London

Sunday

Tali Fraser

Is Sadiq Khan paying the political price of Covid?

When the London Mayoral election was delayed due to the pandemic, no one was particularly outraged: the prospect of Sadiq Khan’s re-election seemed secure and Shaun Bailey, the Tory challenger, was nowhere to be seen. But that might be changing. Internal polling by the Tory party, leaked to the Telegraph, suggests that Londoners have not been best pleased at the city’s recent fate – and Bailey is only seven points behind, at 35 to Khan’s 42 per cent. This is quite the difference from a March YouGov poll putting Bailey at a fairly hopeless 23 per cent. It’s not that Bailey has been much more visible – but it’s easy

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

A perfect luncheon wine

I suspect, though this may be romanticising, that if a French lorry driver with hitherto suppressed culinary tastes won France’s national lottery, and booked a table at the local much-rosetted restaurant, he would know what to expect. A great chain of culinary being would connect him to the heights of gourmandisme. In the UK, we lack a gastronomic tradition. As a result, when it comes to assessing food, inspissated snobbery often takes the place of inspired gluttony. There are superb chefs: Gordon Ramsay, Marco Pierre White, the Roux family. But there are also instances of pretentiousness: no names, no pack drill. These characters forget that the glory of a good

Thursday

William Moore

The joy of commuting

I was on a train from Sussex to London, my first since lockdown, when I realised I like my commute. The thought worried me a little. What kind of weirdo have I become? A commute is a psychological hurdle, something to be endured, not enjoyed. What’s next? The giddy thrill of waiting in a queue? A root-canal fan club? There are some aspects to commuting I don’t enjoy — the expense of a season ticket, of course, and frustrating delays — but overall, yes, I do like it. And during lockdown I actually missed it. What makes my enjoyment even weirder is that I have no interest in trains. There

Thursday

Tanya Gold

A great Dane: Snaps + Rye reviewed

Snaps + Rye is a Nordic-themed restaurant and delicatessen on the Golborne Road, at the shabby and thrilling edges of Notting Hill, just north of the Westway, a road I uncomplicatedly love, probably because it takes me from Notting Hill to places I like better. Notting Hill fell to gentrification long ago — it gasps with boredom — but here London feels like a real city, though only just. ‘This home is not a shop,’ says a sign in a nearby window, with as much feeling as signage can muster. Or should muster. ‘Nothing is for sale.’ It is a bitter time for restaurants and those who love them. Nearby,

Thursday

Joanna Lumley

The joy of eating birdseed

Rather like unpacking after a holiday, when you take unworn clothes from the case still neatly folded because the occasion to wear them didn’t arise, unshown film sequences from my travel programmes are carefully edited and stored. The cancellation of this year’s long trip along the Spice Route made us look at these stories again; with not much prompting we have made three whole programmes from them. In the few years since we made these series the world has changed. The champion wrestler in Mongolia, the softly spoken Mr Battulga, for example, has become president of that country. He told me of his plan to build an eco-city on the

Gerard Lyons

London in limbo: can the capital survive this crisis?

We should worry about what is happening to London. Our capital is, after all, the country’s economic powerhouse. It accounts for just under a quarter of Britain’s GDP. In fact, three of its now most deserted locations — the City, the West End and Canary Wharf — account collectively for an eighth of the nation’s output. There is a danger that short-term damage to London’s economy could become permanent unless the right steps are taken. This was supposed to be the week when things would start returning to some sort of normality, as the government encouraged more people to go back to the office. Yet uncertainty prevails. The announcement last

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Stringfellows with fish instead of women: Sexy Fish reviewed

Sexy Fish is an Asian fusion barn in Berkeley Square, near the car dealerships and the nightingales, if they are still alive. It used to be a bank — NatWest! — and it still feels like it cares for nothing but money, even as it deals in sticky chicken, which means a good deal more than money to chickens. I wonder whether the blazing vulgarity of such restaurants — it has a large mirrored crocodile crawling up the wall, and that is the subtle part — will survive the terror of Covid-19, or whether it will go the way of the Russian Tea Room in New York City, which is

Wednesday

Robert Jackman

The best commuter boltholes within 90 minutes of London

With flexible working set to increase after the coronavirus, more Londoners will be in the market for a commuter bolthole. While the likes of Guildford have been drawing in commuters for decades, experts predict that we’ll see new hotspots emerge in coming years. ‘With the adoption of new working practices, people are realising how easy it is to work from home,’ says Philip Harvey, a senior partner with the consultancy Property Vision. ‘As a result the “golden hour” – the name given to the old commute – has been pushed to 90 minutes, or even two hours,’ he says, predicting that the Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire borders will be increasingly

Thursday

Aidan Hartley

Our exile in NW1

Laikipia The sweetest sound to me now is the dawn chorus of birdsong at home on the farm. I lay awake in bed and listened, as a light rain fell on the coconut thatch above me. When I walked out into the garden the three dogs burst out of the house to go off exploring. While I made coffee in the kitchen, our cats Omar and Bernini rubbed against my legs until I fed them and then in walked Long John Silver the orphaned calf, looking for a bowl of milk. I headed out to the crush where the herds were coming in to be dipped. Cattle were mooing, the

Monday

Olivia Potts

16 food delivery services to try in London

London feels very different from the city it was a few weeks ago. Restaurants are closed, the tubes are empty save for key workers, and Soho is a ghost town. We can’t eat out, or go to bars or pubs; many are struggling to get hold of even basic supplies, like eggs and flour. But a number of food businesses have shown extraordinary tenacity, ingenuity and spirit in the way they have dealt with the daily changes to our lockdown situation, manipulating their business models, and pivoting to delivery services. We’ve collated a list of independent food stores or producers who are delivering in London at the moment. Please visit

Saturday

Lionel Shriver

Cyclists have become an easy police target

Most Britons assume at the outset that any misfortune involving a cyclist is the cyclist’s fault. After all, many a two-wheeled hellion has earned contempt. But put aside the understandable cynicism. This is not one of those stories. A week ago, I was cycling around Buckingham Palace while some low-key royal whatnot was pending but not under way. The vicinity was closed to traffic but not to bikes. As usual, I was heading for Hyde Park Corner via Constitution Hill, because the bike path on the right-hand side in Green Park is insensibly ‘shared use’ — meaning, teeming with pedestrians, and I see no point in our inconveniencing one another.

Monday

Dr Roger Henderson

How to avoid catching coronavirus on the tube

The epicentre of coronavirus – now more correctly called COVID-19 – remains in mainland China, and concerns about a global pandemic occurring have fortunately not been realised although in this fast-changing story this still remains a possibility in the coming weeks. The first death in Europe was recently reported in France, with nine documented cases in the UK. The advice from Public Health England if you have been in Wuhan or the Hubei Province in the last 14 days is that you should stay indoors and avoid contact with other people, like you would for flu, even if you do not have any symptoms. If you develop symptoms, call NHS

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Sumptuous, remote – and forgettable: Locket’s reviewed

Locket’s is a new café from the owners of Wiltons in Jermyn Street. Wiltons is the restaurant that dukes visit when they have fallen out with White’s. It has a sign featuring a lobster that looks like Benjamin Disraeli wearing a top hat. When a bomb fell nearby in 1942, its anxious owner immediately sold it to the banker Olaf Hambro, who was sitting at the bar, by adding the price of the restaurant to his bill. It appeared, thinly disguised, in Jeffrey Archer’s First Among Equals as Walton’s, in which a fictional Tory minister plots the seduction of a woman called Amanda. I like Wiltons, even if the female

Lara Maiklem

A river of lost souls: the extraordinary secrets of the Thames

If you spend enough time on the Thames, you will eventually come across human remains. It is a river of lost souls, filled with suicides, battles, burials, murders and accidents, with people so poor their families couldn’t afford to bury them, or so destitute they were never missed. Their bones wash up on the foreshore in the drifts of smooth, honey-brown animal bones, the remains of 2,000 years of dining and feasting. I know this because I am a mudlark and I’ve found my fair share of lost and forgotten Londoners. Mudlarking is best described as a hobby for the archaeologically curious. Twice a day, the tidal Thames falls low

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

What exactly is a narwhal?

A point that many people mentioned amid the horror and heroism of the attack at London Bridge was the enterprising use of a narwhal tusk taken from the wall of Fishmongers’ Hall to belabour the murderous knifeman. I am surprised to find that the first person known to use narwhal in English was good old Sir Thomas Browne, in the discussion of unicorns’ horns in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Erroures, where he correctly declares that ‘those long Horns preserved as pretious rarities in many places, are but the teeth of Narhwales’. Narwhal tusks are spirally grooved, and Browne observed that the long horn preserved in his day at St

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Who are we kidding – of course terror is a political issue

It was pleasing to see that old clip of Gerry Adams endorsing Jeremy Corbyn re-emerge, just before the acts of carnage were carried out at London Bridge. It reminded us all, should we have needed to be reminded, of Jeremy’s genial relationship with terrorists who murder British citizens (or indeed Israeli citizens). The question, I suppose, is: will it sway any opinions? You would doubt it, such is the kind of deranged certitude in which the his supporters bask, where everything bad about Mr Corbyn has actually been made up by Boris Johnson, or people like me. Even as the first reports of the atrocity were coming in, Corbyn’s Momentum

Thursday

Peter York

The man who built Britain’s first skyscraper

In 2011 Britain’s first skyscraper was finally given Grade I listing. The citation for 55 Broadway — the Gotham City-ish home of Transport for London, which sprouts up from St James’s Park Station — said that the building was important in a number of ways: its architect Charles Holden, the designer of Senate House and a range of breakthrough modernist Tube stations in the 1930s, was increasingly recognised as major. The building’s scale and structure were pioneering for London in 1929. And the sculpture on its otherwise plain façades was by important artists including Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill and the young Henry Moore (his first work on a public building

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