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Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough review – bent Britain at your service | History books | The Guardian
Bullough begins by showing how old colonialists found a new niche in recreating the further-flung outposts of empire – the self-governing protectorates of the British Virgin Islands, the Caymans, Gibraltar – as looters’ havens. They used crafty expertise to create the small print of shell companies and financial instruments that allowed multimillionaires and global corporations to avoid doing the thing they liked least – pay taxes. Successive UK governments, while occasionally handwringing about closing those loopholes, were, he shows, complicit in this practice, working on that time-honoured imperial principle: well, if we don’t do it, someone else will. Over time our biggest growth industry, the new source of the City’s wealth and power, was as 10% fixers for fraudsters and worse.Thames mudlarking permits to be issued again but capped to protect site | London | The Guardian
Overall permit numbers will now be capped at 4,000, and these will be valid for one year rather than three. In addition, the option for permit-holders to automatically renew has been removed. Those interested can instead sign up for a waiting list, which launches at midday on Wednesday 2 October. The changes were introduced because demand had surged to a level “that was just too much for the foreshore to sustain”, said Pippa Barber, head of statutory consents and compliance at the PLA. “There is only a certain amount of foreshore, and there is only a certain amount of history. History only happens once, a pipe only gets dropped once, and once it’s gone, it’s gone for ever.Thames Water Bills to Rise 48% to Fix Pipes and Leaks Around London - Bloomberg
The company said Bloomberg Terminal Monday its proposed investment — running from 2025 to 2030 — would help fund a 28% reduction in storm overflows and a 30% decline in the number of pollution incidents. The average monthly bill may rise by £14.55, which amounts to an increase of about 48%, according to Bloomberg calculations.UK without London
Matt Klein has put forward a fun claim: “Take out Greater London—the prosperity of which depends to an uncomfortable degree on a willingness to provide services to oligarchs from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union—and the UK is one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.”Hippocampal and prefrontal processing of network topology to simulate the future : Nature Communications
Here we tested the hypotheses that the hippocampus retrieves representations of the topological structure of the environment when new paths are entered in order to support goal-directed navigation and the lateral PFC performs path-planning via a BFS mechanism. We combined a graph-theoretic analysis of the city streets of London with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data collected from participants navigating a film simulation of London’s streets. Our analysis reveals that the right posterior hippocampus specifically tracks the changes in the local connections in the street network, the right anterior hippocampus tracks changes in the global properties of the streets and the bilateral lateral prefrontal activity scales with the demands of a BFS. These responses were only present when long-term memory of the environment was required to guide navigation.Satnavs 'switch off' parts of the brain: Using a satnav to get to your destination 'switches off' parts of the brain that would otherwise be used to simulate different routes -- ScienceDaily
When volunteers navigated manually, their hippocampus and prefrontal cortex had spikes of activity when volunteers entered new streets. This brain activity was greater when the number of options to choose from increased, but no additional activity was detected when people followed satnav instructions. "Entering a junction such as Seven Dials in London, where seven streets meet, would enhance activity in the hippocampus, whereas a dead-end would drive down its activity. If you are having a hard time navigating the mass of streets in a city, you are likely putting high demands on your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex," explains senior author Dr Hugo Spiers (UCL Experimental Psychology). "Our results fit with models in which the hippocampus simulates journeys on future possible paths while the prefrontal cortex helps us to plan which ones will get us to our destination. When we have technology telling us which way to go, however, these parts of the brain simply don't respond to the street network. In that sense our brain has switched off its interest in the streets around us."A Tale of Two Velodromes
London’s two velodromes were built in the 19th and 21st centuries. The indoor track at the Lee Valley Velodrome, one of the fastest in the world, is housed in a beautiful stadium built at cost of £94 million. Its distinctive roof, a hyperbolic paraboloid clad in 5000m2 of custom-cut Western red cedar, is a prominent landmark at the edge of the 2012 Olympic park. The open-air track at Herne Hill is completely hidden in a South London suburb. The entrance lies at the end of a narrow path between two semi-detached houses. Coming out behind them, you see a wall supporting a low bank of rusting metal seats. This little stand is the only permanent structure that was built – at any of the venues – for the 1948 Olympics. The pavilion, also derelict, dates from 1891, when the track opened. In 2015, any spectators sit on folding plastic seats in a small area of open terracing in front of the older stands. There is no café. Competitors change in a portaloo in a cluster of temporary cabins and containers behind the old pavilion.Marina Abramovic's odd jobs
“We milked the goats in Sardinia to get sausages and bread. … We made [sweaters] and sell them on the market,” says Abramovic. For one month, Abramovic even worked as a mail carrier in London—which didn’t end well. “First it took me so long time to deliver all the letters,” she says. “And I decide that every letter who was written with typewriter machine must be bad news or a bill, and I throw them away. And I only deliver letters written by hand and become much faster. Only beautiful letters. After four weeks working, they could not prove anything, but they asked me to give back uniform, which I did.”Chaucer's day job
Chaucer’s London job was always a precarious one. The king’s own advisers and allies in the City of London colluded to put him there, as their fall guy in a major profiteering scheme. His job as controller of customs was to certify honesty of the powerful and influential customs collectors – including the wealthy and imperious Nicholas Brembre, long-term mayor of London – and to ensure the proper collection of duties on all outgoing wool shipments. This sounds routine enough, until we realise how much was at stake: in the 14th century, wool duties contributed one-third of the total revenues of the realm. What’s more, the collectors of customs whose activities Chaucer was expected to regulate were themselves wool shippers and wool profiteers on a grand scale, taking advantage of their positions to accumulate immense fortunes at public expense. Their wealth enabled them to become donors and lenders to the king, and to multiply their privileges and profits. As lone watchdog of customs revenues, Chaucer was hardly likely to bring them to heel. His job was, essentially, to look the other way.Personalities self-segregate depending on environment, improving their happiness
The more agreeable residents of London tended to be happiest outside the centre in more residential parts of the capital, where there was more space for gardens and parks. The same suburban areas were not so appealing to open, creative types though. “If you’re high in openness – artists and creative types – you tend to be much happier in a part of London that’s diverse and densely populated and where there’s a lot of stimulation to feed your curiosity,” said Rentfrow.Disaster old skool -- charge admission and hyperbolate!
After the accident, watchmen charged people a penny or two-pence to see the ruins of the beer vats, and visitors came in their hundreds to witness the macabre spectacle. But a report in The Times praised local people’s response to the disaster, noting how the crowd kept quiet so the cries of trapped victims could be heard.In fact, it seems like later rumours that people collected the beer in pots and pans were untrue, as Martyn Cornell, author of Amber, Gold and Black: The History of Britain’s Great Beers, explains: “None of the London newspapers report anyone trying to drink the beer after the flood, indeed, they say the crowds that gathered were pretty well behaved. Only much later did stories start being told about riots, people getting drunk and so on: these seem to have been be prompted by what people thought ought to have happened, rather than what did happen.”The literary map of London is just beautiful
In central London, about 28 percent of home buyers in the two years to June didn’t live in the U.K., according to broker Knight Frank LLP. That rises to about 49 percent for new homes. In Greater London, 10 percent to 15 percent of new homes are bought by non-residents, Knight Frank estimated in October.
The average London house price will rise 44 per cent by 2018 to a dizzying £566,000, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research. So, if I don’t hurry, my savings won’t even stretch to a deposit. Channel 4 has extended Location, Location, Location – a voyeuristic house-hunting show – to an hour from 30 minutes, understanding that property has become our nation’s unrivalled bread and circuses.