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February
C-Charge Protest Fails to Bring Down Government 16th February 2007
But who are these people who claim to use their cars in Central London?
Ha! Ha! Ha! Do you know how many people turned up for the demonstration against the C-Charge Zone Expansion, after literally tens of thousands of words of anguished editorial in the right-wing press? One hundred and fifty. That’s two-hundred-and-fifty less than turned up for a pillow fight in Trafalgar square last Christmas, a hundred less than have signed up for a Petition on the Number 10 website to ‘improve letter boxes’ (no more details given. Your guess is as good as mine), and only a couple more than came to the dreadful, dreadful New Year’s Eve party I was obliged to attend this year.

Driving anywhere in London is like walking in the countryside: it might seem like a good idea, but it always takes at least nine times as long as you’d expect, and leaves you crippled with fury at dead ends, aggressive locals and incomprehensible maps. If Londoners are in a hurry, they get the tube. If we want to enjoy a journey, we hop on a double-decker bus – very nippy in these post C-Charge days - or into a black cab. But we all know better than to drive.

Which begs the question of who these hundred-and-fifty protestors were. Some four or five, I have no doubt, are people whose livelihood is genuinely threatened by the new zone. Several more, I would guess, were journalists from the area, hoping for a scoop, and incidentally furious that they were going to have to pay if they wanted to drive to the organic butcher’s at 12:15, when everyone else in the country was at work.

But I suspect that most of them were people who live just beyond the fringes of K & C, but have always claimed their homes were ‘just off King Street’, ‘oh, I’m a real Notting Hillbilly, mwah, mwah’ or ‘up the road from Chelsea harbour’, and are now furious that those big red ‘C’ symbols on the road prove that they live in dull Hammersmith, dirty Shepherd’s Bush or crack-happy Kensal Rise.

My apologies to anyone whose life has genuinely been spoiled by the C-Charge, but let the rest of you raise a cheer to Ken for adding a whole extra level to postcode-snobbery.
Tate Modern is Worse than Blackpool
With a 21% increase in visitor numbers since 2005, Tate Modern is now the second most visited venue in the country. 4.9m visitors during 2006 make the Bankside modern art gallery second only to the Blackpool Pleasure Beach with its annual scoop of 5.6 million.
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Kenwood House’s popular summer concert series has been cancelled this year following complaints from local residents. Concerns over noise and traffic increase led to English Heritage’s decision to halt the event which usually attracts over 60,000 yearly visitors.
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London’s pub population is on the decrease with an average of five watering holes closing down each week. The capital lost 230 inns in 2006 – a 53% increase on the previous year – a trend which seems set to continue.
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