Westminster Council Turns Down Reagan Statue

According to the Atticus column in yesterday’s Sunday Times, Westminster Council has turned down an application to erect a statue of Ronald Reagan outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

Plans to put a bronze statue of Ronald Reagan outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, London, have been rejected. Westminster council says figures must have been dead for 10 years before they qualify for a public monument (although the Americans might have noticed a statue in Parliament Square of Nelson Mandela, who is still very much with us). Perhaps they could put the former US president there too. It would remind our MPs of Reagan’s driving political dictum – that too much government is bad government. They might even add his famous advice to officials: “Don’t just do something, stand there.”

Bond St Station To Get Cooling Fans

TFL has announced its plans to try and combat heat on the London Underground this summer. Select stations including Bond Street, Bank and Charing Cross will have portable fans strategically placed to increase airflow.

Other initiatives announced include providing air conditioned trains on surface lines within two years. It is also planning to install a number of portable fans at select tube stations, including to help increase the airflow. Mayor Of London, Boris Johnson, said:

It always perplexed me that boffins could produce mobile phones the size of a
credit card yet passengers would emerge dripping with sweat from Tube trains
that lacked air conditioning.

‘That is why I am chuffed to bits that
plans are afoot to finally put these systems on Circle, District, Hammersmith
and City and Metropolitan Lines trains.

Find out more:
Transport For London: London Underground reveals plans to help passengers ‘stay cool’

Savile Row Tailors Lose Bespoke Claim

Savile Row tailors have lost a complaint made to the Advertising Standards Authority about the use of the word “bespoke”.

The complaint centered around Sartoriani in Old Bond Street who advertised bespoke suits, but employed the use of machines to cut the cloth once measurements had been taken.

The ASA has rejected the claim that suits have to be entirely hand made without the use of the a pre-existing pattern to warrant the description “bespoke”. Their findings concluded:

We considered that both fully bespoke and made-to-measure suits were “made to order” in that they were made to the customer’s precise measurements and specifications, unlike off-the-peg suits. We considered that customers would expect a bespoke suit to be tailored to their measurements and specifications. We considered that the majority of people, however, would not expect that suit to be fully hand-made with the pattern cut from scratch. We concluded that the use of the word “bespoke” to describe the advertised suits was unlikely to mislead.

Read more
Telegraph: Savile Row tailors lose fight to preserve the term ‘bespoke’
AFP: Ad watchdog fails to suit Savile Row

Hermes Sells Mayfair Offices

Property Week has reported that Hermes Real Estate has sold offices worth £145million in Mayfair’s Burlington Gardens and Clifford Street.

2/3 Burlington Gardens, comprising of 45,000 sq ft of office space, was sold for £75 million and 7 Clifford Street was sold for £70 million. Hermes Real Estate, which was named Property Fund Manager of the Year 2008 at the recent Property Week Awards, bought the properties in 2004 and managed a yield of about 4%.

Employment Tribunal Rules Against Annabel’s

The Telegraph reports:

The legendary Mayfair nightclub Annabel’s faces a six-figure claim for using the tips from its wealthy clientele to pay its waiting staff the national minimum wage.

An Employment Appeals Tribunal has ruled that the club was wrong to give the cash directly to staff to top up their hourly pay to the legal minimum between 1999 and 2003.

Find out more

BBC Savile Row Documentary

If you missed the BBC’s acclaimed four part documentary series on Savile Row, you might be interested to know that it is being shown again on BBC4 and you can of course catch it on BBC iPlayer.

Local Knowledge: The Best Of Mayfair

We have just added a new section to the website which allows visitors to celebrate the best of Mayfair by sharing their local knowledge. We ask the questions: what’s the best coffee shop, or nightclub in Mayfair for example, and you provide the answers. Using your local knowledge, we can compile a list of the very best that Mayfair has to offer.

Parking Meters Celebrate 50 Years

Parking Meters are celebrating their 50th anniversary in Mayfair with a special display of old meters in Grosvenor Square. Invented in the US in 1935, coin slot parking meters first made their presence felt in Mayfair in 1958.

In 2007, Westminster Council replaced the coin based meters with new a new cashless system.

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Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition Opens

The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition opened today. It is is the largest open contemporary art exhibition in the world, combining a range of new work by both established and unknown living artists.

Gallery 8 of the Summer Exhibition is curated by Tracy Emin, who described it as a ‘great honour’. Talking about her first time as a curator, she said, “My first idea was to make a show that really shocked me. But although the art I choose might be radical and off the wall, the presentation will be calm and classical. I’m not going to drive a red bus into the Royal Academy and hang everything inside it – I’m not out to be provocative on that kind of level.”

The exhibition, which is sponsored by Insight Investments, includes around 1,200 works and most of them are for sale. The annual Summer Exhibition – now in its 240th year – continues until August 17th.

Hirst Invited to Join Royal Academy

The Evening Standard is reporting that the Royal Academyof Arts wants to invite controversial Brit artist, Damien Hirst to become a member.

It’s not clear if Hirst would accept such an invitation as relations between the RA and the artist have been frosty since John Hoyland implied Hirst “farmed” his work out and it lacked humanity. Hirst responded by calling the RA “a big, fat, stuffy old pompous institution”

Find out more from the Evening Standard

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