London

During this year of recovery, I have enjoyed the turn of the seasons more than ever before. This has been a spectacularly beautiful autumn, with brighter colours going on for longer. London is brimming with beauty and magic: there’s the new bridge by Thomas Heatherwick coming — a kind of Hanging Gardens of Battersea — and a new indoor Jacobean theatre by the Globe, lit only by wax candles, for the long winter nights. But this is also a city being hollowed out by global investors. The pumping-up of house prices by clouds of foreign money is making central London completely unliveable-in for anyone on an ordinary salary. The term

We live by simple stories. X has a stroke. X recovers; or doesn’t. But we live inside more complicated stories. Recovering from a stroke is a long haul; I still have an almost useless left arm and walk like a wildly intoxicated sailor. In my mid-fifties, my stroke has been a special excursion ticket into old age — socks and toenails a bewildering distance away, walking sticks with minds of their own — that kind of thing. But here’s the odd bit. This is an old age whose effects (if you do the physio) lessen as the months pass. I’m living backwards — what a rare privilege! I am getting

The Met Police took 166 of London’s traffic junctions hostage this morning. After a recent spate of cycling fatalities across the capital, a ‘major road safety operation’ kicked off today, with 2,500 police officers on the streets ‘making busy London junctions safer’. Codenamed Operation Safeway, the Met are watching for anyone committing an offence on the road. In reality, the Bobbies appeared to be targeting cyclists jumping red lights, absorbed in their music and generally misbehaving on the road: Boris Johnson has acknowledged there is much to be done to make London safer for cyclists, especially as more and more people are taking up two-wheeled commuting. But is ‘handing advisory

Regardless of your views on social housing, you’d have to admit there are far more obvious, and natural, targets for people to choose to protest against rising rent levels in London and elsewhere. So it’s with a strong sense of irony that I find myself defending the sector against accusations that have been levelled at us during the course of the last week. As mentioned in this blog, Genesis is part of a group of housing associations known collectively as the G15. Between us we’re responsible for around a quarter of all the new homes that are being built in the capital. Yes, that’s right: social landlords are stepping up

Ravers of London rejoice — 24-hour tubes at the weekend are finally on their way. TfL has announced today that trains on the Victoria, Central, Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines will run constantly from Friday morning till Sunday evening. The all-night drinkers of the capital have long wondered why it wasn’t possible to keep the Underground running all night. Engineering work has been blamed, while the trade unions have remained bolshie with TfL (I can’t wait for Bob Crow to pop up complaining about this). But by 2015, these lines should be all set for the 21st century. If you happen to live on one of these lines, you’re all set

A couple of months ago I wrote to the Crown Estate about its bike-unfriendly redevelopment of London’s Haymarket area, and was rather surprised when their London team offered to meet me and set out Crown’s cycling credentials. Surprisingly, its new Central London developments have fabulous facilities for bike commuters, with showers, lockers, and ramps that allow you to ride straight into the basement parking space. The past decade has seen an explosion in two-wheeled travel across the capital, while car use has declined. Recent data shows that cyclists make up to two thirds of traffic on certain parts of London’s roads. This is hardly unexpected, given the cost of tube

The Muslim Brotherhood aren’t doing so well in Egypt at the moment. Happily they are making some gains in Britain. On Tuesday the organisation’s dauphin – Tariq Ramadan, famous Islamist ideas man, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and prominent double-speaker gave the Orwell prize’s annual ‘Orwell lecture’. I wonder which direction Orwell’s body is spinning in? And elsewhere, at London’s SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies, better known as the School of Organised Anti-Semitism) a speaker who is opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood was chased from the stage by Muslim Brotherhoood supporters. It is worth watching the video of what turned into an Islamist rally just to remind

I hate drivers. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate all of them, just a considerably larger proportion than I hate of the population as a whole. And, like most cyclists, I drive myself, having been bullied into it by my then girlfriend who bought me lessons for my 27th birthday. But generally speaking I feel the same way about them as Rod Liddle feels about cyclists. Although I agree with Rod on almost all things, it would be weird and awkward if I agreed with him on everything, and this is the slither outside the bubble on the Venn diagram. I don’t object to his characterisation of cyclists as