The London landlord special

If you’re one of the 350 people who became London Centric members over the weekend to read the investigation into the mafia connections of the man behind London’s snail farm boom, thank you and welcome!

Writer Nick Harkaway, the author of the new John le Carré novels, read the piece and said: “I may print a copy and keep it in my pocket for those occasions when someone tells me that ‘the real world doesn’t work like that’.” Another reader described it as like “Sunday Sport meets the Financial Times”, which is the highest praise we can imagine receiving.

It’s probably the single strangest story I’ve ever reported and if you’ve been hesitating about taking out a subscription, it’s worth a read. If Guy Ritchie wants the film rights, he knows where to find us.

Today London Centric brings you a special edition featuring a round up of some of London’s main characters — landlords.

London Centric is increasing its property coverage because it explains so much about the city we live in.We’re particularly interested in your stories about service charges, wild price fluctuations, construction trends, planning problems, dodgy landlords, estate agent scams, or anything curious about the London housing market that you think deserves a wider audience. If you’re a property professional, we’d love to hear from you about what the rest of the media is missing.

If you have a story please send an email or a WhatsApp for our journalists to investigate.

Asif Aziz’s knock-off Rainforest Cafe restaurant fined for hospitalising child in food hygiene breach.

We get so many stories in our inbox about landlord Asif Aziz that it’s impossible to investigate all of them without turning London Centric into a newsletter about one man. Whether it’s shutting down central London cinemas, turning some of central London’s most desirable locations into windowless hotels, or repeatedly leasing his units to tax evading gift shops, the actions of Aziz and Criterion Capital leave Londoners feeling like they don’t have control over their own city.

Now we can add another string to Aziz’s landlord bow: His business has been fined £45,000 for serious food hygiene breaches in a central London restaurant following a prosecution by Westminster council. The incident relates to a seven-year-old boy with a severe wheat allergy who was hospitalised in 2021 after eating a supposedly gluten-free burger at the Rainforest Cafe in ...