It's an Everyman and can be found in the highrise nomansland that separates Westfield from the Olympic Park, now officially known as Stratford Cross. It's housed in a brushed metal box tucked beneath 20 floors of Grade A office space. It has three screens, two half the size of the other, and a total of 253 seats. It opened yesterday with a screening of the new Paddington film (1h 46m • mild threat). It's known as the Everyman Stratford International for awkward reasons which ultimately date back to Eurostar never stopping here. And it perfectly exemplifies how what used to be grubby old Stratford has become a hotbed of default gentrification.
The entrance is in a planter-heavy piazza watched over by security guards who watch you intently should you choose to linger without purpose, just beyond an Everyman-branded snowglobe designed to alert passers-by to the new arrival. Members of the British Council and Care Quality Commission wander past in search of noodly tubs to take back to their desks, while the new winebar nextdoor hopes that TfL executives will drop by for a workplace pit-stop over lunch. The entrance to the Everyman assumes you already know what's showing inside, making no attempt as yet to mention any films, and leads to a lobby bedecked with Hogwartsesque panelling and a seasonal tree. Take the lifts or the stairs and you could be watching Gladiator II with an Aperol Spritz in your hand within minutes.
The team that compiles Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park's social media feed are very excited about it.
'Everyman' is a most inappropriate name for a boutique cinema chain because it very much isn't for everyone. Everyman cinemas have plush red seats and separate cushions, not cramped perches the cleaning staff give a cursory brush between screenings. They also come with little sidetables to rest your popcorn box on, and also perhaps your vegan cheeseburger and mojito, because Everyman's signature offering is an at-seat waiter service. For some people that is indeed a ideal night out, snuggling with a plus 1 watching Hollywood's finest while someone tops up your red wine and brings you £7.90 slices of pizza. But the average Londoner is more likely to consider a £20 seat price an occasional luxury or entirely out of reach, and I bet Everyman's punters are delighted the masses choose to go elsewhere.
They go to Stratford's 13 year-old cinema.
Vue opened in 2011 at the same time as Westfield, a 20-screen digital wonderworld accessed up the maximum number of escalators. It is perhaps more flash than welcoming, a blazing doorway leading to a lower foyer with queueing slalom for the unprepared while those in the know flash their phones at the security guard and glide gently to the pic'n'mix. Tickets bought online cost £1 less than those bought from the desk, and even then they only cost £7.99 making this much more of an affordable treat. Vue thus attracts more of the teenage crowd, whose inability to put their phones away mid-performance nudges many better-off filmgoers towards somewhere quieter, although an auditorium full of people focused on chomping fried food and ordering more alcohol may be no less distracting.
One way Vue excels is in its breadth of film choices, which is easy to do when your screening space is divided up into 20 separate boxes. The big auditoria get the blockbusters, allowing more people to watch one screening of Wicked than can fit in the entire Everyman up the road. But the smaller outliers get the art house movies, the leftovers from last month and in particular a wide range of Asian films, tonight including a Bollywood blockbuster, a 3-hour action sequel in Hindi and two other films whose original languages are Tamil and Malayalam. Know your audience and if you're lucky they'll stay til the credits roll after midnight.
They used to go to Stratford's millennial cinema.
The Picturehouse opened in 1997, designed in postmodern Art Deco style as a counterpoint to the Victorian Theatre Royal nextdoor. Unusually you can determine its function from the exterior - four parallel screens backing onto the gyratory, a long welcoming foyer and a tubular open-plan projection booth running the length of the building. In an era when out-of-town multiplexes were generally the default it always felt like a truly innovative exception. It's also probably my most-visited cinema, nabbing a cheap ticket from the booths by the door or later from the guy at the snack counter hoping to upsell me a popcorn and never succeeding because I'd treated myself to a bag of Minstrels from a nearby newsagent. Alas all now a thing of the past.
The writing was on the wall for the Picturehouse when the Vue opened across the tracks, much larger and with a similar focus on low price tickets. It took away most of the noisy teens in the back seats but it also removed most of the audience, which was great for those of us who remained but terminal for the balance sheet, hence the doors closedfor good at the end of July this year. Initially there were plans for Metro cinemas to take over, indeed if you peer in through the glass doors you can see their branding all around the box office, but I understand they pulled out recently and this iconic building faces an uncertain future.
Stratford has a lot of closed cinemas.
This is the Rex on Stratford High Street which showed films from 1933 to 1969 but these days couldn't survive even as an indoor trampoline park. The Gaumont on Tramway Avenue closed in 1960 and was converted into a factory, since demolished. The Playhouse on Broadway was destroyed by German bombs in 1941, the Trocadero on Juppe Road succumbed to market forces in 1938 and Gale's Electric Theatre was replaced by a Mark’s & Spencer in 1917. Even the Picturehouse would have looked snootily upmarket compared to some of these.
Whatever, if your idea of a good cinema is a cafe-bar with sofas and soft cushions, the new Everyman Stratford International is ready to take your money. You could watch three times as many films by sticking with Vue, but you couldn't do that with an at-seat tempura prawn sharing plate and a Smoked Pineapple Margherita so pick carefully. If a high-profile vibrant destination is your preferred choice then you're probably an incomer, so dig deep and the rest of us will stick with the cheap seats.
Local government organisation in England is complicated, always has been, which is why the government are keen to reorganise it.
There are 317 councils in England:
» 21 County Councils (upper-tier)
» 164 District Councils (lower-tier)
» 32 London Boroughs (unitary)
» 36 Metropolitan Boroughs (unitary)
» 62 Unitary authorities (unitary)
» 2 Sui Generis authorities – City of London and Isles of Scilly (unitary)
Logically it makes no sense that some shire counties have two tiers of government and others have one, but practically it's where we've ended up following the sporadic and inconsistent introduction of unitary authorities over the last few decades. Surrey retains a county council and 11 district councils, for example, whereas neighbouring Berkshire has comprised six unitary councils since 1998 and Buckinghamshire became a single unitary authority (plus Milton Keynes) in 2020. If you want to see how complicated it all is, the following map is clickable.
In a White Paper yesterday the government signalled that it intends to replace all two-tier systems with unitary authorities, mainly for reasons of efficiency. This could be the most dramatic change to local government since 1974 (or it could be yet another well-meaning attempt that ends up as a piecemeal buffet of inconsistencies).
Rather than impose top-down reorganisation the government is inviting proposals from affected areas, which may calm provincial councillors somewhat. They've also suggested an optimum size for the new unitary authorities - a population of at least half a million. Further clarification will follow.
In some counties it's easy to see how things might end up. Worcestershire has a two tier system and a population of 590,000, so its six districts will likely be merged to create one county-wide authority. Cambridgeshire currently consists of unitary Peterborough plus five districts with a total population of 628,000, so will likely end up as Peterborough and Not-Peterborough. Meanwhile Hertfordshire has a two tier system and a population of 1,174,000, which sounds like two unitaries of half a million plus would be the best solution. If you write some population figures on a map you can even play Armchair Council Reorganisation and try to draw your own boundary.
This is such a screamingly obvious solution - Hertfordshire West and Hertfordshire East, each with a population of 600,000 - that I'd be amazed if nobody proposed it. It might feel odd having the same council organising bin collections in Berkhamsted and Borehamwood, or deciding pool opening times in Hitchin and Hoddesdon, but the burghers of Buckinghamshire cope with similar. Imagine the savings that could be made by extinguishing piddly districts like Three Rivers and Stevenage, but also the local accountability that might be lost.
The county, excluding the unitary authorities of Thurrock and Southend, has a population of 1,468,000. This sounds like it'd be perfect for three unitary authorities but if you try to divide up the existing 12 districts it doesn't quite work, at least in any practical sense. Trust me on this, I've spent over an hour playing Armchair Council Reorganisation and every time either the numbers don't add up or the geography gets in the way. My best attempt comes if you merge Thurrock into the mix, which is fine because the rules say we can include "unitary councils where there is evidence of failure" and Thurrock is the posterchild for that.
This gives us a Chelmsford/Harlow-based authority, a Colchester-based authority and an estuary-hugging authority, leaving Southend as a unitary city all on its own. These three new authorities all have populations just over 500,000, so that's perfect, but there are so many irregularities underneath that this would never be the preferred final solution. I show this merely to demonstrate what an absolute can of worms Angela Rayner is opening here.
Whatever, if you're a council leader facing big choices as to who to propose merging with, here's my county-by-county guide to the underlying demographic issues (including the total population in each case).
dg's guide to Armchair Council Reorganisation
Two-tier counties Hertfordshire (1,174,000): Likely two authorities, west and east Surrey (1,195,000): Likely two authorities Norfolk (894,000): One big council, as previously proposed West Sussex (863,000): One big council, probably Oxfordshire (695,000), Suffolk (767,000), Warwickshire (581,000), Worcestershire (590,000): One county-sized council, almost certainly
Partly-unitary counties - more complicated* Kent (Medway plus 1,562,000): would make two or three new authorities Essex (Thurrock/Southend plus 1,468,000): would make two or three new authorities Hampshire (Southampton/Portsmouth plus 1,391,000): would make two or three new authorities Lancashire (Blackburn/Blackpool plus 1,208,000): would make two new authorities
* or you could merge the existing unitary authorities with surrounding districts, somehow
Fully unitary already Already quite large: Bristol, Cornwall, Dorset, County Durham, Northumberland, Wiltshire Undersized, could potentially merge: Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Cheshire, East Yorkshire, Shropshire, Somerset Only recently reorganised: Buckinghamshire, Cumbria, Northamptonshire, North Yorkshire Intrinsically small: Isle of Wight, Herefordshire, Rutland
Not affected Metropolitan boroughs: West Midlands, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Merseyside, South Yorkshire, Tyne & Wear London boroughs: Greater London† Sui Generis: City of London, Isles of Scilly
† although who's to say London won't be affected. Perhaps now is the time to merge Kensington & Chelsea (146,000) and Hammersmith & Fulham (185,000), two of the capital's smallest boroughs, to create Kensington & Fulham (331,000). Kingston would then be the smallest borough and perhaps we could merge that with Epsom & Ewell, enlarging Greater London at the same time, to create the Royal Borough of Hogsmill (250,000). Or perhaps we should just put down our crayons and spreadsheets and wait for further details because it's all too easy to jump to ridiculous conclusions and administrative geography never works out how you expect anyway, but this really could be the biggest administrative change since 1974 so watch this space.
The K4 departs twice hourly on its twisting journey to the edge of the countryside. I settle above the wheel arch with a fine view through the spattered windows, immediately behind an orderly with a donor card displayed prominently upon her lanyard. Altogether we are fourteen strong as we canter forth towards Norbiton station, emboldened by our temporary companionship. Across the aisle are an elderly couple I choose to call Fanny and Edmund, their hair ice grey and teased into rippled strands, who sit in strained silence looking ever forwards. Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. Their joint occupation of the priority seats bristles, but I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.
The car wash on the approach to London Road is bleak, and our progress slow as we attempt to filter into heavy traffic close by Lidl. When finally we emerge the relief is palpable for when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. What follows is a veritable celebration of the phonebox, which is most appropriate given that the K4 was itself a red kiosk of great repute. Old London Road in Kingston is renowned for its toppled box sculpture by artist David Mach, and those with seats on the right-hand side get a grandstand view. What's more the Christmas lights in Kingston town centre feature the very same boxes as a key motif, though sadly they're K6s and no such route number now operates in the locality. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it.
Nigh every passenger alights on Eden Street, such is the allure of shopping in a market town. But Fanny and Edmund sit tight, never stirring, for it seems one half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other. A dozen new companions now join us, many of the doddery kind who have no intention of walking any further up the vehicle than they absolutely must. This being a carriage with a single door the transition is prolonged. Last into the appointed space is a pushchair in which sits a chattering child, a small boy who has deduced that asking "Why?" incessantly doth prolong his mother's attention. "He's sweet," says an onlooker. "He's tired," retorts Mama, and within a few stops he will indeed be fast asleep. Every moment has its pleasures and its hopes.
Our driver will be taking the indirect route to Surbiton, looping via the Fair Field and the sorting office rather than the university. The Hogsmill hustles by, not to mention a hairdresser called Barnet and a fishmonger called The Chip Club, thus life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings. The Duke of Buckingham bids us good morrow from his corner plot and after that we are on our own, climbing a gentle hill no other omnibus serves. The gentleman in front shuffles the gingerbread biscuits in his luggage, somewhat longingly, yet selfishness must always be forgiven because there is no hope of a cure. Meanwhile Edmund mutters something under his breath but Fanny studiously ignores him, as if perchance her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions.
How utterly delightful that the mini roundabout outside Surbiton station has been bedecked with a brightly lit Christmas tree. A further changeover of passengers occurs along Victoria Road, our newest accumulation including a spinster clutching a poinsettia and an old maid carrying a Disney Princess bag. She gossips incessantly with her unexpected travelling companion, a lively catch-up which confirms that Julia recently had a mini-stroke, it's very sad, and they didn't have any of those nice custard cakes in Sainsbury's. Meanwhile the biscuit-fiddler texts home, in extra large type, to request that someone puts the heating on. I trust you are forgiving of my observations, dear reader, because a man who has nothing to do with his own time has no conscience in his intrusion on that of others.
At long last our coachman turns off the Leatherhead Road to enter the grounds of the Mansfield Park estate. The gatehouse is a modern building where the village doctor resides, beyond which the carriage drive twists and turns between cottages barely large enough to house a family of six. So narrow is the track that at one point we find ourselves trailing behind two horsewomen out for a hack along Merritt Gardens, a ridiculously incongruous hold-up. Fortunately there is a stubbornness about the driver that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. This whole estate was once the site of RAF Chessington, hence its 17 streets are named after local residents who lost their lives during WW2, as attested by a small plaque on a bend near the spiritualist church. Time will explain.
The K4 inexorably empties out as it weaves contortedly around the last few streets. Technically we've left Mansfield Park by this point and entered Lower Hook, an older settlement, hence the destination on the front of our carriage is uncomfortably incorrect. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. On the final approach to Ripon Gardens I ask the driver if perchance we have reached the final stop and he unceremoniously flings wide the doors two streets prematurely, mistaking my mumbling for a Hail and Ride request. I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine. I have been cast out in proximity to rural fields on the very edge of Surrey, having learned a great deal about human nature as I travelled alone to Mansfield Park. I was quiet, but I was not blind.
The introduction of six Overground line names continues to have unfortunate repercussions.
One of these is a new tube map, which started appearing the racks yesterday.
It's unfortunate because the last tube map was released only three weeks ago. Alas it included a typo so the decision was taken to withdraw the entire batch pending a reprint, and here is that reprint three weeks later.
I know it looks like the maps are three months apart but that's because the last map was delayed. Overground Renaming Week had long been pencilled in for the end of September, so when the initial tube map was sent to the printers it made sense to write 'September 2024' on the front. Then the cyberattack happened and, after a lot of tough remediation, TfL shifted Overground Renaming Week to the end of November instead. This meant a tube map with September on the front would be released in November, which wasn't ideal but far better than reprinting the whole batch for the sake of one word. Ahem.
Although the September tube map must have been sitting around for at least two months before release, nobody spotted the unfortunate typo waiting in the wings. It was even somewhere really obvious, not like the pesky 'Morden tram zone' error that caused a previous tube map print run to be pulped in 2016. This time it was in the key, specifically in the list of six renamed Overground lines, where inexplicably five of the lines had 'line' on the end but Mildmay didn't. Members of the public spotted this error pretty quickly and TfL swiftly gave the order to remove all maps from public display, deciding that this time it was worth reprinting the whole batch for the sake of one word.
They've got it right this time.
Other than the new date and the corrected key there are only two other changes, which arguably make the reprint worthwhile.
Two stations on the Northern line have been closed for a long time, Colindale since June 2024 and Kentish Town since June 2023. Both were shown as closed on the September 2024 tube map, which made sense when this was due to be published in September but less sense when it finally appeared at the end of November. Both stations are due to reopen in the next few days, Colindale on 20th December and Kentish Town on 23rd December, so both are shown as open on the December map. The new pocket tube map is thus more up-to-date than the poster maps at stations, and that's a win.
Colindale and Kentish Town being open has also removed two daggers from the tube map, which can only help with clarity. There are now only nine daggers on the map, well below the long term average, so binning the previous map has had another beneficial effect.
Someone will already have submitted an FoI request to ask TfL how much the reprint cost, so don't be a snarky grump and submit another. But just imagine how much money could have been saved had the original September tube map been proofread properly, and keep your fingers crossed that nothing untoward turns up on the December tube map now the public's got their hands on it.
The introduction of six Overground line names continues to have unfortunate repercussions.
One of these concerns the Status updates page on the TfL website where for the last ten years you've been able to see a map of disruptions to the network.
Not any more, they've switched it off.
The map was removed three weeks ago when the big Overground digital switchover happened. All the new line names magically appeared down the left hand side but the new colours didn't appear on the map because the underlying programming wasn't up to it. The code was only capable of making everything orange, alas, not distinctly red, blue, yellow, green, purple and grey as required. Nobody had foreseen splitting the lines ten years ago, and the team who put together the digital map had long moved on, so rejigging it for 2024 was neither pragmatic nor appropriate. So they binned it.
This, arguably, is a triumph of branding over practicality. Someone in a high place will have decided that the most important thing was a consistent switch from old Overground to new, displacing the orange overnight. But in removing the orange from the map they've also removed 11 tube lines, Crossrail the DLR and the trams too, extinguishing every last drop of visual information people used to rely on. What's disrupted in west London? Can't show you. Which parts of Crossrail are closed. You'll have to work it out from the text. It is, to put it bluntly, a blinkered sacrifice.
And then yesterday this appeared.
It's an exhortation to download the TfL Go app and use that instead.
Live status map in TfL Go
Download our TfL Go app to see a live map of current status for Tube, London Overground, Elizabeth line, DLR and tram.
The TfL Go app uses a status map as its key interface, it's what you see when you open it up. This blanks out lines that aren't running and adds exclamation marks at stations with ongoing issues, and in this respect is much better than the old map on the TfL website. But you can't scroll out and see the whole thing, you can't switch to show just what's disrupted and you can't see the map and the accompanying text at the same time. You also can't check where the engineering works are next weekend, let alone in six weeks time. It looks brilliant, indeed it's a damned impressive interface, but it's much harder to get an overall sense of what's going on.
TfL are also assuming you've got a smartphone, which of course not everybody has. Nevertheless they're nudging people towards TfL Go a lot these days, despite it being an app with a surprisingly limited range of features. It would be great if the TfL Go map could be reproduced online but apparently this isn't possible, it's custom built within the application itself, as an FoI request this week confirmed. The end result, alas, is digital exclusion, and all because nobody's capable of changing an orange line to six shades of Overground.
What follows is my annual summary of TfL's fare rises, an analysis now in its 16thyear because having some historical perspective on this is important. Boris's years are in blue and Sadiq's in red.
Sadiq would like to have frozen fares, as he did in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2024, but the new government has forced his hand. We'll only help fund transport projects if you raise tube fares in line with National Rail fares, they said, so he's chosen to play the long game. Whitehall didn't specify anything about buses so he's left them unchanged. Overall the TfL fare rise works out at 3.7%, which is ahead of inflation at 2.3%.
Cost of a single central London tube journey
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
Peak
£2.30
£2.40
£2.40
£2.40
£2.40
£2.40
£2.40
£2.50
£2.80
£2.80
£2.90
Off peak
£2.30
£2.40
£2.40
£2.40
£2.40
£2.40
£2.40
£2.50
£2.70
£2.70
£2.80
2025 sees another 10p on tube journeys around central London, an increase almost precisely equivalent to the overall increase of 3.7%. But it's 40p above what the fare was just three years ago, and also retains the price differential for peak and off-peak fares introduced in 2023.
n.b. These are PAYG fares for Oyster or contactless users. Those who insist on paying cash are now paying £7.
Cost of a tube journey from Green Park to Heathrow
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
Peak
£5.10
£5.10
£5.10
£5.10
£5.10
£5.10
£5.30
£5.50
£5.60
£5.60
£5.80
Off peak
£3.10
£3.10
£3.10
£3.10
£3.10
£3.10
£3.30
£3.50
£5.60
£5.60
£5.80
This year's rise is 3.6% but follows a recent significant change. In September 2022 the Mayor announced that travel from Z1 to Heathrow would always be charged at peak rates, hiking prices on the Piccadilly line by £2 overnight. This was to keep central government happy by raising revenue but without overly impacting on the daily life of Londoners. The tube fare from central London to Heathrow will thus now be £5.80 at all times, but that's still massively cheaper than the £12.80 fare if you choose the convenience of Crossrail.
For travel to other stations in zone 6, not cash cow airports, the off-peak fare from zone 1 rises 20p to £3.80.
Here's where the financial pain is.
Off-peak fares outside zone 1
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
1 zone
£1.50
£1.50
£1.60
£1.80
£1.80
£2.00
2 zones
£1.50
£1.60
£1.70
£1.90
£1.90
£2.10
3 zones
£1.50
£1.70
£1.80
£1.90
£1.90
£2.20
4 zones
£1.50
£1.70
£1.90
£2.00
£2.00
£2.30
5 zones
£1.50
£1.70
£1.90
£2.10
£2.10
£2.40
As recently as 2020 all off-peak tube journeys in zones 2-6 cost just £1.50. Since then TfL's accountants have been sequentially distorting the fare scale to better reflect distance travelled, and this year have finally stretched each of the five fares to a different price point.
What's worse is that each of these five fares is rising by far more than the 3.7% baseline. An extra 20p for every journey across 1 or 2 zones equates to an 11% increase, for example Stratford to Canary Wharf or Wembley Park to Harrow. But for off-peak journeys across 3, 4 or 5 zones it's an extra 30p and that's more like a 15% increase. The unluckiest travellers are those travelling through three zones outside zone 1, for example Hammersmith to Hounslow or Camden to Colindale, who are about to be hit by a 16% fare hike! The longest suburban journeys now cost 60% more than they did four years ago, an increase that's both extortionate and deliberate.
Cost of a London bus journey
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
£1.45
£1.50
£1.50
£1.50
£1.50
£1.50
£1.55
£1.65
£1.75
£1.75
£1.75
Bus fares, by contrast, see no increase at all. The Mayor is often kinder to bus passengers because they include the poorest amongst the electorate, so they'll continue to benefit from his prolonged fare freeze. The daily cap for bus journeys remains £5.25 (i.e. three single fares).
The daily cap for tube journeys will however be increasing by an average of 4.6%. That's because fare caps have to cover the possibility that you might have ridden on a National Rail service, and rail fares nationwide are rising 4.6% this year. It's currently possibly to swan around zones 1-3 all day for £10 but next year that rises to £10.50.
Cost of an annual Z1-3 Travelcard
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
£1508
£1520
£1548
£1600
£1648
£1696
£1740
£1808
£1916
£2008
£2100
Travelcards also rise by 4.6% in line with National Rail fares. A weekly Z1-6 Travelcard, for example, rises by £3.60 to £81.60. The price of an annual Z1-3 Travelcard climbs to £2100, which is 24% more than five years ago. Only two versions of the One Day Travelcard are still available, a Z1-4 Travelcard for £16.60 (up 70p) or a Z1-6 Travelcard for £23.60 (up £1).
Here's a particularly sharp fare increase.
Cost of a single Dangle
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
PAYG
£3.40
£3.50
£3.50
£3.50
£3.50
£3.50
£4.00
£5.00
£6.00
£6.00
£7.00
Walk-up
£4.30
£4.00
£4.40
£4.50
£4.50
£4.50
£4.50
£4.50
£5.00
£6.00
£7.00
Cablecar fares are currently £6 per crossing, whether you use PAYG or walk up, but that'll be going up to £7 per crossing from March. A 17% annual increase is indicative of a Mayor squeezing tourists for every pound he can get. However for those who take a round trip the return half's not going up so it'll be £13 to go there and back. Regular Dangleway users should note that a carnet of 10 tickets will be increasing in price for the first time in 10 years, from £17 to £19, but that's still a mere £1.90 per crossing.
Dangleway aside, the serious pain in 2025's fare increases is being borne by those who travel by tube or train outside zone 1. That'll be why the text of the Mayoral press release focuses so heavily on central London, so as not to shine a spotlight on what's going on beyond.
1)Pave over golf courses
Why does London have so many golf courses, and what useful function do they serve? Every day a small number of relatively well-off souls walk around acres of green space occasionally tapping a ball with a stick. In a capital city of limited extent, this is a luxury we cannot afford. There are in fact over 100 golf courses in London covering approximately 3% of the capital by area, a ridiculously wasteful proportion. A lot of fairways are also very close to existing railway stations so could swiftly become a key part of a new 21st century commuter belt. Let's take back our golf courses, perhaps not all in one go but nine holes out of every eighteen. This would leave perfectly sufficient space to play... and if we ever chose to go the whole hog, players could easily drive to an unsullied course in the Home Counties instead.
2)Rebuild Pinner
It doesn't have to be Pinner, it could be Carshalton or Sidcup or Woodford or anywhere else that's low-density suburbia. In such a place we find innumerable avenues lined by semi-detached houses, the very essence of desirable Metroland living. But what a waste! All those properties occupied by a single household when the residential footprint could support so many more. And all those gardens, front and back, where nobody lives bar a host of wildlife and the occasional gnome. We should bulldoze the entire suburb and start anew, reallocating the land to a series of multi-storey blocks and stacked apartments, increasing the population density to its full potential. Sure, we'd give those displaced by demolition first choice in the new development so nobody need ultimately miss out. But imagine the boost to housing stock that the wholesale rebuilding of Pinner and/or Carshalton and/or Sidcup and/or Woodford could achieve.
3)Build moderately high
Skyscrapers aren't the solution, they're widely unpopular because any new residential building over 20 storeys high is essentially lifestyle posturing. Flats in such developments sell for exorbitant amounts as portfolio investments, not as somewhere to live, as luxury marketing campaigns make clear. Why should we pander to foreign speculators by building inexorably upwards, as what should be essential capacity in the sky ultimately goes to waste? Instead let's slap a ban on any property above a certain height whilst simultaneously insisting that every new development reaches at least the eighth floor. By adopting the building policy of our European neighbours and creating a medium-height default for all residential structures, our capital could be transformed into an apartment-friendly meritocracy in which all are equal.
4)Student accommodation
When you were at university you probably lived in a single room with shared facilities down the hall. These weren't the best living conditions of your life but you coped, indeed you probably enjoyed communal living immensely. So let's make student accommodation the new default for the under 30s. Move our young people into tiny apartments - let's not call them cells - and stack them high. Provide a bed and a sink and a wardrobe, add wi-fi and a big screen on one wall, and most indebted youth will think they're in heaven. There'd be privacy so the set-up's a big step up from flatshare, but also all the fun of standing around in the kitchen and bonding over pasta. And yes it'd mean lowering the housing aspirations of a generation, but when they were never going to own their own home anyway let's at least provide their very own box to rent.
5)Choose innovative solutions
How about a monthly lottery every Londoner would want to participate in, where five winners each get a free house of their own and the proceeds pay for those five but also fifty more? How about covering half the football pitches in London with cul-de-sacs, because the ratio of home matches to away matches suggests only 50% of them are really needed? How about adding a new stop to HS2, somewhere beyond Ruislip, and building a massive new town called Harefield Quarter? How about forcing everyone who's built a luxury basement to move into it and then donate all their upstairs rooms to the homeless? How about polling Londoners to find the ten drabbest parks in the capital and then covering them with homes instead? Innovative thinking is what's needed, not the blinkered nimbyism of politicians worried about being re-elected.
6)Develop the 'Grey Belt'
About 22% of Greater London is Green Belt, including over half of the boroughs of Havering and Bromley. But not all of it is attractive wildlife-rich buffer zone, some of it is scrappy paddock, featureless field or derelict waste and could safely be converted to acres of much needed housing. This so-called Grey Belt is the key to unlocking the potential of land adjacent to dozens of underused transport nodes and creating a string of 21st century neighbourhoods, all far less damaging than the original expansion of London which gobbled up vast tracts of prime agricultural land. Let's start with that big field on Fairlop Plain, 1¼ square miles of inaccessible furrows which could take twenty thousand homes no trouble, and bring hope to miserable families who've been crammed into inadequate accommodation for years. Most of those who'd complain don't live anywhere close by anyway.
7)Compulsory flatshare
Single people are one of the biggest drains on our housing stock. They swan around in properties that could easily hold two, as married couples repeatedly prove, and are solely responsible for the length of housing waiting lists in London. As the capital's population swells we can no longer afford the luxury of bathrooms used only by one and kitchens used solely to generate single servings. It's therefore essential that every Londoner living alone should be compelled to double up, if not with a soulmate then in a marriage of convenience, instantly releasing hundreds of thousands of properties to the market. Not only would the price of property stabilise as supply meets demand, but single people would find their rent or mortgage payments halved, and maybe even a new partner. It's win win win.
8)Extend London
At present Greater London covers 33 boroughs across six hundred square miles. But why stop there? The economic influence of our capital extends far beyond its 1965 boundary, so let's embrace peripheral districts and swallow them whole. Watford belongs in London, and Dartford and Epsom too. Hell let's take Slough and Brentwood, and the Gatwick conurbation, even Hatfield and Harlow, and make Greater London greater still. At a stroke we could double its size and vastly increase its housing stock, and all this without a single extra penny being spent. Better still, those priced out of Outer London could then easily find an affordable home in New London, leaving room for those in Inner London to escape the property bubble at its heart. It makes sense to embrace the extended future our capital deserves for the benefit of all.
9)Build above things
Londoners are well used to living above things, like shops, supermarkets, even rebuilt churches, so let's go the whole hog and build above things not normally considered to be residential land. TfL can lead the way with homes above stations, or better still linear apartments covering the open-air railway lines inbetween. Nobody in the trains needs to see daylight, plus they've all got 5G down there now, and the resulting flats would all have the benefit of being exceptionally close to good transport connections. A lot of major roads would look prettier if they were hidden by housing, that's a given. And for the ultimate in elevated living why don't we build a raft of flats across the Thames estuary, somewhere down near Thamesmead where nobody will complain, because all that airspace is currently being wasted.
10)Blue sky thinking
We could perhaps build more affordable housing - and that's properly affordable, not mortgaged beyond the reach of the average non-banker. We should stop listening to greedy developers who claim construction won't be profitable unless they can build what they want, rather than what the community needs. We ought to stop green-lighting developments whose sole purpose is the accumulation of cash for faceless investors, if only our leaders had the resolve. We should consider funding accommodation from the public purse, an admittedly radical departure, rather than insisting taxes mustn't rise because society's better off that way. We might even come to the conclusion that housing is a basic need and a human right, rather than a nest egg asset to be preserved at all costs. But you're right, this would be mere blue sky thinking, and the other nine solutions are far more likely.
For those who like writing online, the blogging platform of choice continues to evolve.
Long ago there was Blogger, which is where I started and continue to reside. In 2003 along came WordPress, which is still the gold standard for many, and in 2013 the slightly snazzier Medium. The latest name making waves is Substack, founded in 2017, which has been picking up more and more top writers of late. I have no intention of jumping ship, let's make that clear at the start, but I thought I'd take a closer look at who's doing what, where and why.
Substack is a 'subscription platform', the idea being that as a reader you sign up to read what your favourite content producers have written. Subscription isn't necessarily obligatory, anyone can see a list of what's been written, but the advantage of signing up is that everything gets emailed to you. A lot of people don't like the hassle of having to check a website to see if anything new has appeared so much prefer it when each post arrives passively and perfectly formatted in their inbox, every single time. I have no intention of emailing my blogposts, let's make that clear too, but I understand why and how it increases readership and engagement.
Substack posts are officially known as 'newsletters' and tend to be the result of considerable behind the scenes effort rather than a scant observation dashed off in minutes. If you're going to email your words to people it makes sense for it to arrive with a satisfying thud rather than as an annoying stream of micro-interruptions. Some newsletters can therefore be of considerable heft, equivalent to a full-on journalistic investigation, a scholarly treatise or well-argued opinion piece. I have no intention of restricting myself to major essays, let's also make that clear, although most of my posts would fit the medium well.
Substack specifically enables and encourages monetisation of content. Authors can decide to make subscribing to their newsletter free or paid, and to vary this from post to post as they choose. It's even possible to introduce your paywall part-way through a post so that non-subscribers are left tantalisingly adrift, wondering what goodies are hidden in the half they can't read. I have no intention of charging you to read what I write, let's also make very clear, although for a number of content producers it can be an invaluable form of income.
The techbros behind Substack take a 10% cut, obviously, because they need to make money too. They also set a minimum subscription price for all paid-for participants, currently set at $5 a month, with the option for a less expensive annual subscription of say $50 instead. Subscribing to a Substack provider is thus not cheap, and signing up to three or four can be a considerable financial outlay. A lot of people are happy to pay to support good content, thereby enabling the writer to create it in the first place, and for everyone else there's the free option with the unpaywalled stuff. I'm aware that a lot of readers would throw money at me if I asked, which is the humbling consequence of a 22-year-old reputation, but let's make it clear that's not on the table either.
Anyway I thought it'd be useful and informative to highlight some really good Substacks, in case you're interested in subscribing, because you never know when a really good read will widen your worldview. Don't let the pricetags put you off enjoying the free version. I'm also open to your suggestions to add to the list, because often the biggest barrier to embracing excellent writing is discovering it exists in the first place.
London journalism London Centric: A freelance investigative mission edited by Jim Waterson, who previously worked at the Guardian as media editor and before that was political editor of BuzzFeed. Recent deep dives include who's behind the ice cream vans on London Bridge, the intractabilities of bike theft and how damaging the TfL cyberattack was. This is the sort of stuff the capital's news-portals ought to be delivering rather than focusing on clickbait froth. [£5.96 p/m, £59.63 p/y] London Spy: Another pair of freelance journalists with an approximately weekly digest of London-based news, plus a list of media posts you might have missed, plus one meaty investigative story you won't already have read about elsewhere. Recent targets include Lutfur Rahman's management style, mapping bike theft and rogue bouncers at Heaven. [£5 p/m, £40 p/y] On London: Dave Hill's longstanding non-populist analysis of all thing political and socio-political, here bundled into convenient Substack form. Only the Tuesday and Friday newsletters fall behind the paywall. [£5 p/m, £50 p/y] The London Minute: A daily digest of nuggety news you might have missed. The Londoner: Manchester's Mill Media dangle their feet into all things London [not a Substack but very similar] [they haven't turned on the paywall yet]
Arts and culture Londonist Time Machine: Thrice weekly missives from Londonist's Editor-at-Large Matt Brown, often in exceptional detail, looking back at events and locations across the city. Has recently explored "the oldest place in London", the Holbein Gate and the closure of Smithfield and Billingsgate markets. Longstanding features include gadabout animal menageries and colouring in the John Rocque map one panel at a time. [£5 p/m, £45 p/y] The London Culture Edit: An escapee from the Evening Standard offers "a weekly curated selection of London’s cultural offerings". [£6 p/m, £60 p/y] Wooden City: Isaac Rangaswami writes about everyday public and commercial places with unusual staying power, every other week. [£3.50 p/m, £35 p/y]
Geeky expertise Odds and Ends of History: Over 5000 subscribers have signed up to see James O'Malley break down the big issues, often from the technical side of policy-making, and it's more interesting than I've made it sound. [£5 p/m, £50 p/y] The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything: Jonn Elledge opines on the nerdy and inherently infrastructural, often with a transport or cartographic bent. Subscribers get the full Wednesday newsletter and everyone else gets nibbles and castoffs to tempt them to sign up properly. [£4 p/m, £40 p/y] Modernism in Metro-Land: Suburban architecture in all its finest postwar forms [free, or $8 p/m, $80 p/y] Municipal Dreams: Council housing, town hall architecture and new towns, that kind of thing [all free!] Grindrod: Sporadic musings on suburbia and modernism from the author of Concretopia [free, or £8 p/m, £80 p/y]
Comedians Love, The Airport: John Finnemore has perfected the art of leaving non-subscribers dangling midway through his weekly quirkfest. [£6 p/m, £60 p/y] Richard Herring: Richard's been blogging daily at Warming Up for over 20 years, and this is identical content but with scripted extras. [£5 p/m, £50 p/y]
Personally I find an inbox of pinging emails quite annoying so prefer to read these via RSS, at least as far as the "sign up to read more" paywall indicator. Also I haven't paid to subscribe to any of these, I get sufficient value out of the free versions and can't persuade myself that the extra spiel is worth £40+ a year. Also I confess I have started my own Substack but only as a holding page with a single post and no intention to add any more, so if you're one of the seven people who've signed up you are genuinely wasting your time. But perhaps Substack is for you, and perhaps you might/could/should check it out.
There are hundreds of red phone boxes in London but only one has the pixiedust to glam up your socials big time. It's the red phone box in Parliament Square, north side, and if you stand alongside you can combine the holy trinity of a) red phone box b) the actual Big Ben c) your pouting face. Get in there and grab one for the 'gram.
Make sure you're wearing your best threads - anything less than top global brands will only embarrass. Beiges, browns and blacks are ideal, nothing overtly colourful else you'll clash with the box. Ensure your skincare regime is at the top of its game because when people zoom in they expect to see perfection. Make sure it's a bright sunny day or come at dusk with lamps aglow for optimum illumination. Pick carefully between leaning nonchalantly against one side or holding the door open with a smile because the perfect alignment can bring all the love. If you don't get the Elizabeth Tower erupting from your head you're doing it all wrong.
But there is a catch which is that every other holidaymaking tourist wants the same shot because it's become one of London's must-do experiences. They've seen their contacts carry it off with aplomb and now they want the same prized digital trophy for their own feeds. The queues for the iconic phonebox are thus insane, even on a grey day in December, so be prepared to wait your turn while fifty other people take their time getting it just right.
The amount of patience displayed here is ridiculous, and all because you cannot leave the capital without the right photograph beside the right red box. One shot is never enough, of course, you have to try it with subtly different smirks, a variety of flicks of the hair and your limbs at all sorts of coquettish angles to ensure that when you scan through your album afterwards the perfect viral image is there.
You'll also need someone to take the photo for you because the proportions in a close-up selfie are all wrong. For the best outcomes turn up with friends or family because that's a lot less risky than handing your phone to a random stranger. But the more people you turn up with the more combinations there are to photograph - here's me, here's you, here's both of us, here's the whole grinning crew - and that's what really slows the queue down.
Thankfully there are quicker alternatives because this side of Parliament Square has four red phone boxes, fortuitously perfectly spaced. The second box back always has a shorter queue because the shot's never as good, the third box is shorter still because that's positively suboptimal and the fourth box attracts a mere handful because the sightlines are all wrong. On my visit the first queue was fifty strong, the second twenty-five, the third more like a dozen and the fourth just a slightly bemused family with no aesthetic sense. If your time is short, pick carefully.
But ideally you'll want to queue for the first phone box no matter how long it takes because you are a sheep with no imagination. You saw the iconic phonebox shot blazing across TikTok and it fired within you a primal need to take exactly the same image as everyone else lest your trip to London be judged a dismal failure. Never stop and ask yourself why genuine Londoners aren't doing the same, just wait your turn before stepping up and frustrating the rest of the queue while you pout and preen repeatedly with a great big clock tower behind you. Your besties will be well jel.
Five other iconic Tiktok locations
• the iconic Platform 9¾ scarf tug
• the iconic 'London Eye as halo" video
• the iconic pastel houses in Notting Hill backdrop
• the iconic blocking the pavement on Tower Bridge moment
• the iconic "you won't believe the size of the queue for the iconic phonebox shot" shot
PARK LANE Colour group: dark blue Purchase price: £350 Rent: £35 Length: 1200m Borough:Westminster Postcode: W1
The final street on the Monopoly board is Park Lane, a seething dual carriageway that somehow retains a luxury cachet. One side is a wall of superior hideaways and five star hotels, the western edge of Mayfair, while the other is a Royal Park and entirely undeveloped. These facts are not entirely unrelated. Officially it's the A4202 and part of the Inner London Ring Road, a street you can dodge along if you don't fancy paying the Congestion Charge. It's also brilliant for plane-spotting, planes being the default tree brightening its three-quarter-mile passage from Marble Arch down to Hyde Park Corner. Welcome to the dark blues, the board's full-on upmarket finale.
Park Lane reveals its backhistory in its name - it used to be a lane and it ran down the edge of a park. Hyde Park was established by Henry VIII in 1537 as a hunting ground and was opened to the public a century later, separated from the track alongside by a long brick wall. As the neighbourhood of Mayfair expanded in the early 18th century this lane formed a natural barrier to further development, and still does, with aristocrats favouring houses on the neighbourhood's western flank with an unbroken vista across the park. Huge hotels started to replace private homes between the World Wars, then in the early 1960s the current three-lane dual carriageway swallowed up 20 acres of Hyde Park in an attempt to ease traffic congestion. It is thus still Park Lane, except there are now six lanes and there's less park.
Let's walk the built-up side first, starting at the Marble Arch gyratory. Raise your eyes above the tourbus kiosks and gift shops and you'll see the first of the hotels, the London Marriott Hotel Park Lane, which opened in 1919 as a concierged residential complex. If you fancy a room with a view of an advert-shrouded ceremonial arch and the constant roar of traffic it's ideal. The next half dozen properties are private homes, mostly their back gardens shrouded behind a stucco wall, in front of which is the bottleneck of London's busiest bus stop. Ten routes stop here and the single shelter is entirely insufficient to contain the waiting passengers when it's pissing down, as I can confirm from bitter experience was the case at the weekend.
Next comes the first of Park Lane's car dealers, Bob Forstner, who've been selling zhooshed up Mercedes and classic Lamborghinis since 2014. Their mancave is dwarfed by the shiny showroom under Brook House where Aston Martin display their wares, sleek beasts none of which is accompanied by anything as common as a price tag. Biggest of all, however, is the recently-opened BMWflagship further down the street where one end's all Minis and the other's devoted to BMW bikes and cars. Should any local resident choose to seal a deal on a handy runaround, a panoramic 4K screen kicks into action to congratulate them on their purchase. Those less interested in cars may prefer to peruse the green plaque on the side of the showroom which confirms that Dame Anna Neagle and her husband Herbert Wilcox used to live in a flat upstairs.
At number 100 is Dudley House, one of London's few surviving aristocratic townhouses, the aristocrat in question being the Earl of Dudley who started work on it in the 1820s. This portico-ed monster has been much altered since, in one case by the Luftwaffe, its ballroom at one point subdivided into lowly offices. The latest owner is a member of the Qatari royal family, inevitably, who bought the building in 2006 and blinged up the interior so much that the Queen once told her supper host "This place makes Buckingham Palace look rather dull". What you won't find any more two blocks down is Grosvenor House, once home to one of Britain's richest homegrown dynasties, because it proved too lavish to maintain so they knocked it down in the 1920s and built this...
The Grosvenor House Hotel is mammoth and multi-stacked, and cutting edge in its day because it was the first hotel to grant every room its own separate bathroom and entrance lobby. Queen Elizabeth learnt to ice skate here when she was merely a princess living down the road, although the ice rink was closed two years later and converted into The Great Room, a ballroom on a scale large enough to host premier award ceremonies. Officially it's another Marriott, and unsurprisingly a chain of sales over the last couple of decades saw ownership pass from Scotland to India to the USA to (once again) Qatar. At ground level the hotel presents a sawtooth profile to the street, the indentations filled with pristine topiary, and across the street is an unlikely Esso garage and an even more unlikely branch of Londis. On Park Lane!
The next hotel is The Dorchester, built on the site of Dorchester House, which is one of the world's most prestigious places to stay. Its subtly-concave eight storeys were built in just 18 months thanks to a pioneering use of reinforced concrete and opened to guests in 1931. During WW2 Eisenhower directed Allied forces from a suite on the first floor, while downstairs today you'll find Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester, one of only nine London restaurants with three Michelin stars. Out front is a bijou terrace garden centred around a plane tree, ideal for exhaust-choked alfresco cocktails, along with one of those heritage 'Taxi' lamps that lights up when one of the porters wants to summon a cab. That said it's hard to imagine anyone's ever at a loss for a black cab round here because they flock to the south end of Park Lane like ants to a picnic.
More hotels follow including 45 Park Lane, a Bauhaus conversion which includes a ground floor salesroom for corporate jets. TheHilton is one of the West End's rare skyscrapers, a 28 storey tower with unparalleled views whose rooftop restaurant is currently closed awaiting the arrival of a Pan-Asian Dubai concession. Following a number of unfortunate gravity-related incidents at the Hilton over the years, its balcony doors are now securely locked. The final hotel is the boxy InterContinental London Park Lane, built on the site of Queen Elizabeth's childhood home at 145 Piccadilly but which has plumped for a Park Lane address for purely snooty reasons. Normally in Monopoly the houses outnumber the hotels but here on Park Lane it's very much the reverse.
Park Lane's central reservation, if I can call it that, is a broad ribbon of plane trees generally inaccessible to pedestrians unless they choose to ignore a succession of subways. It includes a lot of intriguing statues including a pair of upturned feet and a severed horse's head previously located amid the swirl of Marble Arch. The one everyone stops to look at, because it's alongside the sole set of pedestrian crossings, is the Animals In War memorial. This curved wall of Portland stone was inspired (and part-paid-for) by Dame Jilly Cooper and features two heavily-laden bronze mules alongside the legend "They had no choice". Much more easily missed is Lord Byron's isolated statue at the southern end, a Victorian tribute which used to be in a dignified corner of Hyde Park before East Carriage Drive was rudely converted to the northbound carriageway.
The western side of Park Lane, alongside that very same northbound carriageway, can be generally summarised as a broad parkside pavement alongside a segregated cycle lane. Access to Hyde Park is intermittent, thus you'll likely find yourself amid tourists trying to find their way in, as is especially the case at present with the revels at Winter Wonderland well underway. At the weekend I had to feel sorry for the daytrippers who'd booked an expensive coach trip from the provinces without anticipating Storm Darragh so were piling into Hyde Park under brollies to join lengthy queues at insufficient gates before spending the day in a sodden amusement park wondering whether or not to risk a windswept circuit on one of the outdoor rides.
A ramp leads to the only genuine point of interest on this side of the street which is the massive 981-space car park hidden beneath Hyde Park in the 1960s, and whose excavated earth was then used to build the embankments on the M4 between Brentford and Slough. Vehicles can drive straight in but pedestrian access requires scanning a panel at the entrance to a long Stygian corridor so I decided to defer exploring this underworld for another day. A car park under a park - only on Park Lane.
