Excellent as ever LSO. One of your best. Funny and tragic.
I was met with the same apathy a couple of years ago when I managed to video a drug deal going on that happened regularly in my neighbourhood. It was the same scumbag on a scooter who was regularly dealing in the area. He was becoming more emboldened.
This was naturally due to the complete apathy of the Police when I contacted them (twice) to report that I had vividly clear footage of the drug deal going on. The second time I called, they issued me a case number and said someone would be in touch.
And then, (of course) well, you can guess the rest… 🤷🏻♂️
Thanks Ady. A lot of this stuff seems to have been quietly decriminalised. Shoplifting by druggies has been absolutely normalised in Pret and Wasabi and other sort of lunch places in the West End. And people are always being chased out of the TCR Sainsbury’s.
I saw Shelter touting for money around there again the other day. But despite what some well meaning people say, this is at root not a ‘housing problem’, at this level it is clearly a drug and alcohol problem.
I complain about my area being quiet and boring at times but it sounds like heaven compared to that s***hole.
Perhaps modern cities are too crowded and over developed, its not a healthy way to live. I'm pretty sure that poor woman would never have got to that state living here. Literally everyone would have shown concern....seriously, we'd have been past ourselves. I live in an area where people forget to lock doors and still find their lost coat in the play park 3 weeks later. A purse would always be handed in complete with contents.
I despair every time I listen to the news, I can't believe it's the same country I live in.
Wow sounds amazing Elizabeth. Maybe I should move to where you are. I say that, but I do love London. It’s just such a shame about what has been allowed to happen to it. I say shame. I mean crime.
I had an incredible history professor in my first years of university. He taught a course called "The Irish in America". Without making it political, he described an impoverished immigrant population coming to a new country (and being discriminated against) in an era with no "social safety net".
The interesting thing was that, in his telling, the Catholic Church and other private organizations managed to help a vast number of people with alcohol addictions and desperate poverty. The difference between then and now was accountability-- if you needed help and took a handout, you had to look those people who helped you in the eye every day in your local community. And those who had given the help knew the difference between a grifter and a person in honest need of help, so help would not be given twice to someone who wasn't working to help himself.
In modern times, we have billions of dollars being spent and distributed from a govt agency so far removed from the people they are "helping" that no one has any idea if the person is someone in honest need of help or a shameless freeloader-- and by removing the responsibility to render aid from the local community, decent people walk past the homeless, the addicted and the needy without sparing a second glance, because it's assumed "there's whole agencies to handle that!"
All in all, it's a sad and broken system, and the larger, more expensive and more remote the aid organizations get, the worse outcomes we'll have in the local community.
Thank you so much for commenting 00. I think this really gets to the heart of the issue. These people stop being individuals and instead become a sort of resource. One which can be exploited by government agencies, charities etc to their own end.
It is then in their interest to allow the problem to actually grow, because the bigger the problem, the more power and money flows their way. Maybe our societies are too large now for proper local solutions, but as you say, there is no longer any accountability.
I would happily redirect money from some of these ‘Green’ projects to help these people. But then it would simply become a different type of grift. Thanks again.
Mike Solana's Pirate Wires has been doing great work examining the utter failure of San Francisco's attempts to end the homeless crisis by throwing money at it. As he points out, you invariably get more of the behaviour you subsidize.
Yes. These things become money makers for a certain class of people, I guess the PMC, while utterly failing to address any of the issues. I’ll check that out. I like Pirate Wires but I don’t always get a chance to read it.
Maybe it’s just getting too difficult to cope, LSO? Human nature is imperfect, and destructive behaviour has always been around. That’s why we have legislation, enforcement and support services. But when the level of unproductive behaviour in a society exceeds a low percentage, there is a general debilitating effect: not only do the unproductive not contribute, but the effort required to support or contain them substantially diminishes the productivity of others, resulting in a downward spiral of poverty, disorder and crime.
I know ‘Broken Windows’ is a bit of cliche at this point. But it is a real phenomenon I think. I was at Cambridge Circus yesterday, (The junction of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Av for anyone unfamiliar) and I saw two police talk to a homeless guy, who then walked ten yards away to chat with his homeless friend who was literally lying across the pavement, not comatose, he was eating a sandwich. The police just walked on by.
What must the tourists who come from China, Japan and Europe think. It shames us. So much for our ‘international reputation’. This is what visitors actually see of us, not windmills and carbon capture nonsense.
Ha ha. Keepin’ it light Ragged! Yup. Although I think we learned during the lockdowns that some people still needed to actually work. You know, to make things function and to bring us stuff. So maybe they will actually be the AI survivors, and it’s us who will be pitching our tents outside Heals.
Isn’t Labour’s plan to make the rest of the UK like London? It’s been fairly clear for some time that the Police simply don’t want to deal with actual problems (my disillusionment with police started when I did jury service some decades ago). It’s only a matter of time for the public to catch on and realise there’s simply no point trying to get help from our emergency services.
I think the public are pretty aware P. It’s been an age since I’ve heard anyone who’s had a phone stolen go to the police. Maybe afterwards for a ‘crime number’ for their insurance. But at the time? No one bothers.
There was an article in the Spectator a few months ago where the writer described how his teenage daughter had had her phone snatched in London. Scary for her at the time, but no real harm done, and the family got things sorted out fairly quickly. After the practicalities had been completed, he realised that neither he nor anyone else had considered that they should report the theft to the police. What would be the point? Unless someone needed a crime number, as you point out. He found it sobering that he had internalised that attitude.
I think we are spending the resources in the wrong areas Ragged. Prioritising ‘Net Zero’ for instance, when we should be concentrating on this. This is what government is for, and it is failing these people, and the rest of us.
I am certainly pro-Net Zero but I think they are going about it all wrong — in a way that is guaranteed to piss everyone off. Gas cookers and plastic straws are not going to do anything to the price of global warming. But less coal burning and more windmills will help. We do have to do something.
I'm with you on the focus of the police. They waste too much effort on patrolling the speech on the internet and not enough time patrolling the streets.
Again, we agree Ragged. Re Net Zero. We do need to do something. And once China, the US and India make some progress in that area we should follow their lead!
And why do we need to do "something"? Clearly, neither you nor Ragged have read the scientific "support" for it, examined the models and all their assumptions (you would be surprised at how much is "assumed" on which policy is based), nor considered the pointlessness and harms of net zero policies. Everyone is brainwashed through fear. Fear is the modern tool of governments and political movements
Hi! Just giving my usual twopennyworth! (I don't really expect the Joe in the street to have looked at these models but I do expect a bit more scepticism)
I was in York at the weekend. Multiple people sitting or lying on the pavements or shop doorways, even during the day when the hordes were thundering past. Most had identical blue sleeping bags, clearly given by some "charity". All clearly had drug issues. 20 years ago this was uncommon in our cities, now it's the norm and everywhere. Once again glad I live out in the sticks.
It’s definitely a new thing Pilgrim. I did a lot of ‘street’ photography in London in the late 80s. Lots of photos of homeless. Back then it was usually lost old white men, drinkers with mental problems, or ‘characters’. There was one woman. Just one I can actually remember among the regulars, she hung about by the Embankment. There were a few bashes under the bridges. That was about it.
You’re so right about the charity aspect. Michael Shellenberger, a hero of mine, is scathing about how billions of dollars have been pumped into San Francisco to supposedly ‘stop homelessness’, creating instead a huge homelessness industry. It’s beginning to happen in London under Khan.
That industry certainly exists in my native Seattle. It has a sort of symbiotic relationship with the distinct loss of state capacity we're all noticing. If the various NGO's can work to "destigmatize" various socially corrosive behaviors then there's no need for a police response or an ambulance, and neither repair or protection for the decayed and vandalized public spaces. If defecating on the sidewalk outside of a restaurant isn't REALLY a problem then we don't need to think about addressing causes.
At the end of the day a stable, competent government managing a high social trust society shouldn't be so incapable of addressing the overt degradation of shared spaces that we're all seeing. So much of it just seems to come down to the wrong people in positions of authority.
That definitely seems to be the case in the Left-entrenched administration of Seattle, parts of which I've watched deteriorate beyond recognition in the past 20 years in the quest for modernization and replacing much of its former quaintness with a shiny new bigger and better 'city on the hill'. Crime seems to have escalated with it, alongside the mushrooming of tents and trailers even in suburban streets. As in England, the (now reduced) police force don't bother with shoplifting or burglary unless guns are involved.
As Salisbury says above Alexei, there’s little incentive to fix problems when those problems have been de stigmatised’Why are you complaining about a junkie using your doorway as a toilet bigot?’
Well, when I still lived in London, I emerged one day from my front door to find a man pissing in my front garden against a prized shrub and on another occasion, a man (drunk? junkie?) asleep stretched across my front grass. Reluctant to engage with him (in case of?) I called the local police ensconced just at the top of my road, who suggested if he wasn't threatening me, they couldn't intervene. A very small part of why I left London.
I've had similar experiences and the only thing that's come of it has been a further entrenchment of my belief that at the end of the day the organs of the state exist to support themselves and not serve us.
There is something about the juxtaposition of great wealth and the tolerance or even celebration of mass dysfunction that I find particularly repellant about such cities.
Absolutely Salisbury. Is it possible to go back to a high trust society after this? I’m not sure it is without it just turning into another way of removing our civil liberties. Maybe if we started here, clearing/helping people off the streets, and work our way up from there. It’s a puzzle I think about a lot.
I don't know. I think it would require a fundamental reconstruction of the social contract, from the nature of citizenship, obligations and responsibilities to the community, through to the role and scope of government. I remember reading a few years ago how Eisenhower was not especially interested in the form of the United States government after nuclear war because whatever came out the other side of that event couldn't possibly share more than the name of what came before.
It seems somewhat similar in that the failures both of the current leadership class and the willingness of sizable voting blocks to support them regardless will require an earth shattering shock to undermine. I had thought perhaps the response to covid was that shock but it seems not. Or maybe it is and the timeframe is just longer than I had expected. Rome didn't fall in a day.
This reminds me of the time that as a teenager I rang Childline about my friend’s dad who was abusing her and also fostering a younger child. Got a very similar response. What a sick joke.
It’s not just the UK. I live in nice safe Luxembourg; last Sunday on an evening run, I came across a comatose guy on the pavement outside the station. Asked the station if they could call the cops (I’m running, no phone). No, he said. Ok so I went to the nearest station and told them through the speaker phone, and went back to the guy. Cops turned up 10 minutes later. This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened in this town (apart from the BBC tracking a migrant smuggler to the town center detention center that is).
It’s spreading Finlay. We all think we’re ‘safe’ from it until suddenly it is on our doorstep. Thats what I think when I see the mess they’ve made of San Francisco.
I hope your town stays boring for a while yet though. Best to you in Luxembourg.
I've stayed in the St. Giles hotel (a cheap-ish firetrap rabbit warren) at the bottom of TCR a few times on social visits to London. There was a 24/7 bar (not the casino) underneath it. At 2am it was like Star Wars End of the Universe bar, but kinda fun, not sinister.
Do you remember the car park underneath the St Giles Hotel? A terrifying Escape from New York catacomb? Well they’ve now turned that into a new separate Zedwell Hotel. The rooms have no windows, (obvs) and the rooms are cheap. I looked at it on line and it looks OK surprisingly. And it seems very popular.
Dunno about the carpark, I come from far and I don't drive in London. The rooms themselves at St. Giles are fine and in good clean refurbished condition, just the corridors seem a bit poky. Last time I stayed there was 2022. The 24/7 bar doubled as the St Giles breakfast room but seemed to be under separate management. I just found it on Google maps (thought maybe it had shut down) - it's also known as VQ Bloomsbury and you can enter from the hotel or from gt Russell Street.
I love that area of London. My train into London as a kid was to Charing Cross and I always walked straight through Trafalgar Square to Tottenham Court Road then across into Soho. My sister lived on Tottenham Court Road. I bought dozens of books in the old second-hand bookshops that used to be there. I bought my electric piano there.
I haven't been to London recently but, for whatever reason, I have to go three times in the next month and I'm staying in a hotel by Westminster Abbey. I'll walk up Tottenham Court Road every time. I love it. It was always a bit shabby — but nothing like Soho. It seems they have swapped places.
Well done for your Good Samaritan bit. I'm sorry it didn't work out. I'm sorry it never works out.
Yes. Thats the one I thought you meant. The Sussex Arms. It’s two seconds from Cambridge Circus. On the corner of Long Arce and St Martins Lane. No longer a pub. Now a cafe.
Amazing. I live v close to town. But that’s so good. I remember we dropped a guy off on the way back from a job once. He lived in a little house just off Poland St. I was so jealous!
Getting closer! I lived on Senrab Street from 1990 to 1993. My favourite pub was The George. We used to go every Friday night for the musical duo and the audience participation.
Also loved The Lord Rodney by Whitechapel Station — but that's gone now 😢
Thank You for your introspect. When things are that way within the Roman Empire 2.0 at this stage of the game. It's seems inevitable to come for the rest of the world. So, of course I'm saying "thanks for the heads-up". From "across the pond".
Message reciprocated.
We're witnessing the completed and intentional residual effect of the facts that centralized micromanagement is a result of carefully planed world dominance. Thank the words of Zeus himself for the advice given upon the world. That which the Western empire seems to be ignoring. Or more precisely. Subsequently reciprocated. As the precipice of world dominance.
Excellent as ever LSO. One of your best. Funny and tragic.
I was met with the same apathy a couple of years ago when I managed to video a drug deal going on that happened regularly in my neighbourhood. It was the same scumbag on a scooter who was regularly dealing in the area. He was becoming more emboldened.
This was naturally due to the complete apathy of the Police when I contacted them (twice) to report that I had vividly clear footage of the drug deal going on. The second time I called, they issued me a case number and said someone would be in touch.
And then, (of course) well, you can guess the rest… 🤷🏻♂️
Thanks Ady. A lot of this stuff seems to have been quietly decriminalised. Shoplifting by druggies has been absolutely normalised in Pret and Wasabi and other sort of lunch places in the West End. And people are always being chased out of the TCR Sainsbury’s.
I saw Shelter touting for money around there again the other day. But despite what some well meaning people say, this is at root not a ‘housing problem’, at this level it is clearly a drug and alcohol problem.
I complain about my area being quiet and boring at times but it sounds like heaven compared to that s***hole.
Perhaps modern cities are too crowded and over developed, its not a healthy way to live. I'm pretty sure that poor woman would never have got to that state living here. Literally everyone would have shown concern....seriously, we'd have been past ourselves. I live in an area where people forget to lock doors and still find their lost coat in the play park 3 weeks later. A purse would always be handed in complete with contents.
I despair every time I listen to the news, I can't believe it's the same country I live in.
Wow sounds amazing Elizabeth. Maybe I should move to where you are. I say that, but I do love London. It’s just such a shame about what has been allowed to happen to it. I say shame. I mean crime.
I had an incredible history professor in my first years of university. He taught a course called "The Irish in America". Without making it political, he described an impoverished immigrant population coming to a new country (and being discriminated against) in an era with no "social safety net".
The interesting thing was that, in his telling, the Catholic Church and other private organizations managed to help a vast number of people with alcohol addictions and desperate poverty. The difference between then and now was accountability-- if you needed help and took a handout, you had to look those people who helped you in the eye every day in your local community. And those who had given the help knew the difference between a grifter and a person in honest need of help, so help would not be given twice to someone who wasn't working to help himself.
In modern times, we have billions of dollars being spent and distributed from a govt agency so far removed from the people they are "helping" that no one has any idea if the person is someone in honest need of help or a shameless freeloader-- and by removing the responsibility to render aid from the local community, decent people walk past the homeless, the addicted and the needy without sparing a second glance, because it's assumed "there's whole agencies to handle that!"
All in all, it's a sad and broken system, and the larger, more expensive and more remote the aid organizations get, the worse outcomes we'll have in the local community.
Thank you so much for commenting 00. I think this really gets to the heart of the issue. These people stop being individuals and instead become a sort of resource. One which can be exploited by government agencies, charities etc to their own end.
It is then in their interest to allow the problem to actually grow, because the bigger the problem, the more power and money flows their way. Maybe our societies are too large now for proper local solutions, but as you say, there is no longer any accountability.
I would happily redirect money from some of these ‘Green’ projects to help these people. But then it would simply become a different type of grift. Thanks again.
Mike Solana's Pirate Wires has been doing great work examining the utter failure of San Francisco's attempts to end the homeless crisis by throwing money at it. As he points out, you invariably get more of the behaviour you subsidize.
Yes. These things become money makers for a certain class of people, I guess the PMC, while utterly failing to address any of the issues. I’ll check that out. I like Pirate Wires but I don’t always get a chance to read it.
Maybe it’s just getting too difficult to cope, LSO? Human nature is imperfect, and destructive behaviour has always been around. That’s why we have legislation, enforcement and support services. But when the level of unproductive behaviour in a society exceeds a low percentage, there is a general debilitating effect: not only do the unproductive not contribute, but the effort required to support or contain them substantially diminishes the productivity of others, resulting in a downward spiral of poverty, disorder and crime.
Exactly Richard. It’s a spiral.
I know ‘Broken Windows’ is a bit of cliche at this point. But it is a real phenomenon I think. I was at Cambridge Circus yesterday, (The junction of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Av for anyone unfamiliar) and I saw two police talk to a homeless guy, who then walked ten yards away to chat with his homeless friend who was literally lying across the pavement, not comatose, he was eating a sandwich. The police just walked on by.
What must the tourists who come from China, Japan and Europe think. It shames us. So much for our ‘international reputation’. This is what visitors actually see of us, not windmills and carbon capture nonsense.
I think it's all gonna get much worse when AI starts taking away the jobs of the next class up from those currently lying in the streets.
Ha ha. Keepin’ it light Ragged! Yup. Although I think we learned during the lockdowns that some people still needed to actually work. You know, to make things function and to bring us stuff. So maybe they will actually be the AI survivors, and it’s us who will be pitching our tents outside Heals.
It'll be worth learning the accordion. The homeless person who gets the most donations by me plays the accordion.
Ha ha. Great tip. I’ll start today.
How much do you have to pay for them to stop?
Isn’t Labour’s plan to make the rest of the UK like London? It’s been fairly clear for some time that the Police simply don’t want to deal with actual problems (my disillusionment with police started when I did jury service some decades ago). It’s only a matter of time for the public to catch on and realise there’s simply no point trying to get help from our emergency services.
I think the public are pretty aware P. It’s been an age since I’ve heard anyone who’s had a phone stolen go to the police. Maybe afterwards for a ‘crime number’ for their insurance. But at the time? No one bothers.
There was an article in the Spectator a few months ago where the writer described how his teenage daughter had had her phone snatched in London. Scary for her at the time, but no real harm done, and the family got things sorted out fairly quickly. After the practicalities had been completed, he realised that neither he nor anyone else had considered that they should report the theft to the police. What would be the point? Unless someone needed a crime number, as you point out. He found it sobering that he had internalised that attitude.
Depressing, whatever happened to Britain?
It started disappearing in Blair's second year and was given further kicks by Cameron. May, Johnson and Sunak. Two Tier will finish the job.
It's all very sad.
Bristol has a lot of homeless and I more or less have to step over them on my way to the pub. Someone should do something. But who?
I think we are spending the resources in the wrong areas Ragged. Prioritising ‘Net Zero’ for instance, when we should be concentrating on this. This is what government is for, and it is failing these people, and the rest of us.
I am certainly pro-Net Zero but I think they are going about it all wrong — in a way that is guaranteed to piss everyone off. Gas cookers and plastic straws are not going to do anything to the price of global warming. But less coal burning and more windmills will help. We do have to do something.
I'm with you on the focus of the police. They waste too much effort on patrolling the speech on the internet and not enough time patrolling the streets.
Again, we agree Ragged. Re Net Zero. We do need to do something. And once China, the US and India make some progress in that area we should follow their lead!
And why do we need to do "something"? Clearly, neither you nor Ragged have read the scientific "support" for it, examined the models and all their assumptions (you would be surprised at how much is "assumed" on which policy is based), nor considered the pointlessness and harms of net zero policies. Everyone is brainwashed through fear. Fear is the modern tool of governments and political movements
Hello Jos!
Hi! Just giving my usual twopennyworth! (I don't really expect the Joe in the street to have looked at these models but I do expect a bit more scepticism)
I was in York at the weekend. Multiple people sitting or lying on the pavements or shop doorways, even during the day when the hordes were thundering past. Most had identical blue sleeping bags, clearly given by some "charity". All clearly had drug issues. 20 years ago this was uncommon in our cities, now it's the norm and everywhere. Once again glad I live out in the sticks.
It’s definitely a new thing Pilgrim. I did a lot of ‘street’ photography in London in the late 80s. Lots of photos of homeless. Back then it was usually lost old white men, drinkers with mental problems, or ‘characters’. There was one woman. Just one I can actually remember among the regulars, she hung about by the Embankment. There were a few bashes under the bridges. That was about it.
You’re so right about the charity aspect. Michael Shellenberger, a hero of mine, is scathing about how billions of dollars have been pumped into San Francisco to supposedly ‘stop homelessness’, creating instead a huge homelessness industry. It’s beginning to happen in London under Khan.
That industry certainly exists in my native Seattle. It has a sort of symbiotic relationship with the distinct loss of state capacity we're all noticing. If the various NGO's can work to "destigmatize" various socially corrosive behaviors then there's no need for a police response or an ambulance, and neither repair or protection for the decayed and vandalized public spaces. If defecating on the sidewalk outside of a restaurant isn't REALLY a problem then we don't need to think about addressing causes.
At the end of the day a stable, competent government managing a high social trust society shouldn't be so incapable of addressing the overt degradation of shared spaces that we're all seeing. So much of it just seems to come down to the wrong people in positions of authority.
"the wrong people in positions of authority."
That definitely seems to be the case in the Left-entrenched administration of Seattle, parts of which I've watched deteriorate beyond recognition in the past 20 years in the quest for modernization and replacing much of its former quaintness with a shiny new bigger and better 'city on the hill'. Crime seems to have escalated with it, alongside the mushrooming of tents and trailers even in suburban streets. As in England, the (now reduced) police force don't bother with shoplifting or burglary unless guns are involved.
As Salisbury says above Alexei, there’s little incentive to fix problems when those problems have been de stigmatised’Why are you complaining about a junkie using your doorway as a toilet bigot?’
Well, when I still lived in London, I emerged one day from my front door to find a man pissing in my front garden against a prized shrub and on another occasion, a man (drunk? junkie?) asleep stretched across my front grass. Reluctant to engage with him (in case of?) I called the local police ensconced just at the top of my road, who suggested if he wasn't threatening me, they couldn't intervene. A very small part of why I left London.
I've had similar experiences and the only thing that's come of it has been a further entrenchment of my belief that at the end of the day the organs of the state exist to support themselves and not serve us.
There is something about the juxtaposition of great wealth and the tolerance or even celebration of mass dysfunction that I find particularly repellant about such cities.
Absolutely Salisbury. Is it possible to go back to a high trust society after this? I’m not sure it is without it just turning into another way of removing our civil liberties. Maybe if we started here, clearing/helping people off the streets, and work our way up from there. It’s a puzzle I think about a lot.
I don't know. I think it would require a fundamental reconstruction of the social contract, from the nature of citizenship, obligations and responsibilities to the community, through to the role and scope of government. I remember reading a few years ago how Eisenhower was not especially interested in the form of the United States government after nuclear war because whatever came out the other side of that event couldn't possibly share more than the name of what came before.
It seems somewhat similar in that the failures both of the current leadership class and the willingness of sizable voting blocks to support them regardless will require an earth shattering shock to undermine. I had thought perhaps the response to covid was that shock but it seems not. Or maybe it is and the timeframe is just longer than I had expected. Rome didn't fall in a day.
This reminds me of the time that as a teenager I rang Childline about my friend’s dad who was abusing her and also fostering a younger child. Got a very similar response. What a sick joke.
Grim.
Yeah, thankfully he died not long after.
Forgot to say great piece btw :)
It’s not just the UK. I live in nice safe Luxembourg; last Sunday on an evening run, I came across a comatose guy on the pavement outside the station. Asked the station if they could call the cops (I’m running, no phone). No, he said. Ok so I went to the nearest station and told them through the speaker phone, and went back to the guy. Cops turned up 10 minutes later. This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened in this town (apart from the BBC tracking a migrant smuggler to the town center detention center that is).
It’s spreading Finlay. We all think we’re ‘safe’ from it until suddenly it is on our doorstep. Thats what I think when I see the mess they’ve made of San Francisco.
I hope your town stays boring for a while yet though. Best to you in Luxembourg.
I've stayed in the St. Giles hotel (a cheap-ish firetrap rabbit warren) at the bottom of TCR a few times on social visits to London. There was a 24/7 bar (not the casino) underneath it. At 2am it was like Star Wars End of the Universe bar, but kinda fun, not sinister.
I know it well Brendan. In fact I’m standing outside it right now…..
Do you remember the car park underneath the St Giles Hotel? A terrifying Escape from New York catacomb? Well they’ve now turned that into a new separate Zedwell Hotel. The rooms have no windows, (obvs) and the rooms are cheap. I looked at it on line and it looks OK surprisingly. And it seems very popular.
Dunno about the carpark, I come from far and I don't drive in London. The rooms themselves at St. Giles are fine and in good clean refurbished condition, just the corridors seem a bit poky. Last time I stayed there was 2022. The 24/7 bar doubled as the St Giles breakfast room but seemed to be under separate management. I just found it on Google maps (thought maybe it had shut down) - it's also known as VQ Bloomsbury and you can enter from the hotel or from gt Russell Street.
I love that area of London. My train into London as a kid was to Charing Cross and I always walked straight through Trafalgar Square to Tottenham Court Road then across into Soho. My sister lived on Tottenham Court Road. I bought dozens of books in the old second-hand bookshops that used to be there. I bought my electric piano there.
I haven't been to London recently but, for whatever reason, I have to go three times in the next month and I'm staying in a hotel by Westminster Abbey. I'll walk up Tottenham Court Road every time. I love it. It was always a bit shabby — but nothing like Soho. It seems they have swapped places.
Well done for your Good Samaritan bit. I'm sorry it didn't work out. I'm sorry it never works out.
It’s very much my part of town. Where did your sister live on TCR?
SKOOB books is still going in the Brunswick centre. At the back below Waitrose if you are in the area.
Soho is Ok. There are plans to pedestrianise Oxford St which could be good, Soho is ruined by the cars these day. And the rickshaws.
I used to like that big ol' pub in Cambridge Circus — the one the IRA tried to take away from us.
Next to Peter Stringfellows?
I might be mixing up my circuses. The pub is next to that memorial for (I think) Edith Cavell. St Martin's Circus?
Yes. Thats the one I thought you meant. The Sussex Arms. It’s two seconds from Cambridge Circus. On the corner of Long Arce and St Martins Lane. No longer a pub. Now a cafe.
Boo!
My sister lived in a tall apartment building just north of Oxford Street on the right hand side going north.
Amazing. I live v close to town. But that’s so good. I remember we dropped a guy off on the way back from a job once. He lived in a little house just off Poland St. I was so jealous!
I'd love to live in Soho! I'll definitely be having ramen in Soho on my next visit. I used to live in Whitechapel/Stepney.
Ha ha. Me too. In Shadwell.
Getting closer! I lived on Senrab Street from 1990 to 1993. My favourite pub was The George. We used to go every Friday night for the musical duo and the audience participation.
Also loved The Lord Rodney by Whitechapel Station — but that's gone now 😢
Thank You for your introspect. When things are that way within the Roman Empire 2.0 at this stage of the game. It's seems inevitable to come for the rest of the world. So, of course I'm saying "thanks for the heads-up". From "across the pond".
Message reciprocated.
We're witnessing the completed and intentional residual effect of the facts that centralized micromanagement is a result of carefully planed world dominance. Thank the words of Zeus himself for the advice given upon the world. That which the Western empire seems to be ignoring. Or more precisely. Subsequently reciprocated. As the precipice of world dominance.