Woman also arrested at same address in Kent on suspicion of assisting an offender
A serving Metropolitan police officer has been arrested in connection with the disappearance of Sarah Everard in south London.
The 33-year-old marketing executive went missing after leaving a friend’s house in Clapham at about 9pm on Wednesday last week.
Continue reading...Everard, 33, went missing on evening of 3 March while walking from Clapham Junction area of London to Brixton
Police have said they are “increasingly concerned” over the disappearance of a woman who has not been heard from since Wednesday night and are appealing for information.
Sarah Everard, 33, went missing as she walked home to Brixton, south London, from the Clapham Junction area on 3 March after meeting a friend.
Continue reading...The artists have responded to the pandemic with comic, haunting works showing themselves being buffeted around a chaotic London. They talk about lines of coffins, illegal raves and ‘shameful’ statue-toppling
As they call themselves living sculptures, I can’t resist asking Gilbert and George what they think of all the statue-toppling that took place last year. When I ask for their verdict on the removal of public works that have been accused of celebrating slavery and colonialism, they are sceptical.
“We would call that shameful behaviour,” says George. “And it’s very odd – because normally those statues are totally invisible. Nobody ever looks at them. I remember, very near my home town, there’s a statue of Redvers Buller, the hero of the Boer war, surrounded by dying Zulus and things. And if you asked people in Exeter, ‘Where’s Buller’s statue?’, none of them knew. It’s a bit silly. Rewriting history is very silly.”
Continue reading...Company says sewage plan would avoid 105,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions over 30 years
Thousands of homes in south-west London could soon be warmed by the waste from their local sewage works as part of England’s first poo-powered district heating scheme.
Thames Water hopes to harness the heat of human waste from its treatment plant in Kingston upon Thames to warm more than 2,000 new homes that form part of a regeneration plan for the borough’s Cambridge Road estate.
Continue reading...Actor describes being helped with lines and learning by repetition at event for the Vision Foundation
Dame Judi Dench has spoken of her determination to carry on working despite sight loss, even if that means using friends to learn lines and being gently told to stop delivering speeches to the proscenium arch rather than her fellow actors.
Dench described how she copes with deteriorating eyesight – the challenges, the unexpected advantages and the funny side – at an online event on Thursday with Stephen Fry and Hayley Mills for the Vision Foundation, the London sight loss charity.
Continue reading...Public told to watch what they flush after workers take two weeks to free blockage
Members of the public have been urged to be careful what they flush after a “huge, disgusting” fatberg the weight of a small bungalow was cleared from an east London sewer.
Thames Water engineers and MTS Cleansing Services spent two weeks using high-powered water jets and hand tools to chip away at and eventually remove the rock-like heap, which was said to have smelled like composting festival toilets and rotten meat, from a conduit in Canary Wharf.
Continue reading...The £150m repair of Hammersmith Bridge, closed since 2019, is mired in squabbling – and it’s just one of many across the UK that need work
Toby Gordon-Smith can see the district of Hammersmith from his flat. In normal times it takes him a few minutes to get there in his wheelchair. His cannabidiol products business is there, with the accessible tube station that he needs to get to the rest of London. The station is the reason why he moved to the area, but now it might as well be in another city. For he lives in Barnes, on the south side of the River Thames, opposite Hammersmith, and the bridge that connected them is closed for safety reasons – to vehicles since April 2019, and to pedestrians, cyclists and wheelchair users since last August. Although it is nearly two years since the first closure, there is still no clear plan for fixing the bridge.
There are thousands of stories like Gordon-Smith’s. For children in Barnes who go to schools in Hammersmith, what was once a 15-minute walk is now a tortuous three-mile journey along a towpath regularly flooded by the tide, up flights of steps on to a railway bridge (which makes cycling difficult) and through an ill-lit park with high rates of crime. Or they can take a long bus ride, which means getting up at 6am, if you’re going to beat the rush-hour traffic. The area’s main hospital, Charing Cross, is on the north side of the river, so those of its staff who live to the south, and patients needing such things as chemotherapy, now have to make gruelling journeys of an hour or more each way. Ambulances face potentially lethal delays.
Continue reading...Residents project red illumination on closed west London landmark to highlight delays to repair
Hammersmith Bridge has been illuminated bright red in a Valentine’s Day stunt aimed at highlighting delays to its repair.
The 133-year-old west London bridge has been closed to traffic since April 2019 when cracks appeared in its pedestals. It then closed to pedestrian, cyclist and river traffic in August after a heatwave caused the faults to “significantly increase”.
Continue reading...Few places have seen such turbocharged luxury development as Nine Elms on the London riverside. So why are prices tumbling, investors melting away and promises turning to dust?
Every morning, when Nadeem Iqbal wakes up and walks into his living room, he has a view of a miraculous world first. A crisp oblong of crystal clear water now hangs in the air between two apartment buildings opposite his balcony, a liquid blue block suspended against the sky with the gravity-defying quality of a Magritte painting.
This is the Sky Pool, the latest addition to the luxury residential enclave of Embassy Gardens in Nine Elms, south-west London – one absurdist step beyond the private cinema, indoor pool, gym and rooftop lounge bar. It was dismissed as a “crackers” PR stunt when the plan was unveiled by Irish developer Ballymore in 2015, a fantastical aquarium of captive high net worth individuals for the rest of us to gawp at from far below. Surely it would never materialise. But last week the scaffolding was taken down to reveal a bright blue rectangle hovering against the leaden January skies, 10 storeys up in the air – just outside the 30-metre bomb blast seclusion zone around the new neighbouring US embassy.
Continue reading...Rory Hooper, Swampy’s son, joins environmental activists to protest against environmental destruction
Veteran environmental activist Dan Hooper, known as Swampy, who is one of nine protesters in a tunnel in central London to raise the alarm about the environmental destruction they believe the high speed rail project HS2 will cause, is in the tunnel with his 16-year-old son, it has emerged.
The activists have been in the tunnel close to Euston station since Tuesday to raise awareness of the climate emergency and to try to halt work on the HS2 project which is under way in the Euston area. They argue that many ancient woodlands will be destroyed by the project. HS2 says it is planting 7m new trees.
Continue reading...Despite stay at home orders, vulnerable asylum seekers in Home Office accommodation say they were given as little as a day’s notice
Modern slavery survivors with young children were among refugees allegedly forced to move accommodation in London with as little as one day’s notice during coronavirus lockdowns this winter.
Women who are among the UK’s most vulnerable refugees and asylum seekers said they were given just 24 hours to pack before being moved from accommodation provided by the Home Office, often having to travel long distances across the capital, in late December and January.
Continue reading...HS2 protesters describe how they built tunnel, as officials warn of danger from gas and water pipes
Environmental activists have held out for their second night in the Euston tunnel, but eviction officers have said the tunnel is close to gas and water pipes and that the activists are putting their own lives at risk.
The tunnellers described how they constructed what is thought to be one of the largest tunnel networks to be occupied by protesters in one of the busiest parts of London without being detected.
Continue reading...National Crime Agency says it suspects ‘specialist knowledge’ was used to scam bounceback scheme
Three men have been arrested as part of an investigation into fraudulent coronavirus bounceback loans totalling £6m. The National Crime Agency (NCA) said all three men worked for the same London financial institution and are suspected of using their “specialist knowledge” to carry out the scam.
Two of the suspects, aged 30 and 31, were arrested at their office by members of the NCA’s Complex Financial Crime team, while the third, aged 30, was arrested at an address in Camden.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Adapted single-deckers with seats removed and oxygen onboard will transfer patients
NHS staff are preparing to transport patients using two London buses that have been converted into makeshift ambulances, in another sign of the strain Covid is putting on the capital’s health services.
Most of the seats on the single-decker buses have been removed so that each can carry four patients, in an attempt to relieve the intense pressure on hospitals and the London ambulance service.
Continue reading...Nadhim Zahawi says over-70s being invited for jabs and hints teachers could be prioritised in next phase
The first 24-hour vaccination centres will be piloted in London before the end of January, the UK’s vaccines minister has said.
Nadhim Zahawi said that by the beginning of February the scheme would be under way in hospitals in the capital and also pledged that 50 large vaccination centres would be open. He said that at present about 140 people a minute were being vaccinated against Covid-19.
Continue reading...‘Mortality management’ has been stretched and as fatalities pass 100k systems are again feeling the strain
When the UK’s first victim of Covid-19 died on 5 March 2020, there were only 116 recorded infections in the country and few people countenanced a death toll of 100,000.
But for government planners it was different. Emergency response experts tasked with “mortality management” braced for a death toll that they feared would dwarf anything seen since the second world war. As fatalities mounted in China and Italy, the worst-case scenario for the UK was so grim that one scheme hatched involved storing thousands of bodies in a warehouse in east London.
Continue reading...Nicknamed The Wodge because of its girth, the capital’s tallest ever office has just muscled onto the skyline. But in the age of coronavirus, who wants to jostle for 60 lifts with 12,000 others?
With the City of London deserted once more, its streets only populated by the occasional Deliveroo driver or tumbleweed-seeking photographer, it seems a strange time to be completing the largest office building the capital has ever seen, not least because the very future of the workplace is now in question.
But, rising far above the Cheesegrater and the Walkie-Talkie, dwarfing the now fun-sized Gherkin and boasting the floor area of almost all three combined, 22 Bishopsgate stands as the mother of all office towers. It is the City’s menacing final boss, a glacial hulk that fills its plot to the very edges and rises directly up until it hits the flight path of passing jets. The building muscles into every panorama of London, its broad girth dominating the centre of the skyline and congealing the Square Mile’s distinctive individual silhouettes into one great, grey lump.
Continue reading...Morale plummets as NHS sees ‘grave consequences’ of relaxed rules over Christmas
Intensive care medics in London have made a fresh appeal to the public to comply fully with England’s coronavirus restrictions, as they struggle to deal with more patients than at any time over the last four winters.
Morale among ICU staff is tumbling and concerns have been expressed about a “mass exodus” as the second wave of Covid infections escalates rapidly in London and elsewhere in England. Some doctors and nurses have already quit.
Continue reading...The first woman to have her own column in the Observer, Whitehorn was a celebrated writer and author
Katharine Whitehorn, the pioneering newspaper columnist and author, has died aged 92.
The Cambridge graduate worked briefly as a model before embarking on a celebrated writing career, working for publications including the Observer, Picture Post and Saga magazine, where she was agony aunt for 19 years.
Continue reading...'I'm afraid this virus is out of control,' the mayor of London has said after declaring a major incident as the capital's hospitals struggle to cope with coronavirus patients. 'The NHS in London is at risk of being overwhelmed ... we could run out of beds,' Sadiq Khan said. The mayor told BBC News that as many as one in 20 people had the virus in some parts of the city. 'The best way you can help the NHS is by staying at home,' he said
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