascinated by all things macabre. So today, we’ve got an extra-special supernatural edition of your Monday briefing (along with all of your regular news stories, of course). Just remember to keep a light on when you go to bed this evening…

Before we jump into all that however, we just wanted to quickly thank all of you who have joined up as paying members in the last few weeks and left lovely comments on our recent articles (including Danny, whose comment below, made our weekend). 

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Now back to the briefing…

Big story: Asif Aziz is planning to open a new hotel in South London. Why are local residents so angry?

Topline: The historic Morleys shopping centre in Tooting is set to become a new hotel in the empire of billionaire property developer Asif Aziz, despite local opposition.

Why are locals so angry: The plans, put forward by Aziz’s main development company Criterion Capital, which owns the Zedwell hotel chain (known for running windowless hotels, often with capsule-sized rooms, all over London) will see the site turned into a 92-bedroom hotel with a small parade of shops to be retained at the bottom.

The decision, initially reported on by the BBC, was met with anger by locals, some 400 of whom signed a petition objecting to the development of the shopping centre. Their opposition is focused around whether there’s local demand for a hotel, as opposed to housing, and fears the site as a result may be converted to temporary accommodation after the project finished, something residents say happened to another new hotel in the area thanks to a “planning loophole”.

What are Criterion saying: In the planning documents, agents for Criterion Capital argue that the project “provides both environmental and economic benefits” and will “generate job creation, contributing to both social and economic benefits for the local community”. At a committee meeting, six councillors voted to approve the proposal, with two opposed.

Asif Aziz’s track record: Criterion’s involvement in the project gives good cause for locals to bristle. Long-term Londoner readers will recall how we painstakingly exposed Aziz’s links to the closure of dozens of historic pubs across the capital, including several that left publicans illegally squatting in their own pubs or at risk of being left homeless on Christmas.

Exclusive: The billionaire developer closing London’s pubs

Companies linked to Asif Aziz have been buying up and shutting down some of the capital’s most beloved boozers. Now, we’ve mapped them.

The LondonerAndrew Kersley

Elsewhere, Aziz’s firms have been linked to the attempted eviction of the iconic Prince Charles Cinema near Leicester Square, and the successful eviction of the UK’s first YMCA on Great Russell Street, in February. Those antics have turned Aziz into an infamous figure across London. While reporting on last week’s story about the insane happenings on the Loughborough Estate near Brixton we even saw this poster in one of the flats.

The ‘other hotel’: As far as The Londoner can tell, the other hotel in question that local residents are afraid the new project will mirror is located near Tooting Broadway Station, and owned by a firm called LHG. Ahead of its opening, the developer offered the entire block to the council to be rented as a temporary accommodation. While it would be paying above market rate, Putney News reported that Wandsworth Council, struggling like most councils with record homelessness, argued the move would save them £1m a year compared to using costly, nightly paid hotels, which can often see homeless families sent all over the capital.

Your news briefing

🍻 The Guardian spent a day taking some lovely and intimate shots of people at this year’s MCM Comic-Con. What makes this little photo essay worth a small slice of your day is rather than exoticising elaborate outfits or cheap jokes about nerds, its focus on the social side of the convention gives an all-too-human look at an event that pulls in some 100,000 people each year.

🎾 Putney News is reporting on an alleged “conflict of interest” over the plans to expand the Wimbledon tennis site. The historic club won a legal battle over the plans to expand into a neighbouring park but is fighting off an appeal by angry locals. House of Lords member Gus O’Donnell is now pushing for an amendment to the government’s Planning Bill which would effectively see the legal basis for the locals’ case removed. He is also reportedly on the board of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, which runs Wimbledon.

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🪧 Another one from The Guardian here. In response to an attempted far-right rally by UKIP — what the party was dubbing a "crusade on Whitechapel" before it was stopped by the Met — the newspaper has been speaking to community organisers, historians and counter-protestors about the area’s history of antifascist action.

Quick hits: The Camden New Journal spoke to the Italian restaurant owner whose catty farewell message went viral and a wannabe Tiktok influencer has been arrested after a series of incidents targeting lone women on the tube.

In case you missed it…

• Between 3am and 5am in the morning, before the tube opens, tens of thousands of Londoners are already commuting to and from work. For our Saturday read, The Londoner spent the wee hours riding night buses with them.
• Our Thursday investigation was a saga of assassinations, ambulances and a “catastrophic and potentially fatal” chemical explosion, as we followed up on a reader tip about missing money and strange gifts on one of South London’s oldest and biggest estates.
• On Wednesday, we went behind the scenes at the Frieze Art Fair, featuring parties, "man cave" art and an undercover Leonardo DiCaprio.

Wining and dining

With endless offerings and non-stop openings, we all know that deciding where to eat and drink in the capital can be fraught. We want to make it easy — so every week we’ll give you our insider guide to the city’s best spots. 

One perfect meal: The hunt for a perfect cinnamon bun in this city can be never-ending. My favourite so far comes from Toklas Bakery, the little sibling to next door’s effortlessly cool Toklas restaurant. In the brutalist chic of 9 Surrey Street, a stone’s throw from Temple and the Strand, head baker Ellie Chisholm and team make delicious, seasonably rotated treats — recently, that’s taken the form of an Earl Grey-macerated blackberry cheesecake and a fig, mascarpone and burnt honey custard danish. But it’s the cinnamon buns that keep me coming — I can’t quite work out what sets them apart, aside from being made with a tangzhong for softness (and perhaps some wholewheat flour? Just spitballing here), but they’re perfect. And as somebody who compulsively follows bakeries I can’t visit on Instagram, I’m excited for the pop-up they’re hosting for Día de Muertos in collaboration with hype-y Mexico City bakery, Panadería Rosetta — think pastries during the day and a CMX-style speakeasy in the evening (from Friday 31 October to Sunday 2 November).

One perfect drink: Everyone loves some spooky London trivia. All the better if it links to a historic pub, and this one is a go-to favourite of mine to recount in wood-panelled bars across the capital: Do you know why we depict most ghosts as a person wearing a white sheet? It turns out its widespread popularity dates back to the Hammersmith Ghost, a viral haunting in Hammersmith in 1803-1804, which, while petrifying Victorian London and filling newspapers, was largely down to a man dressed in a sheet scaring passersby. But in the midst of the hysteria, a group of drunken men in Hammersmith’s Black Lion pub by the edge of the river decided to take their guns and go ghost hunting one night. The end result? A local bricklayer called Thomas Millwood, dressed in the all-white garb of his trade after visiting his family that night, was shot, and despite carrying his limp body back to the Black Lion, the attempts to revive him were to no avail. If you need a pub to take people this Halloween season, the Black Lion is still there, perched on the edge of the river, with almost no indication of its tragic history, except for the odd knowing visitor.

Have a perfect meal you think we should check out? Want to recommend your favourite pub? Let us know in the comments.

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Our favourite reads

The Decades-Long Rivalry of London’s Two Vampire Hunters — Francisco Garcia, Vice

Published back in 2020, this piece resurrects the saga of the “Highgate Vampire”, a figure who was said to haunt the N6 graveyard, and the resultant life-long war between its two would-be hunters, David Farrant and Sean Manchester. Expect the kind of pagan drama that could only occur in late 1960s/early 70s north London… 

Mysterious Circumstances — David Grann, New Yorker 

There’s a reason this piece has taken its place among the annals of narrative long-form journalism (of which writer David Grann is probably this century’s most celebrated practitioner). While it isn’t exactly scary, this piece on the unexplained death of the world’s foremost Sherlock Holmes expert is undeniably a little spooky (and, like most ghost stories, more than a little sad).

To Do List

1. Tired of the usual Halloween screenings? Give yourself over to the weird and eerie at the Nickel Cinema, the capital’s cult grindhouse cinema. Our pick is Eyes of Fire — an insane (and genuinely spooky) 1980s puritan folk horror that feels like a direct precursor to Robert Eggers’ seminal 2015 masterpiece The VVitch — though you can’t go wrong with a screening of The Wicker Man. 
2. Sick of scary stuff? Head to the Southbank Centre to see Libyan novelist Hisham Matar in conversation with writers Pankaj Mishra and Nesrine Malik, the founders of new magazine Equator, which seeks to explore global narratives and perspectives without centring a Western vantage point. 

From the archive

Feeling bumps in the night? Knocks on the wall? You’re not alone — so did the Hodgson family, the residents of 284 Green Street, Enfield, in the late 1970s. The so-called Enfield Poltergeist quickly became a media sensation, as the 1977 BBC segment above will attest (though, depending on your belief in the case, the retro haircuts might be the scariest thing..).