London

Joseph Mallord William Turner continues to occupy a singular place in British cultural consciousness. The English Romantic artist, watercolourist and printmaker – often referred to as ‘the painter of light’ – elevated landscape painting to high art and, when he died in 1851, left a legacy of 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolours and 30,000 works on paper. When one of these surfaces at auction, it sells for tens of millions of pounds. However, most of his works – with the power of nature, the sea and the industrial revolution as central themes – were bequeathed to the nation.

Is it a stage of life thing? Recently I’ve got a hankering to join a gentlemen’s club. It might be the creeping realisation that having put it off for so long – drifting in and out of London’s clubs over the years as a guest thinking ‘This is rather nice…’ – as I near 50, it’s a case of now or never. So here’s a question – have you been to a club recently? Have you settled into the tightly stuffed, wing-backed armchair at the Athenaeum, White’s, Buck’s, Boodle’s or the Carlton? Have you dined at the Garrick surrounded by the some of the finest things to drip off the paintbrushes of Zoffany, Millais, Hogarth and numerous others?

London has always been dogged by the canard that the Guinness here can’t compete with what’s served across the Irish Sea. It is certainly difficult – perhaps impossible – to replicate the quality of the pints in Mulligan’s on Dublin’s Poolbeg Street, or at the Gravediggers by Glasnevin Cemetery. However, there are pubs here that do it admirably – if you know where to look. Whether you’re a lifelong aficionado, or you’re merely observant on St Patrick’s Day, these are some of your best bets for a great London Guinness: The Auld Shillelagh, Stoke Newington A stone-cold classic of a pub, the Auld Shillelagh’s deceptively small frontage on Church Street leads to a longitudinal bar that serves some of London’s finest pints.

How Rod Stewart kept his hair in place, why the BBC gave its presenters electric shocks and what Paul Gascoigne shot with an air rifle: this month’s London postcode area is N – buckle up for another trivia-packed tour… The first run that cabbies have to learn for the Knowledge is Manor House Tube station to Gibson Square. Their task, as with any journey, is to take the most direct route possible – this is called being ‘on the cotton’, because the route will follow the straight line mapped by an imaginary piece of thread stretched between the two points on the map. The Great Northern Hotel at King’s Cross gets its unusual shape from the River Fleet.

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 streets, many in terraces styled like modern sugar-coated palaces, on Crown-owned land just north of central London. These ‘Regency’ homes would encircle a brand new park which, modestly, the future King would name after himself.

The most recent additions to London's restaurant scene have plenty to offer – from Palestinian culinary history on a plate and a slice of the American East Coast to a tasting menu with a twist and ramen worth writing home about. Here's Spectator Life's guide to the best new openings to try now – and three more to look out for later in the year. Four to book now Akub, Notting Hill It's funny how comfort food doesn’t need to be familiar to be instantly recognisable. You may not have grown up eating Palestinian chicken musakhan, but when you taste Chef Fadi Kattan’s version there’s sense of home that’s unmistakable. The chicken is stripped from the bone, seasoned liberally with citrussy sumac and pressed into a dome of shatteringly thin bread.

Our tour of the trivia behind London’s postcode areas has reached SE, where we find rock stars being embalmed, P.G. Wodehouse reporting on cricket and Westminster Bridge being painted green for a very specific reason. Oh, and Winston Churchill gets a hat-trick of mentions… When Richard Burton played Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1953, Winston Churchill came to see him and sat in the front row. Within a few lines Burton heard a ‘dull rumble… it was Churchill speaking the lines with me. This was fairly disconcerting, so I tried to shake him off. I went fast, I went slow, but the old man caught up with me all the time’. Even in those days the play was routinely cut to make it shorter.

Six months of the year, I’m a (wannabe) Lisboeta, “a person from Lisbon.” A peripatetic British food and travel journalist somewhat scuppered by Brexit, I’m allowed in the Schengen Area for up to ninety days in any 180-day block. I max them out before I’m sent packing. I’ve come to think of these moments in time as “chapters,” in a half-hearted attempt to romanticize the loss of my border privileges. Lisbon is the object of my affections — and has become my base for European chapters from which I breathlessly ping between countries. I try new dishes and try not to fall in love with anyone before I’m ordered home (rather inconvenient: "getting married for the visa" jokes grow less and less funny).

Nothing says "it’s going to be a fine day" like a catcall. A short line at the coffee shop, great. No pushing and shoving to get on the subway, wonderful. But hearing that whistle when walking past a group of builders up on the scaffolding really makes me smile like nothing else in my morning routine. If I’m lucky, I even get a “looking good, darling.” It’s an act that me and my nameless builder friend have perfected. I blush, he gives me a cheeky smile, we both get on with our day. Yet in London, this morning staple of mine is about to be made punishable by up to two years in prison. Bye bye, builder friend. Late last year, the British government launched their war on ogling.

This month our trivia-inspired tour of London’s postcode areas reaches NW, where Tim Burton snored, Madness caused an earthquake and Desmond Tutu asked policemen for directions even though he knew where he was going… The Renaissance hotel at St Pancras station had the first revolving door in Britain. It was installed at the Midland Grand (as the hotel was then called) in 1899, by the device’s inventor Theophilus Van Kannel. (The door itself – or rather a modern replacement – is still in the same spot, at the entrance nearest the road, rather than the main one set further back.) Another innovation was the Ladies’ Smoking Room, the first in Europe where women could light up.

Last time I visited Toronto, Canada, I stayed in Greektown, home to one of the largest Greek communities in North America. Several scenes from My Big Fat Greek Wedding were filmed here, and street signs are in Greek as well as English. On the day I arrived, jetlagged and disorientated, I happened upon a restaurant that was so authentically Greek I imagined I could smell the pine trees and hear the soft chirp of crickets. A couple of elderly men sat drinking ouzo at the bar, and rather than being led to a table I was taken into the kitchen where Maria (reader, that was her name, what can I do?) was stirring various pots, including a green bean and tomato dish (fasolakia giaxni) and meatballs (soutzoukakia).

I have just been proposed to in a somewhat slatternly tiki bar in Mayfair. Not just any tiki bar, but Trader Vic’s, the Polynesian-themed restaurant and lounge underneath the London Hilton on Park Lane. Approaching its 60th anniversary, the bar has seen better days, but for historical purposes my partner of 12 years decided that this dimly lit den would be the location for the proposal of a lifetime. Then wouldn’t you know it – just two weeks later I discover that this cavern of delight where I spent many birthdays is being evicted and will close on 31 December. Trader Vic’s began in the 1950s, when Victor Jules Bergeron Jr. (Trader Vic himself) teamed up with Western Hotels in the US to turn his already popular tropical-themed bar and restaurant into a franchise.

Ferrets at Buckingham Palace, swearing at Wimbledon and the real-life incident that inspired Del Boy’s fall through the bar – it can only mean that our trivia tour of London’s postcode areas has reached SW… The Clermont was the first hotel in London to have lifts. The ‘ascending rooms’ (as they were known when the hotel opened in 1862) were powered by water pressure. Back then the five-storey building, next to Victoria station, was known as the Grosvenor and was a favourite of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. So much so, in fact, that he included it in ‘The Final Problem’, the short story with which he first tried to kill off Sherlock Holmes.

The next time you arrive at London’s Heathrow Airport, you might be forgiven for wanting a welcome fit for a king. Yet under the now nearly three-month-old reign of King Charles III, there is a persistent rumor that Buckingham Palace, that symbol of the British monarchy since its acquisition by America’s favorite monarch George III in 1763, is going to pass out of private hands and into public ones. There has been talk of its being turned into a giant permanent art gallery and museum, showing off treasures from the Royal Collection Trust. There's even chatter of — and I can hear the gasps from here — its being transformed into a five-star hotel. You, too, can pay an exorbitant amount of money to sleep where kings and queens have trod.