London

The best restaurants in Chelsea

Chelsea is a rarefied end of town. The old streets behind Cheyne Walk and around the Physic Garden are some of London’s most charming, while the King’s Road has for a long time been known as the place to be seen. When it comes to restaurants, cheap eats are fewer and further between than other parts of London, but with hefty prices often comes quality. There’s a notable focus on organic produce and the countryside – possibly testament to Chelsea’s proximity to the M4 headed west. A few of the UK’s best known chefs have set up shop in the area and Chelsea is home to some of the city’s

Low life | 12 April 2018

A pair of anti-terrorism officers watched us check through into the boarding lounge. They stood behind the easyJet woman and took us in as we came through. One was about 30, the other about 40; both hard as nails. The younger did the Speedy Boarders; the other the common herd. What was remarkable about them, apart from their being there at all, was their Zen-like stillness and the slow economy of their eye movements. The check-in desk was a maelstrom of anxiety and pocket fumbling and the easyJet woman was working both queues like an acrobat. And there, just beyond, were these two very still individuals who appeared to be

Amused and confused

Tibor Fischer has a track record with humour. His first novel, the Booker shortlisted Under the Frog, takes its title from a Hungarian saying that the worst possible place to be is ‘under a frog’s arse down a coal mine’. And he also has form with being a bit meta: his third novel, The Collector Collector, was narrated by an earthenware pot. Here he throws his weight behind a character who feels like he’s walked off the set of Brass Eye or Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. It’s not entirely clear whether we are supposed to loathe him or sympathise with him. Baxter Stone is a filmmaker whose best days are

London is open – but its young people are dying

We are not even halfway into 2018 and yet 50 people have died on London’s streets. For families who have lost loved ones, this is another incident; another number added to the list. The knife and gun crime epidemic has got out of control. Mayor Sadiq Khan needs to take action and ensure Londoners are safe. Knife and gun crime has been a problem in London since the 1960s. My former headmaster Philip Lawrence died after trying to help a pupil outside St George’s school in Maida Vale. That happened over twenty years ago. He was a victim of knife crime, stabbed to death by a 16-year-old. Young people have been carrying knives for

How Soho became so-so

Sometimes I fret that Soho House & Co is doing to this column what it does to London. It places its smooth tentacles in my prose and suddenly the column has a pointy beard and is playing table tennis, while doing something monstrous in advertising. But I have no choice. I cannot hide in ghostly seafood bars for ever. (Next time, Bentley’s.) Because now Soho House & Co has invaded Kettner’s, which has duly gone the way of the Odeon West End in Leicester Square, a lovely art deco cinema that these days is only a void. It will become something else — a hotel and maybe a cinema again

Labour’s capital gains

Ever since last year’s general election, when Jeremy Corbyn inspired the strongest Labour surge since 1945, the Conservatives have been unsure if this was a freak occurrence or the start of something bigger. As they have learnt to their cost, opinion polls aren’t as reliable as they once were: only election results matter. There will be plenty next month, with seats on more than 150 councils all over England up for grabs. The Tories are nervous in lots of areas. But what terrifies them is London. The capital has served as the incubator of Corbynism, a brand of politics once laughed off as a niche Islington interest, yet now with

City slacker

According to people at City Hall, Sadiq Khan writes some of his own press releases. I can believe it: they’ve certainly become a lot more excitable since he took over. I like to imagine the Mayor of London, late at night, combing the thesaurus for fresh superlatives to bugle his ‘unprecedented programme of far-reaching improvements’ for the taxi trade (allowing black cabs in more bus lanes) or his ‘bold package of measures’ to revive street markets (creating a London Markets Board and an interactive map). One release even panted that Khan had ‘personally scrutinised’ the New Year’s Eve fireworks display ‘to make the acclaimed event the most exciting yet’. Language

Southend-on-Sea

Standing at the end of Britain’s longest pier, on a cold and misty morning, looking out across the Thames Estuary, I wondered, for the umpteenth time: why do people take the piss out of Southend? It’s got no airs and graces. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. Yet out here, surrounded by still grey sky and still grey water, with only a few seagulls for company, I’m struck by its barren windswept beauty. You’d never guess London was only an hour away. Southend-on-Sea has been a running joke for as long as I can remember. Even the train to London was known as the Misery Line, on account of its

The grand tourist trap

Last week, I was in the Florence Baptistery by 8.30 a.m. That used to be early enough to avoid the crowds and admire the Baptistery’s east doors by Ghiberti — the Gates of Paradise, as Michel-angelo called them. No longer. As I stared at the 13th-century mosaics in the apse and Donatello and Michelozzo’s tomb of Antipope John XXIII, a group of bored Italian teenagers started hugging each other and gossiping on the front pew next to me. It was the same all over town. In the Piazza della Signoria, tourists flocked round the copy of Michelangelo’s David at 8 a.m. Next door, they were queuing to see the Botticellis

The Spectator Podcast: Bad charity

On this week’s episode, we look at the Oxfam aid scandal and whether charities do more harm than good. We also tackle the controversial practice of stop-and-search before sampling some of the alcohol-free delights than might keep you off the booze this Lent. The news cycle for the past week has been dominated by revelations about the charity Oxfam, with senior figures implicated in ‘sex for aid’ bartering in crisis zones. Figures from Minnie Driver to Desmond Tutu have quit roles at the beleaguered charity, but bigger questions are being raised about how foreign aid is spent. In the magazine this week, Harriet Sergeant looks at the behaviour of international charities, whilst

Tel Aviv it ain’t

Café Hampstead is a new café in — big reveal! — Hampstead, the gaudiest of the old villages on the hills around London. Hampstead was once, mysteriously, home to progressives too many to type; refugees from Belsize Park carrying their most precious back copies of the LRB in plastic sacks. Why did they live in Hampstead? What for? They have moved out now, or died, and the truth died with them. We will never know what it was that they thought they wanted, or saw; whether it was always betrayal, or the wife made them do it. You can mock, and I do, but Hampstead is less interesting without them;

Get Carter | 1 February 2018

Das Rheingold at the Royal Festival Hall was, all told, a disappointment, but it might not have been had there been one or two more rehearsals, and a replacement of one of the singers. Vladimir Jurowski plans to perform the whole Ring cycle in due course with the LPO, but he needs to remember that memories are still very fresh indeed of Opera North’s transcendently wonderful performance at the same venue in 2016. That showed, among other things, that you can semi-stage the Ring cycle with some imaginative lighting, a minimum of meaningful movement and no props. This new Rheingold looked, for the first few minutes after the Prelude —

Are young Londoners financially squeezed?

London, along with other capital cities like Singapore, Hong Kong, Kyoto are thought to be one of the most expensive cities to live in the world. So is London Mayor Sadiq Khan, going too far by suggesting that every young Londoner should be entitled to a bank account? The simple logic should be: if you can’t afford to live and work in London, don’t move to London. But I suppose it is not as simple as that, and the good, great and the millennials have been lured to the Capital for studying, family or work reasons. This sort of simple logic might be a tad unreasonable. In the first week

The problem with Britain’s productivity

Britain has a productivity problem – it lags behind Germany, France and the US, even Italy. But what, if anything, do we need to do about it? Over time, says economist Gerard Lyons, productive economies outperform less productive ones, but productivity statistics are not everything. Unskilled people who in Britain are working in less productive sectors of the economy would not have a job at all if they lived in France. There, productivity figures are high – but so too is unemployment. Yet those unskilled workers act as a drag on Britain’s productivity figures. However, Britain can improve its productivity, and therefore its overall economic performance, by moving into higher

Gorge on syrup pud and be glad

Rules looks as if it voted for Brexit, and now finds itself inside an eternal Christmas Eve, where it is always Christmas, and always Brexit. And what a gay Brexit, with swags and flounces and light bouncing through the windows on to Maiden Lane, like a child’s vision of hope. Or is it illusion? Does a chimney contain Arron Banks as Father Christmas with gifts in his sack marked ‘depression’, ‘delusion’ and ‘starvation’? Will he get stuck and go shouty-crackers on Twitter? Is Nigel Farage sipping a pint of lager, pretending to be a good elf? The sort of elf that politically alienated elves can identify with and follow, until

Henrietta without a hairband

Henrietta is a restaurant in a boutique hotel on Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, around the corner from the actors’ church St Paul’s, which is very plain. It is as if, when actors die, their feathers are put away and they die as they really are: plain. As Uncle Monty might say: I choose the Doric. Henrietta Street is full of tall, sad houses — the kind London does so well in fiction and in life. They are grand and desolate; you can imagine misery behind them. This one is red brick and, because it is a boutique hotel, they have tried to build a fairyland behind the façade: wealth and

Armageddon is coming: how real-life employers are preparing for life under Corbyn

Numerous readers told me they liked my recent tale — offered as an antidote to ‘media sniping at corporate capitalism’ — about the temporary school built by Porta-kabin after the Grenfell Tower fire. I’m on the lookout for other business stories that celebrate the positive, and I had it in mind to write about an entrepreneur I’ve known throughout his career who has built an international brand that pleases customers, creates skilled jobs and has carried him through tough times to a fortune. But when we spoke, our conversation took an unexpected turn. Did I realise, he asked, how he and his cohort are beginning to think in relation to

Lionel Shriver

Security overkill is terror’s real triumph

The moment the news broke on Halloween that an Uzbek in a rental truck had just killed eight people on New York’s West Side cycle path, my heart sank. Now, you might think that any decent human being — I marginally qualify — would be profoundly saddened by the pointless murder of folks merely out enjoying a city’s recreational facilities on a crisp autumn day. But that wasn’t it. Or you might think — since I spend a fair whack of the year in New York, where as usual I get everywhere by bike — that I might be concerned about becoming a terrorist target myself. I use that bike

Should the City be sending money into Putin’s banking system?

This is an extract from Martin Vander Weyer’s ‘Any Other Business’ column. In connection with the receding possibility of a London Stock Exchange listing for Saudi Aramco, I wrote that the City authorities’ apparent eagerness to accommodate companies ‘from places not best known for their accounting standards, business probity or general attachment to democracy and the rule of law’ smacked of Brexit-driven desperation. Russia was one of the places I had in mind. Now along comes a listing candidate that rings more alarm bells than the secretive Saudi oil giant. The company concerned is called EN+ Group, and it is the first Russian entity to come to the London market