When I started The Knowledge I was shocked to see so many rough sleepers in shop doorways. Now a cross-party group of London Councils report that nearly 170,000 people in London are homeless, i.e. they’re living in hostels, bedsits, or other temporary accommodation. That’s an increase of about 17,000 from last year and means that one in 50 people in the city are now classed as homeless. Most depressingly, “the organisation estimates that this includes more than 83,000 children”.

Here’s something that I hoped I’d never have to write: Recently the City of London police put out an appeal to black cab drivers after a father left an urn containing his child’s ashes in the back of a cab, and cabbies responded with gusto. Unfortunately the general secretary of a London cab drivers’ trade union, responded by saying “I’m not in the slightest bit surprised… The stuff that gets left in cabs beggars belief. We’ve had babies and tens of thousands in cash.” True, but did it need to be said?

The latest pedicab overcharging incident saw Belgian tourist April Argenau charged £464 for a seven-minute ride from Oxford Street to the Royal Lancaster Hotel. Unlike some of the previous incidents, Argenau did look at the amount she was being charged before she paid, but “the driver refused to back down and was intimidating towards her, demanding immediate payment”.

I am sorry to keep on banging on about WordPress, but I have another complaint about Gutenberg.

Elon Musk decided that I cannot now reproduce my tweets on CabbieBlog’s sidebar (see 20th July Whinge), and in the course of rectifying this, I had to reorder those sidebar items (called widgets). After doing so I noticed that I’d ‘lost’ 1,000 followers in my sign-up widget, also the message thanking followers had changed. Contacting WordPress I received these words of advice:
Clear your cache
Wait and refresh
Check the widget

This last piece of advice showed I was using a ‘legacy widget’, so you might have thought with all the effort put in by Automattic the widget’s sign-up successor would be an improvement. Not so the new version, it only gives you a sign-in box. The old version changed the text depending upon if you’d sign up or not and was polite in doing so.

International bank HSBC is going to leave its dockside headquarters for a smaller office near St Paul’s and it’s estimated that the bank’s departure will decrease the area’s value by £542m. So how does the financial district counteract this loss? Well, Canary Wharf has ambitions to become a tourist destination. “How do you turn the most corporate, concrete, soulless corner of the city, five miles from Trafalgar Square, into a place that people actually want to come and visit?” asks Greg Dickinson in The Telegraph. Well, quite.