London
Blue plaque blues
One of the great distinctions and pleasures of British life has been devalued by cheap imitations
Northern overexposure
Manchester isn’t downtrodden, whatever Andy Burnham says. Quite the opposite, in fact
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…
Cool and underground
The Keeper’s House sits in the basement of Burlington House, a restaurant in disguise. It is quite different from the…
How Rome did immigration
Last week it was suggested that the questions asked of London mayor Sadiq Khan had nothing to do with racism,…
Bus battles
From ‘The softening of street manners’, The Spectator, 20 May 1916: Generally the public opinion of the ’bus entirely upholds…
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…
Gaudy! Bright! Loud! Fun!
Best of postmodernism: is that an oxymoron? Jonathan Meades thinks not
Soho in Somerset
It is summer and the listless metropolitan thinks of grass. It cannot afford to stay at Durslade Farmhouse, Somerset, a…
Sadiq Khan’s virtues
The new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said he wanted ‘the most transparent, honest and accessible administration London has ever…
Barometer
London’s other mayor How many people could name the capital’s other mayor, the Lord Mayor of London? The office, officially…
Beware the Lycra louts
Cycling in funny clothes is bad for the soul
The axeman next door
What happened when I tried American neighbourliness in London
Tea and honesty
We recently moved -offices from Canary Wharf to Blackfriars bridge. When you move after a long time in one place,…
Polly’s pleb adventure
Down and Out in Paris and London is a brilliant specimen from a disreputable branch of writing: the chav safari,…
Lost in Piccadilly
Batman owned the Criterion in The Dark Knight, but could he do anything about British Telecom? Savini at Criterion, an…
Diary
The Queen’s 90th birthday celebrations start this week with the real thing and barely stop until her official birthday in…
The bitter taste of victory
The Parliament Hill Café is a drab glass box at the bottom of Hampstead Heath, near the farmers’ market and…
Diary
It’s clear that Vladimir Putin has had a facelift, which might explain why Wendi Deng would take an interest in…
Do the Tories want to lose London?
The Labour plotters who dream of ousting Jeremy Corbyn had high hopes for the local elections on 5 May. They…
Send in the Alsatians
Islington is a bellwether, and also a joke: the most unequal borough in London, where social housing leans against £4…
Why we need migrants
It’s not about economics. It’s about our snobbish, slobbish culture
Too high, too fast
You have to get nearly halfway through this book before it starts to show some life. Until that point, as…
Marco Pierre, why?
Wheeler’s is such a dreadful restaurant that I wonder if Marco Pierre White even knows his name is on it.…
The smelly, snobbish death of the public loo
I blame Nancy Mitford: she made the English so frightened of saying ‘toilet’ that now they have hardly any left…
