London
Commuter says yes
My train journey to work is bliss
Great Dane
Snaps + Rye is a Nordic-themed restaurant and delicatessen on the Golborne Road, at the shabby and thrilling edges of…
Actress’s Notebook
Rather like unpacking after a holiday, when you take unworn clothes from the case still neatly folded because the occasion…
London in limbo
The capital is the motor of Britain’s economy. It needs to get moving again
Bringing Sexy back
Sexy Fish is an Asian fusion barn in Berkeley Square, near the car dealerships and the nightingales, if they are…
Wild life
Laikipia The sweetest sound to me now is the dawn chorus of birdsong at home on the farm. I lay…
How I became an easy police target
Most Britons assume at the outset that any misfortune involving a cyclist is the cyclist’s fault. After all, many a…
A taste of Wild Honey
Wild Honey is a ludicrous name for this restaurant: there is nothing wild about it, and I do not think…
A river of lost souls: the extraordinary secrets of the Thames
If you spend enough time on the Thames, you will eventually come across human remains. It is a river of…
Sumptuous, remote – and forgettable: Locket’s reviewed
Locket’s is a new café from the owners of Wiltons in Jermyn Street. Wiltons is the restaurant that dukes visit…
Trump is saving Nato
It’s almost Nato as usual when Emmanuel Macron calls Nato ‘brain dead’. It’s Nato as usual, and Donald Trump as…
Joan Collins: why I love London taxi drivers
Percy and I have seen quite a few movies recently and enjoyed many of them, which is rare. But the…
I’ve had my fill of brasseries: Moncks reviewed
If you review restaurants professionally you would not think Britain wanted to leave the EU. You would think she wanted…
Why no one ever moves back to London
In last week’s Spectator, Martin Vander Weyer replied to a couple with a baby who had sought his advice on…
Like Twitter, but with food: Market Hall Victoria reviewed
The Market Hall Victoria is an international food shed opposite the station terminus. I have long hated Victoria, thinking it…
Like Team Boris, I’m staying in London this summer
Foolish me. I could have been writing this by the shore of Lake Trasimene, with only one problem: how to…
Worried about sky-high rents? Learn to love a bedsit
‘I’m not going to your place, it looks like a crack den.’ It’s not exactly a vote of confidence when…
Abandoning stop and search would be abandoning a generation of kids
It was somehow inevitable that shortly after Met Police Commissioner Cressida Dick announced a fall in violent crime, there would…
Who needs psychogeography? Plume, by Will Wiles, reviewed
With his first novel about looking after an engineered wood floor, and a second novel about what it is like…
Soho hasn’t deteriorated – you have: Kiln reviewed
Each suburban soul yearns for the Soho of their youth. It isn’t that Soho was better in the 1990s when…
The ideal restaurant for the mythical Spectator reader: Bellamy’s reviewed
Bellamy’s is a Franco-Belgian brasserie in Bruton Place, a dim alley in the charismatic part of Mayfair; the part that…
Celebrities, cars and chickens: Inside the Connaught hotel
You may have noticed the Connaught a little more since 2011, when ‘Silence’, the steamy fountain by Japanese ‘architect philosopher’ Tadao…
The joy of garlic and easy listening: Pucci in Mayfair reviewed
I grew up in south-west London in the 1970s when Italian restaurants had exposed brick walls and paper tablecloths in…
Can you really teach students to solve knife crime?
Next year the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) will offer one degree, in design, technology and the humanities, to teach students…
Pale pomp and £100 Beijing duck: Imperial Treasure reviewed
Imperial Treasure is a restaurant in the part of St James’s where Leopold von Hoesch, the German ambassador to George…
