A Sad Xmas Present - Advances In Mathematics
Our friends at the lovely DIY ‘zine and label Pull Yourself Together have released a free EP (also available on Ltd Edition CD) to celebrate their first anniversary. It’s by Advances In Mathematics. They say:
“In December of 2010, whilst driving back to Manchester from a weekend of excess at ATP in Minehead, Pull Yourself Together Records were trying to get enough 3G connection on a phone to listen to what was about to become the first release on their new label. Now, 12 months on from Patterns’ New Noise EP, via Christopher Eatough’s heartbreaking debut album and Moustache of Insanity’s noisepop monster, PYT Records are celebrating their birthday in the only way they know, by releasing a single from a band they love. Just in time to stave off the annual pop chart festive ennui, we are proud to release Sad Xmas Present EP by Advances in Mathematics.”
12 Dec 2011
Hoxton Hipster Santa would like to sing you a Christmas song to promote a media agency
Click here – HoHoHoxton.com and this guy will sing a Christmas-ish song for you, as well.
12 Dec 2011
We're all doomed/fine [delete depending how drunk you are]
“Shoppers spent an estimated 10% less than last year on the first day of a traffic-free weekend in central London, figures have suggested.”
Oh good god no! We’re for it now, everyone knows our economy is overly-reliant on consumer spending. Oh look here’s another story about the same thing.
“Christmas shoppers hunting technology goods and winter clothes helped to give the West End a £280 million sales boost over its first traffic-free “VIP Weekend”…Total takings were £50 million up on last year’s one-day closure”
What? That doesn’t…but I though you said…oh well…Huzzah! Everything’s fine thanks to the plucky British consumer with his unquenchable thirst for electronic goods and his trusty credit card. Let’s all keep drinking and borrowing and stop trying to understand the news. I’m sure everything is absolutely fine and there’s no need to worry because everything is just fine.
BBC News – Christmas shopping: London West End retail takings fall
Evening Standard – Tills ring out on Oxford street for traffic-free weekend
12 Dec 2011
London agenda for Monday 12 December
1. Visit the ICA for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011 [Le Cool]
2.See the new restoration of the hand-tinted full-colour Le Voyage Dans la Lune (1902) with its new soundtrack by Air [Run Riot]
3. Watch The Rapture play a special show at Rowans Tenpin Bowl in Finsbury Park [Don’t Panic]
4. The Michael McIntyre Christmas Show? Burn it! Burn it with fire! [Time Out]
5. Listen to international authority on the Titanic and the White Star Line, Paul Louden-Brown [Ian Visits]
6. See the lego tree at St Pancras [Tired of London]
12 Dec 2011
Impossible Princess by Chocolate Robots
This song may be as cutesy and fluffy as an unwanted xmas Guinea Pig, but it’s a cracker nonetheless. Mike, Mutt and Marco Giresi (possibly not their real names) work in their parent’s (potentially fabricated) pizza shop. Their debut album of riotous anti-pop is called…wait for it…Pizza Face, and has some real heavyweights involved on the production side – Thom Monahan (Devandra Banhart, Vetiver), Mark Lawson (Arcade Fire). Download it now via their Bandcamp. Their website’s pretty cool too, in a Roy Walker’s Catchphrase kind of way. Apologies to the Giresi’s if all of the above is true.
09 Dec 2011
Benefits reform is going to get messy
A report by London Councils – which represents the joint interests of the London boroughs – predicts some serious fallout from the government’s proposed benefit cap. From 2013 total benefits for those out of work will be capped at £350pw for single people, and £500pw for households. The report predicts that when this happens, London’s high rents may force some families, especially those with more children, to leave their homes.
“The extent of migration, from more expensive to more affordable areas in London cannot be predicted but the extent and degree of impact on housing affordability could mean that significant movement results.”
The repercussions could be toxic. The whole point of the reforms is to incentivise employment and set a reasonable limit to the state’s support for the unemployed. These are good aims to have, and no amount of tribal Tory bashing will persuade me otherwise. But if thousands, or hundreds of thousands of unemployed Londoners are forced to leave their homes, take their children out of school, and descend all at once on the outer boroughs because the economy is flatlining and they can’t get a job…well, that’s very hard on a lot of people, and very destabilising to the city as a whole.
This one needs watching.
London Councils – Does the cap fit? An Analysis of the Impact of Welfare Reform in London (pdf)
Dave Hill – How housing benefit caps and rising rents will squeeze London’s low paid
09 Dec 2011
Primrose Hill Books
Ceiling to floor books lining every wall, the best view in london just round the corner and a lot of love from the locals. Primrose Hill Bookshop holds an important place in a community populated by artists and writers.
In a Victorian terrace on Regent’s Park Road, amongst a row of small but perfectly formed shops, sits Primrose Hill’s bookshop. It’s royal blue awning (I don’t know if you’ve noticed but a lot of small bookshops seem to be painted blue) and boxes of books outside, present an aladdin’s cave of information and stories, begging to grab your attention.
Offering new and popular titles they also print a twice yearly catalogue of the books they have enjoyed and recommend, so that other people may discover them too. Aiming to encourage others to enjoy reading as much as they do. Should they not have it in stock they can order it for you within 24-48 hours, while also tracking down books from overseas and even finding you out of print titles. Offering a very personal service to all of their customers and valuing each and every one of their needs, it’s clear why owners Jessica and Marek are so loved by their locals.
Utilising the abundance of local authors, they hold frequent author events. Previously these have included events with authors such as Ian McEwan, Dorris Lessing, PD James, Martin Amis and Diana Athill. This week’s event being an evening with Jeanette Winterson, discussing her Christmas memories from her new biography Why be Happy When you Could be Normal?. A heartbreaking, moving and entertaining account of her childhood and her relationship with her mother.
The time and attention given to serving their community’s literary needs, is an excellent demonstration of why keeping independent bookshops alive is so important.
09 Dec 2011
London agenda for Friday 9 December
1. Watch a guy try to avoid CCTV for a month and become invisible at Erasing David [Le Cool]
2. Stay up after late at the Hackney Picturehouse for Midnight Movies Messy Christmas [Run Riot]
3. Look at the photos of a British teacher in Rome, Emma Stibbon, that interplay between the sites of ancient Rome and Benito Mussolini at Falls to the Shadow [Flavorpill]
4. Have a discussion with director Nick Broomfield over his documentary on Sarah Palin, You Betcha [Don’t Panic]
5. Recall that Onion headline – ‘I’m like a chocoholic, only with alcohol’ – at the Christmas Chocolate Festival [Ian Visits]
6. See the Dickens Exhibition [Tired of London]
And something for the weekend…
1. Sat Dress up as Santa and celebrate on the streets of London at Santacon [London Confidential]
2. Sun Party at Peckham’s Sister Sledge Christmas Fete [Londonist]
09 Dec 2011
You only need £2,000 in fees to rent a London flat now. That's good, right?
Two weeks ago, I wrote about the mounting threats facing council tenants. The viciousness of the government’s concerted attacks on the provision of so-called social housing have taken many by surprise – but it is becoming increasingly clear that private tenants are next in the firing line.
This morning the Resolution Foundation published a new report into the state of the private rented sector. The sector is notoriously mismanaged, as anyone who has had the misfortune of dealing with a lettings agent will testify. An astonishing lack of regulation, along with tenancy agreements that are stacked in landlords’ favour, has meant a gradual erosion of tenants’ rights – an erosion that has quickened since the onset of the financial crisis.
£2,000 was the headline figure from the report – that’s the amount that prospective tenants in London are paying in up front agency fees in order to move house. If you’re lucky enough to have a job, and if that job pays roughly an average salary, that’s about a month’s wage. The report also pointed out that there are wild variations in the amounts charged by different agencies, often with “no discernible differences in the quality of the service received.”
The report calls for the establishment of an ombudsman service charged with mediating disputes between tenants and agencies, and for letting agents to be brought within the remit of the Estate Agents Act – a move that would give the Office of Fair Trading powers to strike off ‘rogue’ agencies.
These are both important suggestions. Indeed, the mere fact that a think-tank has to suggest that letting agencies ought, perhaps, to be subject to some sort of legal oversight demonstrates the absurdity of the current situation.
But better regulation of agencies is nowhere near enough. Private tenants find themselves in their most vulnerable position for decades. Buying a house is now an impossibility for an increasingly sizeable chunk of the population and, as a result, hundreds of thousands of people are being pushed into private rental. Inevitably, exploitation of tenants has increased as demand for rental property has risen. Rents have crashed through the barrier of affordability, rising many percentage points above inflation. An August 2010 survey, conducted by Shelter, found that the number of private renters “constantly struggling” to keep up with the rent payments had increased by 85 per cent on the year. The number is likely to be significantly higher today.
It is not just unsustainable cost with which tenants have to contend. An ever-increasing pool of potential customers has meant that tenants are of little individual value to landlords. Decide you don’t fancy this one? Not to worry – stick the flat back on Gumtree and it’ll be taken by lunchtime. Landlords don’t need to entice tenants with a properly maintained property, or a reasonable attitude, or a fair tenancy agreement. Landlords can dictate the terms of the tenancy, safe in the knowledge that they can find someone else to exploit if you turn them down.
In that strange utopia we sometimes dream of, in which we have a government that occasionally acts in the interests of the people, we would remedy this problem by investing in the wholesale provision of social housing. Or, at the very least, by introducing fair rent rules and the proper regulation of landlords.
In reality, we are stuck with a government of landowners – a government that has already killed even the infuriatingly moderate idea of a register of landlords.
Rather than legislating to protect tenants, the government is drafting laws to have them evicted. The next stage in the Conservative-Liberal assault on housing is the introduction of Mandatory Possession Orders, which would give landlords the power to force judges to approve evictions of tenants accused of ‘anti-social behaviour’. The primacy of capital over justice is thus beautifully illustrated.
Housing will be amongst the most significant political battlegrounds in the UK next year. We must realise that it’s not just council tenants or squatters who are under threat – it’s all of us. We need to start building private tenants’ networks to forcefully defend our right to decent, affordable housing, and to link up with existing support groups in council housing, housing associations, and squats. Housing is a right – but it is a right for which we are going to have to fight.
08 Dec 2011
Grey Shirt & Tie (The Big Pink remix) by Spector
Shades of vintage New Order and touches of The Orb pepper this classy reworking of Spector’s new single, by fellow Dalston scenesters The Big Pink. Grey Shirt & Tie is out now on Luv Luv Luv. Spector embark on a full headline UK tour in February.
Spector – Grey Shirt & Tie (The Big Pink remix) by snipelondon
08 Dec 2011
Snipe Highlights
Some popular articles from past years
- The five best places in London to have an epiphany
- The best church names in London, and where they come from
- Margaret Thatcher statue rejected by public
- Peter Bayley has worked for 50 years as a cinema projectionist in East Finchley
- A unique collection of photos of Edwardian Londoners
- Hope and despair in Woolwich town centre
- Silencing the Brick Lane curry touts could be fatal for the city's self-esteem
- Could red kites be London's next big nature success story?
- An interview with Desiree Akhavan
- Nice Interactive timeline lets you follow Londoners' historic fight against racism
© 2009-2026 Snipe London.