London

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

Monday

Steerpike

Behind the scenes at the Extinction Rebellion protest

People are protesting on the streets of London again. But this time it’s got nothing to do with Brexit. Instead, activists belonging to campaign group Extinction Rebellion have attempted to bring London to a standstill today by blocking roads as part of what the group says is the ‘last best shot at survival’. Some of those Mr Steerpike bumped into in Parliament Square are certainly setting the bar high for what they want to achieve. As well as saving the planet, green protesters hope to replace ‘the complete and utter joke of democracy’ with citizens’ assemblies in the next six years. By 2025, some of those taking to the streets also want to

Thursday

Mark Mason

The Connaught

You may have noticed the Connaught a little more since 2011, when ‘Silence’, the steamy fountain by Japanese ‘architect philosopher’ Tadao Ando, was installed outside the entrance. But actually the hotel doesn’t want to be noticed. It prides itself on guaranteeing famous guests their privacy. Eric Clapton added his own layer of protection by checking in as ‘Mr W.B. Albion’ (he’s a West Brom fan). Alec Guinness valued its discretion, and was annoyed when Jack Nicholson’s stay during the filming of Batman attracted the paparazzi. The hotel in turn had its own issues with Jack and his entourage. As the star put it to a friend: ‘They have a shit fit

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Garlic and easy listening

I grew up in south-west London in the 1970s when Italian restaurants had exposed brick walls and paper tablecloths in red and white squares and giant pepper pots and were owned by people called Franco who slapped your father on the back. The lasagne came in individual dishes, oozing deep red tomato sauce so hot it stuck to the edges of the dish and burnt your tongue. You cried the first time, but not again, because you loved Spaghetti Junction more than your own home. The perfect Italian restaurant was fixed for me then, in 1979, and that was it, because restaurants are about joy, not food. And so I

Thursday

Peter Jones

Testing teachers’ limits

Next year the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) will offer one degree, in design, technology and the humanities, to teach students to solve ‘complex problems’ like (they suggest) knife crime. Really? The key to problem solving is the development of two essential faculties — the imaginative and the critical. Can LIS really teach for those — or just how to pass exams? The philosopher Seneca insisted that the search for what really counted (his example was virtue) ‘cannot be delegated to someone else’. He illustrated it by telling the story of Calvisius Sabinus, who had the brains and bank account of the Roman equivalent of Sir Philip Green. His memory was

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Ducks and bills

Imperial Treasure is a restaurant in the part of St James’s where Leopold von Hoesch, the German ambassador to George V, buried his dog Giro after Giro electrocuted himself by eating a cable. (Everyone is a food critic. Giro was merely an unlucky one.) And this seems apt. Because it’s rare to see people in St James’s these days. Dog bones and tourists and BBC crews shooting dramas in which actors are spying or arguing about politics are multiple. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Benedict Cumber-batch pretending to be Liz Truss pretending to be Josip Tito. But not real people. They have all gone, presumably to Zone

Monday

Matthew Lesh

Sadiq Khan is wrong about rent control

Rent control would worsen London’s housing crisis while hurting the poor, immigrants, and minorities. Yet Sadiq Khan wants to make it the central plank of his bid to win re-election as London Mayor. Khan has said the case for rent control is ‘overwhelming’ and that ‘Londoners overwhelmingly want it to happen’. But while some may see rent control as a way of capping the money going into the pockets of landlords, it would actually make London’s problems worse. Rent control would lead to less home building—what London actually needs. On top of that it will mean lower quality housing and discrimination against the most vulnerable. From San Francisco to Stockholm, Berlin and New York, rent

Thursday

Anthony Horowitz

Diary – 24 January 2019

Will I be allowed to take my dog to Europe after 29 March? A trivial question, you might think, in these feverish times, but one that might be an indicator of what the EU thinks of us and how/if they’re going to make us pay for leaving. I took Boss, my Battersea rescue, across France this Christmas and it couldn’t have been easier. The dog was barely noticed on the way out and given a fast, friendly check on the way back. Why should anything change? A pet on the road doesn’t get extra germs just because of the colour of its passport and yet nobody has any idea what’s

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Is cannabis driving us crazy?

Fewer people are smoking cannabis these days, down to 1.4 million from two million, they say. I say, if you believe that, you’re high. Arrests, prosecutions and the issuing of ‘cannabis warnings’ might be down — but then, I’ve seen the police quite deliberately look away from dope smokers on the street. Weed is everywhere. I’m sure of this, because the smell of the city has changed. A decade ago, as I cycled across town, the dominant scent was diesel. There were also wafts of tobacco from the fag-break gang and the odd drift of ground coffee. Ten years later both the cigarettes and the diesel have faded. There’s the

Thursday

Tanya Gold

A great Venetian confection

Caffè Concerto is a chain of Italian cafés sprouting, lividly, across London and the world. There is one on Piccadilly, one on Regent Street, and one on the Haymarket. There is one in Birmingham, and one in Westfield. (The precise address is an ungaudy unit 2000a, but presumably it is hidden behind florist-ry). There is one in Qatar. There is one in Saudi Arabia. There isn’t one in Venice, although the website has a photograph of Venice. It’s too Venetian for Venice. The style is very Italian, in that it is a combination of great style and no style at all. (Not bad style. Just an absence, something forgotten or

Thursday

Ian Kelly

Riots in the stalls

The age of Garrick, Norman Poser, a law professor, insists, gave us much of what we take for granted today in the theatre: ‘naturalistic’ acting, and, as Dr Johnson remarked, the very idea of the business of acting as a profession. Hence this book’s portentous title. Its curtain raiser trumpets themes of fame, personality, interiority and cultural self-knowledge, but regrettably Poser’s main show offers a trawl through anecdotes in a style and structure more wooden than the monopedal comic actor Sam Foote’s peg leg. Naturalism in acting, it is often said, originated in this era. But it’s a subject as large as it’s slippery. There is limited source material on

Thursday

Taki

High life | 4 October 2018

To London for much too brief a visit: a marriage, lunch with Commodore Tim Hoare, and a look-see for a house. Yes, I am returning to live in London, but under one condition. It’s called Corbyn, and if he comes in, I’ll stay away. It’s rather cowardly, I know, but I did live in London during the closed shops of the early 1970s. I experienced the joys of the three-day week, the uncollected rubbish, the hospitals without electricity, and the unions exercising power over the government until a certain Margaret Thatcher put a stop to it. I find it hard to understand how people can root for Labour when the

Thursday

James Yorke

Home at last

The Travellers Club was founded in 1819 to provide congenial surroundings for those who had ‘travelled outside the British Islands to a distance of 500 miles from London in a direct line’, and opportunities to meet distinguished foreign visitors. As it nears its bicentenary, John Martin Robinson has produced a thorough, scholarly and highly readable biography on an institution that has served among other things as the ‘Foreign Office Canteen’ and a refuge for derring-do adventurers. The Club’s members included royalty, dukes, ambassadors and explorers, not to mention aesthetes, artists and even authors, despite Anthony Powell’s claims to the contrary. Explorers included Lt Col William Leake, who surveyed the Nile

Thursday

Rory Sutherland

The weird world of Silicon Valley

Which is more diverse: London or Devon? That’s not a trick question. London is much more diverse than Devon. But let’s tweak the question slightly. Which is more diverse: a pub in London or a pub in Devon? Here the answer is not so easy. Though low in ethnic diversity, a pub in Devon might contain a more representative mix of ages, educational backgrounds, earnings, wealth, sexual proclivities and political opinions than a pub in central London. London, for all its vaunted diversity, is a place where you can practise extreme homophily — spending your time exclusively with people nearly identical to you. People largely socialise with contemporaries from work.

Thursday

Jenny Coad

Battersea Power Station

Battersea Power Station once generated nearly a fifth of London’s power. It must have hummed and clanked almost as much as it does today while its transformation proceeds noisily. Graphic prints of it are two a penny across the capital, but I’m fond of them because the power station is my near neighbour. I still thrill to glimpse it framed by rows of Victorian semis, especially now that the new chimneys are lit dramatically at night, red crane lights dotted about them like a spiky ruby crown. Across the world it has celebrity status, thanks to the cover of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album Animals. The band’s inflatable pink piggy caused

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Back to the Eighties

I wouldn’t normally visit Coq d’Argent, which I think means the chicken of money. It is a moderately famous restaurant in a pink and brown tower in the City of London, once owned, as so much has been, by Sir Terence Conran, and now by D&D, specialists in soulless food barns. As restaurants go, it feels unlucky. It has — how to put this? — a circular roof garden from which people sometimes throw themselves off. One was a restaurant critic, but his last meal was not at Coq d’Argent. That was at Hawksmoor in Spitalfields. He had good taste, then, and he quoted Samuel Johnson on Twitter as he