Latest news with #Whitechapel
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Want to know what's going right in Britain? Come to the capital, look at the Elizabeth line railway
Another week, another piece of good news concerning London's newest railway. This time it's a timetable update showing that the Saturday service on the core section of the Elizabeth line will increase from 16 to 20 trains an hour. From December, there will be a train every three minutes between Paddington and Whitechapel, higher than the normal off-peak frequency, just in time for your Christmas shopping. OK, it's hardly world peace or a custodial sentence for the people who keep adding AI to search engines, but in 2025 you take what you can get. There are two competing narratives about what, in happier times, we used to know as Crossrail. The first and most familiar is a litany of complaints. The new line took for ever to happen, even by the standards of such things: an east-west heavy rail tunnel linking Paddington and Liverpool Street was first proposed mere weeks after the conclusion of the Blitz, and as far back as the 1990s information leaflets about the plan were appearing at outer London stations and exciting some of the cooler local teenagers. But the route didn't actually get the nod until 2008, at almost exactly the point someone in the offices of Lehman Brothers was asking: 'So, when you say sub-prime …' And then, of course, it arrived late and over budget. This is par for the course with infrastructure 'megaprojects', which have a well-known habit of costing billions more than projected – but the insulting thing about this one was that, as late as the summer of 2018, its promoters were still touting it as the exception to the rule. On the last day of August that year, though, about four months before opening day, news broke that it would not be delivered on time. In retrospect, the fact the stations were visibly unfinished should have been a useful clue. In the end, the £4bn budget overrun – on a single London project – was bigger in itself than the sum Rachel Reeves put aside for transport in any single city region in 2025. Less expensive but more irritating was the line's new name. London has a habit of doing this – the only tube lines built since the network effectively entered public ownership in 1933, the Victoria and the Jubilee, were named for the royals, too. Nonetheless, it felt deeply weird to do this while Queen Elizabeth II was still alive. And so, by the time the line opened in 2022, the shine had come off. But that's when the narrative began to change – because, while there have been teething problems (mostly involving signalling, mainly in west London), it's become increasingly obvious that the line has been an enormous success. By its third anniversary in May, it had provided more than half a billion journeys, more than any other operator in that period, including the entirety of the South Western Railway or Northern Trains networks – this, remember, for what is in essence a big tube line. It is also responsible for a staggering one in seven journeys on the entire British rail network. TfL reckons almost 30% of these are people who'd previously have travelled by car or not at all. More than that, the line has transformed the geography of London. It has halved journey times from parts of south-east London to the West End, put Paddington and points west in easy reach of the eastern suburbs and provided passengers at Heathrow with a single fast train to essentially everywhere. Even the ExCel exhibition centre in the Royal Docks is no longer hell to reach (merely to enter). Suburbs have been regenerated, more jobs created, more houses built; the line's forelock-tugging name has ceased to sound weird. It's hard to argue it was not worth the wait. All of which raises an obvious question: if it worked this well, why on earth are we not building more of it? As things stand, at least six trains an hour – a service frequency passengers in much of London, let alone elsewhere, would kill for – go no farther west than Paddington. Doesn't that suggest a case for an extension? Or what about the abandoned plan to extend the Canary Wharf branch to Ebbsfleet in Kent? Or for Crossrail 2, the latest iteration of the nearly-as-long-discussed Chelsea-Hackney route? Or for extending the Bakerloo line to Lewisham? The biggest prizes, though, are surely not even in London. One of the big constraints on the West Midlands rail networks is the shortage of space at Birmingham New Street station. A Birmingham Crossrail, allowing suburban trains to travel from east or west, could enable higher frequencies by getting local trains out of the way of intercity ones, and revolutionise transport in a city still far too dependent on cars. Then there's the M62 corridor, where four city regions with a combined population nearing London's abut. The region's terrible transport links are not the only reason productivity in Manchester or Leeds lags their continental peers – but the fact commuters can't rely on trains turning up on time or at all when deciding where to work surely can't be helping. And yet governments have repeatedly refused to back the new line – branded variously as Northern Powerhouse Rail, High Speed 3 or Crossrail for the North – meant to address this. Even less ambitious schemes – new through platforms at Manchester Piccadilly, electrification to bring the region at last into the late 20th century – have been loudly promised then quietly abandoned. Reeves has promised £3.5bn to fund upgrades on the existing TransPennine route – but given that a new Manchester-Leeds route was projected to cost £5bn when proposed over a decade ago, it is hard to see how this the extra cash could provide anything even close to the transformative new line that London is now enjoying. The reason, of course, is that the Treasury sees rail infrastructure not as investment but as a new cost centre. (Road maintenance, for some reason, never gets the same treatment.) In direct contrast to the bit of the rail network run by TfL, indeed, stealth nationalisation on the rest of the network has been accompanied by service cuts. This is absurd. Experience suggests that, if you build it, they will come, and jobs and homes will follow. Someone should take the Treasury on the Elizabeth line. Jonn Elledge is an author and former assistant editor of the New Statesman
Telegraph
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Look out, Sherlock, Mark Gatiss has created a brilliant new sleuth
In Bookish (U&Drama), a detective drama by Mark Gatiss set in 1946, Gabriel Book is a super-sleuth without a super power. Book doesn't bang on about little grey cells or make Sherlock-style synaptic leaps. He is just a bookshop owner who has read a lot of books, and from there gleaned knowledge about what makes people tick. No violin-playing, no bravura deduction, no visions. It's actually quite refreshing. Mark Gatiss, Bookish's writer and star, has also quite evidently read a lot of books, as well as seen a lot of classic movies. With his work on Sherlock and Dracula, as well as his annual ghost stories for BBC Two, Gatiss is steeped in crime fiction. He knows the genre inside out, and Bookish therefore toes a teasing line between things you've seen or read before and new ways of repackaging those old things for television in 2025. Although the story is set in 1946, that strange era immediately postwar where a broken Britain was rebuilt in a hurry, away from the whodunits its themes are contemporary. Book is gay but has to hide behind a lavender marriage to avoid social stigma. Much of the show away from the mystery of the week unpicks how Book and Trottie (Polly Walker) aka Mrs Book, first met, and how and why they came to their convenient arrangement. Similarly, at the beginning of the series a young man called Jack (Connor Finch) is released from Whitechapel prison and thereafter welcomed into Book and Trottie's embrace with suspicious alacrity. There is, obviously, some connection between Jack, Book and Trottie. What it is forms another gentle puzzle that bubbles along beneath all six episodes of what will surely be the first of many series. (In fact as I write a second has just been announced). Bookish is first and foremost a clever, witty, well-plotted sleuther. From an opening two-parter about a poisoned butcher (Danny Mays, having a blast) to a finale about murder at the esteemed Walsingham Hotel, Bookish is a series of puzzles that are presented and then solved with a satisfying completeness. Gatiss plays fair by his viewer, asking them the same questions based on the same evidence that he asks of his detective. This, of course, is the Agatha Christie formula, but it is much easier to get wrong than right. What it isn't is gritty or cutting-edge, and at times it veers towards arch. But then in a series called Bookish about a man called Book who owns a bookshop called Book's Books (and loves to tell everyone why the apostrophe is quite correct in this instance) there should be no expectation of gore or grime such as in Netflix's recent Dept Q or HBO's True Detective. This is an overwhelmingly fun-filled drama that happens to be about multiple murders. It helps that it looks superb, given what must have been a low budget, and its cast – featuring names as grand as Elliot Levey, Joely Richardson and Paul McGann – adds extra lustre. Bookish is not game-changing, but it is not trying to change the game, just let us enjoy playing it. In the last 12 months we have had Ludwig, Death Valley and now this, all plotting a course for what British drama can offer having been priced out of the market for grandeur by US streamers. Another puzzle solved. Bookish airs on U&Alibi on Wednesday 16 July from 8pm
The Independent
03-07-2025
- The Independent
Sniffer dog finds potentially dangerous pills in bike box
A sniffer dog named Skye discovered a cache of illegal cigarettes, vapes, and unlicensed erectile dysfunction tablets in Whitechapel, east London. The four-year-old springer spaniel detected suspicious smells from a locked bike box outside a shop on 11 June. The disguised bike box contained 10,000 illegal cigarettes, 1,000 illegal vapes, and 1,000 unlicensed erectile dysfunction tablets, described by councillor Abu Talha Chowdhury as potentially 'really dangerous'. This seizure was part of a two-day crackdown by Tower Hamlets Council 's Trading Standards team, which confiscated a total of 100,000 illegal cigarettes and 10,000 illegal vapes. The operation is part of Tower Hamlets ' 8 million Anti-Crime Task Force, a joint initiative with the police to enhance community safety and disrupt illegal trading.
Daily Mail
21-06-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE The school where NONE of the pupils speak English as first language
On a bright, sunny afternoon parents are picking up their children from Kobi Nazrul primary school in London 's East End in familiar scenes repeated up and down the land. Yet Kobi Nazrul is unique. It's thought to be the only school in the country with no pupils who speak English as a first language. Despite the language barrier, the 'friendly and welcoming' school received a glowing report from Ofsted in its most recent inspection. Leaders have 'high aspirations for pupils' who 'very much' enjoyed their learning environment and gave the school a 'good' rating, the second highest. Parents seem equally as enthusiastic. Picking up her six-year-old son, Bina Begum, 36, told MailOnline: 'The school is amazing, they're so supportive and very welcoming. 'I think the staff are doing a wonderful job.' The inner city school sits in a quiet side street off the busy Commercial Road in Whitechapel - a district once synonymous with Jack the Ripper and the Kray twins and home to the nation's true Cockneys. So how is it that pupils at the school - that stands in the shadow of towering skyscrapers which represent the immense wealth of the City - start their academic life speaking very little, or no, English at all? Latest UK government data shows that of the 243 pupils aged three to 11 on the primary school's register, 100 per cent of them do not have English as their first language compared with 22.8 per cent across England as a whole. Department of Education statistics, obtained by MailOnline under a Freedom of Information request, show 92.5 per cent of boys and girls at the school speak Bengali as their first language. The overwhelming majority of children at the school come from the local Bangladeshi community. Yet there are also a number of youngsters from Indian and Pakistani backgrounds who speak Hindi and Urdu and a small but growing number who speak Albanian. There are also pupils who are fluent in Italian and German who were born in Italy and Austria to Bangladeshi families who later moved to London. At the end of the street, just yards away, is the East London Mosque, one of the largest in Europe which accommodates up to 7,000 worshippers for prayers. Mrs Begum said: 'The majority of children are from a Bengali background but the school embraces all cultures and everyone is made to feel at home. 'My niece was the first in the family to go there and she's now 27-years-old. Her siblings followed and now my son is in Year One and my daughter is due to start later this year.' Speaking at the school gates as he waited for his son and daughter with other fathers, Md Al Mamun, 40, said: 'I like that the teachers and those who run the school try and keep things interesting for the children. 'They had a trip recently to the seaside and the children loved that. There's also a lot of extracurricular activities organised by the school. 'The classes aren't huge. 'My children speak English fluently but also speak Bengali, most of their school friends do. 'But it's not just children from a Bengali background. There's children from Indian, Pakistani and Middle Eastern backgrounds and a few children from Albanian backgrounds.' According to the 2021 Census, more than half of Whitechapel's residents - 51.3 per cent to be exact - come from an Asian background. The area has a long history of welcoming immigrants. From the late 19th century until the late 20th century, Whitechapel had a very high Jewish population but since the 1960s it has been home to London's Bangladeshi community. Gone are the traditional East End pubs and pie and mash shops and in their place are Islamic cafes and shops selling Muslim robes and sarees. Palestinian flags flutter from windows or are painted onto the grills of shopfronts and street signs warning of 'No ball games' are written in Bengali as well as English. The local authority is headed by controversial Bangladeshi-born mayor Lutfur Rahman who was re-elected three years ago. Rahman had been removed as mayor in 2015 and banned from standing again for five years after being found guilty of electoral fraud. Mohiul Islam, 56, has worked for a money transfer business based opposite the school, for the last 40-years. He said that when the business was set up in the mid-1980s there were still 'a few' East End-born and bred Cockney families living in the area. Mr Islam, who is originally from Bangladesh, said: 'They are all long gone. I don't know of any now because they've either passed away or moved out of Whitechapel. 'This area has always been popular with Bangladeshis, it's our heartland in London. 'Before Brexit there were Bengali families who had been living in Europe, in countries like Italy, Germany and Austria who came to Whitechapel. Some have stayed others have gone back. 'There is also a growing number of East Africans, particularly Somalis, moving to the area but I think it will always be dominated by the Bangladeshi community.' Not all the changes in recent times have been good, according to Mr Islam. He said: 'I think the biggest change is the sheer number of people who live here now. It's become very overcrowded and as a result there's a lot more litter around the streets. 'The young people are also not as considerate today as people were a while ago. They appear much more arrogant and entitled. 'There are still drug dealers operating around here and some of the youngsters walk around smoking cannabis, you can smell it. 'But I would say there are fewer robberies than before and there has been a reduction in instances of domestic violence which used to be a big problem locally. There's more education and awareness around the issues now.' Shahin Ahmed, 55, runs a corner shop close to the school. He said: 'Most of my customers are from a Bangladeshi background but there are increasing numbers of shoppers from Europe and Brazil. 'A lot of the children come in here after school and all of them speak in English to me even though they are fluent in Bengali. 'There is a good sense of community spirit around here. There is very little in the way of tension. 'The police and council have put up more CCTV cameras which has helped push the drug dealers out. 'Whitechapel is a busy and crowded area and it's noisy but the streets around the school are relatively quiet and calm.' Mohammed Saaddudin, who runs a nearby Halal butchers, explained that the majority of Bangladeshi's in Whitechapel come from one region in the north east of the country. Mr Saaddudin, 71, said: 'I would say if you stopped 100 people in the street outside, at least 90 of them would be from Sylhet. 'When Bangladeshis first started coming over to England, that's where they came from. 'Over the last 15-20 years Bangladeshis have been coming over from other parts of the country but most of us will be from Sylhet. It's a home from home in Whitechapel.' Iqbal Hossan, 50, is one of many Bangladeshis to come to London from Italy. He had been working in Venice and Milan before travelling to Whitechapel eight years ago and now runs Caffe Italia just off Commercial Road. Despite the name, most of the customers are Bangladeshi and speak Bengali. Mr Hossan said: 'The UK has a much bigger Bangladeshi population than Italy and Whitechapel is the centre of London's Bangladeshi community which is why so many of us have travelled over. 'The coffee and the food is Italian but it has a Bangladeshi flavour.' The terraced streets around Kobi Nazrul primary are filled mainly with late Victorian three-storey villas. The average price for a detached house is more than £1million and more than £600,000 for a two-bed leasehold flat - out of the price range of the families of most pupils at the school. According to an Ofsted report in 2016, a 'much higher than average' number of students - almost half those on the school roll - were eligible for 'pupil premium funding' - grants aimed at improving the outcomes for disadvantaged children. Through the scheme primary schools receive £1,480 per child with funds allocated to schools based on how many children are receiving free school meals. The school also had a higher than average proportion of pupils who had special educational needs or disability with most cases relating to 'speech, language and communication needs or moderate learning difficulties'. Despite this the school, which was named after a Bengali poet and activist, is thriving. According to the latest published performance data, 76 per cent of pupils at Kobi Nazrul are meeting 'expected standards' in reading, writing and maths even though all 29 children in the final year of primary school did not have English as their first language. That compares with a local average of 71 per cent and an average of 61 per cent in England. But it was not always this way and the school has had something of a chequered past. In 2006, future Prime Minister David Cameron visited Kobi Nazrul to unveil his 'vision' to transform education. Cameron, who had recently been made Conservative leader, outlined his party's plans to turn around the fortunes of schools in inner-city areas which he said had been failing for too long. The school was chosen for the launch as it was achieving good results despite its location in one of Europe's poorest districts. Another high profile visitor was Judy Murray who went there to share tennis tips and teach the kids ball games - just days after her son Andy beat Novak Djokovic in straight sets to win his first Wimbledon title in 2013. But there were troubles on the way for the school which just months later was plunged into crisis amid allegations its leadership had been infiltrated by Islamic extremists. Troubles began after a dramatic drop in standards led to Kobi Nazrul recording the worst ever SATs results in the borough. Just 40 per cent of children at the school achieved the required results in Maths and English compared with 82 per cent in 2012. It led to an emergency Ofsted inspection carried out with no notice at the request of the then education secretary. It then emerged Tower Hamlets Council held information relating to concerns over attempts by Islamic extremists to infiltrate local schools and subvert teachings. It also emerged that one of the school governors was a senior member of Hizb ut-Tahrir - a radical global group with a 'long-term goal of establishing a caliphate ruled under Islamic law' which has since been outlawed in the UK. The school was placed in special measures after it was found to be 'inadequate' in all areas. Its then headteacher denied there had been attempts at radicalisation but amid the failings, the head was replaced along with the school's entire board of governors. Australian-born Belinda King was appointed interim head before the position was made permanent and she remains at the school today. She set off on a mission to turn around the failing school and quickly produced results. In February 2016 the school was given its 'good' Ofsted rating after an inspection found the 'highly effective senior leadership team' has secured 'significant improvements'. Ms King told MailOnline: 'The community here is wonderful. We are a very diverse school and I'm fiercely protective of all my children and their parents.'
The Guardian
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hamad Butt: Apprehensions review – beauty and violence from a lost and dangerous YBA
Flies crawl about in a triptych of glass-fronted cabinets, while in another installation you gradually realise the fragile bottles you're looking at are full of poisonous gas, lethal to humans. Does this remind you of anyone? Hamad Butt is the Damien Hirst who got away, the Young British Artist of the 1990s who didn't win the Turner prize, make millions or lose his youthful talent and turn into a bloated mediocrity. Now he is a cult figure precisely because he is none of those things and can instead be presented as if he was a complete unknown, whose art expresses his queer Pakistani identity rather than being part of a fin-de-siecle art movement of sensation and creepy science. I couldn't find any reference, even in the moving array of Butt's working documents on show, to the fact he studied at Goldsmiths alongside Hirst, Collishaw, Wearing and more. If we need to detach this brilliant artist from that generation to celebrate him, it's better than forgetting his work. But as soon as you walk into this convincing retrospective you're back in 1992. Occupying the whole of the Whitechapel's main ground floor gallery is Butt's three-part installation Familiars. Like a giant executive toy, spherical glass vessels are suspended from the ceiling by thin threads in a long row. Pull the first one back, as it is weirdly tempting to do, and you'd set them going by action and reaction. Except it would surely shatter these vessels and kill you, or at least make you very ill. The coloured gas inside each sphere is mustard-coloured, as in mustard gas. This is gaseous chlorine, first used as a chemical weapon by Germany in 1915 and in these static, sealed bottles it looks lovely, golden, glowing in the gallery lights. It's disturbing but, let's be honest, darkly thrilling to be only a thin glass wall away from a first world war soldier's death here in an art gallery. To put it another way it's sublime. One of the sculptures in this installation is actually entitled Substance Sublimation Unit, a play on chemistry and aesthetics. The other two elements of this epic sculpture look equally hazardous: a ladder with rungs that light up with blazing gas like a stairway to hell, and three curving, blood-red glowing spikes. To feel such beauty and violence in a gallery may strike you as shockingly new or oddly nostalgic. In the archives room there's a 1995 Jak cartoon from the Evening Standard, depicting a dodgy geezer selling gas masks outside the Tate – a reference to a leak from this installation when it was in a show called Rites of Passage, alongside Louise Bourgeois. Hamad Butt was not alive to laugh at Jak's cartoon. He died in September 1994, at the age of 32, from Aids-related complications. In a video interview, lying on a sofa at his family home in Ilford, he's still talking vividly about his future projects, months before his death. What a compelling presence he is, how deeply intelligent and imaginative. His gripping art makes you aware of how quickly and suddenly you can stray from civilised normality to mortal danger. His installation Transmission glows with gorgeous, if clinical, blue light – but look for too long, or without the protective glasses you are offered, at its ultra-violet bulbs and you risk damaging your eyesight. The bulbs rest on a circle of opened books made of glass, on which the monstrous people-eating, world-conquering flora from John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids are engraved. In another classic trope of Young British Art, that of appropriation, his design of a Triffid, with its fat vegetable body, long sucker and libidinous tongue, is borrowed wholesale from the cover of the original Penguin paperback of The Day of the Triffids. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion The labels prompt you to see Hamad Butt's art in relation to his tragic early death, so Transmission is about the Aids epidemic, and his Triffids – which also feature in a hilarious animated video – are images of the HIV crisis. However, in the video interview, he says 'transmission' refers in the first place to the transmission of light. He clearly did not want his art to be understood only one way. Today figurative painting is back in fashion, so this exhibition includes Butt's early canvases before he turned conceptual. On the sofa on screen he explains he had to stop because he was too in thrall to Picasso and Matisse. You can see Picasso's shadow over his paintings of sensual Minotaur-like men. This exhibition risks removing him from his wider context, but it can't go very wrong with such art. It's right to include his paintings, drawings and archives because we possess so little of such magnificent promise. Hamad Butt died so long before his time, yet his work is a living thrill. He is the Young British Artist who is for ever young, for ever lethal. Hamad Butt: Apprehensions is at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, from 4 June to 7 September
