London Echo: The Same Problems Have Returned and We Are Reporting Them Again With Freshly Managed Despair

This Publication Has Been Running for Three Years. The Headline Topics Have Not Meaningfully Changed. We Have Made Our Peace With This.

The London Echo would like to acknowledge, as a matter of editorial transparency, something that has been building for some time. We have been publishing for three years. In that period, we have written about the housing crisis on eighteen separate occasions, TfL service disruption on twenty-four occasions, the unaffordability of central London pints on eleven occasions, and the phrase “London is changing” on so many occasions that the phrase has lost all meaning to our staff and now triggers a mild, involuntary twitch in our editor. London is changing. London is always changing. London has been changing continuously since it was first built on a marsh by people who had significantly lower expectations of property values. At some point, does constant change simply become the permanent, stable condition? We have decided that it does and we are reporting it as such.

This Week’s Echo: Housing (Again, Still)

The housing crisis continues. Rents are up. Supply is down. The government has a plan. The plan involves a target. The target will be missed. A new, revised target will be announced. The revised target will also be missed. A taskforce will be convened. The taskforce will report. The report will inform a strategy. According to Crisis UK, rough sleeping in London has increased for the third consecutive year. The Mayor has a homelessness strategy. The strategy has a launch event. The launch event has a hashtag that received 340 impressions. The hashtag has not housed anyone. This is the Echo. We have reported this before. We are reporting it again.

This Week’s Echo: Transport (The Northern Line Chapter)

The Northern line is having a moment. It has been having this particular moment since Monday. TfL describes the situation as “minor delays due to an earlier incident.” Passengers on the platform at Kennington at 8:34am on Wednesday would use different language. The Overground has also been renamed, at a cost that multiple Freedom of Information requests have established was £6.3 million, into six separately branded lines named after London rivers. The rivers do not, in the main, run along the routes of the lines named after them. Commuters are confused. The branding team is satisfied. The trains run on the same schedule as before the rivers were mentioned.

This Week’s Echo: Culture (A Pattern Emerges)

Something excellent opened this week. It is sold out. You did not get tickets because you did not know about it until it was sold out, and you did not know about it until it was sold out because the people who organise truly excellent things in London do not market them to the general public, they tell their friends, and you are apparently not quite in that particular circle of friends yet despite living here for six years, which is information you have decided not to examine too closely on a Thursday afternoon. The excellent thing closes in five weeks. You will read a review of it and experience a specific variety of cultural FOMO that is exclusive to London and cannot be reproduced in any other city. The Poke has been documenting London cultural FOMO since 2015 and confirms both its prevalence and its complete irresolvability.

A Note From the Editor

We acknowledge that we are writing the same articles again. We acknowledge that the problems are the same. We are choosing to interpret this not as futility but as commitment. The Echo echoes. That is its function. The city will eventually catch up with its own reporting. We remain available to cover it when it does.

SOURCE: https://thepoke.co.uk