London

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Un-Italian job

I have been waiting, like a heroine in fiction, for the specialist lasagne restaurant. London has long been heading this way for the benefit of the consumer-simpleton who can only process one piece of information at a time. It is clearly a response to the glut of choice in late capitalism, and so close to Karl Marx’s home in Dean Street that I can almost feel his cackling shadow. Less choice for your aching head, child, but isn’t it really more choice? The choice not to choose? That phenomenon brought us the pop-up Cadbury’s Creme Egg restaurant, which only served food made with Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. Because people are mad,

Alexandra Coghlan

No laughing matter | 9 June 2016

Rossini is the meat-and-two-inappropriately-shaped-veg of summer opera; he’s the wag in the novelty bow tie, the two satyrs shagging enthusiastically among the lupins and lobster on the cover of this year’s Glyndebourne programme. His comic bel canto frolics are the natural soundtrack to this off-duty opera-going, a champagne-perfect combination of frothy plots and fizzing coloratura. So why are they so hard to pull off? Perhaps it’s the pressure of expectation. It has been more than 30 years since Glyndebourne last staged Il barbiere di Siviglia, and hopes were high for Annabel Arden’s new production. For the first half-hour it looks as though they’re going to be met. Enrique Mazzola’s affable,

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Blue plaque blues

Blue plaque spotting is one of the mind-broadening pleasures of British life. A walk to the dentist can be transformed into a serendipitous encounter with a forgotten genius from the past. ‘Luke Howard, 1772–1864, Namer of Clouds, lived and died here,’ says the blue plaque on 7 Bruce Grove, Tottenham. Even if you’ve never heard of Luke Howard, you instantly take a liking to him — and never again will you hear the word ‘cumulonimbus’ without thinking of him. ‘Lived here’ is the key: you’re passing the very house where the person woke up for breakfast each day, and the intimacy of that is what makes the encounter so much

Sara Wheeler

Northern lights | 2 June 2016

‘The only use of a gentleman in travelling,’ Emmeline Lowe wrote in 1857, ‘is to take care of the luggage.’ My sentiments entirely. The extract from Unprotected Females in Norway reprinted in this book recounts Lowe’s travels with her mother round the Dovrefjeld in the centre of the long country. Tramping through the valleys wearing mosquito veils, ‘solid plaid skirts’ and hobnail shoes, the pair reckoned that the only essentials were a driving whip and a fishing rod. Lowe (who published anonymously) is a spirited companion on the verdant plains and the snowy peaks, and her pleasure in the long boreal gloaming leaps infectiously from the page. She and Mother

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Cool and underground

The Keeper’s House sits in the basement of Burlington House, a restaurant in disguise. It is quite different from the grand cafés of St James’s and Mayfair, which are raging exhibitionists with banquettes splayed like limbs. It is secretive and it knows, consciously or not, the tricks of children’s literature: the looking-glass, the wardrobe and the door. It is an 18th-century basement transformed, by magical whimsy, into a restaurant. To visit the loo is a quest for which you need a Gandalf, a hobbit and a lamp. Burlington House looks like an English mansion that stared at Palladio, had a panic attack and exploded. It is clever-clogs land, home to

Michael Henderson

Northern overexposure

‘The shortest way out of Manchester,’ it used to be said, ‘is notoriously a bottle of Gordon’s gin.’ But that was a long time ago, when ‘Cottonopolis’ was the pivot of the Industrial Revolution, the British empire was expanding and life was cheaper. They tend not to drink gin any more in the bars on Deansgate. It’s cocktails, a tenner a pop. The hub of George Osborne’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ is a much-changed city. Now they’re queuing to get in, even though the super-duper HS2 rail link may go no further than Crewe, which is in Cheshire, and only southerners think Cheshire is in the north. Andy Burnham is the latest

Hugh Pearman

Giving Tate Modern a lift

Tate Modern, badly overcrowded, has built itself a £260 million extension to spread everyone about the place more. This means that there are more galleries and other big rooms for various modish activities — 60 per cent more space, they say. It opens on 17 June with a total rehang throughout. But having been shown round the place, I’ve become transfixed by the lifts. When it opened in 2000 they never expected nearly five million visitors a year — which is well down on its 2014 Matisse-driven peak of nearly six million, but still twice as many as it was designed for. So when they called back Swiss architects Herzog

Thursday

Jonathan Meades

Gaudy! Bright! Loud! Fun!

In any epoch most of what is built is mediocre, though we may not realise it at the time because our neophilia persuades us of merit where there is none. Equally, we may fail to distinguish the few exceptions — those instances where architects and builders have ascended to a higher standard of mediocrity or have even escaped its dulling clasp. It takes time for public taste to catch up with architects’ taste. Today, 40 years after brutalism dissipated in an assault of bien-pensant hostility and oil crises, few weeks pass without a new book or blog hymning its sublimity, energy and gravity. It is, of course, all a bit

Peter Jones

How Rome did immigration

Last week it was suggested that the questions asked of London mayor Sadiq Khan had nothing to do with racism, but more with multiculturalism. As St Ambrose could have said, ‘If you live in Rome, live in the Roman way; if elsewhere, as they do there.’ Until the large-scale irruption of Germanic tribes fleeing the Huns in the 4th century AD, eventually ending the Roman empire in the West, Romans had been fairly relaxed about immigrants, temporary or permanent. Many came under compulsion: hostages, prisoners of war and slaves, this last group keeping wages low across a range of service industries. Rome itself actively welcomed foreign doctors and teachers, while lawyers, diplomats,

The Spectator

Bus battles

From ‘The softening of street manners’, The Spectator, 20 May 1916: Generally the public opinion of the ’bus entirely upholds the conductor. The influence of the tyrant is too strong to allow of protest, but now and then cases of rebellion occur, and bold females who consider themselves slighted vow that they will write to the company. But an ordinary ’bus-load contains no such heroines…. Sometimes, however, the will of the passengers prevails by reason of unanimity. A few nights ago a drunken soldier got, late at night, into a West End ’bus. The conductor civilly asked him to get out. The man began to argue, and a number of elderly

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Despite rumours to the contrary, the high-speed loco has left the drawing board

There’s a lot of negativity around HS2, and I sniff a Brexit connection. You might think Leave campaigners whose aim is to boost British self-belief would promote the idea that we have a talent for grands projets such as the Olympic Park and Crossrail, rather than a propensity to deliver half what’s promised at double the cost. But there’s also an overlap between Tory MPs opposed to the northbound high-speed rail link, usually because it bisects their constituencies, and Tory MPs opposed to the government on the EU referendum. So I suspect that’s where the trouble lies. The spin is that cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood is reviewing the project

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Soho in Somerset

It is summer and the listless metropolitan thinks of grass. It cannot afford to stay at Durslade Farmhouse, Somerset, a branch of the Hauser & Wirth art gallery that serves food and plays cow noises in a former barn as authentic country folk rip their eyeballs out. Locals talk about Durslade Farm as a child that died. I think it is a Holocaust memorial for cows, but oblivious. Babington House is the country branch, and it is open to members, their friends, and hotel guests. There is a a spa called the Cowshed that sells ‘Lazy Cow’ and ‘Moody Cow’ beauty products (misogyny masquerading as irony), a restaurant and a

Dot Wordsworth

Sadiq Khan’s virtues

The new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said he wanted ‘the most transparent, honest and accessible administration London has ever seen’. It sounds lovely, especially if the Underground is cheap too. Mr Khan’s are a very 21st-century triad of virtues, though honest might sound old-fashioned. It would once have appeared on a housemaid’s reference: ‘Diligent, sober and honest’, i.e. not lazy, drunken and thieving. We now grow sceptical of politicians who begin replies by saying ‘To be honest’ (as if this was a rare departure). Honesty once measured outward respectability, as reflected in a Tudor description of Eton as ‘an honest Colege of sad Priestes, with a greate nombre of

Kate Webb

One day, two lonely people

Twenty-four long hours, two lonely people, one city in decline. This is the premise of A.L. Kennedy’s new novel Serious Sweet, a work full of anger at what has happened to London since the Thatcher revolution and concern for the city’s isolated, impotent inhabitants. Kennedy’s representative Londoners are Jon, a divorced and fusty civil servant, a ‘passed over man’ plagued by failure, and Meg, a bankrupt accountant and recovering alcoholic who jokes at her own expense that she is ‘Fine: Fucked-up Insecure Neurotic and Emotional’. The novel takes in many contemporary bugbears — the loss of civility, state snooping on private lives, misogyny and child abuse — but like the

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 5 May 2016

London’s other mayor How many people could name the capital’s other mayor, the Lord Mayor of London? The office, officially renamed the Lord Mayor of the City of London in 2006 to avoid confusion with the Mayor of Greater London, was instituted in 1189 and has been an elected office since 1215 — albeit only by the votes of representatives of livery companies. The current holder, elected last Michaelmas, is Jeffrey Evans, fourth Baron Mountevans, a shipbroker. The mayoralty was Evans’s second election victory last year; in July he won the election to replace the third Viscount Tenby as a crossbench hereditary peer. Top tips The government said it would

Henry Jeffreys

Beware the Lycra louts

Spring is here and the air is alive with the sound of sweaty manmade materials rubbing together, as middle-aged cyclists fill every road, dressed head to toe in Lycra. They whizz along, jumping red lights, weaving in and out of the path of trucks, screaming at pedestrians and taxi drivers; barely evading death three times a morning. Lycra isn’t just a fabric; it’s a state of mind. At work, these often portly, always angry, red-faced individuals might be mild-mannered middle managers who work in marketing. But in their cycling kit they are superheroes who happen to swear a lot. The double Olympic champion Laura Trott was once asked to help

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Tea and honesty

We recently moved -offices from Canary Wharf to Blackfriars bridge. When you move after a long time in one place, you notice the surprising ways in which your behaviour is subliminally affected by your surroundings. On my second day in the new office, someone came from Victoria to meet me. After about 25 minutes of useful conversation, I thanked them and they left. Something about the encounter seemed strange; I suddenly realised that, back in the old office, I’d never had such brief meetings. Instinctively it felt discourteous to give anyone who had made the longer trip to Canary Wharf any less than 45 minutes of your time. This sense

Misti Traya

The axeman next door

When I moved to London, my husband Henry gave me a copy of Kate Fox’s Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour. He was hoping the gift would avoid an awkward conversation about our cultural differences. As an American, I cannot think of anything more English than that. Fox’s chapter about introductions bothered me. The brash American approach: ‘Hi, I’m Bill from Iowa,’ particularly if accompanied by an outstretched hand and a beaming smile, makes the English wince and cringe. I had never known friendliness to be cringeworthy. I felt sorry for Bill from Iowa. I pictured him arriving in my neighbourhood and being scorned for enthusiastically introducing

Monday

Toby Young

Is it ‘Islamophobic’ to draw attention to Sadiq Khan’s links with extremists?

Zac Goldsmith came in for a fair amount of criticism yesterday after writing a piece in the Mail on Sunday that, among other things, pointed out that Sadiq Khan criticised Labour’s decision to suspend Ken Livingstone in 2006 when he compared a Jewish Evening Standard journalist to a Nazi concentration camp guard. Reviewing the papers on Marr, Owen Jones called it ‘another example’ of a ‘poisonous’ and ‘disgraceful’ campaign that had tried to brand Khan as an extremist simply because he’s a Muslim. He called it ‘an attempt to tap into anti-Muslim prejudice’ and urged Conservatives to tackle Islamophobia as vigorously as his own party is tackling anti-Semitism. But is

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Lost in Piccadilly

Batman owned the Criterion in The Dark Knight, but could he do anything about British Telecom? Savini at Criterion, an Italian restaurant, waited four months for an internet connection and telephone line as they prepared to launch this year; when it arrived they gave BT what must be the worst review in the history of telecommunications: ‘This wouldn’t happen in Italy.’ It ruined the launch, they said. They couldn’t invite actors, except by pigeon post. And because actors are, in restaurant marketing terms, signposts — and they do look like signposts, specifically Monagasque signposts — no one knew Savini was there. It has no constituency. It is George Galloway, who