Latest news with #LondonCentric
The National
8 hours ago
- Business
- The National
Edinburgh gift shop accused of tax evasion after investigation
Edinburgh's Kingdom of Treats has allegedly been engaged in 'phoenixing', where the legal owner of a shop changes every few months and the old owner vanishes without ever paying their taxes, along with a string of English gift stores. London Centric launched an investigation into Piccadilly Circus: Kingdom of Treats and Souvenir Megastore after local politicians and other legitimate gift stores raised concerns that business renting from a company founded by one of the UK's richest men was not paying tax. READ MORE: Amnesty calls on John Swinney to stand up to 'authoritarian' Donald Trump The publication also sent journalists to knock on doors at dozens of addresses across London and Edinburgh where the legal operators of the shops supposedly live or work, to ask whether they intended to pay their taxes. They found that often the legal tenants of the gift shops accused of avoiding tax are often overseas students from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh who have registered the business under abandoned offices, or even car parks. London Centric also discovered that the supposed gift shop owners leased the properties for their businesses from Criterion Capital, which was founded by the billionaire property developer Asif Aziz (below). The billionaire reportedly moved his tax residency to Abu Dhabi in 2024 amid concerns the Labour Government could increase taxes on wealthy individuals, according to The Times. There is no legal responsibility for a landlord to enforce the payment of taxes by their tenants. Lawyers for Aziz told London Centric that while he is a founder of Criterion Capital, he is 'not involved in the matter of day-to-day lettings' and this is a matter for 'the commercial letting team at Criterion Capital.' The lawyers said Aziz and Criterion deny any involvement in 'phoenixing' and added that 'lettings are made to commercial tenants on standard commercial terms', and a landlord is 'entitled to let to tenants who will pay a market rate for the property.' London Centric's investigation found that just monitoring the tills at Kingdom of Treats and Souvenir Megastore for an hour, they both raked in hundreds of pounds. 'Everyone says they're money laundering,' explained a former tenant of one of Aziz's units, who shared details of the shops' operations with London Centric. 'They're not money laundering. They're taking serious money.' The gift shops which were investigated were allegedly not adding VAT to sales, which is a 20% levy on most purchases in the UK, with some till operators apparently confirming that they do not add the tax to customers' purchases.
The National
9 hours ago
- Business
- The National
Edinburgh gift shop accused of tax evasion following investigation
Edinburgh's Kingdom of Treats has allegedly been engaged in 'phoenixing', where the legal owner of a shop changes every few months and the old owner vanishes without ever paying their taxes, along with a string of English gift stores. London Centric launched an investigation into Piccadilly Circus: Kingdom of Treats and Souvenir Megastore after local politicians and other legitimate gift stores raised concerns that business renting from a company founded by one of the UK's richest men was not paying tax. READ MORE: Amnesty calls on John Swinney to stand up to 'authoritarian' Donald Trump The publication also sent journalists to knock on doors at dozens of addresses across London and Edinburgh where the legal operators of the shops supposedly live or work, to ask whether they intended to pay their taxes. They found that often the legal tenants of the gift shops accused of avoiding tax are often overseas students from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh who have registered the business under abandoned offices, or even car parks. London Centric also discovered that the supposed gift shop owners leased the properties for their businesses from Criterion Capital, which was founded by the billionaire property developer Asif Aziz (below). The billionaire reportedly moved his tax residency to Abu Dhabi in 2024 amid concerns the Labour Government could increase taxes on wealthy individuals, according to The Times. There is no legal responsibility for a landlord to enforce the payment of taxes by their tenants. Lawyers for Aziz told London Centric that while he is a founder of Criterion Capital, he is 'not involved in the matter of day-to-day lettings' and this is a matter for 'the commercial letting team at Criterion Capital.' The lawyers said Aziz and Criterion deny any involvement in 'phoenixing' and added that 'lettings are made to commercial tenants on standard commercial terms', and a landlord is 'entitled to let to tenants who will pay a market rate for the property.' London Centric's investigation found that just monitoring the tills at Kingdom of Treats and Souvenir Megastore for an hour, they both raked in hundreds of pounds. 'Everyone says they're money laundering,' explained a former tenant of one of Aziz's units, who shared details of the shops' operations with London Centric. 'They're not money laundering. They're taking serious money.' The gift shops which were investigated were allegedly not adding VAT to sales, which is a 20% levy on most purchases in the UK, with some till operators apparently confirming that they do not add the tax to customers' purchases.
Time Out
07-07-2025
- General
- Time Out
New trains on London's Bakerloo line could arrive much sooner than expected
Brown line-riding Londoners, rejoice! The oldest trains on the London Underground could finally be replaced before the decade is up. At 53 years old, Bakerloo line trains have needed to retire for some time now. In 2024, Sadiq Khan said that they were 20 years past their use by date and deputy mayor for transport Seb Dance said that it was 'quite astonishing' they were even still working. London Centric reported that last week TfL boss Andy Lord said that the ordering of new Bakerloo line trains could start in the coming months, thanks to a new £2.2bn new capital renewals program by the central government. Those trains would be walk-through and air-conditioned with CCTV, like the new Piccadilly line trains that are currently being built (but which were recently delayed). However, Lord caveated that the trains still wouldn't come into service until the latter end of the decade. That's because there is a 'significant amount of infrastructure upgrade' needed on the line before the new trains can start running. That's about all the updates we have for now. Unfortunately there's still no solid date in the diary for when the Bakerloo line will finally offer 21st century tube travel. The news comes soon after a report revealed that the majority of Londoners support proposals for a Bakerloo line extension, which can only happen once the current outdated trains are replaced. You can read more about what that extension would look like here.
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
‘It's absolutely f---ed': Why Google's new £1bn London office is in crisis
The crowning glory of Google's new, massive headquarters in London's King's Cross is its rooftop garden. More than 300m long, with hundreds of trees across four stories and a running track, star designer Thomas Heatherwick envisaged it as a haven for the tech giant's 7,000 staff, as well as bats, bees, birds and butterflies. At least, it is meant to be the crowning glory. However, delays to the project have meant that, while it is still under construction, the building and its garden have been invaded by foxes. The vulpine skulk has taken advantage of the building's lack of human occupants, digging burrows in the manicured grass and leaving their droppings around. 'Fox sightings at construction sites are pretty common, and our King's Cross development is no exception,' a Google spokesperson said after a report on the London Centric website. 'While foxes have been occasionally spotted at the site, their appearances have been brief and have had minimal impact on the ongoing construction.' The foxes, pests though they are, may be the least of Google's problems. Today, visitors to the construction site are met with the cacophonous sounds of drilling and hammering; the sights of scaffolding and cherry pickers obscuring the view; the constant bustle of workmen coming and going. The 11-storey building, the cost of which has never been confirmed but expected to be well north of £1 billion, still appears to be a long way from being completed. Building site sources tell The Telegraph that all manner of things have gone wrong, from shoddy workmanship that was, in effect, 'hidden' because of the vastness of the project to wooden floors that became so saturated with rainwater that they need complete repairs. Much of the ground floor, which is supposed to house shops and other public spaces, remains a shell. The date for its opening, which was meant to happen last year, has been repeatedly pushed back. 'If they get this job done by the end of 2026 it would be a f—ing miracle,' one worker tells me. 'I don't think the people building it know what they are doing.' An electrician says: 'They have unlimited money so they throw out ridiculous dates. It's going to be interesting, but very stressful and long hours.' (Both Google and Heatherwick Studio declined to comment on these claims.) There is a sense of gloom among those working on site. One worker simply says: 'It's absolutely f---ed, mate.' Another, who only started working on the project on Monday, describes it as 's--t'. Some might say that Google bosses should not be surprised that building its landmark has not gone entirely smoothly. Heatherwick, 55, has a habit of designing ingenious objects and places that are later found to be impractical, from a sculpture to commemorate Manchester hosting the 2002 Commonwealth Games to a New York visitor attraction later called a 'suicide machine' and London's Routemaster buses to Boris Johnson's abandoned Garden Bridge in the capital. The $2 trillion technology giant launched its quest for a London headquarters in 2013, when it commissioned a more typical office block from architects AHMM; by 2015, those plans had been binned as they were apparently 'too boring' for the tastes of co-founder Larry Page. Enter Heatherwick, who can be described as almost anything except 'boring'. He turned the concept of a giant office building (almost literally) on its head, and designed a long structure parallel to King's Cross railway platforms that is longer (330m/1,083ft) than The Shard is tall (310m/1,106ft). The finished building – dubbed a 'landscraper', as opposed to a skyscraper – will have nap pods for weary workers, as well as a 25m swimming pool and a basketball court. Plus, of course, the garden. The final design is a collaboration between Heatherwick's eponymous studio and that of Bjarke Ingels, the Danish architect. The team also worked on Google's (completed) California headquarters. Heatherwick was unlikely to design a run-of-the-mill office and always makes a point of doing things differently. He had a bohemian childhood as the son of a pianist father and jewellery-designer mother, and attended two private schools – Sevenoaks in Kent and the Rudolf Steiner School in Hertfordshire – before studying design at Manchester Polytechnic and London's Royal College of Art. It was at the latter institution that he met Terence Conran, the founder of Habitat and the Design Museum, whom Heatherwick impressed by building an 18ft-high gazebo out of laminated birch that sat in his garden. Conran became Heatherwick's mentor and famously described him as 'the Leonardo da Vinci of our times'. He has had his fair share of successes, most notably when he designed the Olympic cauldron for the 2012 London Games. It consisted of 204 copper cones, one for each participating nation, attached to long stems that wowed people the world over when they came together to create one larger vessel. Heatherwick, who was awarded a CBE in 2013, was also the driving force behind Coal Drops Yard, a stone's throw from Google's King's Cross building, that is a thriving hub of shops and restaurants after decades as a derelict wasteland. But for every Heatherwick triumph, there has been a misstep. His sculpture for the Commonwealth Games – named B of the Bang – was a cluster of metal spikes coming from the top of a column to imitate an explosion, but it was completed late and over budget. More concerningly, a tip of one of the spikes fell off shortly before it was unveiled and, when others threatened to do the same, it was dismantled in 2009. Manchester City Council sued Heatherwick and his contractors; the case was settled out of court. Other notable misses include Heatherwick's Routemaster buses, which were commissioned by Johnson when he was Mayor of London, which were much more expensive than other models and had a tendency to overheat in summer months, and the aborted plan for a Garden Bridge across the River Thames, which ultimately cost taxpayers £43 million without anything to show for it. Most destructive was the Vessel, a visitor attraction in New York's Hudson Yards. The copper-coloured network of 154 staircases and 80 landings was supposed to be New York's answer to the Eiffel Tower, but it was closed down in 2021 (after less than two years) after four people had killed themselves by jumping from it. Carla Fine, a local who is an expert on the matter, told The Telegraph at the time that it was a 'suicide machine'. It only reopened last October after netting was installed. 'The project met all the safety standards, and actually it went above them. It was just an extremely tragic, sad use that the project got put to,' Heatherwick told the Financial Times in 2023. 'Nobody predicted Covid and what that would do for people's mental health.' His current projects include transforming the Kensington Olympia in West London and turning the capital's BT Tower into a high-end hotel. Not a trained architect himself (but the employer of large numbers of them at his studio), Heatherwick has said that we are in the grip of an 'epidemic of boringness', with soulless glass-and-steel buildings populating cities all over the world. Heatherwick's eccentricity, which has been a characteristic for decades, is almost designed to attract opprobrium or eye-rolls from others in the field. As he finished his postgraduate studies, rather than make a business card Heatherwick made ice lollies that had his phone number on the stick; on various occasions he has shipped a snowball to China so that somebody there could experience British snow, and taken a kebab to Italy for someone else. 'I'm not a fan, because I think he doesn't know the difference between a building and a CD rack,' says Ellis Woodman, an architect and the director of the Architecture Foundation. 'There's no sense of scale, no sense of an urban idea that the buildings are contributing to. They disregard architectural history or the character of the spaces in which they stand. [The Google building] is not a building that's interested in making relationships with things around it. The work is always the most important building on its site, whatever he's doing. There's never a sense that the role of a building might be to contribute to the definition of a space with other buildings.' Heatherwick has become a big brand in the building world, in the way that Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid did before him. Woodman says that, with the quasi-utopian ideals he set out in his 2023 treatise Humanise, Heatherwick is 'carrying on that 'architecture-as-a-marketing tool' tendency'. 'He's not seriously engaged with the problems of housing or sustainability,' Woodman adds. 'It's a succession of projects like the Vessel, which one might ask if the world ever really needed.' Others in the design world reckon that Heatherwick's regular criticism by architects stems from a resentment that an interloper could gatecrash their industry without having to go through the same formal training. 'I'm very 'pro' him. He's a very creative and inventive figure, but he's divisive because he was trained in industrial design in Manchester, not in architecture,' says Charles Saumarez Smith, the former director of the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery who is a distinguished historian of art and design. 'Architects view themselves in a professional way, and so obviously have not been so enthusiastic about him being globally successful as he has been as an architect. I think that is at the root of it.' Saumarez Smith tells me that he thinks Heatherwick's Google building is 'mind-boggling' and 'vast, but in a way it manages to disguise its scale. I'm looking forward to seeing it in more detail when it's finished'. How long before the Google building is finished, and what it will be like when it is, is anyone's guess. 'You can't fully know whether something's going to work until it's finished,' Heatherwick told The Telegraph in a 2018 interview. 'Anyone who says otherwise is lying. I get worried when my team aren't worried. Worry is a useful energy.' One wonders if Heatherwick feels worried about the Google HQ at the moment. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Time Out
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
A campaign has been launched to defend music festivals in Brockwell Park
The battle for the future of Brockwell Park is raging on. At the end of April a local group launched a legal battle against Lambeth Council urging a review of the festivals being held in the south London park, which include Wide Awake, Mighty Hoopla, Field Day and City Splash. The group, Protect Brockwell Park (PBP), which includes actor Mark Rylance, was complaining about several impacts of the festivals on the space, including walls being erected in the park, noise and environmental damage. But later a counter campaign appeared on social media, called SayYesLambeth. This group claimed to be a grassroots organisation fighting to keep festivals in Brockwell Park. 'Fighting for culture, joy and community in Lambeth. Say YES to homes. YES to nightlife. YES to events in our parks,' read their Instagram bio. However, some locals claimed this group was a fake, created by the local council or the festival organisers to make PBP look bad. London Centric investigated, and reported that the SayYesLambeth campaign was created by 'five gays with a laptop' – a group of friends who belong to a queer rugby team in south London. London Centric's Jim Waterson spoke with David, a member of the group who lives in Brixton. David asked Waterson not to publish his last name due to his work in the civil service. ' London Centric has yet to find anything to suggest SayYesLambeth is run by anyone other than an informal group of rugby-playing friends,' said the report. View this post on Instagram A post shared by SayYesLambeth (@sayyeslambeth) In an open letter posted on the SayYesLambeth Instagram, the group wrote: 'For too long, a small but powerful group has dominated the debate about Lambeth's future – shouting down new homes, opposing events in our parks, and trying to silence our vibrant night-time economy. Their voices are loud, organised, and well-funded. But they do not speak for all of us. 'We, the young people, the renters, the workers, the small business owners, the creatives – we are the majority. And now it's time to make ourselves heard. 'Lambeth's night-time economy isn't just about entertainment – it's about life, jobs, and opportunity. From music venues to clubs, from bars to late-night cafés, these spaces are vital for our communities. They provide work, they foster creativity, and they offer safe spaces for people from all walks of life. Without them, Lambeth risks becoming sterile, unaffordable, and soulless. 'We also need to protect events in our parks. Mighty Hoopla, Wide Awake, Lambeth Country Show and other festivals bring life, joy, and connection to Lambeth. They showcase our diversity, support local businesses, and give thousands of people access to music, culture, and community right on their doorstep. Parks are for everyone – and events are part of that shared, joyful use.' SayYesLambeth also created a petition to save the festivals, which had 512 signatures at the time of writing. Highlighting the festivals' positive impact on local businesses, Brockwell Live said in a statement: 'Brockwell Live delivers a series of free and ticketed events in Brockwell Park with more than half of attendees coming from across Greater London. 'Celebrating the city's diverse music and culture, events include the capital's largest Caribbean and African music festival, a nationally significant queer pop festival and a critically acclaimed celebration of jazz, funk and soul. 'Since 2023, we have co-produced the Lambeth Country Show, a free event run by Lambeth Council for 50 years, helping Lambeth save over £700,000 in 2024. 'Brockwell Live proudly supports many local organisations through the Brockwell Live Community Fund and has donated over £150,000 to date. 'We take our stewardship of Brockwell Park seriously. We welcome scrutiny and maintain open channels for dialogue with residents, councillors, and community groups at all times.' The forthcoming legal challenge could see Brockwell Park's festivals cancelled, and potentially change the face of day festivals in the capital forever. The hearing will take place on Wednesday, May 14.
