London

Thursday

Steerpike

Sadiq’s £1.5 million damp squib

From our UK edition

London politicians are no strangers to seeing fireworks. But this year's annual New Year's Eve shindig was a somewhat more muted affair than usual, after mayor Sadiq Khan ordered the last-minute cancellation of events in central London in response to a surge in the Omicron variant, despite the NYE celebrations being, er, almost entirely outdoors.  Those who wished to see the fireworks instead had to make do with watching the BBC's coverage at home, featuring a dreadful, trite opening monologue over an army of drones spelling out the letters 'NHS'.

Emily Rhodes

A modern Medea: Iron Curtain, by Vesna Goldsworthy, reviewed

From our UK edition

Vesna Goldsworthy’s finely wrought third novel explodes into life early on with a shocking scene in which Misha — the boyfriend of our protagonist, Milena Urbanska — returns from a short, tough spell of military service, initiates a game of Russian roulette (‘the only Russian thing I could face right now’) and blows his brains out. It is 1981. Misha and Milena are children of the political elite in an unnamed capital city in the Eastern Bloc. As such, they are afforded privileges their compatriots lack: palatial homes, preferential treatment, western luxuries as seemingly innocuous as cans of Bitter Lemon from Italy and imported tampons, instead of ‘the scratchy home-produced sausages of grey cotton waste encased in a flimsy net that...

Tuesday

Ed Mead

The London property hotspots most likely to gain value

From our UK edition

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 property in December, meaning many house searches no doubt ended in vain.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

The best schnitzel in London: Schnitzel Forever reviewed

From our UK edition

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 widely beloved hamburger; perhaps it is because cows are bigger.

Wednesday

Liz Rowlinson

The rise of the London pied à terre

From our UK edition

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 having partly revived for many, an appetite for metropolitan life regained, demand has shifted back towards London.

Wednesday

Steerpike

Sadiq surrenders on face masks

From our UK edition

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 unmasked.

Monday

Gavin Mortimer

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

From our UK edition

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.

Wednesday

Revd Steve Morris

The history of the American Memorial Chapel

The clipped voice on the old television newsreel tells us that November 27, 1958 was a gray old London day. The Queen, accompanied by Vice President Richard Nixon, was dedicating and opening the American Memorial Chapel at the far east end of the City of London’s great cathedral. Ordinary men and women from all over Britain paid for the chapel by public subscription. It was the least we could do. It was a miracle that the cathedral had survived the Nazi Blitz almost intact. One part of the cathedral was hit by a bomb in October 1940, and it was on that site that eighteen years later the Memorial Chapel was built. The Chapel is dedicated to the 28,000 American people who were stationed on British soil and died in World War Two, many of them on D-Day.

chapel

Thursday

Taki

Lord Lucan, Joan Collins and the greatest dinner ever

From our UK edition

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 architecture, and it was certainly true in my case, but what I did take in was the mood.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Dregs of fake Provence: Whitcomb’s reviewed

From our UK edition

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 corner. That looks like a giant Lego fridge!

Monday

Joe Rogers

Drinking with James Bond

James Bond’s most impressive talent is not his prowess as a spy or his skills of seduction. It’s his ability to always get exactly what he wants at the bar. In the 1954 novel Live and Let Die he orders a round of Old Fashioneds while on a train to meet Felix Leiter, his CIA opposite number. Not only does the buffet car make them for Bond, they even have his preferred brand of bourbon, Old Grand-Dad. You try pulling that sort of thing on the Acela from Penn Station to DC. ‘Sorry Solitaire, they wouldn’t do us a cocktail, but I’ve got a cup of Lipton’s and a bag of pretzels.’ We’d all like to drink like Bond but, lacking his miraculous powers, we need to be in the right sort of bar to do it.

bond

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

Harriet Harman calls for Cressida Dick to resign

From our UK edition

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, even in high-profile cases such as this.

Tanya Gold

The real Greek: Lemonia reviewed

From our UK edition

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 that — but it is close enough. Some restaurants hold memories of pleasure: this is one such place.

Thursday

Taki

I was the next Truman Capote

From our UK edition

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 at home the other night I asked her: why London all of a sudden. ‘You were playing Don Giovanni all those years, and I found it humiliating to be near those women,’ was her answer.

Thursday

Cosmo Landesman

Americans, London needs you

‘Nobody wants to admit it, but London was boring even before the pandemic — and it’s still boring now!’ I said. We were at a London drinks party. The guy retaliated with a smirk and that old Dr Johnson line, ‘He who is tired of London, is tired of life.’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not tired of life — I’m tired of people who always quote Dr Johnson when you make some slightly disparaging remark about London!’ I dislike that Dr Johnson quote because it assumes that you can’t be genuinely tired of London; your discontent must be due to your own boring, miserable life and not because London has become an overpriced, culturally exhausted and soulless city — which it has.

London

Thursday

Jonathan Miller

France’s provocateur is coming to London

From our UK edition

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 March.

Caroline Crampton

The watery life of the capital

From our UK edition

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 rush hour.

Tanya Gold

Scarface’s lair with nibbles: Louie reviewed

From our UK edition

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 zeitgeist cries: we’re going to need a bigger Ivy. Or at least it used to. Louie is a small, golden rebuke.

Prue Leith

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

From our UK edition

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 Street. It took ten years to persuade the club that cooking and writing are arts so it should accept me as a member — it prefers painters and sculptors.

Monday

Andrew Tettenborn

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

From our UK edition

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.