Boris Watch

Mira Bar-Hillel, the Standard’s property correspondent (who previous crossed our radar over the porkie pies Boris was telling about the Three Sisters project at Waterloo), has a scoop:
Plans for an 18-storey City office block have been rejected by Boris Johnson because he said it would have a detrimental impact on views of the Tower of [...]

Boris’s trouble with the South London Line isn’t going away, despite his keen, almost desperate attempts to pin the blame on the DfT.  As we know, the DfT were allowed to run rings round Boris by his desire to cut costs at TfL, with the DfT equally keen to have Boris and TfL Rail carry [...]

Rather belated, but there’s an interesting set of coloured vote maps for the London Assembly elections in 2008 here.

What’s missing in this list of Congestion Charge reports?

CC Impacts Monitoring First Annual Report (Jun 2003)
CC Impacts Monitoring Second Annual Report (Apr 2004)
CC Impacts Monitoring Third Annual Report (Apr 2005)
CC Impacts Monitoring Fourth Annual Report (Jun 2006)
CC Impacts Monitoring Fifth Annual Report (Jul 2007)
CC Impacts Monitoring Sixth Annual Report (Jul 2008)
?

I can’t find the Seventh [...]

Word comes from the London Cycling Campaign that they’re drawing up a manifesto of what Boris’s proposed Cycle Superhighways should look like.  There’s a sign-up page if you support the manifesto, which boils down to three things:

safety
continuity (wide enough without breaks)
no gyratories

I’m not sure the last of those is going to go down that well [...]

One of the less objectionable aspects of Boris’s suburban obsession was a competition to design posters for TfL to attract people to the outer reaches of the capital, much as the Hounslow Skyride directed people to view such jewels as walled up disused seminaries and now-closed grotty pubs.
It’s interesting, therefore, to see what suburban delights [...]

Another quick one for the ‘file under interesting’ – TfL has come to an agreement to hand over a lot of houses it acquired as part of the aborted A406 widening plans in Enfield many years ago.  These have been either let out on short leases or allowed to become derelict, but since a much [...]

I must confess I was a bit staggered when I saw quite how much money was going into the Cycle Hire scheme – £82m at the last count, £41m of it in the first year.  It really has to be a success based on that, and I’m beginning to have my doubts.  First off there’s [...]

Two more to add to the pile of ‘Boris Takes Undue Credit’, a pile that’s beginning to blot out the sun from some angles.
First, the opening of Imperial Wharf, a station that’s been in the London transport plan for decades and was designed and ready to go well over a year ago.  We get a [...]

Everyone’s talked about this, so I’ll keep it brief.  EastEnders is not about London, it’s a fictional show about characters and situations.  It’s filmed in Elstree in Hertfordshire.  It’s nothing to do with the London arts scene, which (I was at a gig in Shoreditch, and can thus attest personally) was ticking along nicely on [...]