London

Thursday

Damian Thompson

In his new piano concerto Thomas Ades’s inspiration has completely dried up

There’s nothing like a good piano concerto and, sad to relate, Thomas Adès’s long-awaited first proper attempt at the genre is nothing like a good piano concerto. Not in the version we heard at its UK première in the Royal Festival Hall, anyway. What a disappointment! Perhaps Adès can rescue it, but he’d have to hack away at the score as ruthlessly as Bruckner dismantling his Third Symphony. That work wasn’t necessarily improved by its revisions but, honestly, almost anything would be an improvement on the first two movements of the 21-minute concerto performed by Kirill Gerstein and the LPO conducted by the composer. You knew there was something wrong

Friday

Spectator Life

Where to buy property in London

With prices in many parts of the city already beginning to fall, buying in London is a minefield. Striking a balance between liveability and getting a good return on investment is the trick we should all be aiming to pull off. Afterall, buy somewhere that’s already got too many tattooed men selling flat whites and you’ll end up paying the price later when you realise values in the neighbourhood have topped out. Equally, buy somewhere that’s cheap, but far below the radar for cool hunters and you could end up with the same problem. We’ve picked out some areas in the north, east, south and west of the city that

Thursday

Joan Collins

Joan Collins: why I love London taxi drivers

Percy and I have seen quite a few movies recently and enjoyed many of them, which is rare. But the most enjoyable was Judy, for the performance of its star, Renée Zellweger. I met Judy Garland many times when I had just arrived in Hollywood as a young starlet and I can tell you that Renée resembles her uncannily, both physically and emotionally. Judy was fragile and birdlike, but her voice was strong and magical. I watched her sing at a party given by the legendary songwriter Sammy Cahn, who accompanied her on the piano. Apart from Miss Garland’s brilliant voice, it was fascinating to watch the audience. People who

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Are Boris’s hedge-fund pals conspiring to ‘short the UK’? I doubt it

Minding my own business at 67 Pall Mall — the private members’ club favoured by oenophile West End hedge-fund managers that will serve as this week’s restaurant tip — I’m watching two tieless but well-tailored gents at the next table sampling different vintages of Château Pichon Longueville. And I’m thinking: ‘Bastards! These must be the friends-of-Boris who are conspiring to reap billions from a no-deal Brexit!’ It was former chancellor Philip Hammond who wrote recently of Johnson being ‘backed by speculators’, citing the PM’s sister Rachel who had spoken of the influence on him of ‘people who have invested billions in shorting the pound and shorting the country’. The novelist

Friday

James Kirkup

Four reasons Rory Stewart could struggle in London

Could Rory Stewart become Mayor of London, disrupt the main political parties and strike a historic blow for humane centrism and political compromise? Possibly the best reason to bet against him is that quite a lot of people like me will be arguing – and hoping – that he can win. By “people like me” I mean the commentator-class. I know what I am. I run a think-tank at Westminster and I write about politics for newspapers and magazines. I don’t belong to any political party and have voted for at least five of them in my 43 and three-quarter years. I don’t really understand tribal partisanship and I admire

Thursday

Tanya Gold

I’ve had my fill of brasseries: Moncks reviewed

If you review restaurants professionally you would not think Britain wanted to leave the EU. You would think she wanted to live happily in the twinkling golden stars of Europe like Emily Thornberry’s neck fat, eating, semi-eternally, at a European-style brasserie. British restaurants are a silent acknowledgement that native food is not very good unless you really like cabbage. Please don’t write to me about fungus from Maidenhead. I don’t care. Our cities reflect it; every-where I see European-style brasseries glinting with the promise of European–style bliss. Where is the courage of our seething psychological imperatives? Why don’t we put our madness where our mouths are? I daydream about a

Monday

Spectator Life

The 10 best London boroughs for families

New analysis of house prices and schools across London shows that, out of London’s 32 boroughs, Sutton and Richmond upon Thames are best for families. When comparing size of property, the amount of green space and, most importantly, quality of schools, Sutton soared to the top of the rankings with an average house price of £508,679 for a semi-detached property – not bad considering the average house price in London is £485,830. For this price, families will be getting approximately 100 square metres of property, in an area with the lowest crime rate in all of London. When it comes to giving the kids a chance to let off steam,

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

An oil price spike doesn’t mean a recession is on the way

An oil price surge from $60 to $72 per barrel, as happened after the drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq refinery caused a sudden 6 per cent cut to global supply, would once have been taken as a sure signal of economic troubles ahead. A 1990s study of postwar oil prices plotted against employment and other data by Professor Andrew Oswald of Warwick University showed that every spike in energy costs had shortly been followed by recession. The theory still held in 2008: even though the ‘Great Recession’ was attributed to financial mayhem, it came soon after a speculative oil peak of $147. But today’s barrel price seems to be

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Why no one ever moves back to London

In last week’s Spectator, Martin Vander Weyer replied to a couple with a baby who had sought his advice on accepting a low offer for their cramped London flat to buy a house in commuterland. Their fear was that, if Brexit led to a property crash, they could face negative equity. Should they call the whole thing off? Emphatically not, said Martin. ‘Buying a family home is a long-term choice, rarely regretted, in which fluctuating value matters far less than whether you love the house.’ He’s right, I’m sure. But I’d like to add a further thought experiment which may reaffirm their decision. I recently heard of a different property

Thursday

Henry Wilkins

The six best commuter villages close to London

Staring into a stranger’s armpit on a rush-hour tube train can often lead to thoughts of moving to a tiny village. We imagine that, there, we might find the space to be ourselves. As a description of Louis de Bernieres’ fictional Surrey village, Notwithstanding, reads: it is a place where, “a lady dresses in plus fours and shoots squirrels, a retired general gives up wearing clothes altogether… and people think it quite natural to confide in a spider that lives in a potting shed.” Perhaps it’s just me, but as a Londoner, that all sounds rather liberating. In the interests of bucolic fantasies, we’ve put together a list of commuter

Tanya Gold

Like Twitter, but with food: Market Hall Victoria reviewed

The Market Hall Victoria is an international food shed opposite the station terminus. I have long hated Victoria, thinking it the most provincial part of central London. It longs for the provinces, it impersonates them, it summons them. It is odd because the station itself is beautiful: a grimy Edwardian fantasy with tall grimy chimneys and a fantastical clock. But the rest of it is painful: the ugly road to parliament; the immense new blocks with their hideous restaurants; the sad and stripy Roman Catholic cathedral, which searches for grandeur but just looks weird; the Queen’s back wall, which I marvel at, because it tells so much. Victoria is a

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

Summer in the city

Foolish me. I could have been writing this by the shore of Lake Trasimene, with only one problem: how to transmit it to London. Last time I stayed in the delightful house there, the technology was still in the era of Hannibal’s victory. There was no wifi, only spasmodic mobile-phone reception, and the nearest English newspapers were 50 miles away. ‘Where ignorance is bliss…’ Instead, I stayed in London to work out what was happening. As I say, folly. After two fruitless weeks, I have not even identified the questions, let alone the answers. There have been compensations: one great Test match, and very likely more to follow. Steve Smith

Thursday

Edmund West

Great and small

‘I’m not going to your place, it looks like a crack den.’ It’s not exactly a vote of confidence when your mother describes your home that way. Admittedly, the bedsit I have lived in for ten years is tiny. There is no central heating. The white blinds have faded to yellow. It’s not much good for house parties: I could fit four people, five if I sat between the sink and the microwave. However, I would like to defend living in bedsits. Whenever I hear people complaining about housing in London, I wonder whether they have considered a bedsit. I’m autistic and work as a part-time carer, but even on

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

Why has London Bridge station been shortlisted for an architectural prize?

London Bridge station has been shortlisted for the Riba Stirling architects prize. The jury said its “impressive” new concourse had “significantly improved the experience of those who use it daily”. That’s nonsense, says The Spectator’s Wiki Man, Rory Sutherland: In the shadow of the Shard, not far from Borough Market, is a £1 billion public artwork, an allegorical sculpture entitled ‘What is wrong with the world today’ by the reclusive wunderkind Netwór Krail. It was officially unveiled by the Duke of Cambridge last year. The reason you may not have read about this monumental piece is that most of the press coverage failed to notice this structure was a landmark in

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Stop posturing over stop and search

It was somehow inevitable that shortly after Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick announced a fall in violent crime, there would be an absolute horror-show of death across the capital. The ‘weekend of bloodshed’ began on Friday 14 June with the murder of 18-year-old Cheyon Evans, knifed by teens in Wandsworth. A few minutes later Eniola Aluko was shot dead in Plumstead, then three men were hospitalised in Clapham, another dead of knife wounds in Tower Hamlets, and another an hour later in Enfield. In Stratford the next day, by the Westfield shopping centre, more than 100 young men attacked and injured a handful of police officers. A section 60 order

Thursday

Christopher Priest

Darkness visible | 9 May 2019

With his first novel about looking after an engineered wood floor, and a second novel about what it is like to stay in a chain hotel, Will Wiles seems determined to corner the market in unpromising literary subjects. His latest novel, Plume, is about a chap who lives in a rented flat in London and who works in an office. Hooray! — the sainted few who are already Wiles fans will learn this with their hearts pumping with anticipatory happiness. Mine certainly did. A quick summary is appropriate, as Wiles’s novels remain, for now, under-regarded. Care of Wooden Floors (2012) was exactly what it said on the tin. The narrator

Thursday

Tanya Gold

The dark side of Soho

Each suburban soul yearns for the Soho of their youth. It isn’t that Soho was better in the 1990s when I invaded the Colony Room, twitching, and took a fag off Sarah Lucas. It is that I was. This was the view of a friend after I last wrote on Soho restaurants. We once ran holding hands through the sprinklers in St James’s Park laughing at Peter Mandelson, who was passing with his dog, and that is my memory of the Blair years. So Soho, which is thick with metaphor anyway — its very name is a hunting call: death for one and ecstasy for another — is a district

Thursday

Alex Colville

Genius and geniality

I cast my Readers under two general Divisions, the Mercurial and the Saturnine. The first are the gay part of my Disciples, who require Speculations of Wit and Humour; the others are those of a more solemn and sober Turn, who find no Pleasure but in Papers of Morality and sound Sense…Were I always Grave, one half of my Readers would fall off from me: Were I always Merry, I should lose the other. I make it therefore my endeavour to find out Entertainments of both kinds. Thus spake Joseph Addison in 1711, frustrated at the difficulty of keeping readers of The Spectator happy. Leo Damrosch, emeritus professor of literature

Richard Bratby

Prima le parole

‘I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all,’ wrote Stravinsky in one of his more honest moments, and when it comes to humour the old fox had a point. Strip away words, visuals, parody and extra-musical associations (the flatulent bassoon; the raspberry-blowing trumpet) and Orpheus, unaided, doesn’t have much left in his comic armoury. Two concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall could almost have been test cases. Geoffrey Paterson conducted the London Sinfonietta in the UK première of No. 50 (The Garden) by Richard Ayres, a composer whose playful, surreal sensibility cheerfully jettisons any idea of music as an end in itself.

Wednesday

Tanya Gold

Top brass

Bellamy’s is a Franco-Belgian brasserie in Bruton Place, a dim alley in the charismatic part of Mayfair; the part that has not been ruined. There isn’t much you can do with an alley except blow it up. It feels like a survivor from a more ancient time: 2004. Its rivals from that time are broken or gone. Annabel’s is now enormous. The Ivy is a franchise like KFC. The new generation of fashionable restaurants have glittering statuary by cretinous artists, professional PRs and spin. They are ideas. What use is an idea when you want three courses of French–Belgian cuisine for £29.50 a head in central London? Bellamy’s is named