London

The mega-rich are best housed behind high fences, on wooded estates patrolled by dogs; that way, they don’t have to annoy the rest of us. But I can see how irritating it must be, if you live in the crowded Ladbroke Grove area of west London, to have a neighbour like Reade Griffith, an American hedge-fund manager who has received planning permission for a vast basement extension to his house that will take many months to excavate. Fellow residents of Kensington and Chelsea, other than those wealthy enough to have similar schemes in mind, will probably think it serves him right that he has been charged an £825,000 ‘Section 106’

At last. I’ve waited a long time for this moment. I’ve been through years of torture at the hands of excitable twenty-somethings, experimental thirty-somethings and Booker-prize-winning forty-somethings. I’ve had nothing but adventurous, liberal-minded, free-spirited sorts living in the flat upstairs. But I don’t want happy, joyful and free people living near me. I don’t want successful artistic types. No good can come of it. I remember only too well having to knock on the door the night my next-door neighbour won the Booker prize. ‘But it’s a big celebration,’ said a girl, swaying from side to side, as she explained why they were making such a racket. ‘That’s as may

Shake Shack is a hamburger restaurant in Covent Garden market. It came from New York and it is as needy and angry and angry-needy as America itself; it is, I suspect, quite capable of inventing a bogus reason to invade Burger King while posing as a victim of Burger King’s evil machinations. ‘Good things come to those who wait,’ it says in its promotional material online. ‘See you in the queue!’ (That, if you are English and a man and have never had psychotherapy, is called passive aggression.) Covent Garden market is full of August tourists; that is, wanderers with no destination, staring blindly at the metal Apples and Chanel.

What to say about the Shard that isn’t said by the fact it is 1,020 feet high and looks like a slightly elongated cheese triangle, and that it is designed as a home and office for those who want nothing more than to live and work in a building that looks like a slightly elongated cheese triangle? I cannot help but think that its architect, who is called Renzo Piano, is a fan of — or possibly secret PR for — Dairylea and was also a very unhappy small boy. (Freud may be over-quoted on the soothing possibilities of size, but he is still right. Small becomes big, and so

Now that most taxi drivers use satnavs, should ‘the Knowledge’ be abolished? Shouldn’t we ditch the requirement that all London black cab drivers spend several years acquiring an insanely detailed knowledge of London before obtaining a badge? In cabbie folklore, the model for the Knowledge was first suggested by Prince Albert. True or not, there is something German about the notion that every tradesman should have a qualification. And the test is teutonically stringent: more than 70 per cent of applicants fail or drop out. It demands that the prospective driver memorise 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks within six miles of -Charing Cross. Now, useful as it once was, many people

You can always tell when an ‘edgy’ part of London loses its cool; it’s normally around the time a Starbucks opens and the bankers pitch up. By the time the warehouse raves accept credit cards at the bar, you know that it’s time to move on. So imagine how oh-so-trendy Hoxton must be feeling this morning. Last night it hosted the summer party of spin-merchants and global lobbyists, Weber Shandwick. It’s over, N1.

Two marble graves are side by side. One is grey and encrusted, with moss growing over the top. The other is smooth and shiny white. It looks new but, in fact, like the grave next to it, it’s more than 100 years old. It’s not just been cleaned — its top layer has been shaved off completely. On its front are potted plants, hydrangeas and a can of Guinness. These are tributes to its new resident. Its old resident, Robert John, died in 1894. His inscription is still there, on the back of the headstone. His remains are there, too, if they haven’t disappeared into the soil. John’s grave is

It’s not going to be a popular rallying cry, I admit. Somehow ‘Save the Bankers’ doesn’t quite pull at the heartstrings in the same way as ‘Save the Whales’ or ‘Save the Pandas’. Yet the news comes to us today that UK banks will have slashed nearly 190,000 jobs worldwide by the end of next year from their peak staffing levels. That’s equal to the whole population of Geneva. The figure applies only to the Big Four banks of RBS, HSBC, Lloyds and Barclays, so the number for all City-based banks is probably larger. Nor is what is happening with the Square Mile’s financial institutions only a reflection of the