London

Wednesday

Steerpike

Ho ho no

Parents who have taken their little angels to see Father Christmas in his grotto at Selfridges got a shock: he’s not there this year. No lists, no photos on the knee, no overpriced gift. Uproar has ensued. The store’s PR team tells Mr Steerpike: ‘Selfridges will not be having the traditional Santa’s Grotto this year. We felt a different direction was needed for 2013’. Santa has been downgraded to a roaming personal shopper who ‘advises customers on the perfect, and personalised presents.’ But one source has a different view: the store’s international clientele aren’t bothered about Christmas so the space required to recreate Lapland is no longer economically viable. But, ye traditionalists,

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Northern voters turn against HS2

When George Osborne first announced his plans for high speed rail, I was all for it. I’ve spent too much of my life on broken-down trains between Inverkeithing and London – and, like many Scots, resented the way that most transport money seemed to be spent in the imperial capital. As I say in my Telegraph column today, the key to staying happy about HS2 is not to think about it much further: don’t contemplate the costs, don’t ask if transport can be helped in other ways. This is what Westminster is doing: all its parties have signed up to the project. They won’t have a proper debate about it.

Thursday

Taki

Taki: Ugly people build ugly things — look at New York and London

New York Hot money from China, India, Russia and Singapore is pouring into London; hotter money from the same countries is flooding into the Bagel. London has become unaffordable for the average Joe around Kensington and Chelsea, as has the West Village in downtown New York. Well, unaffordable is relative. There is a delicate social ecology system pointing in the wrong direction in both metropolises, but — like a stock market gone haywire, as at times markets tend to do — when the correction comes there will be lots and lots of empty luxury lots the poor can move into. London is now essentially a tax haven, and New York

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

You’re not as special as you think

My preferred route from the Times’s offices in Wapping on to the main road takes me across a precinct then down a short flight of concrete steps to the pavement below. Across the top step (for reasons unclear to me) a yellow line has been painted behind the step’s edge, like those lines you’re supposed to stand behind on railway platforms. Crossing this, and turning right when I reach the pavement, takes me straight to the right-hand side of the steps. A rational pedestrian seeking to shorten his journey would choose such a route, but not with any precision: one could plot a range of courses down the steps, all

Monday

James Forsyth

Boris’s immigration issue

When you discuss Boris Johnson’s leadership prospects with Tory MPs, one subject nearly always comes up: immigration. The Mayor is a liberal on the subject while most of the party takes a far more sceptical view. Tory MPs wonder how he’ll explain to the electorate why he once backed an amnesty for illegal immigrants. But Boris’s Telegraph column today shows how he can make a better — and more demotic — case for immigration than any other politician. He is prepared to tackle the subject and, what he calls, ‘this sense of indigenous injustice’ head-on. He’s also surely right that the solution to ever-rising house prices in London is to build

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Three cheers for the board at West Ham

What a pleasure it is to bring you a good news story this morning, something uplifting. On Saturday afternoon, West Ham entertained Manchester City, but a substantial number of City’s ticket allocation was not taken up. So the West Ham board, which includes the lovely Karen Brady, decided to give the spare tickets, free of charge, to some “locals” who were not usually habituated to visiting the ground each week. The “locals” took up the offer and came along to Upton Park where they dutifully cheered for Manchester City and entertained regular supporters by dropping to their knees for prayers at half time. You can only imagine how delighted the

Monday

Ed West

What have Londoners gained from the London housing bubble?

Now that the middle class squeeze has become my sujet du bore at the fancy north London dinner parties I attend, I was interested in Saturday’s New York Times piece about what foreign billionaires are doing to our insane property prices. One statistic really stuck out: ‘An astonishing £83 billion worth of properties were purchased in 2012 with no financing — all cash purchases. That’s $133 billion.’ Crikey. Author Michael Goldfarb argues: ‘And as for services, the minimal tax paid by those who have made property into money means that a city whose population has increased by 14 percent in the last decade can’t afford to build new schools. There

Thursday

Simon Jenkins

Simon Jenkins’s notebook: Why a wind farm will never be as beautiful as a railway viaduct

Until I plotted a book on England’s best views I had not realised how much people cared. Ask them to nominate a favourite church or house or even town and they will casually suggest a few. Ask for a view and you delve deep. A view is personal, intimate. It is not a landscape but the experience of a landscape. Many suggested places where they had fallen in love or found consolation. A number said simply, ‘The view from the end of my garden.’ Rejecting such a choice for ‘England’s best views’ could be a personal slight. That may be why Hazlitt advised his readers always to walk the countryside

Michael Paraskos

What a coincidence

If you are going to read a novel that plays with literary conventions you want it written with aplomb. In Three Brothers we are not disappointed, as Peter Ackroyd shows a deftness of touch that comes from being a real master. Here his theme is families. Or rather, it is London. Or rather, it is the use of coincidence as a plot device. In fact it is all three, but perhaps the most important is coincidence. As a literary device, coincidence is the presence of the author in the novel acting like an ancient Greek god directing events. This is apparent from the start when, in almost fairytale fashion, Ackroyd

Tuesday

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

This isn’t a property bubble – it’s a reason to improve London’s transport

Everyone —including me, if I’m honest — has been talking about a new property bubble. But is it for real? London house prices are rising at an annual rate of almost 10 per cent, and shares in the capital’s bellwether back-from-the-dead estate agency Foxtons soared on their stock market debut last week. Yet according to the Office for National Statistics, the national rise is just 3.3 per cent, the average price of a home having only recently regained its pre–credit-crunch peak. -Outside the South-East, and hotspots such as oil-rich Aberdeen, the pattern is largely flat or even falling. Although real incomes (adjusted for inflation) have fallen over the past five years,

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

A windfall tax on monster basements could solve London’s housing problem

The mega-rich are best housed behind high fences, on wooded estates patrolled by dogs; that way, they don’t have to annoy the rest of us. But I can see how irritating it must be, if you live in the crowded Ladbroke Grove area of west London, to have a neighbour like Reade Griffith, an American hedge-fund manager who has received planning permission for a vast basement extension to his house that will take many months to excavate. Fellow residents of Kensington and Chelsea, other than those wealthy enough to have similar schemes in mind, will probably think it serves him right that he has been charged an £825,000 ‘Section 106’

Andrew Marr

Andrew Marr’s diary: Holidays after a stroke, and what the Germans really think of us

It’s been a strange summer. After a stroke, holidays are not what they used to be. We went to Juan-les-Pins for a week in a hotel. It seemed perfect because it had beaches for the family, and at nearby Antibes there is a great little Picasso museum for me to haunt. It has the best drawing of a goat ever made. My daughters and wife doggedly manhandled me across hot sand into and out of the water and I enjoyed that. But being surrounded by so many fit people running, cycling and swimming was a little dispiriting. Mind you, I’ve always been useless at holidays. I hate being too hot.

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Melissa Kite: Spare me from successful neighbours

At last. I’ve waited a long time for this moment. I’ve been through years of torture at the hands of excitable twenty-somethings, experimental thirty-somethings and Booker-prize-winning forty-somethings. I’ve had nothing but adventurous, liberal-minded, free-spirited sorts living in the flat upstairs. But I don’t want happy, joyful and free people living near me. I don’t want successful artistic types. No good can come of it. I remember only too well having to knock on the door the night my next-door neighbour won the Booker prize. ‘But it’s a big celebration,’ said a girl, swaying from side to side, as she explained why they were making such a racket. ‘That’s as may

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: James Whitaker’s widow answers Toby Young

Absent friends Sir: Alec Marsh (‘Welcome to Big Venice’, 10 August) accurately observes that Londoners are priced out of central London by largely foreign buyers of second homes. Wealthy foreigners not only buy, they also rent, often living in London for a few years, during which they frequently return to their first home for weeks or months at a time. In Marylebone, where I have lived for 43 years, an average earner can neither buy nor rent. Moreover, rentals are only short hold. This contributes to the death of communities: it is not their foreignness which makes the new residents bad neighbours, nor their love of the convenient transport and

Tuesday

Matthew Plummer

Ignore Labour’s rage against the machines

Two months ago I walked into the railway station at Biarritz. Without thinking I headed to the ticket machine on the concourse, pressed the small Union Jack on the touchscreen, and thirty seconds later had my ticket in my hand. Very simple and stress free, which is unsurprising as modern ticket machines are beacons of sanity for the international traveller. I remember the palaver at the Polish Railways ticket counter at Wrocław in 2006, when I was saved by a local in the queue behind me who could translate ‘could I have a single to Poznan for the early morning train tomorrow, and do I have to buy a supplementary

Thursday

Tanya Gold

‘Like a concentration camp run by KFC’: Tanya Gold visits Shake Shack

Shake Shack is a hamburger restaurant in Covent Garden market. It came from New York and it is as needy and angry and angry-needy as America itself; it is, I suspect, quite capable of inventing a bogus reason to invade Burger King while posing as a victim of Burger King’s evil machinations. ‘Good things come to those who wait,’ it says in its promotional material online. ‘See you in the queue!’ (That, if you are English and a man and have never had psychotherapy, is called passive aggression.) Covent Garden market is full of August tourists; that is, wanderers with no destination, staring blindly at the metal Apples and Chanel.

David Blackburn

Send George Osborne to the Tower

Send George Osborne to the Tower, then he might learn that currency manipulation rarely ends well. Coins and Kings occupies four small rooms in a Yeoman Warder’s house on the site of the old mint, which was established by Edward I in the 1270s in response to endemic counterfeiting, coin clipping and general skulduggery. This permanent exhibition progresses through the Middle Ages to Elizabeth I’s attempt to restore confidence after her bankrupt father had debased the currency and caused inflation, riots and misery (on display is an Elizabeth I half pound coin, above). The Reformation saw traces of continental popery being removed from coins, and the crown take even greater

Sebastian Payne

The View from 22 – learning to switch off, is London the new Venice and Britain’s shale ambitions vs. the EU

Will holidays ever be truly relaxing again? In this week’s View from 22 podcast, Mary Wakefield and Freddy Gray discuss Clarissa Tan’s magazine cover piece on how technology has ruined our holidays. Has our love of the smartphone and tablet destroyed our ability to ‘switch off’? Do we need to control our impulse to use technology? And is this all a bad thing for our brains? Alec Marsh and our cartoon editor Michael Heath wonder if London is becoming the new Venice — bustling with tourists and barren streets of houses. Michael has been a Londoner since 1935. How has the capital changed since then? Have areas like Primrose Hill

Alec Marsh

Welcome to Big Venice: How London became a tourist-trap city

Queuing to gain admittance to the pavement of Westminster Bridge on a ferociously hot Sunday afternoon recently, I found myself trapped. Pinioned by a road to one side, a stall selling models of Big Ben and snow-dome Buckingham Palaces to the other, and bordered by the great bronze statue of Boudicca, I was caught in a corralled mass of tourists and going nowhere fast. It occurred to me that the last time I experienced such a peculiar blend of urban misery was in Venice. This might have been the Rialto in August. But it wasn’t the Grand Canal that we were crossing, it was the Thames, and it started me