Back at the Gherkin: Kerb has solved its planning pickle
THOSE City-ites who manage to get into work today will be rewarded by the re-appearance of the Kerb street food market outside the Gherkin. The purveyors of trendy luncheon treats won their planning appeal with City of London Corporation, which had previously ruled they couldn’t set up on the site. “They decided to grant permission – I think they finally thought it’s obviously a good thing especially given the support we had,” KERB founder Petra Barran told The Capitalist. Barran isn’t relaxing too much just yet though. “You have to be aware when you’re operating on other people’s land you don’t have the surest footing – it’s the curse of being an itinerant in a static city.” Roll on we say.
STARTING the evening with shots of Dutch gin all round, Jupiter hosted its first investment dinner with incoming boss Maarten Slendebroek at the helm on Tuesday. Slendebroek, the half-Dutch half-Swedish replacement for Edward Bonham Carter from next month, promised a “low key, Nordic” handover with no big surprises. Jupiter’s fund managers have enough of those in any case: James Clunie confessed to be around “eight and a half out of ten” worried about Ed Miliband’s policies. He added that energy firms are already cutting spending just in case Scotland votes for independence. Bonham Carter, meanwhile, avoided any forecasting in his speech; he signed off by repeating JP Morgan’s claim from a century ago that “markets will fluctuate”.