Emirates cable car contract gags London's next mayor

The sponsorship contract for mayor Boris Johnson’s cable car means his successor would be prevented from criticising the deal with the Dubai government-owned airline Emirates, it has emerged.

The contract, which has appeared on the TfL website under Freedom of Information legislation, outlines the £36m deal struck between Docklands Light Railway Limited, which operates the system, and airline Emirates to sponsor the cable car for 10 years.

Should any future mayor be tempted to criticise the deal, then clause 6.5 in the Emirates Air Line contract should be enough to deter them..

DLRL shall not, and shall procure that none of TfL, each member of the TfL Group, the Air Line Contractor… and their respective directors, senior staff and official spokespeople acting in the course of his or her employment shall make any statement in connection with the subject matter of this contract that is disparaging or defamatory of the Sponsor, any member of the Emirates Group, or any person forming any part of the Government of Dubai and/or the Federal Government of the United Arab Emirates or any member of any of the Royal Families of the United Arab Emirates.

Johnson – who as mayor is the chairman of TfL – claimed in 2010 the cable car would be built “entirely from private finance”. But the Emirates deal covers only just over half its costs – and the way it is structures means it will have only paid out £13.2m so far.

Emirates will pay the rest off in a further eight £2.85m instalments each summer until 2021. European Union funding covers another £8m, leaving a £16m shortfall which the mayor hopes will eventually be covered by the premium fares charged on the link between Greenwich and the Royal Docks.

The clause may have been written with Johnson’s predecessor – who last year branded the cable car a “disaster” – in mind. But the UAE, whose human rights record has been criticised in recent years, was praised by Ken Livingstone when it agreed to pay its congestion charge bills in 2006.

But it certainly means any future mayor will have to be very careful when talking about the deal. Emirates will have no such worries about Johnson, who earlier this month opened a visitor attraction promoting the airline at the cable car’s Greenwich terminal. The opening of a visitor “experience” is included in the contract.

The contract also includes restrictions on firms which TfL could have dealings with on the cable car, who the cable car could be sold to, which would appear to block dealings with Israeli companies. The UAE does not recognise Israel as a state, and the contract specifically rules out individuals or organisations from states with which the UAE does not have diplomatic relations.

It also includes provisions for Emirates to “upgrade” some gondolas to its own design and to name the three towers which carry the cars across the Thames. It also commits TfL to run the cable car from at least 7am each weekday – despite the pitifully low user figures in the morning rush hour.

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"They've got to find men to marry": Boris Johnson on why women attend university

Boris Johnson has risked accusations of sexism after he told a City Hall audience that rising numbers of women are attending university in order to find a husband.

Johnson’s remark was made at last week’s launch of the World Islamic Economic Forum, where he appeared alongside the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak.

Asked about the role of women in Islamic societies, Razak told the Evening Standard’s Pippa Crerar:

“Before coming here my officials have told me that the latest university intake in Malaysia, a Muslim country, 68% will be women entering our universities.”

After which Boris interrupted with the suggestion that:

“They’ve got to find men to marry”

The comment was greeted with widespread laughter as well as a few groans.

Last year Johnson was accused of being “disrespectful and patronising” to female members of the London Assembly, a charge he vehemently denied.

You can listen to the full exchange from last week below. Thanks to Martin Hoscik for the original recording.

"Ozymandias had nothing on us". Geographer-poet Tim Cresswell talks about his new collection, Soil

What: A collection of poems, many set in contemporary London
When: Get it now
Where: From publisher Penned in the Margins
How much: £8.99

Soil is Tim Cresswell’s first collection of poetry. The poems talk of foxes and geology and people ironing in Acton living rooms while the city hums around them and the world ages deep beneath their feet. We asked Tim about his poems, and about how his day job, as professor of human geography at Royal Holloway, inspired them.

Snipe: The collection opens with a fox at the top of the Shard eating pork pie crusts and looking down across the city. That’s an image a lot of people will instinctively be drawn to and find interesting and meaningful about living in London now – but they might not be able to explain why. Can you articulate why you wanted to write a poem about this, and to open the collection with it?

Tim: This is a poem I am very fond of. When I read the story of Romeo (the name the builders gave him) found on the 73rd floor of the Shard as it was being built I was astonished. All those stairs and ladders. I had a powerful image of this fox sitting looking at the lights of London, the planes descending from east to west, the glow of the London night. I wondered what a fox would make of it all. I also thought of all the stories of foxes in mythologies of the world and decided that this true fox story was possibly even better. Somewhere in the back of my mind were the poems of Ted Hughes…the much anthologised Thought Fox and the less well known but better poem where he encounters a fox on a London bridge. Finally there are all the foxes I see in the evening hours around my home in Ealing. They remind me of the incompleteness of urban London… Or perhaps the way in which London, to be complete, needs foxes alongside other characters from the book such as weeds and parakeets and blackberry brambles. So the poem does a lot of the work of the whole collection…reflecting on urban natures, dwelling, being displaced. At the heart of it is Europe’s tallest building with all of its steel and glass and a small fox. The juxtaposition speaks volumes.

“…feeling the clay wick the wet away / from the membranes in your mouth”

Why do you like the idea of people eating earth?

It seems elemental…cannabilistic even. Geophagy is widely practiced and the stuff of folk tales. It brings a very clear set of imagined sensations to mind. Perhaps it goes back to childhood experiences or eating unwashed carrots. It all gets mixed up with the erotic and issues of fertility in ways I cannot really rationalise.

“…a place that could spend millions of years buried / and still blackbirds wake me up in spring”

Rewilding is an idea that’s knocking around at the moment (George Monbiot has a book out about it). A lot of your poems are about plants and animals living in “human” places. Do you believe in the possibility of a wild, non-human existence? Or are we way past that?

It is commonplace now to talk of the social construction of nature. There is nowhere on earth that has not been influenced by our presence on earth. This is recognised by the invention of the anthropocene by geologists. I think it is unlikely that there is any segment of space that we can point to and call wilderness without a heavy dose of irony. I think, however, that we may be looking in the wrong way. There are bits of the ‘wild’ in everything. Right at the heart of the human body there is the wild. There is wild in the glass and steel of the Shard. There is wild inside the Large Hadron Collider. Put it this way… If we argue that nature is socially constructed we are pointing out that humans…and the way we self organise… are evident in every scrap of the stuff we call nature. If we reverse the argument and say that everywhere we look in the human world there is at least some element of ‘nature’ then we can also say that the social is naturally constructed. Choosing the former argument over the latter is just a political choice. There is of course a danger in making nature centered arguments as they can quickly become deterministic in ways that can quickly become eugenics or worse.

_{Chart of soil types, from Wikipedia. Tim’s collection makes great play of the scientific language of soil}

Is geological time one of the last sublime thoughts left to the contemporary poet?

It is certainly one of them but not the last. Geology and deep time are awe inspiring in a sublime way if you sit and think about it. If you look at the creases and folds in a landscape with exposed vertical surfaces you cannot but be impressed by the kind of power that can fold the very earth. Some of that is going on in the poem Earthwork which is set in Banff in Canada where you can see the waves of sediments along the valley the Bow River has cut into. I think we are collectively doing our best to tame this sense of awe by insisting on calling our current geological era the ‘anthropocene’ – a name which suggests we are the prime agent in the creation of the earth around us at this particular time. This is an interesting perspective that serves the useful purpose of directing our attention to the Human influence on the global environment. What it also does, however, is point to a more prevalent sense of the sublime in our time and this is a narcissistic sublime…a sense that we are in awe of ourselves and our own accomplishments. Some talk of the ‘technological sublime’ in reference to the beauty and awe of a mushroom cloud or even the rainbow colors of oil on water. It makes sense to me. I remember this sense as I landed at Chicago at night seeing this endless grid if lights as we approached O’Hare. No one could deny the extraordinary beauty of such a thing. We did that! How terrible and beautiful! Ozymandias had nothing on us.

“Imagine lines around the world – his lines – her lines…they have pressed themselves on the earth”

You’re moving your life (I think I’m right in saying) from London to Boston. As someone who has studied human geography as your career, how does it feel to be a number within the global statistics of human migration? As a poet and an academic, how hard is it to find the personal in the great flood of numbers?

Such a question lies at the heart of do much that I write and think about both academically and poetically. It is also personal. I have moved constantly as an airforce child, a student and an academic. I don’t think I have lived anywhere more that seven years and I am constantly interested in what somewhere else might have to offer. I would be very happy if the next stop… Boston… was the last. I admire people who don’t move much. That seems brave to me. But I am very interested in the meanings that accompany moving people and things. Travel and stories were joined at the hip early on in our history and have remained that way. Numbers are interesting but the stories much more so. The quote you give with this question refers to the phenomenon of ‘desire lines’…the paths we make as we take short cuts that were unintended by planners. Those lines of bare dirt we see across the park, or cutting off a corner. I like to think of those globally…as paths that reflect some of our desires. I always had that image in my head of an automatic map that traces lines with every movement. Some times in strange cities I try and figure out if the line of the now us crossing over an old line from another journey I have taken.

More than one of your poems talk of blood and soil, of a connection between a person and the soil on which they were born and raised. That’s a powerful idea in human history – that there’s a vertical connection between people and the earth. Will this idea be as powerful in the future?

It’s hard to see it going anywhere. People still fight wars for an abstract notion of the soil. This is at the heart of Heidegger’s notion of ‘dwelling’..of being itself. What we are faced with now is a point in history when more people than ever are moving. Places are rarely purely vertical…they are also horizontal…produced by ‘elsewhere’ as much as by ‘here’. I grew up in a world where the location my family happened to be living in meant very little. Many poets we know and love – such as Seamus Heaney – have a craft of place that involved a deep sense of loamy, peaty rootlessness that really makes little sense to me except as an ideal of sorts. So I wanted to reflect on soil in a different way. In many ways soil is entirely inappropriate as a metaphor for belonging. Soil moves all the time. It is eroded and transported and deposited. It slumps and disperses. Soil is mobile. Bedrock is just one source of a soil’s identity. So, strangely, soil turns out to be a reasonable conceptual metaphor for place and belonging after all.

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One Minute With Lotfy Nathan: Director of The 12 O'Clock Boys

Lotfy Nathan, 26, debuted his documentary feature —12 O’CLOCK BOYS—to critical acclaim at this year’s SXSW Film Festival. While showing the film at London’s Open City Docs Festival, he spoke to Snipe about Baltimore, bike gangs and embarking on his first film.

Health and safety fears stop passengers hopping on and off London's new bus

Staff on Boris Johnson’s new hop-on, hop-off bus are preventing passengers from hopping on or off due to safety concerns, Transport for London have admitted.

The rear platform is closed during the evening and when there is only one member of staff on board.

However some passengers have also reported staff routinely blocking the rear platform in between stops.

One ‘conductor’ reportedly told passengers:

“You can’t get off except at the stop, it’s health and safety.”

TfL today insisted that passengers could alight in between stops but admitted that some staff were being too restrictive.

In a statement they said they were working to ensure that conductors balance passenger safety with “freedom of choice.”

A spokesperson told The Scoop that: “The role of the conductor on the New Bus for London is primarily to ensure the safe boarding and alighting of passengers using the open platform.” but added that

“Passengers are able to hop on and hop off the bus between stops if the bus is stationary in traffic. The conductor will advise passengers to watch out for moving traffic. We are working with the new conductors to ensure they balance the need to keep passengers safe with the need to allow passengers the freedom of choice to hop on and off the bus when they want to.”

Further confusion has been caused by TfL’s current conditions of carriage which state that:

“on our bus services, you must board or alight from the vehicle only at official bus stops”

Previous statements from City Hall have“repeated this advice” in relation to London’s new bus.

The new buses have also experienced a series of technical problems this week. A number of the buses on the first fully operational route reportedly broke down during service.

The five best places in London to have an epiphany

London in the early 21st century is a confusing place and time to be alive – what with all the unpredictable weather and constantly evolving pop-up food scene we’re having. What we need are some clarifying epiphanies.