Cory Doctorow at 6:01 pm • 
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In an excellent NYT story, Sarah Lyall reports on "lights-out London" -- the phenomenon whereby ultra-wealthy foreigners (often from corrupt plutocracies like Kazakhstan and Russia) are buying up whole neighbourhoods in London, driving up house-prices beyond the reach of locals, and then treating their houses as holiday homes. They stay for a couple weeks once or twice a year, leaving whole neighbourhoods vacant and shuttered through most of the year, which kills the local businesses and turns central London into something of a ghost town.
“Some of the richest people in the world are buying property here as an investment,” [Paul Dimoldenberg, leader of the Labour opposition in Westminster Council] said. “They may live here for a fortnight in the summer, but for the rest of the year they’re contributing nothing to the local economy. The specter of new buildings where there are no lights on is a real problem...”
Meanwhile, prices are rising beyond expectation. For single-family housing in the prime areas of London, British buyers spend an average of $2.25 million, Ms. Barnes said, while foreign buyers spend an average of $3.75 million, which increases to $7.5 million if they are from Russia or the Middle East...
The most visible, and also the most notorious, of the new developments is One Hyde Park, a $1.7 billion apartment building of stratospheric opulence on a prime corner in Knightsbridge, near Harvey Nichols, the park and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which functions as a 24-hour concierge service for residents. Apartments there have been purchased mostly by foreign buyers who hide their identities behind murky offshore companies registered to tax havens like the Isle of Man and the Cayman Islands.
It is rare to see anyone coming to or going from the complex, and British newspapers have been trying since it opened two years ago to discover who lives there. Vanity Fair reported recently that as far as it could discern after a long trawl through records, the owners seem to include a cast of characters who might have come from a poker game in a James Bond movie: a Russian property magnate, a Nigerian telecommunications tycoon, the richest man in Ukraine, a Kazakh copper billionaire, someone who may or may not be a Kazkh singer and the head of finance for the emirate of Sharjah.
A Slice of London So Exclusive Even the Owners Are Visitors [NYT/Sarah Lyall]
(via Beyond the Beyond)
Cory Doctorow at 2:03 pm • •
Last week, Tate & Lyle Sugars created a one-day pop-up cake hotel in Soho, where the rooms were stuffed with edible fixtures and furniture:
A Mediterranean-inspired bedroom, with edible furnishings, a caramel popcorn-filled bathtub, floating meringues and edible pearlescent popcorn bunting, all created using Light Soft Brown sugar. The perfect location for a midnight feast!
A Pirates of the Caribbean room, with a giant treasure chest full of edible pearls, ginger spiced doubloons and cutlasses, which visitors can spray gold themselves, and rum and raisin chocolate brownies and tea cakes – all made from Taste Experience Caribbean-inspired Light Muscovado sugar
A British-inspired Golden syrup sugar room, with a giant golden-syrup lion, patriotic treacle tarts in the shape of the British Isles and a giant tower of doughnuts
A Mayan-inspired room hidden in the cellar featuring a Mayan fudge temple, complete with floating meringue ‘clouds’, ‘sacrificial’ salted caramel and chocolate hearts, and Mayan-inspired carved gold cookies all made from Taste Experience Mayan-inspired golden caster sugar
A Mississippi-inspired ‘Mardi Gras’ room featuring a five foot long rainbow cake in the traditional colours of green, yellow & purple, gold baby heads and of course King Cakes
A Barbados-inspired library, with edible shells, and beautiful hand-painted cookies, fruit cakes and florentines showcased as museum features inside vintage glass jars, all made from Barbados inspired Dark Muscovado sugar
A Guyanese-inspired room, complete with a sea turtle cake, and cake ‘turtle eggs’ buried in mounds of Demerara sugar
A South Pacific-inspired room with a huge two metre high Easter Island statue, made entirely from chocolate mud cake baked using Golden Granulated sugar
SWEET DREAMS… WORLD’S FIRST CAKE HOTEL OPENS TO THE PUBLIC
(via OhGizmo)
Cory Doctorow at 10:49 pm • •
Hey, Londoners! I'll be launching the UK edition of Rapture of the Nerds today at 1PM at Forbidden Planet. Although the book is available across the country at finer stores, this will be your only chance to stroke the marvellous 3D printed Space Marine Stross and have your picture taken with it.
Cory Doctorow at 12:55 am • •
Hey, Londoners! A reminder that I'll be signing the UK edition of Charlie Stross's and my novel Rapture of the Nerds, tomorrow at 1PM at Forbidden Planet. Charlie can't make it, so I have fashioned a cunning 3D printed Space Marine Stross to accompany me, which you may rub for good luck if you attend.
Cory Doctorow at 3:31 am • •
Hey, Londoners! A quick reminder that I'll be signing the new UK edition of Rapture of the Nerds this Saturday at Forbidden Planet on Shaftesbury Ave at 13h. Come on down and say hi!
Cory Doctorow at 4:45 pm • •
Mat Ricardo sez,
The first episode of the 2013 season of Mat Ricardo's London Varieties is now up, online, for anyone to watch, completely free!
This is the edited version of the brand new variety show that comes live, once a month, from the Leicester Square Theatre in the heart of London's West End! This months episode features juggling, magic, circus, comedy, music and two middle-aged men making fools of themselves with some hats. It was a fun night.
Some Boing Boing readers have said hi to me at previous shows, so I hope you all watch, enjoy and share it to your hearts content!
The next show is on March 28th, at 9.30, and features Al Murray The Pub Landlord in conversation, plus performances from The Boy With Tape On His Face, award-winning magician Pete Wardell, and the hilarious Elliot Mason. Oh, and I'll be attempting a feat of strength and dexterity that killed a fellow juggler in 1936. Tickets available right here.
Mat Ricardo's London Varieties: Show One
(Thanks, Mat!)
Dan sez, "The BBC have produced
a radio play of Neil Gaiman's
Neverwhere with a host of great British actors. Sounds exactly like you want it to sound."
— Cory
•
Cory Doctorow at 11:12 am • •
Charlotte sez,
It's International Women's Day today and the London Feminist Network (to whom I proudly belong) have organised the most awesome fundraising event for our conference later this year, a film launch for "Banners and Broad Arrows." In 1832 the women of the United Kingdom were excluded from the Parliamentary franchise. After 71 years this injustice remained. In 1903 the Women's Social and Political Union was formed. This is the story told through their own eyes.
A lecture by writer/director Nigel Shephard, who will be presenting his work so far on the film Banners and Broad Arrows. He tells the story of the Suffragette Movement from its inception in 1903 to its demise at the outbreak of war in 1914, using original still photographs taken by the Suffragettes themselves.
The really cool thing about this lecture is that there will be a whole load of pictures on display that have only recently been released from the Official Secrets Act. These never previously published photographs were smuggled out of Holloway prison by campaigners.
This is a great opportunity to discover the history of the suffragettes through their own photographs and to meet the director and share in developing ideas for the film. Please, please come along to demonstrate your support at this first fundraising event to take the film into full production. It's only £10 a ticket and all profits are being split equally between the film producer and the London Feminist Network."
THE KINGS HEAD THEATRE UPPER STREET ISLINGTON
7.30PM SUNDAY 24TH MARCH 2013
Banners and Broad Arrows - never before seen photographs of the suffragettes in Holloway prison
(Thanks, Charlotte)
The
UK edition of Rapture of the Nerds hits shelves on April 12, but we're having a
sneaky early release at Forbidden Planet in London on Mar 23 at 1PM. Tell your friends! (I'm pretty sure that Forbidden Planet will take advance mail-orders for people who can't make it, and I'll sign and personalise every one of 'em).
— Cory
•
The Lost Lectures are fascinating presentations given in secret locations around London and Berlin. If you sign up,
you can get tickets (and the hush hush info) necessary to see them live — or you can watch them online from anywhere after the fact. I kind of wish I was in London on March 22nd, when the series is featuring both Alice Taylor — a melder of games, toys, and tech who also happens to be Cory's wife — and science blog god Ed Yong. What a great lineup!
— Maggie
•
Cory Doctorow at 8:26 pm • •
Jeffrey sez, "I spent the last 4 months stitching 48 THOUSAND images together into a single panorama which lets you see things up to about 15 miles away.
This image is about 4 times larger than the previous world record image, a 114-gigapixel image of Shanghai (at the time incorrectly labeled as 271 gigapixels)
The panorama was shot from the top of BT Tower, using 4 cameras, lenses, and robots for moving the cameras. Three photographers using about $100,000 of gear spent 5 days up there. Ultimately we used 1 set of images which was shot over 90 minutes.
Stitching was done on two workstations with 192GB and 256GB of RAM, using Kolor Autopano Giga stitching software.
Sadly, the software choked on the gigantic dataset, and the stitching work ended up taking about 3 months longer than planned. This took a serious toll on my mental health. I am extremely happy to be finally putting this image out to the public and letting it see the light of day.
Of course there are errors in the image. In the end we had to deliver it to the client with a deadline which had already slipped by months. At any rate, there are FAR fewer errors in the image that I expected.
I hope you enjoy it. Can anyone find the pig?"
BT Tower 360 Panorama of London
(Thanks, Jeffrey!)
Cory Doctorow at 11:11 pm • •
Mat Ricardo sez,
Last year I started a monthly variety show in a small East London venue. It was a little personal project that let me show my vision of what a variety show could be. Well, happily, it was a bit of a success - all the shows pretty much sold out, we got nominated for some awards, and The Stage named us the best light-entertainment show of the year. We were very pleasantly surprised to find out that there was a passionate audience for the kind of shenanigans I staged!
So for the 2013 season things are getting bigger and crazier. "Mat Ricardo's London Varieties" will run a season of six shows, once a month, and we're in a London West End theatre! I've been working hard for the last few months putting together the absolute best variety bills you could wish for. Some big names, some not so well-known, but every single performer is the absolute best at what they do. Magicians, circus performers, acrobats, clowns, comedians, singers, dancers, purveyors of thrills, skills, spectacle, beauty and silliness - every single one of them a top-of-their-game headliner through and through.
There hasn't been a real, knock-down, drag-out, no-apologies variety show in a West End theatre since the heydays of my heroes in the 60's and 70's, and this is a real labour of love - a childhood dream come true for me, but also something special for the performers and for all the fans of variety who have seen something they love go out of fashion. Well, we're back, and we're taking no prisoners!
The opening night is Feb 28th, at the Leicester Square Theatre, London, at 9.30pm.
"Mat Ricardo's London Varieties" comes to London's West End!
Tickets
(Thanks, Mat!)
Cory Doctorow at 6:17 pm • •
The Camden Council in London removed many public benches, apparently in an effort to chase out vagrants. A group of Guerrilla Benchers were offended by this, and responded by reinstalling their own benches on the sites of the old street furniture.
Camden council in London decided to remove several public benches, for the benefit of the public last year. Along with a scheme to convert all bus stops to be fitted with un-usable benches. The basic plan seems to be to move on undesirables and homeless people away as they don't fit in with the aesthetics of the area. Rather than addressing these problems they have taken the usual tactic of moving them on and hoping that someone else will deal with them...
...Due to the colossal and inorganised nature of local councils, and their cunning disguises the guerrilla benchers were not approached or questioned by anyone as they installed the benches.
Unfortunately however the drills ran out of batteries just after the first bench had been installed. In true workman style it was obviously time for a fry-up breakfast and cup of tea whilst the batteries re-charged.
Guerrilla Benching
(via Beyond the Beyond)
Cory Doctorow at 8:03 pm • •
Ed sez,
Inspired by traditional Victorian floriography, writer and artist Ed Saperia developed a series of over 200 "flower codes", allowing you to express anything from a simple romantic gesture ("I adore you") to a loaded question ("Someone else?") or even an insult ("Creep!") using nothing but a few common flowers.
"We are a messaging culture, submerged in an endless deluge of communication. Sometimes, though, we are lost for words. This system makes it a little easier to say those difficult things."
An online dictionary and decoder may be found at www.cryptofloricon.com, and if you're in London from 8th-10th February a pop-up florist near Brick Lane will feature a range of bouquets spelling out the various codes.
Boing Boing's favourite will probably be three carnations, one lily and a gerbera, which translates to "Help, I'm trapped in a florist's!".
Cryptofloricon
(
Thanks, Ed!)
Cory Doctorow at 10:33 pm • •
FREEDOM, a legendary anarchist bookstore in east London, was firebombed on Friday morning. This is the store that Peter Kropotkin helped found in the 19th century, and the home of a monthly newspaper that published Emma Goldman. No one was hurt, and no one seems to know who did it, or why. The store was uninsured.
They're having a community clean-up day today. I wish I could go, but it's my daughter's fifth birthday, so I'll be donating to the repair and rebuilding fund. This is a ghastly, senseless act.
The bookshop has been firebombed. Fortunately nobody was hurt, but there’s quite a lot of damage from both the fire and the water used to douse the flames.
If you’d like to help us sort out some of the mess, please come down to the shop on Saturday 2nd February from 1pm and give us a helping hand. See here for details.
We’re still assessing the damage, so watch this space for further news.
If you’d like help us out financially, cheques or postal orders made payable to Freedom Press can be sent to Freedom Press, 84b Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX.
You can also help by ordering books through our website here and then emailing us at subs@freedompress.org.uk to let us know that your purchase was a donation.
I can't say enough about what a tragedy this is. FREEDOM is an institution and an incredible bookstore.
Freedom firebombed
(Photo: International Times)
