London

Tuesday

Ed Mead

The London property hotspots most likely to gain value

The preponderance of publicity over the last 24 months exhorting Londoners to abandon ship has left some areas of the capital looking like relative bargains or at least lagging behind widely hyped price rises elsewhere in the UK. Indeed, the average property price in Cambridge is now higher than that of the capital. Anecdotally, the stress of moving under duress has meant a significant number of those recently ‘lost’ have now returned to areas like Wandsworth, Hammersmith and Fulham. Many buyers have rented for a time in order to attempt a rural purchase before deciding to return. According to data from propertymark, there were an average of 29 buyers for every available

Thursday

Tanya Gold

The best schnitzel in London: Schnitzel Forever reviewed

It is a truism that there is never enough schnitzel (‘slice’, German); or, rather, schnitzel does not get the attention it deserves. Restaurants do serve it, of course. Fischer’s does a fine Wiener schnitzel, as part of its riotous pre-war Vienna tribute act, and elderly people, I am told, queue for it while wearing slankets. Brasseries sell it often: the perhaps unconscious desire to re-enact the meals of the Weimar Republic is one of the stranger things of the age. The Coffee Cup in Hampstead serves it with a jaunty side order of spaghetti pomodoro. But the (chicken) schnitzel has never had the stardust of the less interesting but more

Wednesday

Liz Rowlinson

The rise of the London pied à terre

There’s nothing new about having a London pied à terre. For many based in the country yet working in the city having a ‘flat in town’ is a matter of convenience, whilst for those seeking to enjoy theatre trips or other metropolitan pleasures, it’s rather a luxury. Yet it’s been an increasingly expensive to acquire one since April 2016 when a stamp duty surcharge on second homes added an extra three per cent to each tax band, and when last year’s coronavirus lockdown made everyone flee to the country, flats in the capital were cast off rather than coveted. But what a difference a year can make. With the daily commute

Wednesday

Steerpike

Sadiq surrenders on face masks

Throughout the pandemic, Sadiq Khan has been positively evangelical on face-coverings. The Mayor of London has waxed lyrical about their virtues throughout the pandemic, declaring that: ‘my mask protects you, your mask protects me’ that ‘if we don’t wear masks, the virus will spread further’ and calling such face-coverings ‘the most unselfish thing you can do.’ Ahead of Boris Johnson’s July 19 unlocking, Khan attacked his decision to axe the legal requirement to wear a face covering on public transport. Instead the Mayor insisted that wearing a mask remained ‘a condition of carriage’ for passengers using public transport in London, with some 500 enforcement officers patrolling the capital’s trains and buses to eject the

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

Who is – and isn’t – welcome in Sadiq Khan’s London?

Right-wing Frenchman Eric Zemmour, who is expected to run for the presidency of his country next year, has been designated persona non grata in London by the city’s mayor.  ‘Nobody who wants to divide our communities or incites hatred against people because of the colour of their skin or the god they worship is welcome in our city,’ said Sadiq Khan in response to a question about Zemmour’s presence in the capital. A noble declaration, one with which few would disagree, but rather incongruous coming from the mouth of Khan. For this is the man who waxed lyrical about Jeremy Corbyn at the Labour party conference in 2017.  A legacy of

Thursday

Taki

Lord Lucan, Joan Collins and the greatest dinner ever

There’s a narrow stretch of Chelsea, south of the King’s Road from Oakley Street to Ormonde Gate, that reminds me of post-war London when I first came here with my dad. Names such as Margaretta Terrace, St Loo Avenue, Alpha Place and Robinson Street bring back sweet memories of youthful innocence and desire. London back then was big on rep but ranked last on comfort. Much later, towards the end of the 1950s, Queen’s Club held the second biggest tennis tournament in the land and had just one shower in the men’s locker room. (With a dirty white curtain.) It is often said that schoolboys derive no benefit from fine

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Dregs of fake Provence: Whitcomb’s reviewed

Whitcomb’s is in The Londoner hotel on the south-west corner of Leicester Square. The Londoner calls itself ‘the world’s first super boutique hotel’, which may mean that it is the world’s biggest small hotel. Or its smallest big hotel. I don’t know. Whatever its existential status, the developers destroyed an art deco cinema — the dour and lovely Odeon West End — to make it, and it looks like a piece of bright blue infant Lego with lesions for windows. Heritage organisations objected to the cinema’s destruction. Westminster council replied: who cares? We need Lego with lesions, or anything that looks like Lego: look at the Hotel W round the

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Harriet Harman calls for Cressida Dick to resign

Labour’s Harriet Harman has called for Cressida Dick to resign as chief of the Metropolitan Police after Wayne Couzens was sentenced to a whole-life order for the murder, rape and kidnapping of Sarah Everard. He is the first police officer to receive such a sentence. In a letter to the Commissioner, Harman writes that ‘women’s confidence in the police will have been shattered’ by the case and that it is ‘not possible for you [Dick] to lead’ the changes necessary in the force following this case. It is significant that Harman has called for Dick to go. She is not a bandwagon politician and does not tend to call for scalps,

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The real Greek: Lemonia reviewed

Lemonia lives in the old Chalk Farm Tavern in Primrose Hill, which is better known as the set of Paddington. It is not surrounded by fields filled with duellists under a hill of primroses these days, but it is still vast, pale and beautiful: a survivor in the sprawl. There has been a tavern on this site for so long — it was first recorded in 1678 when a corpse was carried to it — that it is possible John Keats drank here. I hope so. It is not a beaker of the warm south – it is slightly too near Camden and its stink of pigeon and bleach for

Thursday

Taki

I was the next Truman Capote

It’s nice to be back in London, and Glebe Place is a delight. Mind you, it’s not the mansion I was expecting, just a very nice mews house on a very quiet part of the street away from the King’s Road. The noise of the city gets on my nerves, which means that I’ve lived on an island, and among cows, for too long. Alexandra seems to like London more than I do nowadays, and that’s a switch if ever there was one. Knightsbridge was home for 40-odd years, but the wife hated it. Writing about one’s wife is a bit like kissing your sister and all that, but ensconced

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

France’s provocateur is coming to London

Five years ago, London’s affluent French poured their dosh into the campaign of Emmanuel Macron. This time around, supporters of France’s rising provocateur are trying a similar tactic. Eric Zemmour is the Tucker Carlson of French media. A potential rival to Marine Le Pen, he is planning a visit to London in October. His undeclared but badly concealed French presidential campaign has the backing of ‘Generation Z’, a shadowy group of French political consultants and fundraisers, who are looking at the monied expatriates of South Kensington and seeing potential campaign money. If Macron’s people aren’t spooked by Zemmour, they aren’t acting like it I profiled Zemmour in the magazine in

Caroline Crampton

The watery life of the capital

To write about London and its rivers is to enter a crowded literary field. Many aspects of watery life in the capital have been documented for public consumption over the past 150 years, from Hilaire Belloc’s lament for the river’s lost monasteries in The Historic Thames to Peter Ackroyd’s doorstop, London: A Biography. More recently, it is previously unremarked everyday stories which have found a home on many publishers’ lists. The practice of mudlarking especially of sifting objects from the river’s mud has held readers in thrall. Sometimes it sounds as though the Thames foreshore at low tide must be as busy as a King’s Cross platform during a pre-pandemic

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Scarface’s lair with nibbles: Louie reviewed

A French creole restaurant rises in the sullen ruins of London. It is called Louie, for French king or trumpeter, depending on your wish. It is next to the Ivy — now a private members’ club and franchise stretching to the London suburbs bearing small bowls of shepherd’s pie — and it is infinitely preferable. That is, I can get a table, and no pastiche medieval windows or tabloid photographers are involved. It’s a terrible thing being jostled into a gutter so someone can photograph the former cast of Crossroads. The Ivy is the Love Island of grand restaurants. It is for the spuriously famous, which is now everyone. The

Prue Leith

At last, a dose of up-close culture in London

In London for the first time in 18 months, I was as excited as a child on a birthday outing. We were desperate for a dose of up-close culture after months of Zoom, so we crammed in three exhibitions, two plays and a couple of first-class meals that I didn’t have to cook. Glorious. It helped that we had two of the few blue-sky days of this otherwise wretched summer and that I’d deliberately fallen off the wagon. My husband John says that I’m much nicer when I’m drinking. Apparently, when giving my kidneys a holiday, I’m altogether less joyful. We stayed at the Chelsea Arts Club in Old Church

Monday

Andrew Tettenborn

The Liberal Democrats have a dangerous vision for the City of London

Liberals have always set great store by laws and declarations. It was joked about Lord Loreburn, the liberal Lord Chancellor in the years before the First World War, that if told the Germans had landed he would immediately have taken steps to obtain an interim injunction from the Chancery Division requiring an immediate withdrawal. These days something similar seems to be happening as regards the Liberal Democrats’ approach to climate change. Last Thursday Ed Davey took aim at the City, which he has decided to add to the party’s growing list of climate change villains. In a curious interview with the Guardian he put forward a modest proposal to deal

Thursday

Max Décharné

A glimpse of lost London – before the yuppie invasion

In a 1923 book called Echo de Paris, the writer Laurence Houseman attempted to conjure up in a very slim, elegant volume the atmosphere and especially the conversation of an afternoon a quarter century earlier that he had spent in the company of the exiled Oscar Wilde. It was a conscious act of imaginative recreation, seeking to place the reader at the same boulevard table alongside the participants. As the author explained in his introduction: The scene, as regards its setting — the outside of a Paris restaurant — is true to history; and if, toward the end, a touch of drama has been introduced, the reader will understand that

Thursday

Peter Parker

How two literary magazines boosted morale during the Blitz

William Loxley’s lively account of ‘Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon magazine’ begins with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrating to the United States in January 1939 and ends with George Orwell dying in University College Hospital in January 1950. Between these two events Loxley explores the often interconnected professional and personal lives of a number of British writers, publishers and editors — principally Orwell, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender, John Lehmann and Dylan Thomas — during the second world war and its immediate aftermath. Faced with criticism in both public and private for his and Auden’s ‘defection’, Isherwood attempted in January 1940 to justify his action to

Monday

Ross Clark

Can London’s floods be explained by climate change?

It’s climate change again, innit. It didn’t take long for Sunday’s flooding in London to be put together with Canada’s recent heatwave and the floods in Germany and China to be used as ‘evidence’ of ever-accelerating climate change – giving us even less time to save the world than previously thought. ‘More rain as Londoners call out climate change,’ screamed a headline on City A.M., alongside pictures of water pouring through Stratford DLR station and cars stuck on the North Circular. Sunday’s flash floods have also brought an old favourite out of the closet: a map purporting to show large parts of London which will be underwater by 2030 –

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

The clever radical who led the City’s transformation

It’s a vivid example of unintended consequences that the swimming-pool builders of southern England should owe so much to Sir Nicholas Goodison, the former chairman of the London Stock Exchange who has died aged 87 and whose obituaries suggested little inclination to frivolity, poolside or otherwise. Head-and-shoulders the most cerebral of the Exchange’s leading members at the turn of the 1980s, he was also one of its most far-sighted and probably, as a noted connoisseur of 18th-century clocks, its most cultured. A traditionalist majority of his peers were content with the City’s clubbable old ways. But Goodison — a third-generation stockbroker who had originally thought of a career in teaching

Friday

Mary Dejevsky

Is London being ‘levelled down’ already?

In his ‘levelling up’ speech in Coventry this week, the Prime Minister insisted time and again that this was no ‘zero sum’ game. Improving the fortunes of the poorer parts of the country would not entail levelling richer parts of the country down, he said: ‘Levelling up is not a jam-spreading operation. It’s not robbing Peter to pay Paul…. It’s win-win.’ Well, maybe. But there was good cause for his defensiveness. One reason advanced for the Conservatives’ dramatic defeat in last month’s Chesham and Amersham by-election was apprehension that such places would have to help pay the bill for, say, regenerating Hartlepool. Yes, of course, there were specific reasons for the