The shaman who killed Brockwell Park’s festivals

Dear Londoners — what a glorious weekend. We’re still riding high. The same can’t be said for Lambeth Council, who are panicking after a High Court ruling has put a spanner in the works for a summer of Brockwell Park festivals (and the cash flow associated with them). The latest on that below in your London in Brief. 

But first, mark your calendars: on 12 June we’re finally throwing The Londoner’s long awaited launch drinks, with a 6pm kick-off. It’ll be a fabulous affair, if we do say so ourselves, hosted at the Sekforde in Clerkenwell. All the Londoner team (plus, our amazing contributors) will be in attendance for an evening of gossip and getting to know one another. We’ll also be taking to the stage for a short talk about our work at 7pm. Grab £7 tickets via the button below; the price is to cover the hire fee. We can’t wait to see you. 

London in Brief

🎵 After a bombshell ruling on Friday threw plans for summer music festivals in Brockwell Park into jeopardy, Lambeth Council and the company behind the events are scrambling to ensure they can go ahead. A High Court decision ruled in favour of campaigner Rebekah Shaman, a member of local group Protect Brockwell Park, finding that Lambeth Council’s approval of a series of festivals in the space was ‘unlawful’, This morning, the council issued a statement saying Summer Events Limited — the company applying for the permissions on behalf of the various festivals, which include Field Day, Mighty Hoopla and Cross the Tracks — “has applied to Lambeth Council for a new certificate of lawfulness, for 24 days, following the High Court ruling last week on the previous certificate. The council is urgently considering that application. That consideration does not stop the events proceeding.”

🌱 As for the campaigner who volunteered to represent Protect Brockwell Park, she’s a pretty interesting character. Rebekah Shaman’s surname is either a classic case of nominative determinism or a deliberately chosen moniker. Shaman’s website describes her as an “eco-conscious pioneer”, who conducts “shamanic ceremonies” in the “urban jungle”. She’s also a managing director of the British Hemp Alliance. Apparently pop music festivals in the local park do not fit into her mission to help Londoners find “synchronicity and magic in the ordinariness”. 

🥳 Where are the happiest places in London? It’s a pretty immaterial question but it is one Londoner staff were prompted to consider over the weekend by a push notification from The Guardian. Apparently, within the M25, the most jolly spots include The Ridgeway in Enfield, Clapham Junction, Bounds Green, Surbiton and Bromley. Beyond the question of whether those places are worth living in, or if you can even afford to (a £2.1m property listing is helpfully advertised in the section on Clapham Junction), we noticed a bit of a theme emerging: they’re all either sited on the fringes of the capital far from the “urban bustle”, or — in Clapham Junction’s case — with all the transport links to get you out of London. It seems The Guardian thinks the key to a happy life in the capital is to get as far away from it as possible. 

🚨 There has been non-stop speculation about who might replace Sadiq Khan going into the next mayoral election. While Khan hasn’t actually said he’ll step down, it’s presumed by most people in political circles that he will. Names that have been floated recently include Vauxhall MP and APPG for London chair Florence Eshalomi, or Tottenham MP and Foreign Secretary David Lammy (though he may want to remove his controversial advisor if that is the case). But this weekend a much scarier prospect was tabled. Fresh off returning to the capital from the United States, the Mail on Sunday reported that once-beloved, now cringe-inducing actor James Corden was spotted at the Bafta television awards talking up the possibility of a mayoral run. While chatting to the hosts of Sky News’ Electoral Dysfunction podcast about his love of the “cut and thrust” of politics, it was suggested the reputed Labour supporter should step into frontline politics and there “was talk that he should run for Mayor of London”. Stranger things have happened. 

🏠 At this point, it’s far from news that London property’s market is one of the most favoured vehicles for foreign plutocrats to launder their money. But more evidence just in: The Guardian have a write up of a new report that a loophole in the UK means that the real owners of £64bn of property in England and Wales have been hidden using opaque ‘trusts’. One line in particular stood out to us: that one £61m (no, that wasn’t a typo) London apartment owned by the partner of a Russian oligarch ended up using these opaque ownership structures to swerve sanctions. This matters, not just for the sake of knowing who owns the capital’s increasingly limited housing supply, but to ensure we know exactly who is profiting from London’s property — and if they’re breaking the law to do it. 

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

Catch-up and coming up

Last week saw: 

• Andrew and Miles’ deep dive into the brutal and secretive legal campaign launched by the chicken shop Morley’s to crush its competitors and build a city-wide monopoly
• Freelancer Ed Strang trying to get to grips with the capital’s growing obsession with saunas
• Our weekend long read on the radical plot to free 15 Gentoo penguins kept on display without access to fresh air or natural light in a basement room of the London Aquarium. The penguins’ plight earned a shout out from Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey.

Callouts:

• Did you attend or work at the University of East London or know someone who did? Please get in touch with andrew@the-londoner.co.uk
• Do you work in London’s sustainability or start-up sectors? Reach out to andrew@the-londoner.co.uk

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: Machan Kitchen, 171 Farringdon Rd, London EC1R 3AL
There’s a few notable entries for good Sri Lankan cooking in the capital, each of which fits a different mood and budgetary requirement. For cheerful, you’ve got Hoppers on Frith Street — a typical Soho-style eatery; for expensive and cheerful there’s Rambutan near London Bridge; and, seeking the cheap and cheerful variety (well, by London dining standards), you can head to Machan in Clarkenwell. Yes, their website looks like it was designed by a travel agent, but the food is genuinely transportive. 

Machan serves string hoppers with the correct bouncy consistency, stodgy mutton rolls, devilled chicken and, best of all, “kajugama” — a spiced cashew curry cooked with green beans. You can also grab an arrack cocktail to start you off. If you’ve never had arrack before, try to imagine if whiskey and rum had a child and sent it off to be raised by coconut flowers. Careful though, there’s a fine line between starting you off and finishing you off and that line smells of fermented coconut sap. This is probably the only eatery in London that openly proclaims “tropical beach vibes” on its homepage and actually delivers — Miles 

One perfect drink: Nicholas Nickleby, 6 Ferme Park Rd, Finsbury Park, London N4 4ED
The thing about London is that it’s big. Like really, mind-bogglingly, incomprehensibly big at times. And as a natural response to that, a lot of people in the capital tend to gravitate towards the same several dozen boozers that are curated for them in a never-ending stream of content. The sources may change — from online listicles to monotone food influencers — but the pubs that feature stay the same, and, inevitably, are always rammed as a result. Maybe one of the biggest offenders in this category is the Faltering Fullback in Finsbury Park, recently voted by Time Out to have the best beer garden in London. 

So next time you’re in that neck of the woods, do yourself a favour; swerve past the Fullback’s vine-covered beer garden and keep walking until you’re past the Parkland Walk, heading towards Harringay. If you’re lucky, you’ll stumble onto the Nicholas Nickleby. A gorgeous restored, wood-panelled pub, it evokes the best bars you’d find all over continental Europe. Which is helpful, because as of last year it has been run by Bohem, an upstart London-based Czech brewery. As a result, the Nickleby is only one of two places in the capital this newsletter knows of (the other being Bohemia House in West Hampstead) to drink actually good Czech lager, and soak it all up with central European bar food. Conversely, despite the quality of the beer, it’s also one of the cheaper places to drink in North London, with pints coming in at sub £6. You can thank me later — Andrew

Our favourite reads 

Eileen Perrier’s portraits of Black Britain — Bindi Vora, FT Magazine
London’s own Eileen Perrier has a retrospective running at Autograph Gallery until September and in FT Magazine Bindi Vora has written a relatively short but neatly balanced homage to Perrier. In her work, chiefly through portraiture, Perrier explores her dual Ghanaian and Dominican heritage, the “chasm between her mother’s vivid recollections of home and the reductive imagery of Africa that Perrier saw in the photojournalism of the 1990s.” You can see a humanism to Perrier, there’s a comfortableness that radiates from her subjects. 

An English gentleman, a crooked lawyer: the secrets of Stephen David Jones — Hettie O'Brien, The Guardian 
Hettie O'Brien masterfully weaves together the story of Stephen David Jones, “the epitome of an urbane, chivalrous Englishman.” He read the FT, lived in a plush Victorian mansion block in Little Venice, sent his son to Eton and wore a waistcoat. Also, as O'Brien chronicles, Jones was a decidedly strange lawyer, often acting as a kind of financial matchmaker for wealthy clients. 

To Do List

Visit the V&A’s new East Storehouse, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, from May 31
As readers of our deep dive into the Natural History Museum’s quest to stop London’s bug apocalypse, most major museums have thousands more exhibits sitting in their archives that never make it onto display. But the V&As new East Storehouse, opening at the end of the month, may change things. A mixture of a storehouse for some 250,000 museum objects, it’s — unusually — set to be open to the public given unprecedented behind the scenes access to the inner workings of a major museum.

Giant, Harold Pinter Theatre, running until August 2nd
Mark Rosenblatt’s triumphant, morally complex drama about author Road Dahl’s public flirtation with antisemitism in the 1980s, fresh off winning three Olivier Awards including Best Actor for John Lithgow’s depiction of the famed author, has now moved to the Harold Pinter theatre in Central London. It’s well worth watching before it disappears at the start of August.