London

Thursday

Alex Clark

Is no one having fun?

Who’d be young? Not 25-year-old Tamsin, if her behaviour is anything to go by. A classical pianist who’s never quite going to hit the heights, she devotes herself to playing for the residents of an old people’s home. She’s also acquired a boyfriend, Callum, a teacher several years her senior, for whom, when Christmas comes round, she buys an electric vegetable slicer that he’s had his eye on. The couple holiday in a run-down B&B in Ilfracombe. They are not exactly living la vida loca. But Tamsin is also suffering from a kind of arrested development — still occupying her childhood bedroom in Holland Park, where she keeps a watchful

Thursday

Maisie Rowe

Wild things

Mud, timber, junk, fires, splinters, rust, daubed paint… Suddenly people are talking about adventure playgrounds again. With the Turner Prize-nominated collective Assemble constructing a new adventure playground in Glasgow, and their exhibition The Brutalist Playground at Riba, we’re being asked to think again about these ugly but lovable spaces. It was the landscape architect Lady Allen of Hurtwood who saw that in these gloriously chaotic environments — with their dens, walkways, animals, zip wires and cargo nets — children could find a freedom, self-expression and self-determination that is denied to them elsewhere. In 1946, on the way to Norway for a lecture tour, Lady Allen’s plane stopped to refuel in

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Farewell to the City’s stroppy regulator: a modest sop for the new bank tax

A City insider at last month’s Mansion House dinner told me the Financial Conduct Authority had become ‘a bit of an embarrassment’ — or rather, that was my bowdlerisation of what he actually whispered. So it comes as no surprise that FCA chief executive Martin Wheatley has resigned, having been told by the Chancellor that his contract would not be renewed. A former London Stock Exchange director and Hong Kong securities regulator, Wheatley has a knack of making enemies: Hong Kong investors, unhappy with his handling of alleged misselling of Lehman Brothers ‘minibonds’, once burned a funeral effigy of him outside his office. London bankers didn’t quite go that far,

Thursday

Philip Clark

The London ear

The opening bars of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s A London Symphony (1914) are scooped out from the gloopy bedrock of the city. Vaughan Williams was dredging through the same mud, silt, slime and ooze as those scene-setting paragraphs of Our Mutual Friend (1865), where Charles Dickens shows that the real glue binding his book together will be the River Thames. Dickens’s famed ‘boat of dirty and disreputable appearance’ berths Our Mutual Friend in the earth and experience of London. Similarly, Vaughan Williams’s cellos and double basses, which launch his symphony, plod out from the sludge of the river. But, by the time his bucolic Scherzo waddles into view, you could be

Mark Mason

National Busking Day is an insult to real buskers

This Saturday is National Busking Day, a series of events across the country proving that Britain’s arts establishment just don’t get it. The whole point of busking is that it’s free-spirited, independent, individualistic – exactly the sort of enterprise that doesn’t need or want a national day. ‘Let’s take something that lots of people do spontaneously, without any wish to be organised,’ goes the thinking, ‘and then organise it.’ First prize for Not Getting It goes to Gareth Powell of London Underground. ‘Busking on the Underground network,’ he says, ‘has been a rite of passage for London musicians for generations.’ Yes, Gareth – one that they pursued in spite of

Friday

Ed West

We need a Campaign to Protect Urban England

If a political subject is inconvenient to both Left and Right then the chances are that it won’t get addressed, however serious the problem. And so it has been with house-building; we have a desperate need for more homes in this country, but the Tories don’t want to discuss it because the obvious solution is to build more homes in Tory areas where the locals oppose it; Labour don’t like to because the subject of immigration upsets them. More generally both globalist Left and Right, represented by a spectrum encompassing the Economist, Financial Times, City AM, the Times and Guardian, like the idea of an economic model which depends on

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Chelsea carnivores

The Maze Grill is on a sinister street in Chelsea, between a small Tesco — a boutique Tesco? — and a shop selling ugly sculptures of cats. The Chelsea Physic Garden, with its poisoned plants and amazingly posh Sunday walkers, is nearby. I cannot walk in the Physic Garden without hearing the howls of property developers from the skies, longing to destroy it, because what is it for, this garden and its small carnivorous plants, these tiny, dangerous Chelsea-ites? The Maze Grill is the fifth restaurant of that brand from Gordon Ramsay, who operates 25 restaurants globally from Las Vegas to Raqqa, alongside his more important sideline of shouting at

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 2 July 2015

‘The Greek people,’ the Financial Times leading article said on Monday, ‘would be well advised to listen closely to the words of Ms Merkel. The plebiscite will be a vote for the euro or the drachma, no less.’ It is interesting how menacing powerful ‘moderate’ institutions can become when popular feeling challenges them. In the eurozone theology to which the FT subscribes, its statement above cannot be true. It is not possible (see last week’s Notes) for a member state to leave the euro, any more than it is for Wales to renounce sterling. Eurozone membership, once achieved, is a condition of EU membership. So the Greeks cannot vote to

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Picnics

Strange, isn’t it, that despite having such famously terrible weather, we Brits are so fond of a picnic. It’s something to do with making the most of what sunshine we get — but if you ever plan to eat outdoors, it will almost invariably end up raining. Never mind. There’s very little that we’re better at than embracing our terrible weather, and keeping buggering on. This year’s Ascot was, for me, a case in point. Every day of the meet was blessed with excellent weather — except, of course, the one day I went. A person more sensible than I might have looked at the forecast and planned accordingly. I

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Myths and legends

The Ivy is a Playmobil-style faux-medieval restaurant in a triangular building opposite The Mousetrap; of the two, The Ivy is more ancient and threatening. It has mullioned windows, a photogenic lamp post and a parking space for paparazzi to shoot people who want to be shot, as in early Martin Amis novels. It has been refurbished for its 100th birthday, in the manner of an ancient dowager empress seeking new fingers. Of the ‘celebrities’ or ‘notables’ or ‘people who are better than you’ who used to dine here I cannot speak; but apparently it was a live-action re-enactment of a Nigel Dempster diary. Christopher Biggins blah. The pig from Babe blah.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 25 June 2015

Home Tens of thousands took part in a demonstration in London against austerity, and thousands more in other cities. Russell Brand was heckled for being too right-wing: ‘Fuck off back to Miliband,’ protestors in Parliament Square cried. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, explaining his thinking on further benefit cuts: ‘There is what I would call a merry-go-round: people working on the minimum wage having that money taxed by the government and then the government giving them that money back — and more — in welfare.’ The government sold more shares in the Lloyds Banking Group, bringing its ownership to less than 17 per cent. The village bank that appeared in an advertisement

Oliver Lewis

Ten myths about Brexit

  1. Leaving the EU would hurt the UK’s ability to trade with it.   The fearmonger’s favourite argument. But fear not: the global economy has changed dramatically since Britain joined the EU in 1973, seeking entrance to a common market. The World Trade Organisation has brought down tariff rates around the world; even if we didn’t sign a free-trade deal with the EU, we would have to pay, at most, £7.5 billion a year in tariffs for access to its markets. That’s well below our current membership fee. 2. Three million jobs will disappear.   A bogus figure, heard often from the likes of Nick Clegg. It dates back

Tuesday

Sebastian Payne

Constituents give Zac Goldsmith ‘permission’ to run for Mayor of London

Zac Goldsmith is in the race to be the Tory candidate for Mayor of London. After announcing his intention to seek the nomination last week, Goldsmith balloted his constituents in Richmond Park for their permission: 79 per cent of those who responded said he should run, while 18 per cent said no. Although the turnout was just under 26 per cent, it’s still a victory for Goldsmith’s brand of direct democracy. In response to his local referendum, Goldsmith said he’d work ‘tirelessly to repay my constituents’ loyalty’: ‘I am hugely grateful to the residents of Richmond Park and North Kingston for taking part in the ballot, and am overwhelmed by the mandate

Friday

Sebastian Payne

Syed Kamall enters race to be Tory Mayor of London candidate

Syed Kamall, the Conservative leader in the European Parliament, has entered the race to be the party’s Mayor of London candidate. The field now consists of Kamall, Andrew Boff, Sol Campbell, Stephen Greenhalgh, Ivan Massow and Zac Goldsmith, Kamall announced this afternoon he is ‘really excited about the prospect of doing this.’ In a statement announcing his candidacy, Kamall pointed out that he’s a ‘Londoner born and bred’: ‘I look forward to having some robust conversations and debates over the coming months about the issues which affect our city. We need to tackle some of the most important things like housing and transport but we also need to ensure that everyone in our city

Thursday

Ismene Brown

Walking with cadence

I often regret that I’m writing in the past tense here, but never more than about milonga. It is such a smash show in every way that by rights it would be having a six-month run where everyone can see it, rather than five measly days at the elite Sadler’s Wells dance theatre where people aren’t put off by a choreographer’s tripartite name that takes several goes to pronounce. Tango has a way of curdling in show presentation — just to say ‘thrusting loins and stiletto toes’ is already a Strictly-type parody. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is something of an expert cook, however. Uncategorisable except in that mysteriously wide umbrella called

Emily Hill Emily Hill

The green house effect

I write this half-naked, sucking on ice cubes, breaking off sentences to stick my head in the fridge. In the flat below, one neighbour dangles out of her window, trying to reach fresh air, while another keeps having to go to hospital because the heat exacerbates a life-threatening heart condition. We live in a beautiful new development on the banks of the Thames. Fancy pamphlets in our lobby boast of our building’s energy efficiency. In winter, we bask in a balmy 24ºC, without having used the radiators in two years. The insulation in the walls is super-thick; our energy bills are super-low. But from spring to autumn, whatever the weather,

Michael Moorcock

One vast, blaring cultural circus

In the late 1980s Peter Ackroyd invited me to meet Iain Sinclair, whose first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, I had greatly admired. Ackroyd initially knew Sinclair as a poet, author of Lud Heat, an influence on his own wonderful novel Hawksmoor. Passionately interested in London, the three of us began to meet regularly. Sinclair was an admirer of the French situationist Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle) and popularised psychogeography in Britain. In his blending of myth, literature and close social observation, I felt he combined the virtues of Orwell and Pound. Before long, in company with the likes of the rock guitarist Martin Stone, the creator of

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Grills just want to have fun

The Beaumont Hotel is a bright white cake in the silent part of Mayfair, where the only sound is Patek Philippe watches, tick-tocking. We are in the eye of the storm, where it should be quiet; of the cacophony of Selfridges, just to the north, we hear nothing. It is the first hotel from Chris Corbin and Jeremy King, creators of the Delaunay, the Wolseley, Brasserie Zédel and Fischer’s. The façade is so languid, pristine and self-satisfied that it could — no, should — be Swiss, even if it was once an Avis garage wrought in Art Deco. It reminds me of the Beau-Rivage Palace on Lake Geneva, a hotel

Sunday

James Forsyth

Why so many senior Tories want Zac Goldsmith to run for mayor

Over the last few weeks, a string of senior Tories have urged Zac Goldsmith to run for Mayor of London. Goldsmith is, as I report in the Mail on Sunday, regarded by the Tory hierarchy as giving the party the best chance of keeping City Hall blue. In a contest that it will be very difficult for the Tories to win, Goldsmith scrambles the race—what other Tory would get Green second preferences? The attraction of Goldsmith is particularly strong as Nick Ferrari, as Daniel Boffey writes in the Observer, is unlikely to throw his hat in the ring. At the top of the Tory party, there is a belief that

Thursday

Will Gore

His dark materials | 4 June 2015

Have you heard the one about girlfriend-killer Oscar Pistorius not having a leg to stand on? Or what about the Germanwings knock-knock joke? If you find gags like these funny, you could come and stand with me on the terraces at Brentford FC. When we played Leeds United earlier in the season, we chanted at them, ‘He’s one of your own, he’s one of your own, Jimmy Savile, he’s one of your own.’ The general public has never wasted much time making up jokes about tragic public events. Making light of high-profile tragedies is a perfectly understandable human reaction, even if it might be frowned upon by some. And what