Telecom news

• The London Buzz – 14th May 2025

  14-05-2025 18:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  Today’s London news round-up:Dozens of Barking households have not been able to return to their homes for more than three weeks after a faulty fire sprinkler forced them to evacuate and damaged the properties. Romford RecorderA former teacher is making history at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show – with the event’s first-ever funeral flower display. BBC News
  ️ Boarded up and derelict: pictures show lack of progress in bringing London’s old City Hall back to li
  
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• Camden’s iconic Black Cap gay pub to reopen in March 2026

  23-02-2026 14:30 via ianvisits.co.uk
  Camden’s legendary gay pub, The Black Cap, has confirmed its reopening date, a smidge over a decade since it was forced to close.The pub, which has been a gay haunt since the winter of 1965/66 was forced to close in 2015 when the owners decided they wanted to redevelop the site. The owners themselves closed in 2020, and the company’s administrators sold the building to a new owner who has been working to reopen the venue once again as a gay cabaret pub.
  It had been expected to reopen
  
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• Relief for Stansted Airport travellers as contactless train ticketing arrives in March

  23-02-2026 12:19 via ianvisits.co.uk
  Travellers heading to Stansted Airport will finally be able to use contactless payments for train journeys from next month, after long-delayed approval was given to extend London’s contactless system.
  The lack of contactless payments on the railway to Stansted Airport has often caught travellers out, as they were unaware they needed to buy a conventional ticket, and were often hit with fines when arriving at the airport. Warning signs were added at Liverpool Street ticket barriers to try t
  
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• TfL warns of widespread rail and Tube disruption throughout March

  23-02-2026 11:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  There will be significant disruption to TfL’s rail and tube services throughout March due to large-scale engineering works, and TfL is advising people to plan ahead.
  The new Piccadilly line train at Hammersmith station, Jan 2026 (c) ianVisits
  The Elizabeth line will be particularly affected in the eastern branch as Network Rail carries out engineering works on their tracks. In the central part of the Elizabeth line, TfL will also undertake some track renewals.
  The Overground will be affect
  
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• Royal Docks plans would add floating parkland and residential boat berths

  23-02-2026 10:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  Plans are being shown off to encourage more boats to use the Royal Docks for long-term mooring, as well as an intention to create a new floating park in the dock.
  (c) Royal Docks Management Authority
  The plans would affect an area known as Royal Victoria Dock West, which is the end closest to London City Hall and the Cable Car.
  If carried out, the two biggest changes will be a range of floating walkways reaching into the dock, lined with water plants. There already is one small floating park in
  
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• London’s Alleys: Ship Tavern Passage, City of London, EC3

  23-02-2026 08:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  This central London alley, next to Leadenhall Market, is named after a ship but dominated by a swan.The alley likely came into existence when the first Leadenhall Market, as a market for herbs, opened, with a long passage leading from the market to Gracechurch Street.
  William Morgan’s Map 1682
  OS Map 1875
  The alley used to be longer and straighter, but the eastern half was cut off when a building was constructed on the site. That building was demolished in 2000, and archaeologists research
  
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• Altice France liabilities add around €1bn to debt pile

  21-02-2026 06:00 via ft.com
  Rival telecoms groups are considering new bid for Patrick Drahi’s French business
  
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• Altice France liabilities add about €1bn to debt pile

  21-02-2026 06:00 via ft.com
  Rival telecoms groups are considering new bid for Patrick Drahi’s French business
  
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• Tickets Alert: Half price tickets to see Zippos Circus

  20-02-2026 17:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  The travelling circus is coming to town and will be popping up around London throughout 2026, and there’s a way of getting half-price tickets to the show.
  (c) Zippos Circus
  Prices to watch the shows vary depending on how close you are to the action, but range from £21 for the rear seats to £35 for ringside seats. However, the opening-night preview show, just after they settle into each location, offers half-price tickets, so from £12 to £15 per seat.
  Which, for a 2-
  
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• Four free exhibitions at the V&A South Kensington

  20-02-2026 13:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  The V&A has several large paid-for temporary exhibitions, but dotted around the building are a number of smaller free exhibitions worth seeking out.
  They range from a single display case to several rooms – and all are free to visit.
  Photography Now
  Until 12th September (rooms 96-97)
  A collection of recent acquisitions by the V&A, including, unusually for a photography collection, sculptures. A case of small tear bottles has been made from the remains of photos burnt by their owners
  
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• Musk’s Starlink to be tested against Eutelsat on French shipping fleet

  20-02-2026 06:00 via ft.com
  Move by CMA CGM comes amid European efforts to support OneWeb as a rival to SpaceX’s satellite network
  
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• Free tickets to visit the Barbican’s heated greenhouse conservatory

  19-02-2026 15:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  If you’re looking for an escape from the winter, the Barbican Arts Centre includes London’s second-largest heated conservatory, and it’s totally free to visit.The conservatory wraps around the huge fly tower that supports scenery for the theatre beneath your feet, and while the Barbican’s concrete is still very evident, it adds to the overall effect. Imagine a city centre abandoned by humans and overrun by plants, and that’s what you are walking through when you vis
  
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• Dot by Dot, Sea by Sea: Seurat’s painting glow at the Courtauld

  19-02-2026 13:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  An artist who died young, and whose painting method was almost mechanically precise, has somehow filled two rooms at the Courtauld Gallery with seascapes that are unexpectedly calm and contemplative.Georges Seurat was a French post-Impressionist best known for a technique later dubbed pointillism: painting not with expressive brushstrokes, but by patiently placing thousands of tiny dots onto the surface. Rather than mixing colours on a palette, Seurat relied on the viewer’s eye to do the w
  
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• Tate tries to turn an advertising campaign into a Cultural Event

  19-02-2026 09:30 via ianvisits.co.uk
  Tate Modern has announced an advertising campaign, and that is a very odd thing to announce.
  Spitalfields – Image courtesy Tate and Jack Arts (part of BUILDHOLLYWOOD)
  It’s not that advertising campaigns are never announced, but when they are, it’s usually in advertising trade magazines, and generally by the agency that did the work. The client doesn’t normally issue a press release that essentially says, “We are putting up some posters.”
  Yet that is exactly wh
  
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• How Londoners tracked death figures to survive the Great Plague of 1665

  19-02-2026 08:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  New research has uncovered how Londoners reacted in real time to the Great Plague of 1665, revealing that people reshaped their daily lives around published death figures – using them to decide where to go, who to meet, and whether to remain in the city or flee.
  From a 2015 exhibition at Guildhall Library
  The study, from the University of Portsmouth, shows that weekly death reports, known as the Bills of Mortality, served as a practical guide to survival. Rather than being distant or abstr
  
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• Orange CEO warns there is ‘no incentive for investment’ in Europe

  19-02-2026 07:30 via ft.com
  French telecoms group will prioritise growth in the Middle East and Africa, says Christel Heydemann
  
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• Oscar Wilde’s trial dock set for public access following restoration work

  18-02-2026 17:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  You will soon be able to stand in the very trial dock where Oscar Wilde stood trial, after funding was secured to restore it.
  Front page of the Police News – 20th April 1895
  Funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund will support the conservation and reopening of the original dock from Court No.2 at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court – the place where Wilde appeared following his arrest in April 1895, ahead of his trial at the Old Bailey for “gross indecency”.
  His p
  
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• Liberty Global agrees to buy out Vodafone in Dutch joint venture for €1bn

  18-02-2026 16:02 via ft.com
  The telecoms and media company aims to list planned ‘Ziggo Group’ in Amsterdam next year
  
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• New exhibition explores how an English merchant and his Chinese colleagues changed botanical art

  18-02-2026 13:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  A small exhibition at the Garden Museum is restoring the story of a botanist who is little known today, but was on the cusp of honours before he died tragically young.At its centre is John Bradby Blake, an English botanist working in Chinese Canton in the late 1760s while employed by the East India Company. But the exhibition’s real achievement is in restoring visibility to the Chinese collaborators without whom his work would have been impossible.
  Bradby Blake’s botanical ambitions
  
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• Royal Mail steams ahead with Hornby centenary postage stamps

  17-02-2026 17:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  The Royal Mail has issued an eight-stamp set marking more than a century of Hornby Model Railways.
  Four of the eight stamps (c) Royal Mail
  Founded by Frank Hornby, whose first clockwork Hornby Series trains appeared in 1920, the company began producing models of real British locomotives in 1929. For many railway enthusiasts, Hornby became a parallel record of railway history — preserving classes, liveries and eras long after the originals had disappeared from the network.
  Each stamp in the
  
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• Star Trek beams into the Science Museum with films, props and late-night events

  17-02-2026 14:13 via ianvisits.co.uk
  The Science Museum is boldly going where no science museum has (probably) gone before, opening a season of Star Trek events that beam sci-fi imagination straight into the realm of real science.
  M CBS Studios Inc. (c) 2026 Par. Pics.
  To mark Star Trek’s 60th anniversary, the Science Museum will launch several months of events with a late-evening opening of the museum for adults next month.
  The museum late takes place on Thursday 26th March, and will feature a range of Star Trek themed event
  
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• Who really made Dickens? New exhibition credits the women he depended on

  17-02-2026 13:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  Charles Dickens’s novels are often criticised for their idealised passive female characters, but as the Dickens Museum now shows, he was, in life and in death, surrounded by formidable, intelligent and independent women.
  Charles Dickens Museum
  A new exhibition at the museum shifts attention away from Dickens as a solitary genius and instead places women at the centre of his creative world and cultural afterlife.
  One of the exhibition’s most moving threads centres on Mary Hogarth, Dic
  
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• Northern line upgrade could bring a new train depot to a former horse hospital

  17-02-2026 08:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  A long-term aspiration to run more trains on the Northern line could see a new depot being built on the site of a former railway horse hospital in North London.
  Totteridge and Whetstone station
  Transport for London (TfL) aspires to increase the number of trains on the Northern line at peak times to 36 per hour, but doing so would require 45 additional berths to accommodate the extra trains required for the more intensive service.
  TfL has worked out that this would require at least two new depots
  
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• Newham to get its museum back after 30 years with new heritage centre

  17-02-2026 07:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  More than thirty years after Newham closed its local museum, a replacement is set to open in Canning Town following a £2.7 million grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The council is currently converting the Grade II-listed Old Library into the Newham Heritage Centre, and the grant will assist with that work and ensure it can house Newham Council’s historic archives.
  As part of that work, the borough’s museum collection will also go on display for the first time in ov
  
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• Unfinished Mozart manuscript going on display in Mayfair museum

  16-02-2026 17:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  There will be a rare opportunity to stand face to face with music written in Mozart’s own hand as an unfinished manuscript goes on display at the Handel Hendrix House for a few months.
  Handel Hendrix House (c) ianVisits
  The sheet is modest in size but immense in significance. Carefully inked across the page are the opening 20 bars of a fugue – not Mozart’s own invention, but his transcription of a harpsichord work by George Frideric Handel, composed more than sixty years earlie
  
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• Tickets Alert: Chevening House garden’s 2026 open day

  16-02-2026 15:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  The date for Chevening House’s annual garden open day has been confirmed, and it’s a chance to wander around an impressive garden normally reserved for government ministers and their staff.The building, Chevening House, was built around 400 years ago, and it would probably still be a private house, but the last Earl Stanhope, childless and with his brother killed in WW1, effectively gifted it to the nation.
  A trust was set up in 1959 that allows a government minister nominated by the
  
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• Morph, Wallace and evil penguins: Inside Aardman at Young V&A

  16-02-2026 13:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  Wallace and Gromit may have travelled to the moon for some cheese, but they did so in a vegan rocket made from lentils. Or at least, the rivets, carefully glued to the rocket by Nick Park, were made from painted lentils, and that’s a small nugget of information you learn at Young V&A’s new exhibition about all things Aardman.As an exhibition, it’s a chance for people (mostly the younger generation) to learn about the art and craft of making animations, as most of the inform
  
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• London’s Alleys: Martin Lane, City of London, EC4

  16-02-2026 08:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  Martin Lane is a narrow cobblestone passage next to London Bridge that was once longer, used to reach down to the riverside, and is linked to a rhyme about oranges and lemons.For most of its life, the alley’s main feature was the church of St Martin Orgar, possibly named after Ordgarus, a Dane who donated the church to the canons of St Paul’s.
  Sadly, most of the church was destroyed during the Great Fire of London. The badly damaged remains were restored and used by French Protestant
  
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• Tickets Alert: Animal Dissection Live!

  13-02-2026 17:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  Trigger warnings and squeamish alerts…
  Sometimes there’s a chance to see or experience something you probably never thought you would want to – and in April, the dissection of a dead lion will take place in public.
  The original Golden Syrup logo is a dead lion surrounded by bees
  Hosted at the Royal Institution, the lion, which died of old age and was then donated to science, will be dissected to demonstrate how animal biology works. Medical and veterinary students will be used
  
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• The City of London adds its 114th Livery Company — and it’s for HR

  13-02-2026 15:00 via ianvisits.co.uk
  The City of London’s list of ancient and modern Livery companies has got a bit longer, as the Court of Aldermen has approved a new applicant.
  The Aldermen’s Court Room (c) ianVisits
  The City of London’s Livery Companies trace their origins to medieval guilds, acting as both regulators of their trades and, in the centuries before the modern welfare state, as social care services.
  Some are ancient, with origins in the earliest trades, such as ironmongery, swordmaking, brewing bee
  
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