Nearly the weekend

It’s been a busy week in City Towers. Not ‘exciting busy’ but ‘ho-hum busy’ as I’m sure some of you can relate to though in that time Mayor Boris has been off to New York to promote London however while he was away someone at TFL saw the opportunity to declutter the tube map of London, significantly by removing the river Thames.  As you can tell from the photo the Thames is a pretty integral part of London and although City dwellers may know where it is it’s still a good reference point to have on a map don’t you think? I can’t imagine how tourists would feel trying to find the London Eye having been told “it’s on the Thames” when the Thames didn’t appear on one of the most significant London travel maps.

Now TFL apparently saw this as an “operational decision” and didn’t see the need to consult anyone but the subsequent outcry and sound of BoJo hitting the roof has since persuaded them otherwise and they’ll now find themselves ranked alongside the State of Indiana’s who once considered a proposal to set the value of pi to 3 (or 3.2, or 4) for convenience sake…

In other news Land Securities is in process of partnering with Blackstone for the latter to take on half of Broadgate, by Liverpool Street station. Frequent home of lunchtime attractions Broadgate is home to a £2.1bn debt of which Blackstone will apparently take on half and although I don’t imagine it’ll have many, if any, implications in the short-term perhaps its long-term future may now be a bit rosier.

Another City protest

It could have easily passed you by that this week is the DSEI exhbition in the Excel Centre in the Docklands, DSEI standing for Defence Systems and Equipment International.

This has attracted the understandable interest of the protesting community and they seem to have chosen a few targets in the City to visit yesterday before heading down to Docklands today. That’s apparently why the City offices of AXA and BT were attacked yesterday as the Metro relates:

“About 60 activists, many wearing masks, stopped traffic as they paraded through the capital to protest against the Defence Systems and Equipment International Arms Fair taking place at the Excel centre in Docklands this week. After storming the BT building in Newgate Street, they moved on to the head offices of Axa Investment Management nearby.”

Probably to their great surprise they actually managed to get into the BT building and the Metro takes up the story again:

A witness at the BT building said: “They came running in and jumped over the security barriers, smashing glasses and telephones. Some of them went up to two floors above, having a look round and writing graffiti. It could have been really frightening but when they started shouting about BT being involved in the arms trade I knew that they didn’t know what they were going on about. Then they must have got bored and left.”

Maybe if an under-employed training company in the City isn’t able to fill its IT and Secretarial courses they ought to offer courses in effective protesting because I’m struggling to find anyone who understands their list of targets and most of the staff at the companies concerned seem entirely mystified about their supposed involvement. Did you know what DSEI was before you read this??