Category: London

  • Five reasons it might not be so bad to have Boris as Mayor after all

    UPDATE April 2022. I’m leaving this up, although it’s obviously a bit embarrassing (and wrong – Johnson ultimately served two terms as Mayor). 1. The Mayor doesn’t have much to…

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  • Spitting nails in London W1

    Passing The New Piccadilly today I got chatting with Lorenzo, the owner. His battle with the landlords isn’t going well… (More pics here).

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  • Londony things

    I drove, on the afternoon of yesterday’s catastrophic elections, across a large slice of North and East London, from suburban Hertfordshire to Stratford in the East End and then –…

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  • On the buses

    The Routemasters are like jellied eels or Hawksmoor Churches or those people who swim in the ponds on Hampstead Heath. They’re eccentric and they say something about London’s weirdness and…

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  • Parking people

    Why are 80% of Central London parking attendants from West Africa? Terrific Radio 4 programme (MP3) by Ade Daramy. These guys take terrible stick from God fearing Londoners who think…

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  • 7/7?

    Looks like only the foreign press has adopted 7/7 as a name for yesterday’s bombings. Seems crass to be worrying about labels but a unique tag for the events would…

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  • The day after infamy

    A big city is an amazing thing. It’s obviously more than the sum of its parts. This city’s history makes it wide open, accepting, perhaps incautious and that makes London…

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  • And watch out for those pea-soupers…

    Strange ‘insider tips’ from The Economist’s London City Guide that came through my letterbox the other day, apparently cut and pasted from a 1950s travel guide: Table manners are keenly…

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