Thousands of years ago, housewives living in what is now Iran would prepare for the spring equinox and Persian New Year by cleaning their homes from top to bottom. Today, ‘cleanfluencers’ on social media earn a living all year round by demonstrating how to keep your home sparkling. That might mean road-testing their new robot
From Henry James and T.S. Eliot to Wallis Simpson and (albeit briefly) Taylor Swift, US expats have had a long love affair with London. But over the past year the number of Americans – overpaid, what with their favourable exchange rate, oversexed, possibly, and certainly over here – has been escalating fast. In 2024, 6,100
During the course of last year, Alex Greaves and his wife Sarah seriously considered moving out of London. The couple, who live in Southfields in the south-west of the city with their sons aged two and five, were tempted the idea of a new life in the country – inspired largely by friends’ idyllic tales
‘John’ has a dirty little secret – one so shameful that he has insisted on anonymity in order to tell his story. Last year, while in the process of buying a three-bedroom family house in Whitchurch, Hampshire, the 42-year-old office worker committed an act which, while perfectly legal, could kindly be described as ruthless. ‘We
Earl’s Court as I first remember it was where Australian travellers found a cheap bed for the night. It was also the place to go for beers with unfamiliar labels, and bags of kiwi fruit, a rare delicacy in the 1980s. And at a time when Neighbours was riding high in the TV ratings there
John Lewis recently returned to its roots, resurrecting its ‘never knowingly undersold’ price-matching promise. But it’s hard to imagine how the company, which opened its first store on London’s Oxford Street in 1864, could apply this undertaking to its latest venture. For, not content with supplying the nation with sofas and curtains, lightbulbs and sewing
For most of us the main ingredients of outdoor cooking are a smouldering barbecue grill, slabs of alternately under- and over-cooked meat and a light sprinkling of frustration. But these days, it seems, there is another option on the menu. Ever since the pandemic, more and more homeowners have been investing in lavish outdoor kitchens
In 1939 George Orwell took aim at burgeoning British suburbia and its population of lower middle class lackeys in his novel Coming Up for Air, memorably describing the new homes being built on the fringes of cities as ‘semi-detached torture chambers where the poor little five-to-ten pound a-weekers quake and shiver’. More than eight decades on
It has been ten years since work began in earnest on the regeneration of one of the few surviving sections of old-school central London. While the rest of Zone 1 seemingly saw wall-to-wall gentrification, Elephant and Castle remained an outpost of stubborn, scruffy ordinariness, an oasis of discount stores, greasy spoons and traditional boozers. Over the
They are expensive to maintain, plagued by tourists and influences seeking picture-postcard holiday snaps and cost more per square foot than houses in some of London’s most affluent neighbourhoods – despite lacking basic amenities such as running water. And yet such is the allure of the traditional seaside beach hut that, amid an otherwise shaky
In Britain’s battle to cut carbon emissions, the government sees heat pumps as a key weapon. Unveiling the latest energy efficiency plan in March, energy secretary Grant Shapps doubled down on Boris Johnson’s offer of a £5,000 grant for anyone willing to install one. These smart bits of home technology work by transferring thermal energy from the air,
You don’t get much further from the seaside than Derbyshire, a county landlocked at the heart of England. During lockdowns house-hunters simply couldn’t get enough of coastal property, and prices in Wales and the West Country boomed. But three years after the start of the pandemic, a new property powerhouse is emerging. According to the latest UK
Eunice Day’s breaking point came when her neighbours asked if she would move her car from a communal grass verge in their cul-de-sac so that it could be mowed. After several weeks of polite hostilities, Day stormed a neighbour’s home in the Dorset town of Ferndown, a row ensued, and the resulting scuffle left the
At the start of this month, the modish kitchen appliance brand Sub-Zero & Wolf proudly announced the launch of its Classic French Door fridge-freezer. This beast of a machine, featuring Nasa-inspired air purification technology and an automatic ice-maker complete with ‘party mode’, will set you back £23,868 – or the best part of a year’s salary for the
Almost 30 years ago, my journalistic career began in the faded seaside town of St Leonards-on-Sea, where I spent six months undertaking a crash course in shorthand, typing and all the basic skills of local paper reportage. With no previous experience of just how dismal an out-of-season holiday town could be, my spirits were high on
In the early years of the 19th century, the extravagant, spoiled and hard-partying Prince Regent had a surprisingly good idea. Encouraged by pals like Beau Brummell, and with the financial backing of the property developer James Burton, the future King George IV hired the architect John Nash to design a new London neighbourhood. His vision was for a series of magnificent
Spring is property auction season, when a motley collection of semi-derelict houses, flats with leases in the single figures and the homes of mortgage defaulters get sold off. This year, though, a scan of the catalogues of some of the UK’s leading property auction houses reveals a new class of property under the hammer: rental
As trophy homes go, the Grade II*-listed Glen Usk is hard to top. Set on the west bank of the River Usk in Wales, it is a white rendered neoclassical fairy-tale of a Georgian country house and its current owners have thoroughly renovated the eight-bedroom home, set in 35 acres. At the tail end of 2021
Not so long ago buyers were treating house-hunting as a blood sport – price ceiling-shattering bids and gazumping were commonplace everywhere from the Cornish coast to the London suburbs to the Lake District. But six months is a long time in property. Following the debacle of the mini-Budget and amid rising interest rates and soaring
Once again estate agents have been named among the least-trustworthy people in Britain, rated in the public consciousness somewhere between politicians and journalists (ouch). Less than a third of people believe agents tell the truth, according to the annual Veracity Index from market research firm Ipsos Mori, which tracks consumer trust in particular professions – less
