Economist.com Cities Guide: London Briefing - June 2005

News this month

Going underground

Passengers travelling on London’s underground network will soon be able to use their mobile phones at stations deep beneath the city streets. Mobile access will be introduced at all 275 underground stations by mid-2008, according to Transport for London (TfL), the quango that oversees the capital’s transport. Small antennae called “microcells”, hidden in signs or vending machines, will make the subterranean service possible. Unlike other cities’ systems, London’s will support fancy new 3G phones, as well as wireless internet access for laptop users.

The announcement was mostly welcomed by Londoners. But TfL’s suggestion that the service “could be extended across the network to include tunnels and moving trains at a later date” raised some hackles. Overcrowded during rush hours, stiflingly hot in the summer and often delayed, one advantage the Tube has over London’s buses is that passengers are spared telephone chatter. That could now come to an end. Still, there are plans to reinvest the income generated in the Tube network, which should make commuting slightly more comfortable for the 19m people who use the service each year.

Hold the presses

A chapter in British newspaper history closed on June 15th when the Reuters news agency left Fleet Street for new premises in Canary Wharf in east London. Once synonymous with the national newspaper industry, the bustling thoroughfare has been colonised by lawyers, accountants and bankers since the newspapers began moving out in the mid-1980s. Reuters’ departure, which was marked by a service at the “journalists’ church” of St Bride’s, leaves just a handful of British journalists based on Fleet Street.

Shed a wistful tear: Fleet Street’s association with publishing dates to 1500 when a printer, Wynkyn de Worde, built London’s first printing press alongside St Bride’s. But whether the newspapers’ dispersal across London has damaged the quality of British journalism is debatable. More than one grizzled veteran dipped his quill to lament the “cross-fertilisation of thought” and “community spirit” that have allegedly been lost. Of course, the prodigious amount of wining and dining this necessitated, and for which Fleet Street’s denizens were famed, will not at all be missed.

All change

That thousands of Londoners leave the city each year for greener pastures is well established. A new report by Halifax, a mortgage-lender, found that 2.3m people, most of them middle-aged, left the capital in the decade to 2003. The migration rate seems to be accelerating, with 190,000 Londoners leaving in 2003—a 38% increase on the total for 1993.

There have also been significant population shifts within the capital. Most dramatic is that of blacks, who are largely abandoning troubled inner-city neighbourhoods such as Brixton in favour of humdrum suburbs. Thanks to an influx from Hackney and Newham, there are now more Afro-Caribbeans in the north London borough of Redbridge than in the whole city of Manchester. In South London, blacks are moving from Lambeth and Wandsworth to Croydon. As a result, London’s Afro-Caribbeans are becoming considerably less segregated than African-Americans in New York and Chicago.

The net closes

Tight security surrounded the opening of the Wimbledon Championships in south-west London on June 20th. The All England Club is London’s proposed venue for the tennis tournament at the 2012 Olympic Games, leaving police keen to avoid a potentially embarrassing security breach. Picnic hampers, cool boxes and briefcases have been banned, and visitors must pass through metal detectors and body searches to enter the grounds. One couple reported having their corkscrew confiscated; another visitor was forced to relinquish a bottle of Pimm's.
Wimbledon’s official caterers, who charge visitors £10 ($18.20) for a glass of champagne and £2 for ten strawberries, are no doubt pleased.

Police have also sent special warnings to those Wimbledon perennials: stalkers (including one man who lunged at champion Maria Sharapova at a tournament in America). Meanwhile, the tournament’s organisers have joined forces with other sporting promoters to declare war on “touting”, the reselling of tickets, which is legal under British law with the exception of those for football matches. Twenty civil injunctions have been taken out against people auctioning tickets to the Wimbledon Championships online. But the move came too late for one chump, who reportedly paid £3,000 on eBay for a pair of “backstage passes” to the Championships that officials reckon are bogus.

Stand and deliver

DHL, an international courier, is refusing to make deliveries to “unsafe” parts of London. The German-owned firm was the first to set up in Baghdad after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and it operates in troublespots such as Afghanistan and Cambodia. But the hood-wearing thugs of Canning Town and Custom House in east London apparently present too great a threat. A spokesman for DHL said that a combination of threats and harassment of its drivers led to the suspension of deliveries.

Residents of the two areas—both in the poor, inner-city borough of Newham—have been asked to collect packages from DHL’s depot instead. The company has also temporarily suspended deliveries to parts of Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham for similar reasons. This is even after a council-led audit of crime and disorder in Newham, published in 2004, found that the level of crime per 1,000 people was lower than in other inner-city boroughs such as Hackney, Southwark, Tower Hamlets and Haringey.

Catch if you can

July 2005

Frida Kahlo

Until October 8th 2005

Visitors to London this summer should make time for a trip to Tate Modern for a large show of work by Frida Kahlo. The self-taught Mexican artist, who never fully recovered from a gruesome bus accident when she was 18, is perhaps best known for her startling self-portraits (knitted black brows, an imperious stare). Married twice to Diego Rivera, a Mexican muralist, and also involved with Trotsky, Kahlo's stormy life and physical pain are reflected in her work, and have turned her into something of a feminist icon.

Some 60 paintings and 20 drawings are on display (two of them lent by Madonna). As well as self-portraits (including a wedding portrait of Kahlo and Rivera), the curators have gathered still-life paintings and lesser-known works.

Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG. Tel: +44 (0) 20 7887-8000. Open: Sun-Thurs 10am-6pm, Fri-Sat until 10pm. Tube: Southwark & Blackfriars. See also Tate Modern's website.

More from the London cultural calendar