London

Monday

Camilla Swift

What is the T-charge, and how might it affect you?

The T-charge – short for Toxicity Charge – comes into force in central London today. It’s part of the London mayor, Sadiq Khan’s, plan to improve air quality in the capital, and it mainly applies to vehicles registered before 2006. Rather than banning ‘high polluting vehicles’, he hopes that the charges will discourage people from driving into central London. The Green Party’s Jenny Jones today urged the London mayor Sadiq Khan to make sure that the revenues from the T-charge are used to improve public transport, and encourage people to opt for the bus or tube instead of their cars. But in reality, that’s not going to happen. Why? Khan

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Raw materials

‘Art by its very essence is of the new… There is only one healthy diet for artistic creation: permanent revolution.’ Jean Dubuffet wrote those words in 1963, and when Jean-Michel Basquiat burst on to the New York art scene 20 years later — barely out of his teens, untrained and black — he seemed to embody them. Together with his friend Al Diaz, he had grabbed attention in the late 1970s with a campaign of cryptic graffiti signed SAMO© targeted on the SoHo gallery district. Born to middle-class Haitian-Puerto Rican parents in the South Bronx, Basquiat didn’t waste time tagging trains. He knew the value of location; his dad was

Thursday

Hugh Pearman

Lost in the metropolis

Richard Rogers is to architecture what Jamie Oliver is to cookery. It is not enough for either of them just to be very good at what they do and to bank the proceeds: they want so much more. They want to use their skills and money to improve society more broadly. They are old-school campaigning idealists (and Oliver trained in the kitchen at the River Café, run by Rogers’s equally committed wife, Ruthie). The downside of being a do-gooder in the UK, of course, is that people can find you irritating. Just because you and a mate (Renzo Piano) won the competition in 1971 for the Pompidou Centre in Paris

Tuesday

David Sinclair

In banning Uber, London is fighting the future

For the last ten months I have been working as an Uber driver in London. It is an amazing company to work for. Totally flexible, constantly innovative, fair and prompt in its payments. I’ve driven old people, youngsters, businessmen, drunks, choirgirls, cancer patients, a woman about to give birth, athletes (fit and injured) and visitors from every corner of the globe all over our great capital without any problem. It is a fantastic social enabler for anyone on a budget in the metropolis. And I’ve found it to be a perfectly fair and reasonable provider of income for self-employed, self-motivated people, such as myself. I first started working in London

Friday

Ross Clark

Sadiq Khan has kowtowed to the protectionists over Uber

Let’s face it, the decision today by TfL not to renew Uber’s licence to operate in London has not come about ultimately as a result of genuine concerns over passenger safety. It is a protectionist move to promote the business interests of London’s black cab drivers and to satisfy the unions and other left-wing activists who have latched onto Uber as a cause célèbre in their efforts to stamp out flexible ways of working. I don’t know much of what goes on the back rooms of Labour party HQ but it is fascinating that the decision has come to be made on the same day that it was announced that

Thursday

Sabuhi Gard

When is the best time to exit the London property market?

Owning a property in Central London is a dream for some, but a burden for others – if you are an accidental landlord, that is. An accidental landlord? But that I mean you were lucky enough to buy a property 20 years ago, then decided to move out of London – and were left wondering what to do with it. Rent it out? Sell it? Only a mad man would want to sell a property in London? Right. Wrong. Recent figures from property website Rightmove showed that this year, asking prices for homes in London have recorded their biggest annual fall so far this decade – having dropped on average by £18,000

Saturday

Nick Cohen

The Thames Water monopoly needs to be challenged

Enough has been written about a Conservative government that knows its electoral success depends on Britain remaining a property-owning democracy, yet offers nothing beyond token gestures to stop the young being priced out of home ownership. Enough, too, has been said about graduates being overcharged, pensioners soaking up the largesse of the tax and benefit systems, the failure to upgrade infrastructure, the obesity crisis, and all the other problems that can’t be tackled because of half-thought-through Tory prejudices. Allow me instead to concentrate on the scandal of the privatised water industry. Journalists and academics have been banging on for what feels like an age about an ‘organised rip-off’, to use

Thursday

Michael Hann

Northern rock

A fortnight ago, the debut album by a young British guitar band entered the chart at No. 6. You might have expected to see this pored over with some interest by the press, for whom the search for the New Arctic Monkeys, the New Oasis and the New Smiths has long been a matter of urgency. Instead, you will scour the daily newspaper arts pages in vain for mentions of the Sherlocks, and you won’t fare much better looking at the specialist music magazines. According to the self-anointed tastemakers of British pop, they might as well not exist. That’s because the Sherlocks are representatives of a growing trend in British

Thursday

Paul Levy

Pleasure palaces and hidden gems

Theatre buildings are seriously interesting – as I ought to have appreciated sooner in the course of 25 years writing about theatre and opera. This coffee-table whopper, weighing in at just under a kilo, dazzles: Michael Coveney’s text is even better than Peter Dazeley’s remarkable photographs. And in a luminous foreword, Mark Rylance sets out the not-so-obvious difference between theatre and cinema: ‘In a theatre you need to hear the truth. In a cinema you need to see it.’ Most of the theatre audience can’t see the actor’s eyes, and have to rely on hearing emotion in the voice and, to a lesser extent, detecting emotion in body language. Hence

Thursday

Tanya Gold

A perfect feast with Roger Allam

J Sheekey is one of Richard Caring’s older, and better, restaurants. Since he has dowsed the suburbs of London in multiple outposts of the Ivy (there is one in Wimbledon, another in Richmond and presumably one pending in Penge), J Sheekey increasingly feels like an island in a sea of pointlessly aspirational green. The rise of the Ivy — the original celebrity brasserie, which is code for an indifferent restaurant full of awful people eating shepherd’s pie — is an inevitable consequence of the rise of celebrity culture. This is anti–culture, and the Ivy is, therefore, an anti–restaurant. So many celebrities, and now so many Ivys to put them in.

Saturday

Martin Vander Weyer

Forget London’s lost Garden Bridge: bring on Nine Elms-to-Pimlico instead

I can’t work up much indignation at the collapse of London’s Garden Bridge project, which has been strangled by the refusal of mayor Sadiq Khan to guarantee its continuing operational and maintenance costs — assuming its trustees, led by former banker and minister Lord Davies of Abersoch, would have succeeded in raising the £150 million of private capital required to build the bridge and plant its 270 trees in the first place. Promoted by Joanna Lumley and Sadiq’s predecessor Boris Johnson, this was a beautiful but whimsical idea, placed in an overcrowded stretch of the Thames and based on a ramshackle business plan. In a more confident economic climate it

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Tapas but no phantom

I am always surprised to remember that Andrew Lloyd Webber has taste; it must be remembrance of Cats. I was surprised, for instance, to learn that he once owned Pablo Picasso’s portrait of d’Angel Fernández de Soto, which I always thought of as my Picasso because it looks like my friend Hadrian Wise, who used to come to Merton College bar in his pyjamas. We once rolled a joint as long as The Spectator because he loved The Spectator. High as I was after the Spectator-length joint in 1994, I never thought I would write for it. Neither did he. Now Lloyd Webber, whose masterpiece is Phantom of the Opera,

Monday

Camilla Swift

How one London junction is raking in fines of £200,000 per day

Driving in central London is a minefield at the best of times. What with the confusion of the congestion charge zone, one-way streets at every turn, cyclists all over the place and it being nigh-on impossible to park, it’s a wonder that anyone even tries to drive in London. Perhaps this is all a tactic by the Mayor to put off drivers from coming in to the capital. It does seem like a pretty good tactic, to be fair. The latest gripe is about one particular junction in Bank, from which cars are banned, and only buses and bikes are allowed to drive through. However, the rules were only changed

Thursday

Ian Sansom

A choice of first novels | 3 August 2017

Remember Douglas Coupland? Remember Tama Janowitz? Remember Lisa St Aubin de Terán? Banana Yoshimoto? Françoise Sagan? The voice of your generation? (If you’ve forgotten the voice of your generation, the brilliant Christopher Fowler’s forthcoming The Book of Forgotten Authors will provide you with the necessary reminder. The voice of my generation, as far as I’m able to recall, was a poet called Attila the Stockbroker, who we used to go and see perform in Harlow, and who did an excellent Peel session. Whatever the hell happened to Attila the Stockbroker?) Three new debut novels might all properly be acclaimed as representing the voice of their generation — though who knows,

Thursday

Ian Sansom

… trailing strands in all directions

Letters of Intent — letters of the intense. Keen readers of Cynthia Ozick (are there any other kind?) will of course already have copies of the books from which these often fiery essays have been selected. There’s a broad range of work represented here, from personal essays through to Ozick’s often rather profound philosophical enquiries into the meaning of art and religion — though the inclusion of no fewer than five essays on Henry James, two on Kafka, two on Virginia Woolf and two on Saul Bellow might make one wish for a little more breathing room, a little more room to roam. But this is a quibble. This is

Hugh Pearman

Towering extravagance

The Shard is an unnecessary building. Nobody apart from its developer asked for it to be built. Nobody was crying out for a big spike of concrete, steel and glass filled with a mix of superluxury hotel, ultraprime apartments and loads of speculative offices right above London Bridge station, with an expensive viewing gallery as a sop to public accessibility. Had it never happened, we would not regard the air it did not fill as a waste of atmosphere. The Shard is merely a gigantic financial speculation, majority-funded by Qatari money. And yet it is a very good piece of architecture. Its veteran Italian architect, Renzo Piano, succeeded in designing

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Bending London’s listing rules to win Saudi favour smacks of desperation

Now here’s a tricky question. The world’s largest oil company, potentially worth six times as much as ExxonMobil and ten times as much as Royal Dutch Shell, wants to list its shares on a major stock exchange next year, and has indicated that the choice is between London and New York. The company’s initial public offering of just 5 per cent of its shares promises a $100 billion deal that will generate a fee bonanza for bankers, lawyers and PR men in the chosen marketplace, with several more tranches to come. Clearly London should go all-out to win this lucrative and prestigious piece of business, which would reconfirm the City’s

Monday

Rod Liddle

Welcome to the green belt: a safe space for lily-livered Londoners

I am thoroughly enjoying Melissa Kite’s latest, justifiable, gripes which have been provoked by her move out of London. Stuff shuts too early, for a start. And there are signs everywhere telling you what you can and can’t do, officious Lib Dem and Labour parish councillors and a general air of nastiness. Also, they won’t let her ride her horse in the village. I think Melissa’s problem is that she hasn’t moved to the country, but to the faux country. She is in the green belt, and the green belt is crowded and fraught and terrified that it is about to be eaten up by London. Further, its inhabitants are

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Pride of lions

‘Are they all gay too?’ asked my husband, waving the Sunday Telegraph with its headline ‘Pride of Lions’. He had been delayed ​ in traffic in the sun during the Pride in London rally the day before and was still showing signs of confusion. The headline was referring, through a play on words, to the British and Irish Lions’ unexpected draw against the All Blacks. But I was then surprised to discover that pride for a group of lions is ​the resurrection, accomplished in the late 19th century, of a medieval term (deriving from lions as symbols of the sin of pride). It disappeared from English for 400 years, after

Thursday

Laura Freeman

Something nasty in the woodshed

I’ve diagnosed myself with early onset cottage-itis. It’s not supposed to happen for another decade, but at 29 I dream of just the smallest bolthole in the country: a bothy, a gatehouse, a folly below the ha-ha in someone else’s stately home. A shepherd’s hut in tasteful shades of prime ministerial greige. Liberated from the city I would be a nicer, calmer, more industrious person. I would write my magnum opus and be self-sufficient in rhubarb crumble. Every morning when the drills start on the cycle super-highway that will speed the passage of Deliveroo couriers through west London, I put my head in my hands and will myself into a