Where was it?

In the Dorset village of Iwerne Minster.

A quick description

It was a three-bedroom terrace house, but one that didn’t have the terrace house feel of being hemmed in, because at the back, beyond the cobbled courtyard, there was half an acre of garden. The countryside was also only a 150-yard walk away.

How did you find it?

I was in the military and travelled a lot, but I wanted to put down roots. These were the days before the internet when you relied on estate agents’ offices and ‘for sale’ boards, plus patience. My first wife, Brigit, and I knew the area well and Iwerne Minster is an idyllic village that a lot of people pass by. We found the house within a few months and it became our family home for a while.

What sold it to you?

Location, location, location! The setting opposite the village church was typically British and simply perfect. Through the sound of those bells, you could also tell what day it was.

Was it a smooth purchase?

I don’t remember much pain. This was also back in the day when not much gazumping went on.

Best memory of living there?

Walking to the village shop most days when my children, James and Charlotte, were young to buy them an ice cream. It was wonderfully quiet even though we were only a few hundred yards from the A350.

Biggest indulgence?

This may sound ridiculous, but it was the first time I ever bought myself a set of drainage rods, and that Victorian plumbing definitely needed such a set to make everything flow freely. I haven’t been without them since. Such things come into their own when you have property.

What happened to the house?

I moved on with my job and ended up in the Herefordshire/Worcestershire area and purchased a property in Malvern, again on the edge of a village. I moved on again eventually, to a farm in Cornwall, and, in 2014, found myself at Chateau de la Motte Husson in France. This is really my first true country home — we have neighbours that we can’t even hear or see.

Dick Strawbridge will be appearing at the Game Fair (July 24–26), hosting Q&A sessions and taking part in a cookery demonstration with his wife, Angel, and children Arthur and Dorothy.

This feature originally appeared in the July 22, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

You wait all year for a billionaire's palatial £25 million home in a leafy enclave of London to come up for sale, and then two come along at once.

Last week we looked at the Goldsmith family's magical home in Richmond Park, Ormeley Lodge, which was home to the late Lady Annabel Goldsmith for many decades — and the place where she and her husband, Sir James Goldsmith, hosted everyone from pop stars to royalty.

Today, we look at a different house cut from the same cloth, and located just three miles away: Stud House, the Lebedev family home in the grounds of Hampton Court, for sale with Knight Frank and Savills.

It has a huge amount in common with Ormeley Lodge: both are located in the grounds of a Royal Park (in this case, Hampton Court Park); both are Georgian buildings full of character, flair and beauty; both are on the market for £25 million; and both have been in the family of high-profile billionaires for many decades, with a guest list that reads like Who's Who. Stud Park was bought by Alexander Lebedev in 2007, and it has long been the home of his son Lord Lebedev — best known as Evgeny Lebedev, owner of The Independent and The Evening Standard newspapers — who is now selling the place.

The timing of the sale seems to be good for the vendor. Research from Knight Frank suggests that there are around 3,000-4,000 billionaires in the world at the moment (neither the Lebedevs nor the Goldsmiths are among them these days, according to reports), and many of them are flocking back to buy property in London.

New research by Beauchamp Estates suggests that the market for homes in the £15-million-plus bracket has been soaring in the first half of 2026, with £1.24 billion of ultra-prime property sold — that's up 79% on the same period last year.

The reason for all this? A combination of soaring stocks in tech companies, and the political instability in the Middle East making London once again an enormously popular spot for the well-heeled to buy a home. 'London has bounced back,' says Rosy Khalastchy of Beauchamp Estates, 'the luxury homes market spluttering back to life with American and Middle Eastern buyers currently dominating ultra-prime sales in the capital’s best addresses.'

We'd say that 'Stud House, Hampton Court' definitely counts as one of those 'best addresses', and whoever ends up taking on this 18th century home will have a place that really is quite something, inside and out. It's hard to know where to look in a home full of fascinating art and glorious furnishings, which Lord Lebedev brought together with the artist and designer Patrick Kinmonth and the antique dealer and interiors consultant Edward Hurst.

Stud House is a fascinating home, arranged on an unusual inverted-L floorpan: entering the house via an enormous grand reception hall, there is a reading room and conservatory immediately ahead of you, and to access the rest of the rooms you move around to the right through a second hallway, past the morning room and drawing room with its semi-circular bay window, and then on to the larger part of the house.

There's a library, study, dining room, TV room, kitchen, pantry and laundry arranged around the stairs in the centre of the house.

Head down and you'll find a huge wine cellar, but head up and you'll get to the first floor, where you'll find six of the eight bedrooms — including a magnificent master suite with dressing room and a huge bathroom attached.

Two of the bedrooms have access to a balcony looking over the grounds, and Hampton Court beyond, while there are also a couple of treatment rooms and a security room on the floorpan.

The second floor has the remaining two bedrooms, plus a sitting room and storage — it's a space that is seemingly ideal for staff accommodation.

It's a lot to get your head around, but thankfully the agents have kindly shared a video walkthrough which will let you see the house, the art, the grand pianos, the four-poster beds, the exotic wallpapers, the spectacular gardens (laid out by Mollie Sainsbury) and more.

Lord Lebedev — or Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation, to give him his full title — has spoken with great warmth of this beautiful home, though it wasn't necessarily the sort of home he'd have chosen himself. He explained to the FT a few years ago that it was really his father who fell for Stud House first: 'I think he was probably more in love with it than I was but I can see now, having grown older, that it’s a special house.'

There is one more curiosity of Stud House that's worth mentioning: it's a leasehold property, with the freehold part of Hampton Court; the lease has 128 years left to run. And the service charge? £300 a year. Not bad for a place that literally has Hampton Court on the doorstep.

Stud House is for sale through Knight Frank and Savills at £25 million.

In 1949, a 16-year-old schoolboy went down to the races at Lewes, and placed a three-horse accumulator bet The stake was £10 — about £300 in today's terms, a wild amount to place on a longshot.

All three horses came in, netting that schoolboy, Jimmy Goldsmith, £8,000; that's the equivalent of over £250,000 in 2026 terms. 'A man of my means should not remain a schoolboy,' he declared at a celebration dinner once he was back at Eton. True to his word, he left school immediately, and Sir James Goldsmith went on to become one of the most successful — and most controversial — businessmen in Britain. And also France, Mexico and Spain, all places where he kept homes at various times of his life,. and with various of the women and children with which he shared that life.

Top of the list of the women in his life is Lady Annabel Goldsmith, a woman every bit as celebrated and flamboyant as her husband, and the radiant society darling after whom Annabel's nightclub is named. Both Jimmy and Annabel were married to other people when their affair began in the mid 1960s; but the affair became a long-term relationship when they started a family and bought a home in the 1970s. That home was the magnificent Ormeley Lodge in Ham, between Richmond Park and the River Thames — and it's just come to the market via Knight Frank and Sotheby's International Realty.

It's an extraordinary house by any yardstick. Grade II*-listed, described by Pevsner as 'exquisite' and dating back to the early 18th century, this Queen Anne home is a ten-bedroom house which, in the words of the agents, 'embodies both English Baroque and Classical styles, characterised by high ceilings, grand proportions and a wonderful sense of light throughout.'

With ten bedrooms, glorious formal gardens and endless elegant details, it is a true country house in London, with a list of former residents that includes politicians, diplomats, aristocrats and even an antique clock dealer, Ronald Alfred Lee, who used the place both as his home and his business premises, with his wares displayed throughout the many glorious reception rooms.

In the Goldsmith era the house was very much Lady Annabel's home, with her huge circle of well-connected friends attending parties which are legendary. Ben Goldsmith, younger brother to Jemima and Zach, told The Times that it was't unlike growing up in a 'commune', that was 'part convalescent home, part heartbreak hotel, children’s nursery, teenage marijuana den, Harrods toy department at Christmas, Portuguese soap opera,' with the Portuguese connection coming in large part from the long-serving staff at the home.

One of those taking refuge was Diana, Princess of Wales: 'She was incredibly close with my mother for the last decade of her life,' Ben adds. 'She was there constantly, lying by the pool.' Two of Ben's Eton schoolmates also visited regularly: Prince William and Prince Harry, now HRH the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Sussex.

Jemima Goldsmith, Ben's older sister, also brought A-list connections: she dated Hugh Grant for several years, and married Imran Khan, the Pakistan cricket legend who became his country's prime minister. Khan remained on good terns with the family, and after his divorce from Jemina lived in a cottage on the grounds.

Lady Annabel's death last year at the age of 2025, however, brought the era to and end, prompting the Goldsmith children to put the place on the market. 'Ormeley Lodge has been our much-loved family home for 50 years, the setting for countless happy memories,' they said in a joint statement.

'We now feel the time is right to pass the property onto its next custodian, and we hope it will be enjoyed and cherished as much as it has been by our family.'

Knight Frank's Paddy Dring echoes that statement, and underlines what a special property it is:

'The sale of Ormeley Lodge represents a rare chance to acquire not only a remarkable residence, but also a part of British cultural heritage. Lovingly maintained over the past 50 years, we expect the property’s unique history to resonate strongly with discerning buyers around the world. Opportunities to secure a house of this size and character, surrounded by such established, picturesque and expansive gardens in a London setting are very uncommon, so it is certainly an exciting proposition for any prospective owner.'

Ormeley Lodge is for sale via Knight Frank and Sotheby's International Realty.

For a Victorian hostess, serving ice cream at dinner, turned out from thrilling moulds shaped as beehives, asparagus or swans, was the 19th-century equivalent of showing off on Instagram, ‘afford[ing] the cook the opportunity of making some of the prettiest dishes it is possible to send to the table’.

Leading the charge was the original cookery influencer, Agnes Bertha Marshall (1852–1905), an English culinary entrepreneur who became a leading cookery writer, producing two of the most important books on ice cream — Ices Plain and Fancy: The Book of Ices (1885) and Fancy Ices (1894) — earning herself the title ‘Queen of Ices’.

Born in Haggerston in the East End of London, Marshall was an illegitimate child, raised by her grandmother in Walthamstow. Little is known about her early life — or where exactly she learnt to cook — but it is believed that she trained in Paris, detailing in the preface to her 1887 tome Mrs A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book that her recipes are ‘the result of practical training and lessons, through several years, from leading English and Continental authorities, as well as a home experience earlier than I can well recall’.

Her promotional tour for this title saw her cook elaborate luncheons in front of large audiences across the country, securing her reputation as a household name. In 1878, she married Alfred William Marshall, a union that allowed her to take advantage of the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act. In 1883, she bought a plot of land and opened the Marshall School of Cookery at No 67, Mortimer Street, London.

In 1885, Marshall patented a device that could freeze a pint of ice cream. The hand-cranked machine promised ‘smooth and delicious Ice produced in 3 minutes’. She also toyed with using liquefied gas as an ultra-rapid freezing agent — a century before Heston Blumenthal popularised the liquid-nitrogen technique in the pursuit of molecular gastronomy. When he called the ‘Queen of Ices’ one of Britain’s ‘greatest culinary pioneers’, he wasn’t exaggerating

As well as teaching Londoners how to cook, she ran a domestic staff agency business, sold domestic and cooking equipment and campaigned for better standards of food hygiene. Her 1888 recipe for ‘cornets with cream’ would put edible ice-cream cones on the culinary map, using finely chopped almonds, fine flour, caster sugar, one egg, a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of orange flower water, mixed to a paste.

Once baked, cornet shapes were quickly cut out of the paste and wrapped around a cornet tin, baked again ‘till quite crisp and dry’ and then filled ‘with any cream or water ice’. This serving suggestion was a novel concept to Victorian Londoners. Cheap ice creams had hitherto been served in small glass containers called ‘penny licks’, which were rarely cleaned between customers. They were eventually made illegal in 1926 for their role in spreading diseases such as tuberculosis.

Strawberry Hill remains the undisputed icon of the Gothic Revival movement. Built by Horace Walpole from 1749 (making it, technically, a precursor to the current which it helped to create), the jet-white edifice conceals a dark and moody interior that was designed to accommodate Walpole’s collection of antiquaries. He referred to this particular decorative style as ‘gloomth’ — warmth and gloom coming together in harmony.

These days, house buyers prefer to err on the side of light rather than dark — but occasionally we come across the home that manages to do a little of both. That is emphatically the case with a house just down the river from Walpole's home, in the beautifully-named Strawberry Vale. Here, a double-fronted Victorian home is up for sale at £4.75 million with Dexters and Inigo. This six-bedroom villa is flooded with light, but its bold colour scheme brings the gloomth to striking effect.

The house, with its long garden that trails right down to the Thames, forms part of a conservation area comprising nine other houses. and spread across four floors, with a beautifully preserved porte-cochère leading to the raised ground floor.

A glass-covered awning connects the street to the building, where each storey, save for the attic floor, is blessed with at least four or five street-facing windows — and there are even more at the back.

The proportions are vast, with the first floor dedicated to the master suite (complete with a walk-in wardrobe and a balcony) and a guest room.

The ground floor has a gym, plant room, cinema room and a store leading to the garden. Three bedrooms, with a lateral balcony, occupy the second (and top) floor.

These are, as industry parlance goes, very good bones indeed. The current interiors, the world of interior designer Claire Botha, are bold, flamboyant, and a decidedly 21st century take on Walpole’s vision of handsome riverside villas with cosy, moody interiors.

Some elements are timeless and classic: the front door, decked out in stained-glass windows; the exposed brick wall in the kitchen; the elegantly-tiled master bathroom with panelling and a mantlepiece. But safe to say that the look won't be for everyone.

Proximity to Teddington and glorious Richmond Park should typically lure buyers with an appreciation for period finishings.

The riverside garden, 150-ft long, comes with private mooring and a boathouse — both real rarities this close to central London. Parties here will be a thing of beauty. It is perfect for a large family, with one or two dogs.

For sale at £4.75 million through Dexters and Inigo.

Estate agents have a long and storied history of rebranding areas to elevate their profile. The most famous example for this is in New York, where the neighbourhood once known as Greenwich Village was later divided by salesmen into East and West. Why so? Because the area known as Alphabet City, stretching from Avenues A to D and Houston to 14th Streets, was once impossible to sell a house in due to a notorious crime rate. The solution, agents found, was to squash the eastern stretch of Greenwich Village and Alphabet City together and rename it. Thus, the East Village was born. The median sale price per square foot in the district now stands at $1,520 (£1,153 at the time of writing).

London agents have more recently begun referring to Battersea as South Chelsea. They’re only half-joking (irony, after all, is a covetable currency this side of the pond), for Battersea has had a major glow-up these past few years, catering to a market that enjoys proximity to the King’s Road without wanting to face the onslaught of crowds from the minute they leave the house — or, indeed, find themselves too close to Chelsea Stadium. In good news for fans of the area with £16 million to spare, the neighbourhood’s finest home is now for sale via Savills: Old Battersea House, a wonderfully private old manor home with seven bedrooms and a lawned garden, looking every bit the country seat despite its central London location.

The house is believed to have been completed in 1699 for naval administrator Samuel Pett and is rumoured to have been designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Such undocumented claims are always tricky to assess, but it does look remarkably like a smaller version of building that definitely was by Wren: Kensington Palace.

The house ended up serving as a teacher training college between 1840 and 1926, and was known as Terrace House up until 1931, when it was rechristened Old Battersea House by then-custodian Wilhelmina Stirling.

Stirling is perhaps better known under the pseudonym she used as a writer and collector, Percival Pickering, and for being the sister of Evelyn de Morgan, pre-Raphaelite artist and wife of William de Morgan. The latter was himself a celebrated potter and close friend of William Morris, and Stirling later founded the De Morgan Foundation, to date the largest collection of works by the couple. This was after using the Battersea home as a monument to their work: every wall or surface was decorated with an original De Morgan for more than 30 years — until her tenure ended.

Country Life published an article in in 1932, taking photographs which preserve what it looked like at the time. The writer of the piece? Anna Marie Diana Wilhelmina Stirling herself. In the article, she also tackles the Wren connection, discussing similarities both internal and external between Old Battersea House and Kensington Palace, as well as the Royal Hospital Chelsea, another Wren masterpiece.

Today, more modern (though no less glamorous) inflections adorn the walls of the historic home. Among its attributes are Loro Piana curtains, panelled drawing rooms and operational fireplaces. The master bathroom boasts a lantern pendant while the study is dotted here and there with elegant antiques. Its classic appeal speaks volumes of the restoration projects undertaken by the architecturally sensitive owners who followed Stirling’s stewardship.

After her death in 1965, the house was left to while away for years before American businessman Malcolm Forbes — founder of the eponymous magazine — acquired it in 1970. His family’s own art collection, grown and housed in Battersea over four decades, made headlines of its own when the family attempted to sell £5 million worth of art in 2012.

Fittingly, much of their collection harked back to the Pre-Raphaelites, with paintings by Edward Burne-Jones part of the sale. With 10,000 square feet of space across the property, this home will no doubt appeal to similarly lofty patrons. During his time there, Forbes greeted many visitors, including members of the Royal family and his close friend Elizabeth Taylor.

Original baroque interiors and sweeping staircases have been preserved, while London’s only licensed heliport is handily close by. After all, anyone dropping £16 million on a home is more likely to use this method of transportation than most. Another transport option is found at nearby Cadogan Pier, at the foot of the Albert Bridge, from whence passengers can take the riverbus to London Bridge in just under 30 minutes. No traffic to contend with here — unless, of course, you take the vintage convertible Mercedes instead (it's not listed as part of the sale, but you can always ask if it could be popped in to sweeten the deal...).

Of course there’s a private gym, a cinema room, a modernised kitchen, and all the hallmarks of a modern superhome. The gym in particular is fascinating, with its collection of art sitting alongside the various bits of equipment.

As in all good homes, however, it is the bedrooms that take the biscuit. Four poster beds, high ceilings and elegant floorboards give an impression not only of continuity and serenity, but of living in a country home.

The country house feeling extends to the setting. Shrouded in foliage from the lawn garden that surrounds the property, the views here are Arcadian: a far cry from the grit of nearby Zone 1.

Old Battersea House is for sale via Savills — see more details.

The phrase 'if these walls could talk' feels like it could have been coined with Number 41, Carlton Hill in mind. This beautiful period home — for sale through Aston Chase at £4.25 million — sits on one of the most sought-after streets in St John's Wood, and was for years the London home of Eric Idle, the actor, writer, musician and comedian who was one of the founding members of Monty Python.

Idle is one of the rare creatures able to pull off the trick of being both naturally funny and musically gifted (see also: Victoria Wood, Dudley Moore and Hugh Laurie), and it's hard not to wonder if he sat in this very kitchen while first humming the tune for Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, the unforgettable, blackly-comic song at the end of Monty Python's Life of Brian.

Idle, incidentally, is credited with coming up with the idea for the film: the story goes that a journalist kept badgering him about the Pythons' third movie, a film which the group hadn't even thought about yet. He flippantly replied that it would be called Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory — and from that seed, the iconic parallel life fable emerged.

Life of Brian came out in 1979, a time when the Pythons were at the height of their fame — and Idle often hosted A-list friends at his St John's Wood pads (he owned two houses on the street), from the cast of Star Wars (a story Idle told on television in 2018) to The Rolling Stones.

Some of those friends stayed even longer. Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia in the Star Wars films, rented the house for a few months in 1979 while she was in London filming The Empire Strikes Back at Elstree Studios, and Idle was away making Life of Brian. Her co-star (and one-time lover) Harrison Ford himself rented the house a couple of years later, while shooting the studio scenes for Raiders of the Lost Ark, also up at Elstree.

The home itself is a classic London townhouse, with a façade of white stucco and brick, with elegant sash windows and fine proportions.

Inside, it's deceptively large, set over four floors — with the main living space being the 30ft kitchen-dining-family room space on the garden floor, which opens out through a garden room to the outside space.

The first floor is almost entirely taken up by a huge drawing room, which has a terrace at one end, though there's also a separate study at the back of the house.

The four bedrooms are split across the first and second floors — though no evenly. The first floor is entirely taken up by the principal bedrooms, with its dressing room and huge en-suite bathroom. All three remaining bedrooms are above, as is a smaller bathroom.

There's also a surprise lurking at the base of the house: the lower ground floor has been set up as a space that's ideal for any successful actor: it's a gym by day, and a home cinema by night. What more could any iconic movie star wish for?

The house on Carlton Hill, St John's Wood, London is for sale through Aston Chase — see more details.

Morning light pours through the fan-vaulted ceiling of St Mary Aldermary, spilling between laptops and cups. The gentle hum of conversation rises beneath the carved-stone ribs of the building, one of Sir Christopher Wren’s lesser-known works. This is Host Café, EC4, an ethical, non-profit coffee shop run by the church itself — where City workers, freelancers and tourists alike sit in pews once reserved for prayer.

Londoners have long sought communion through conversation — and, for centuries, they have congregated in the caffeinated sanctuaries of the city: coffee houses. Long before St Mary Aldermary began serving single-origin espresso, another London pioneer, Pasqua Rosee, was pouring his first cups for a curious crowd in St Michael’s Alley in 1652, igniting a social revolution. By the late 17th century, London had become addicted, home to hundreds of so-called ‘penny universities’, each one a microcosm.

Step inside and you’d find sailors arguing with scientists, poets needling politicians and merchants huddled over ledgers by candlelight, akin to ‘rats in a ruinous cheese store… some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, others jangling,’ wrote London Spy author Ned Ward in 1704. The air was thick with smoke, gossip and the smell of roasting beans. As Ward himself admitted: ‘When I had sat there for a while… I myself felt inclined for a cup of coffee.’ Early brews were tar-black, gritty, strong as hell and sobering. They woke people up, literally and figuratively, in an era when the safest drink was stupefying ale.

Each house had its speciality. The Grecian was a haven for duelling scholars and scientists — Isaac Newton once dissected a dolphin on the table. Jonathan’s echoed with stockjobbers bellowing prices; at Lloyd’s, the bustle of shipowners, merchants and sailors seeking reliable shipping news evolved, improbably, into a global insurance empire. Button’s on Russell Street was awash with pamphleteers and poets, housing first offices of Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, Gay and The Spectator. Literary contributions were submitted through the mouth of a marble lion. What united these dens was convivial conversation. For a penny, one could buy entry into a new way of thinking: egalitarian, restless and caffeinated.

‘No man might refuse your company,’ stated one set of coffee-house rules. Equality was the order of the day — a radical idea in a city built on hierarchy — and ideas were prized more highly than titles. Anyone could enter and speak freely. Long communal tables, filled with manuscripts and printed papers, invited conversation between strangers and no seat could be reserved. As the historian Thomas Macaulay observed, you might have seen ‘earls in stars and garters, clergymen in cassocks, pert templars, sheepish lads from the Universities, translators and index-makers in ragged coats’, all blended together. Engaging with someone new was de rigueur and debate flowed as freely as the coffee itself.

Historians still argue whether women were seated at the table or written out of the scene, yet diaries and literature of the period place them inside these rooms — not only as patrons and participants, but often as proprietors and servers. They shaped the coffee-house world as much as any man.

A revolution in democratic discussion, the coffee house was equal parts newsroom, salon and free-school. A space where art and argument shared common ground. Their subversive chatter so alarmed authority that, in 1675, Charles II attempted to close them altogether, denouncing them as ‘places where the disaffected meet’. The ban lasted 11 days, overturned by public outcry and caffeine withdrawal.

Three centuries later, that same spirit survives. The tables are smaller now, the beans more expensive, but Londoners still gather around cups to exchange ideas, contend opinions and, occasionally, change the world. Button’s itself may now be a cheerless Starbucks, but, across the city, a handful of cafés, bars and salons still quietly uphold the noble art of conversation.

The Poetry Café in Betterton Street, WC2, sits in what Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society, calls ‘the Hogarthian heartlands of Covent Garden’: a fitting heir to London’s coffee-house past. ‘Poetry’s main hangout,’ she tells me, ‘is where poets come to launch books, try out new material or simply swap views.’ She notes the same collaborative energy now stretches far beyond the capital: 136 ‘Stanza groups’ gather across the country ‘meeting in village halls, above pubs and in each other’s kitchens… workshopping over a creative cuppa’.

A stroll away in Bloomsbury, the London Review Bookshop Café, WC1, has been given a new lease of life by St John, of nose-to-tail fame. It now serves up coffee alongside Proustian madeleines, literature and lively event nights. ‘When the good folk at The Review asked if we’d be interested in their former café space, we were intrigued,’ says Trevor Gulliver, St John’s co-founder and CEO. ‘A bookshop has its own calm and activity, a sense of purpose to its existence. The more time we spent there, the more it felt like a happy relationship — light-filled, full of ebb and flow between café and bookshelves, the many people who come through the doors, even the square behind.’

In Piccadilly, W1, the effortlessly elegant Maison Assouline hums with salon glamour for a new age. Recently named by 1000Libraries as the most beautiful book-café in the UK, this former bank hall is now a destination that invites ideas and human connection.

Then there are the new gatherings that widen the circle still further. The story-telling night RAW Talks seeks to champion ordinary people with extraordinary tales. As co-founder Christine Charitonos tells me: ‘There’s no shortage of events where one listens to experts or celebrities talk about their achievements. But do these types of nights satisfy the need for human connection? RAW platforms everyday people and their true-life stories in an environment where everyone is equal.’

‘The coffee houses of the past were about ideas,’ she explains, ‘but they were also about finding belonging — a space where you could walk in, join the conversation and be accepted into the fold.’ The same might be said of Geist Talks, a cultural salon that began as a post-lockdown gathering of friends in a West End warehouse. ‘People were clearly longing for in-person conversation as an antidote to the screen-based isolation of those years,’ says co-founder Sara Sjölund. ‘Our first talk was on the science of the mind, with a Tibetan Buddhist monk and a Yale neuroscientist and, when we hosted our second, with the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, people were practically fighting for tickets.’ Today, Geist hosts monthly events in striking venues, each followed by an informal dinner ‘where people can continue the conversation’.

Echoing their Hanoverian predecessors, these modern salons are an antidote to loneliness and remind us that culture thrives in communal settings. The fundamental desire remains the same: to gather, to converse and actively listen.

As evening falls, Host Café’s last patrons drift out into Bow Lane and the aroma of roasted beans lingers in the nave like incense. Centuries ago, the same invigorating smell would have percolated through the alleys of Cornhill and Covent Garden, beckoning Londoners in search of warmth, wit and wisdom. The decor changes, but London’s truest communion endures: a table, a cup and the shared pleasure of being together.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person doesn’t realise how inconvenient something is until it’s done better. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our homes. The key that needs jimmying, the door that requires a knack to close, the drawer that demands coaxing: such irritations soon become unfelt. Until, that is, you have a house that works.

The owners of this Victorian house on Warwick Avenue in west London know this better than most. When they bought it, in 1993, the house — spacious, with a beautiful garden and access to an enormous shared private square beyond — made perfect sense. There was enough room for their growing family and fewer stairs than the Hampstead home they were leaving behind. Yes, there were quirks — the windows were leaky, the configuration was a little strange, the spare bedroom was too big and the master had no en-suite — but these were nothing a bit of patience couldn’t counter. And, besides, the handsome property had charm and character.

However, in the late 2010s, a damp problem took hold, creeping ominously through the lower-ground level. The couple, both lawyers, knew the basement was in need of serious attention, ‘and we also knew we weren’t going to put our 25-year-old kitchen back in,’ one of them recalls. They enlisted Marks Barfield, a Clapham-based practice, who are best known for their public projects — the London Eye, Cambridge Central Mosque, Brighton’s i360, the Treetop Walkway at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — but behind the scenes have been quietly building a reputation for their low-waste, regenerative approach to residential ones.

‘The original plan was focused largely on the basement,’ says Julia Barfield, co-founder and director of Marks Barfield, ‘incorporating a study, a mudroom, a gym, some wine storage and a new kitchen extension.’ Receptive to Marks Barfield’s inherent ‘greenness’, the couple also began thinking about installing air-source heat pumps to replace the tiny, cranky combi boiler, but as the practice began examining the building’s performance it became clear that simply replacing the heat source wouldn’t fix the heating problem. As one of the owners puts it, ‘there was absolutely no point in doing half a house.’

Before long, Marks Barfield had engineered an extensive top-to-bottom retrofit that not only addressed the damp ingress, but completely reshaped the building’s thermal performance — something the house was in desperate need of because it had little to no insulation. Under the guidance of practice director Ian Crockford, the team started to install breathable, wood-fibre insulation and lime plaster, fossil-fuel-free air-source heat pumps and mechanical ventilation systems, setting their sights on creating a home that performed to Passivhaus standards.

The course of renovations never did run smooth and as they began to strip things back to the brickwork, the architects came across oddity after oddity, and challenge after challenge. At some point in the house’s history, someone had decided to chop chunks out of the roof purlins, a choice which, combined with the four water tanks, each weighing about three tons and dating to the time the house had been cleaved into flats, means that the external walls had started to bow by 6cm. Meanwhile, a dormer window in the attic was discovered to have no lintel and therefore supporting the entire weight of the roof.

The house is Grade II-listed and sits inside a conservation area, so planning alone took six months, and Marks Barfield were required not just to reinforce the roof, but retain as much as possible of the existing fabric. As an outfit interested in circular building practices, this was, mercifully, preferable. In fact, throughout the house, the architects tried to reuse materials wherever possible, while also designing for deconstruction, ensuring that — as Julia says — ‘anything we’ve done can be taken apart, the materials reused by someone else in the future.’

Underneath the basement extension, Marks Barfield installed stainless-steel screw piles, upon which sits a ground beam made from repurposed rolled steel joists. The window frames and 90% of the brickwork were reused; the extension’s Douglas fir exterior, with its subtle psychedelic grain, came from an old carton factory in Devon. In a neat twist, it originates from the same part of west Canada as one of the owners, likely arriving in the UK about 50 years before her.

Where the architects weren’t able to reuse or recycle, they opted for low-carbon solutions, such as a green roof and heritage-friendly, Fineo sash windows, which use a vacuum between the panes instead of glass to achieve thermal insulation that’s as effective as triple glazing. They also operated a ‘host and donor system’, giving steel reclaimed from this house to another one under the care of Marks Barfield in Stockwell.

These choices reflect Julia’s desire to be ‘a good ancestor’, a term borrowed from the title of Roman Krznaric’s 2020 book about ways in which long-term thinking can benefit future generations. Conscious that the building industry is responsible for 62% of the UK’s waste, she and her practice endeavour to work as responsibly as possible. It’s admirable, but it’s also plain common sense (Julia once saved a client £1.65 million by reusing materials). ‘The driver for us is the planet,’ she says, ‘but it’s enormously reassuring that our principles don’t get in the way for our clients.’

Back in Warwick Avenue, common sense has prevailed in a way it definitely didn’t before. By slicing up the enormous spare room, Marks Barfield has created a spacious ensuite for their clients. They also removed a strange, cupboard-like bathroom that once occupied a nearby half-landing, letting the room’s high window pour extra light into the stairwell. A lot of the work — including the insulation and plastering — is invisible, but no less important. While working on the upper floors, Ian noticed that the joists had been hacked apart to make way for plumbing and reinforced them. ‘It’s a miracle the bathtubs didn’t fall through the ceiling,’ he says. However, where the practice’s handiwork is on show (notably in the basement, which is now a cool and airy enclave with enough space for work, fun and family life) it is undeniably pleasing: comfortable, beautiful, logical.

The logic that Marks Barfield has imposed on this house is what makes it special. ‘We could have stayed here for another 30 years,’ says one of the owners, ‘and it would have been fine. But now it is enjoyable — cool in summer, warm in winter. It’s how a house should be.’

The other one tells me about a window that illuminates the junction between the ground and first floors: large, arched and ‘almost chapel-like’, she says. ‘We lived for decades with its strange mismatch of glass panes. Some were frosted, some were patterned, some were plain.’ Now restored to its original design, the window is a thing of unintrusive, low-key beauty. ‘I didn’t realise how nonsensical it was.’ She is talking about the window, of course, though the observation seems to reach much further.

Visit the Marks Barfield website for more information.

Some may question why the Six Senses global chain of five-star hotels and spas chose to open its inaugural British venture in this part of London, but it seems fitting that this restorative retreat is set within one of the capital’s most elegant landmarks.

With its majestic colonnaded Portland stone façade, distinctive rooftop cupolas and elaborate Edwardian shop-front glazing, not to mention its proximity to Hyde Park and Notting Hill, the Whiteley building was once a bustling emporium. At its height, Yorkshireman William Whiteley’s retail empire — which started life as a tiny drapery on Westbourne Grove in 1863: think Woman of Substance vibes — employed 6,000 staff, featured an in-store theatre, had a golf course on the roof and promised its genteel clientele the chance to purchase anything ‘from a pin to an elephant’.

The irony then, that this statuesque property that closed as a shopping centre in 2018 has been reinvented, as part of a £1.5 billion pound refurbishment by the architects Foster + Partners, as an achingly cool, health-conscious and quietly luxurious hotel was not lost on me. I also could not help but wonder what Whiteley (who was shot dead in 1907 by a man claiming to be his illegitimate son) would make of the way his pride and joy, known as ‘the Harrods of Bayswater’, looks now.

The 109-room Six Senses London opened on March 1, 2026. Once you’ve entered the serene, hushed and plant-filled lobby — dominated by a dramatic, black-iron and marble-stepped spiral staircase that ascends to the third floor — it’s clear that the space affords a peaceful refuge from the hurry and noise outside.

As soon as I walked in, I felt awash with a sense of calm and tranquillity. I was expecting a high level of attentive service, which was quickly confirmed by Egesa on reception, who warmly welcomed me with a spritz of a ginger spray, after I’d selected it from a deck of botanical tarot-style cards. However, I was not prepared for the way that the glazed rotunda (directly above the circular bar in the Six Senses Space, the brand’s discreet — and first ever — private members’ club) infuses the first floor with light and a steadying atmosphere of stillness.

Our junior suite was a triumph of clean lines, furnished with modern, Art Deco-inspired curved furniture, velvet sofas and a round table to eat at. The generous, twin-sinked bathroom, with a bath plus a shower within a wet room, was perfect for two girlfriends getting ready for an event. A separate loo was a bonus, too, although I never quite got to grips with its heated seat and integrated bidet.

The food, served at the Whiteley’s Kitchen — either in the colonial-style restaurant (white walls, ivy-green leather banquettes and rattan chairs) or outside on the olive-tree studded terrace in the sun-drenched central courtyard — offers a vegetable-first menu of enticing small plates, such as courgettes romana with fermented peppers, green chard rolls with mushroom XO and ricotta nettle agnolotti.

This philosophy of nourishing, sustainably-sourced nutrition was also in evidence at breakfast, where you can have what you want, fuelled by exquisite coffee from Brazil and Rwanda, and help yourself from a ‘wellness’ trolley, laden with gut-friendly kombucha, kimchi and sauerkraut, plus turmeric shots, made in the hotel’s ‘fermentation lab’.

Having been at a party the night before, we did not fancy wine with our lunch, but were pleasantly surprised when the Wine Director, Eugenio, recommended a delicious non-alcoholic alternative in the shape of a glass of Feral N°1 White beet Hop Szechuan Pepper, which was fresh, citrussy and spicy.

The standout factor of this establishment, however, has to be the spa and gym spanning nearly 24,000 square feet (reportedly the largest at a London hotel and the first to offer a magnesium bath, alongside a soon-to-be-opened 65 foot indoor lap pool) on the lower ground floor. Descending the steps to this subterranean idyll, it’s impossible not to gasp at the myriad suspended creamy-white handmade porcelain petals in Ula Saniawa of Unit 89’s sculpture above the shallow pool in the spa reception area.

I was able to exhale further when Nuryiye, one of the sage green linen-clad therapists, treated me to one of the very best massages I have ever had. Involving body rocking, vigorous dry brushing and a sound bath, the treatment — which was so blissful, I did not want it to end — concentrated on my calves, tummy and shoulders to promote lymphatic drainage. There is also a Biohack Recovery Lounge, supported by a HUM2N Longevity Clinic offering medical-grade diagnostics and screenings.

Finally, in what might be a nod to the property’s heritage and a desire to nurture health and welfare by combining the latest gym-equipment technology — such as compression boots and electro-muscle stimulation — with age-old remedies, the hotel’s wellness ethos includes an intriguing Alchemy Bar.

Designed to look like an old, wood-panelled apothecary, with countless drawers and jars containing all manner of herbs, spices and concoctions — as well as dried flowers hanging from the ceiling—this is where the hotel’s herbalists assess guests’ individual needs and come up with a tincture designed to address their personal circumstances through the healing power of plants. My bespoke recipe — delivered by Jade the next morning, after an hour-long interview the previous day — included oat straw, rose, skullcap, lemon balm, motherwort and hawthorn, to ease anxiety, mental fatigue and general overwhelm by diluting it with water and drinking twice a day. All of which ensured that I left with a lasting, and mood-enhancing, souvenir of my time at a genuinely fascinating and thoughtfully-run hotel.

Rooms at Six Senses London start from £800.

A stone’s throw from the chaos of the City and the bustle of Liverpool Street is a network of streets that feels mercifully stuck in time. A portal to the 17th century, when hoards of Huguenots descended upon London fleeing religious persecution, the cobbled alleys that make up the area known as Spitalfields are among the most beautiful in the capital.

Rental opportunities are rare, and sales even rarer. Once you buy here, you stay here: be you Tracey Emin, Gilbert & George, or another artistic grandee who's been lucky enough to call this patch their stomping ground for the past three decades (or longer). But an opportunity has just arisen in the form of this house on Wilkes Street, which is on the market at £4.75 million through the Unique Property Company.

Wilkes Street, which runs parallel to bustling Commercial Road and draws together Hanbury and Fournier Streets, is among the most picture-perfect in the district. With red brick façades, outdoor shop signage from 18th century and sash windows painted black, red or sage, it could easily feel like a toy town were it not for the rough edges that still lend the area that little bit of grit — a reminder of its past a centre for slum housing (when its fortunes turned in the 19th and early 20th centuries) as well as a welcome departure from fellow post-gentrified neighbourhoods on the western edge of Zone One, which some might describe as over-manicured.

The house now for sale on Wilkes Street is a Grade II-listed townhouse dating back to 1720. It was, for 150 years, a furrier’s factory — a time when much of its fine detailing was hidden away. This has since been rediscovered and restored, bringing to life a home that thrums with history and embodies, on each of its five floors, different elements of the English architectural character.

Unfolding over 2,244 sq ft and on the market for £4.75 million, it is one of few homes that still retains an original weavers' loft (the Huguenots who settled in the area were highly skilled cloth merchants). Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, one of London's most magnificent churches, can be seen from the makeshift balcony jetting out from the top floor.

'Ground–floor shutters, door casements and canopy are a faithful reproduction of the joinery that would once have hugged the deep red brickwork,' say the agents, while 'the heavy panelled front door appears to be original.'

Not every original feature has survived. A fanlight which is likely to have sat in the living room has since been replaced with a leaded light. The current owners, however, have been careful to preserve as much of the building's history as possible. Boxed-in candle arrangements hark to a pre-electric passé while original fireplaces and floorboards still course throughout the house — safe for the lower-ground floor, decked out in handsome York stone.

There are four bedrooms overall, two of which are in the attic floor — although Unique Property Company notes that applications for an additional bedroom could easily be put forward (and has been done in the past). There are three bathrooms and as many reception rooms: a home as perfect for entertaining as it is for living.

No doubt the pièce de résistance, however, is the walled garden at the rear of the house, accessed via bridge across two ornamental ponds. It is, per Unique Property Company, 'a small world of its own'. At the far end, a beautifully time-worn door opens into a storage room, 'once part of the night soil alley that slipped along the backs of the houses,' the sales agent notes. It now presents future owners with an opportunity for renovation. Let us hope they keep this sensitive.

For sale through The Unique Property Company at £4.75 million — see more details.

This is an expanded profile of a property on Wilkes Street which first appeared in Country Life's 'Seven of the best' spread on May 6, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Arguably the two most prestigious clubs in Britain are not clubs in the actual sense, but the VIP segments of two events that have come to typify the British experience. Not for them are the accoutrements of the Mayfair townhouse: the porticoed entrance and curtain rods emblazoned with coats of arms. Accession to these clubs is not granted via classic nomination and secondment, but by private invitation from the governing body or friends in places higher than one’s own.

These are clubs, indeed, only in the empirical sense: money-can’t-buy, who-do-you-know environments that reach their annual apogee during the Season. The first is Car Park 1 at Royal Ascot, whose members would sooner forego the event entirely than attend it from Car Park 2. The second is the Royal Box on Centre Court at The Championships, Wimbledon, known to true devotees simply as ‘Wimbles’.

The Season extends to other clubs, too. The Hurlingham Club will host Chestertons’ annual Polo in the Park from June 5–7, as well as the Armani Cup from June 23–27. The clubs on Pall Mall are decked out for peak wedding season. At Royal Ascot, the Calvary and Guards Club welcome guests to their own marquee within the Royal Enclosure. The House of Koko, a members’ club that backs onto the cult north London music venue, normally would have set up camp in the fields near Glastonbury for members dropping upwards of £10,000 on five days’ worth of revelry, were it not for the festival taking a fallow year in 2026 and are instead taking over a fiñca hotel in Ibiza for the opening of that particular season, from June 3–7.

Which of these clubs is the right one for you? It depends whether your idea of a members’ establishment is more scions smoking cigars in the garden or bright young things dancing on the tables. Our guide to the very best covers both ends of the spectrum and everything in between. Already a member and curious to see the alternatives, or keen to join one for the first time? Reader, look no further — the answer is right below.

The Athenaeum

Are you exceptionally clever? Are libraries your happy place? Do you enjoy long, sweeping lawns backing onto other members’ clubs, to whence you can retire in the summer between meetings in St James’s and before a night at the theatre? I know, I know: it all sounds rather lovely. The London Library is also just around the corner.

The Athenaeum has nurtured centuries of British thought among its lofty, neo-Classical environs — and the lure of being able to glean some of that intellectual heritage is undeniably appealing, if only by osmosis. Careful, however: the architectural pretentiousness of the building’s façade, complete with a gold statue of Athena, does not extend to its members. These are some very serious people indeed. ‘I’m sure you’re aware that we have had quite a few Nobel Prize winners among us,’ the club’s erstwhile chairman told a member of Country Life staff when he joined in the early Aughts. ‘It’s rather more than France.’

The Hurlingham Club

Anyone wondering whether The Hurlingham is right for them falls into one of two categories. Either you believe the club might one day lift the cap on its wait list (so, a wishful thinker) or you are the offspring of generational members and have been using the facilities since before you were born. You wonder, now that you’re all grown up and working in public relations, whether you might be better off joining Third Space instead. It’s so near the office, after all, and the showers there actually have doors. However, it’s also £245 a month and mum and dad still pay for The Hurlingham — so then again, maybe not.

White's

Were the happiest days of your life those you spent at an all-boys’ boarding school? Is your favourite pudding spotted dick? Do you enjoy the idea of your name appearing alongside Beau Brummell’s in the club’s bettings book? Do you feel, frankly, that the Garrick was wrong to accept women in 2024 when it caved under pressure from The Guardian, of all places? There can be no sacred cows — not even the monarch’s wife.

If all this strikes a chord — and you are of the male persuasion — then White’s may be just the ticket. It is, after all, the oldest club in London, the oldest in Britain and, consequently, the oldest in the entire world. That’s got to carry something—not cachet, because you wouldn’t be caught dead using such a word, but perhaps heft? Clout? The heritage of a once-great culture? Anyway, no time to waste: you have a million pounds to make before lunch.

Maison Estelle

Do you find most Mayfair clubs to be a little dour these days? Maison Estelle, whose sumptuous yet homely interiors feel like something out of the Country Life Top 100, is something of a Mecca for London’s young financial minds who find their parents’ clubs a little dated. They also enjoy the idea of being somewhere that hosted one of the BAFTA afterparties in 2025, which would have been rather complicated to do at White’s, as they would have had to turn away Demi Moore.

Maison Estelle appeals, moreover, to those curious about country life. With its oh-so-elegant outpost in the Cotswolds, Estelle Manor, the club offers city mice a chance to sample rural living ahead of their eventual move westwards, when they decide to raise a family and live somewhere that’s within easy reach of the Dragon School. The London site also enjoys immediate proximity to Bond Street, should one’s Rolex need servicing at any point or a meeting in Canary Wharf be put in the diary at the last minute. The Elizabeth Line is a five-minute walk away — or 10 minutes in a black cab.

See also: 5 Hertford Street

The Royal Automobile Club

Is Top Gear your favourite television show? Do you own an Aston Martin? Do you sit on the board of Rolls Royce PLC? And have you ever won the Grand Prix? If so, great. If not, don’t worry. The RAC is one of the more welcoming and open-minded clubs on the Pall Mall circuit, which is to say that many members sign up primarily to enjoy the frankly unparalleled reciprocals.

As in the clubs of old, gossip and one-too-many-glasses of something or other are the tricks of the trade. This is a place where people pull up, get stuck in and know how to have fun; proverbial vroom-vrooms are more important than their motoring counterparts. Nonetheless, do brush up on your knowledge of luxury racing vehicles. If not essential, small ‘e’ enthusiasm for the topic is highly recommended.

Car Park One (Royal Ascot)

Do you enjoy racing? Ah, you do, do you? Car Park One is not available. Best head back to the Royal Enclosure, or Car Park Two.

Car Park One is for those who enjoy the rigmarole of Ascot without the actual pressure of committing to the races. Sure, you might pop into the Royal Enclosure and bet on whatever colt Andrew Balding has told you to bet on, even if you now have to pay a modest £25 per annum to retain the privilege of doing so — but, really, you’re here for the vibes. You got the horses out of your system at Cheltenham earlier this year and know the picnic is the main event: Scotch eggs, smashed potatoes with crème fraiche and copious amounts of smoked salmon. On the quiche-to-equine spectrum, your enthusiasm is more firmly for the former.

Conversation still must flow, even if the winnings do not. Brush up on your knowledge of the global stock market, although such things should already be second nature to you.

The Groucho Club

Kids are awfully dull these days, aren’t they? It’s all me, me, me; health, sobriety and early nights. Whatever happened to fun? The sort our folks used to have? Well, members of the Groucho Club know how to have it in spades, so if the above felt oddly resonant, this could be one for you. Assuming, of course, that you are happy for your annual fee to subsidise those of the young and beautiful whom the Groucho has been trying to court for years, with free membership and literary events and the eternal line that ‘Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst used to come here all the time’. So did Salvador Dalí, who used to scribble a drawing on the back of his bill in lieu of paying (worth a whole lot more than the monies he’d have had to part with).

Yes, the Groucho was once beloved by artists — but if you find such a crowd intimidating, fret not. There aren’t many of them left here anymore.

See also: Soho House

The Royal Box (Wimbledon)

Are you the A list of the A list? Or betrothed to someone who is? Only then can you possibly hope to make it into this most coveted of clubs — together with The Prince and Princess of Wales, Sir David Beckham and Tom Cruise. Rest assured, however, that plenty have managed, although it certainly helps to be good looking and have starred in an episode of The Crown.

Is this the club for you? Well, that depends. Do you enjoy having cameras pointing in your face at all times? Do you still enjoy tennis when it goes to tie break for the third consecutive set and the sun beats down on your forehead in a proto-Sisyphean manner? You know all too well that a Panama hat is not suitable attire for BBC One. Also, do you prefer to watch tennis in stately-ish silence or curse whenever Novak Djokovic wins a point?

If your answer to any of the above was: ‘Irrelevant: I’ve received an invitation from the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club for what is indisputably the event of the year and you can bet your life savings that I’ll be going with bells on,’ then I guess you already know that this is the club for you and hardly need me to tell you otherwise. Fortune favours the invited.

The House of Koko

Are you a member of the Argentine aristocracy? Or a minor royal from the house of Genoa? Perhaps a young banker who wants to join a club, but isn’t sure which? This one seems rather convenient, as it’s rather close enough to Islington (where you live), doesn’t have much of a wait list (so you've heard) and comes with a rooftop restaurant and balcony. What’s not to love?

Everyone here is attractive, too, which is one of the main reasons you wish to join a club in the first place. Nominally, of course, you are here to network — specifically, to talk music, as you run an independent record label somewhere in Farringdon. Andy Cato of Groove Armada is a close family friend and you are yourself a veteran of Koko, the concert venue, to which you started going when you were only 16.

You mourned what you thought was its death in 2020, when a fire swept through the concert hall, but soon found out about its redevelopment and the introduction of a members’ club at the back of the building. In fact, you were earmarked for founding membership, but decided against it at the time (it didn’t ‘align with your plans’). Things have changed, however: you’ve since resigned from several other clubs because you thought this one offered everything and more — although you’ve kept the gym as a personal insurance, as so much revelry cannot take place without you putting in some extra hours on the treadmill.

The Houghton Fishing Club

‘Membership of the Houghton Fishing Club is the dream of every serious fly-fisherman,’ this magazine wrote in 2008. Yet, as we caveated, it is ‘obtainable by only the very fortunate few’. Founded in 1822, Houghton is the oldest private fishing club in Britain and has exclusive fishing rights to 13 miles of the River Test in Hampshire. With 25-odd members, it is harder to get into than even the Marylebone Cricket Club (wait list: 30 years). No doubt, to many readers, this exclusivity will sound rather appealing. To which we ask: do you possess a title? Ideally, one that’s been in your family for far longer than the club has been around? If so, welcome: you’re probably more familiar with Houghton’s proceedings than we are. If not, dear reader, you may wish to kiss that particular dream goodbye.

This feature originally appeared in the April 29, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

As the plainer cousins of the beloved butterfly, moths are frequently disregarded, passed off as dull or drab. But when the late Lee Alexander McQueen set up the Sarabande Foundation in 2006, it was a moth he chose as its emblem. When asked why, Trino Verkade, McQueen’s very first employee and now the charity’s director, answers succinctly: ‘A moth is a tenacious creature. Ever-evolving. Constantly growing. It will always fly towards the light.’

Such characteristics are exactly those Sarabande seeks to support in its work, providing emerging artists of all sorts with the means to realise their vision without restrictions. Offering its annual intake access to affordable studio spaces, mentorship opportunities, chances to exhibit, scholarship programmes and many more initiatives designed to support their future successes, the charity emerged out of McQueen’s desire to democratise access to the Arts (he himself had been born into a working-class East London family in 1969 before achieving stratospheric success).

‘They don’t have to be young, they don’t even have to have gone to art school,’ Trino says of the Sarabande cohort. ‘We just want our artists — whether they be painters, sculptors, milliners, fashion designers, animators or jewellers — to be at a pivotal point in their career.’ Alumni include Molly Goddard, Michaela Yearwood-Dan and John Skelton. She is adamant that Sarabande is not an incubator, but an accelerator. ‘Our artists aren’t babies. They’re not here to work things out. They’re here because they’ve got talent and something to say.’

Since its establishment 20 years ago, Sarabande — whose august ambassadors include the artists Marina Abramović and Sam Taylor-Johnson, the photographer Nick Knight and the costume designer Sandy Powell — has opened two blocks of studios in London, letting them to artists at almost unheard-of rates, subsidising monthly rents to just £1 per square metre, ensuring they can invest instead in their ambitious projects. The first Sarabande site was in Haggerston, the second in Tottenham. ‘We have always gone to the places where we feel exciting things are happening,’ says Trino. ‘We go to artists, rather than asking them to come to us.’

In true Sarabande style, however, the home of the foundation is metamorphosing. While the charity’s headquarters will remain in its Victorian stableblock in Haggerston, in Tottenham, Sarabande will, in May, move from its current location within a pair of Grade II-listed townhouses on the High Road to another set of two, this time Grade II*-listed, just a few doors down.

Such a sentence doesn’t do justice to the immensity of this endeavour. The buildings the charity has taken on — known as Holly House and Prudhoe House — were constructed in around 1715 to 1725 for Sir Hugh Smithson, Duke of Northumberland and a local MP. Thought to be the first semi-detached buildings in the country, the houses are perfectly symmetrical — paradigms of the Georgian ideal, with handsome Queen Anne façades, half-hipped roofs and a dentilled parapet cornice made of brick. Each with its own coach house, they were built to lure wealthy merchants to Tottenham, at the time a well-heeled rural enclave on the road to Cambridge from London. But by the time Trino first looked round the buildings in 2017, they were, to put it mildly, in need of love.

Prudhoe House, though used, had lost much of its charm; Holly House, meanwhile, was in a state of total disrepair. Tottenham Hotspur FC, which had bought the buildings a few decades previously, had managed to slow the decay with a new roof, but the situation was getting desperate. Trino remembers walking around the top floor when on her initial visit; three years later, it was too unsafe. While negotiations with the football club took many years, Trino says she knew Tottenham believed Sarabande could help them save the buildings. She recalls a conversation with Daniel Levy in 2020, then the club’s chairman. ‘He just totally understood what we were doing with Sarabande. Spurs do a huge amount of development in the area and they knew they needed someone with proper vision to take on the tenancy,’ she says. Together, they applied for National Lottery Heritage Funding — and eventually secured it, though it was 2023 before the decision was finalised and work could begin.

Tottenham Hotspur FC had already worked with F3 Architects, which made deciding on their involvement straightforward as did the practice’s experience of the adaptive reuse of historic buildings. What F3 have achieved here — especially in the more tumbledown Holly House — is quite spectacular. It is what they refer to as ‘arrested decay’; that is, a true kind of preservation. Across the 14 studios that now occupy the majority of the building, there must be a fragment of decorative history from almost every era on display. Layer upon scraped layer of paint has been left, as have the palimpsest of wallpapers, revealed when the rotten plaster was removed; there are patches of wall sprouting tufts of horsehair between extant Georgian laths, trippy violet walls, and doors daubed with 300 years’ worth of brushstrokes, as thick as an Auerbach canvas.

Unless something was dangerous or needed removing, F3 have left it. As Trino explains, ‘the idea is that the houses continue to live — and we continue to add to their stories. By patching everything up, you make it fake.’ Naturally, with this approach comes a degree of acceptance that, in the future, things will need mending, crumbling areas will crumble more. ‘And we’re happy with that. That is the life cycle of a building. We’ll fix it when it needs fixing,’ says Trino. ‘What’s important is that these houses are being used.’

The only particularly noticeable interventions are the plywood boxes superimposed on the studios’ walls, providing artists with pinboard space, or the fire-safe lino floors installed in the upper rooms, which are reserved for jewellers and their soldering tools. Next door, Prudhoe House, which had been lived in for 20 odd years, required much less work, though F3 and Sarabande have still placed the building’s historic fabric at the forefront throughout. With their six-over-six sash windows and generous proportions, the studios in here, now properly heated, must still be among the finest in the country, even without the extraordinary material history that survives next door.

One of the stipulations of the Lottery’s Heritage Fund is that any project it supports must meaningfully increase public access to and engagement with the heritage asset in question. Here, that has meant the creation of a gallery space in the basement, which Sarabande artists, who are also encouraged to participate in group shows, can avail themselves of whenever they have a suitable body of work. As Trino says, ‘having a gallery that will show your work is a great impetus for an artist.’

There is also the House of Bandits, a café, its name a nod to the anarchic ‘Sarabandits’ the charity supports, housed within the former coach yard of Holly House. Just as in the house, the building’s preserved historic fabric is integral to its character, only now enriched by the addition of site-specific artworks, including carved flagstones and a bar, created by Sarabande alumni Jo Grogan, Tom Hemingway, Castro Smith, Yijia Wu and George Richardson. ‘Once a Sarabande artist, always a Sarabande artist,’ says Trino.

The Sarabande Foundation takes its name from Alexander McQueen's Spring/Summer 2007 collection (above), a poetic meditation on fragility, decay and grandeur. There is something fitting, then, about the charity making its home in buildings that have themselves been in metamorphosis for three centuries; here, disintegration and creation are not in tension. These houses have known splendour and neglect in equal measure. Now, housing artists, they are becoming — like the moth — something else entirely.

Anyone walking down the upmarket high street of London’s St John’s Wood on February 6, 2012, will have noticed something unusual taking place. All 109 horses that make up the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery were walking to their new £16 million, purpose-built home in Woolwich Garrison. The day marked the end of over 200 years of military presence in NW8 and 2,500 school children, along with 400 veterans and locals, lined the route, which was decorated with bunting and flags.

Alongside its operational roles, the King’s Troop carries out ceremonial duties such as firing gun salutes and providing a gun carriage for state funerals. Being based in St John’s Wood was handy as Buckingham Palace was a 40-minute hack from the barracks. Soldiers and their horses could regularly be seen riding in the leafy streets of the affluent neighbourhood and the sound of their reveilles was a feature of the community. The site had been home to a military riding school since 1825 and used exclusively by the Royal Horse Artillery since 1880. According to one report, in the mid 1850s, 228 men were living at the barracks — with a single bath.

After the Second World War, the artillery was mechanised, but George VI wanted to keep a troop of horse artillery mounted and so formed the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, in 1947. When Elizabeth II acceded to the throne five years later, she insisted it should remain in her father’s name in recognition of her father’s special interest in the Troop. Today, the Troop takes precedence over all other regiments and parades and it's always on the right of the line of the British Army.

The lease on the barracks, granted by the Eyre Estate, expired in March 2012 and the 5.5-acre site was put up for sale. It was bought by the late Malaysian entrepreneur Ananda Krishnan — the force behind Kuala Lumpur’s iconic Petronas Towers — for a reported £250 million with a view to developing it into a new residential space in one of his favourite parts of London. Following several years in planning and development, sales at the 120-home residential square will launch in the autumn.

At the heart of St John’s Squire is the Grade II-listed riding school, which has been carefully preserved and will form the community’s residence club. The structure was completed by Royal Engineers in 1825 and has had numerous visits from members of the Royal Family, including Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh, Diana The Princess of Wales, Princess Anne and Prince Charles before he became King.

Former officer and Honorary Colonel of the King’s Troop, Major General Matthew Sykes, is taking an active role in shaping the future of St John’s Wood Square and was a serving officer when many of these visits took place. He remembers the final visit from Elizabeth II in 2011, where she underlined the word King’s Troop in the visitor’s book. When he heard that a sale of the land had been agreed, Sykes approached Krishnan to see if the history of the site could be woven into its new chapter. ‘I had an idea that the company was going to build something very special in a very special part of London. The Royal Horse Artillery was stationed there for over 100 years and I wanted to ensure that, in 100 years, people would understand that history.’

The initiative paid off. Architects Wilkinson Eyre (co-founder Jim Eyre is chairman of the Eyre Estate family trust) and heritage experts Walter Lily have spent just under three years restoring the riding school. The structure had to be secured to allow a team of Irish miners to dig a basement underneath; upon completion, it will be home to a 65-foot swimming pool and spa. The vast, 20-metre-long oak beams that span the width of the building — which Sykes remembers seeing from the floor of the school, having been thrown off his horse for the nth time — were cleaned and repaired while the roof was laid with nearly 13,000 Welsh slate tiles. A clock tower, which previously had just one face, was sent to specialist restorers Smith of Derby and now has four new faces. Two new street names are being introduced to the maps of London: King George VI Avenue and King’s Terrace — an exercise which required special dispensation from Buckingham Palace.

‘They aren’t paying lip service to the history of the site,’ continues Sykes. ‘That’s obvious from the tremendous care that’s been put into the restoration of the riding school, which looks better than it ever did. To me, it feels like the team is trying to create somewhere that people will be proud to live — somewhere that has soul.’

The scheme is spearheaded by Sir George Iacobescu, former chairman of Canary Wharf Group, and led by CEO Gareth Stow. While the launch is likely to draw some comparisons with Chelsea Barracks, Stow is quick to point out the differences. ‘It’s a much smaller site for one thing [Chelsea Barracks is 12.8 acres], there are only 120 properties compared with over 500 at Chelsea and it’s also a very different part of London. While everyone knows Chelsea, St John’s Wood is a bit of a hidden gem. Those who live there love it for its fresh air, proximity to Primrose Hill and Regent’s Park and quiet, residential streets — and the fact that it’s understated.’

Knight Frank recently identified St John’s Wood High Street as the second best in the UK after Wimbledon Village. The popular American School in London is just opposite the main entrance to St John’s Wood Square and is anticipated to draw buyers to the new homes. ‘The area attracts sophisticated, well-educated and well-travelled residents who like the fact that they aren’t in the hustle and bustle of areas like Mayfair,’ says Stow.

The architecture and scale of the new houses, designed by Squire & Partners, deliberately ape the terraces of Georgian and Victorian properties that surround the site and over half of the site is made up of gardens designed by Chelsea award-winning designer Andy Sturgeon. ‘We are custodians of a special site in a beautiful area of London,’ says Stow. ‘As an asset, we know we’ve got to respect the opportunity. We think that we’re setting the highest standard of quality for a new residential development.’

Sales at St John’s Wood Square will launch in the autumn of 2026. Visit the website for more information.

A study appeared in The Lancet Public Health last month — an occurrence that rarely elicits national attention — that found our pollen season is now nearly two weeks longer than it was in the 1990s. The timing was propitious: bunged-up noses and itchy eyes are as common in spring as an item on Nicky Haslam’s annual tea towel and a nasal overtone now supersedes any conversation in which one takes part, or on which one eavesdrops. Perhaps our adenoidal Prime Minister thinks it’s all a case of imitation and flattery, although tomorrow’s elections will show the reality is anything but. Sorry, Sir Keir: it is just hay fever.

The chatter on the topic these past few weeks, however, suggests the tide of ignorance may finally be turning. Tackling the cause of hay fever has often ranked low on our list of priorities, the condition deemed either too unsexy or too indulgent to warrant much attention. For decades, the professional recommendation has been simply to take an antihistamine and grow up; meanwhile, town planners and landscape architects have been busy finding ways to mitigate the damage caused by allergenic trees. The first step, to the uninitiated, is to quit planting male trees over their female counterparts, which trap pollen from the air. Moving into summer, the key is to keep grasses short (a trade-off for rewilders who favour wildflower meadows) and finally, come autumn, one has to target the weeds.

Trees remain our primary concern. Historically, town planners have preferred to plant male trees because these are tidier and easier to maintain, producing no seeds, fruits or pods the way female trees do. These at least appear to be less of a nuisance to citizens. Yet hay fever continues to get worse: an estimated 13 million to 18 million people suffer from the condition in Britain (roughly a quarter of the population), with a 2021 poll of 7,000 people finding that 37% had developed symptoms for the first time within the previous five years. In the worst-case scenario, victims can suffer from angioedema, chronic sinusitis and asthma. With that, the quest to change what and how we plant has become galvanised.

How, then, should we weave more female trees into our landscape? Going further still: what more do we stand to gain from them? London’s green-minded mayor has previously hinted at planting an urban jungle along a soon-to-be-pedestrianised section of Oxford Street, one of many environmental projects in a city where several boroughs are expected to vote Green. This is fertile ground for new female trees, the fruit of which might also support more avian life — and, in certain cases, yield crops for local citizens. It’s a win on all counts. Now, the real work begins.

This feature originally appeared in the May 6, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

London’s cognoscenti gathered at Notting Hill's The Fat Badger last Friday to drink not wine, nor Martinis, but Showerings fine cider. It seems an odd idea: a drink usually associated with picnics or pub gardens suddenly being paired with tagliolini or whatever trendy dish Londoners are serving nowadays. Nick Showering, whose family has been making cider in Shepton Mallet for nearly 200 years, is ebullient about his product’s ascending fortunes. Only last week, the brand went live in 490 Tesco stores at a price point nearly double that of supermarket staples such as Aspall. ‘It shows an appetite for fine cider,’ Nick says, ‘even among those who previously wouldn’t have known about it.’

Fine cider — made from 100% fermented apple juice — is different to the stuff we are used to drinking as a casual, afterwork tipple. It boasts a more complex flavour; perhaps a more acquired taste. When Clare Smyth, Britain’s only three-Michelin-starred female chef, cooked a gourmet fish and chips on the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen last year, she paired the meal with Showerings ‘because the tannins and bitterness of the fine cider cut right through the fattiness of the fish,’ says the brand’s heir apparent. ‘West Country cider is closer to a red wine: characterful, bodied and tannin-rich,’ Nick explains, ‘because the orchards here produce cider apples, unlike in the South-East.’ There, orchards tend to produce dessert apples, a sweeter variety whose cider is ‘lighter bodied’. Could cider tastings be the new wine tastings?

For young people, perhaps. ‘As they get priced out of fine wines,’ explains Hannah Crosbie, a wine critic for The Observer, ‘they can turn to fine cider, as it’s a more accessible entry point.’ The drink, she adds, is a far richer and more varied drink than people give it credit for: ‘It can range from peaty flavours to something more PetNat-adjacent' — the latter shorthand for Pétillant Naturel.

A purist may well turn their nose up; yet they’d be missing out. Near Taunton, the Temperley family has been making fine cider at Burrow Hill Farm since 1971. Their Somerset Pomona, a 20% ABV apple liqueur blending young cider apple juice with matured apple brandy, and aged in oak barrels, won gold at the Women's Wine and Spirit Awards last year.

Envelope-pushing chefs are keen to explore fine cider’s potential in cooking, too. Diarmuid Goodwin, a Northern Irish cook who trained under Angela Hartnett, says he used fine cider to make the base in a nettle and haddock chowder, which he recently prepared live on Virgin Media’s Six O’Clock Show. ‘I’m not usually a fan of cider,’ he laughs. ‘It reminds me of drinking behind a church when I was 15. In my ripe old age, however, I’ve learnt to appreciate the complexity of the real stuff.’ Sip slowly…

This feature first appeared in the April 29, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In 1746, tall ships sailed up the Thames, only two bridges crossed the river, London was a global centre for trade in the likes of coal, wood, wool, cloth and meat and its population numbered about 650,000.

During this year, too, French-born Huguenot surveyor, engraver and cartographer John Rocque (1704–62) created a pioneering mapping masterpiece, An Exact Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, and borough of Southwark — the first detailed and accurate bird’s-eye view of the capital ever seen.

Two centuries later, the Daily Mail reproduced Rocque’s map, alongside words by Wallace Crawford Snowden, in a book entitled London 200 years ago. The recently published London in the 18th Century is a revised and updated version of that work, with Rocque’s map once again reproduced in glorious detail over numerous pages with historical explanations.

Travel back in time to a period when myriad timber yards were on the south side of the Thames opposite the Strand, when Buckingham House, built in 1703 for John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham and Normanby, wasn’t the U-shaped building that would become Buckingham Palace and Bermondsey was open countryside.

'London in the 18th Century' is available from Atlantic Publishing (£25)

This article first appeared in the April 22, 2026, issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

There are many sentences that I think about on an almost daily basis, and most of them come from a letter that Hunter S. Thompson wrote to Anthony Burgess. They involve lizards, hoodlums, thugs, ‘a 50,000 word novella about the condition humane’, typewriters and piazzas. I get a lot of emails, plenty of which are useless, and it’s only a mix of time constraints and politeness that stops me from responding to most of them with this amalgam of insults that Dr Thompson concocted while running the National Affairs Desk at Rolling Stone.

The first time I encountered this elite piece of correspondence was at the Freemason’s Hall, when it was read aloud to me (and many others) by Dominic West. The event was my first experience of Letters Live, the epistolary event that was first created by Shaun Usher and Jamie Byng in 2013. Other readings from that night included Andrew Scott reading DO, a letter from Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse; Kurt Vonnegut’s letter to the children of Xavier High School in New York City, brought to life by Sir Ian McKellen; and Noel Coward’s correspondence to Marlene Dietrich, imploring her to ‘NOT be so bloody vulnerable’, perfectly executed by Benedict Cumberbatch.

So much of that night remains in my memory (particularly Vonnegut’s apology for not making a public appearance, due to his resembling an ‘iguana’ at the age of 84). But that’s the thing with letters, isn’t it? They stick with you. They stick with you because they take great care and effort to write, and because when you read them you understand that someone has stopped and made the effort to write to you.

‘A letter asks for patience, from both the writer and the reader,’ Shaun tells me, via email. ‘It allows for uncertainty, contradiction, and vulnerability in a way instant communication rarely does. Letters capture people mid-thought, without hindsight. You meet someone exactly where they were, on a particular day, feeling whatever they were feeling.’

Shaun’s obsession with letters began in 2002, from a place of love. ‘My now-wife and I fell in love largely by letter,’ he says. ‘Writing to one another slowly, carefully, and without an audience changed how I understood what letters could hold. That curiosity soon spilled into reading other people’s correspondence, and before long I was completely hooked.’

In 2009, he launched the website Letters of Note, which then led to a bestselling book in 2013 (‘I never imagined how widely it would resonate’). It was at the launch of that book that Letters Live was born, when Byng, the CEO and publisher of Canongate, suggested ‘bringing the letters off the page and reading them aloud, simply and without embellishment’. That evening was the first Letters Live. ‘Something happened in the room,’ Shaun says. ‘Hearing these voices aloud gave the letters a new kind of life, and it was immediately clear there was something worth continuing.’

And continue it has, with around 90 shows both in the UK and internationally. From humble beginnings at a book launch, Letters Live has performed in London, Los Angeles and New York City. In 2016, at the Calais ‘Jungle’, Jude Law and Matt Berry read letters written by refugees, and during the Covid Lockdown, a digital event was broadcast from the Roundhouse. Festival appearances include Hay, Glastonbury and Wilderness.

The most recent event was at the Queen’s Elizabeth Hall on the Southbank, London, in association with Cunard, where the theme of the evening was a nautical one, and featured performances from Harriet Walter, Cumberbatch, West, Damian Lewis, Louise Brealey (who, like Cumberbatch, has been a long-time contributor), Toby Jones, Meera Syal and James Corden. Music was performed by Laura Mvula and Bea and her Business. The next event is at the Royal Albert Hall on April 22, and on May 14, Letters Live returns to New York City.

Having attended a few shows, what always stands out to me is the power of the written word. It would be easy to be overawed by the presence of the A-list performers, but the real stars were, are, and always will be the letters themselves. In a digital world, nothing captivates quite like correspondence.

Were you surprised by the popularity?

Yes, very much so. Letters Live was never conceived as a long-term project. That first show was simply a launch event, an experiment, and we all assumed it would end there. What surprised me wasn’t just that people came, but how they listened. People were willing to sit still and give their full attention to someone else’s words, written in another time, for another person. The response since has been consistently humbling. Audiences return, performers ask to be involved, and the format continues to find new rooms and new contexts. The recent show with Cunard was a good example of that: letters shaped by long journeys and time at sea finding their way back into a shared, live space, and being met with the same quiet attentiveness.

What are some of your favourite letters that have been read out at an event?

That’s always a difficult question, because favourites tend to shift with time and context. Letters read recently often linger longest. At our most recent show, Dame Harriet Walter read a wonderful letter by the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, written at sea, full of wit, physicality, and delight in the experience of travel. Damian Lewis, meanwhile, transformed himself entirely in a letter written by the pirate Henry Every, bringing a surprising mixture of menace and theatrical flair to the stage. One of the pleasures of Letters Live is the sheer variety of performances, and not knowing which as-yet-unused letter, or which upcoming reading, will soon become a favourite. We’ve barely scratched the surface.

How do you find the letters?

They come from everywhere. I spend a lot of time in archives, libraries, museums, and buried inside published collections of correspondence. I also have thousands of letters in my own library at home, which I dip into constantly. We’re also often given access to private or institutional archives held by our partners, which can open up whole worlds of previously unseen correspondence. For our most recent show, Cunard shared material from their own maritime archives, which was a real gift. Often it’s a footnote or passing reference that leads somewhere unexpected.

Obviously one of the great pulls of the show are the celebrities. How do you choose them? Do they reach out to you?

It’s a mixture. Sometimes we approach people we admire, and sometimes performers come to us after seeing a show. The best readings are the ones where the performer almost disappears and becomes a conduit for the voice on the page. When that happens, the room leans in.

Do you have a favourite performer?

I genuinely don’t. We’ve been incredibly lucky. Different performers bring different energies, and part of the pleasure is never quite knowing how a letter will sound until it’s read aloud for the first time.

What does the success of the programme tell us about the art of letter writing? Is it a dying art?

Letter writing is certainly less common in everyday life. But the success of Letters Live suggests the appetite for slowness, depth, and sincerity hasn’t gone anywhere. People still want words that have been thought through. Writing shaped by time rather than speed. Letters may be written less often now, but when we encounter them, they still carry enormous weight.

Any exciting plans for the future? You’ve done the UK, New York, Los Angeles, Glastonbury. Anywhere else?

There are always conversations bubbling away. One of the pleasures of Letters Live is how well it travels, both geographically and emotionally. I can’t say too much yet, but there are certainly places we’d love to take it next.

Do you write a lot of letters yourself?

Everyone presumes, understandably, that I write letters on a daily basis. The truth is, I spend far more time reading and listening to other people’s letters than writing my own. That said, sailing on the Queen Mary 2 recently did something I hadn’t expected. While staying in the ship’s Grill Suite, the pace slowed, distractions fell away, and I found myself reaching for a pen. It was a reminder of why letters existed in the first place.

What do you think makes a great letter?

Honesty. A great letter isn’t trying to perform. It’s trying to say what needs to be said. Whether it’s funny, furious, tender, or mundane, the best letters feel necessary, as though the writer couldn’t not write them. That urgency, that truthfulness, is what allows a letter to last.

The Letters Live in association with Cunard show was a celebration of sea voyages and the exclusive sanctuaries of Cunard's Grill Suites.

The particular edition of Letters Live drew inspiration from the calmness of sea travel, and the human need to stay connected across oceans during crossings. As experienced by Shaun Usher on his recent voyage aboard 'Queen Mary 2', the experience is shaped by spaces designed for reflection, such as the Grill Suites, where generous living areas, private balconies, and attentive concierge and butler services create an atmosphere of calm and elegance.

For more information, click here.

My hero as a young boy was the Milky Bar Kid. He was a cowboy, but, more importantly, he wore, like me, a pair of glasses. He made spectacles cool and that was very important.

I had almost forgotten about him until I walked into E. B. Meyrowitz in the Royal Arcade, just off Bond Street. Here, I met the utterly delightful Sheel Davison-Lungley, owner and inspiration behind the company and a shoo-in for the nicest proprietor I have ever met.

The extraordinary thing about glasses is that, as a population, we take so little interest in what they look like — and perhaps more importantly, how they make you look. Yet, in my case, I wear them all the time. They are the first thing I put on in the morning and the last thing I take off at night.

My eyesight started going when I was in my late forties with a frustrating hereditary disease. I only wore glasses in childhood due to a squint, which was operated on. I haven’t been very lucky with my eyesight, but that changed when I walked into E. B. Meyrowitz.

Glasses are how people see me and part of my personality. They are me. My granddaughter doesn’t recognise me when she pulls them off my nose. This means that getting the right pair matters. They need to fit (my previous ones didn’t), be the right colour for your complexion and complement your jaw line, at the same time as highlighting your eyes.

Sheel, between plenty of laughs and storytelling, carefully measured my face. The proportions and variations are what we recognise each other by — a fact, strangely, I hadn’t acknowledged until then.

After the science came the art: a variety of frames in various hues was tried. I first thought I wanted a black pair, but soon realised it was too harsh. I cycled through various options before landing on the right pair: rectangular frames in dark-brown acetate, less hassle than a horn that needs looking after.

Being bespoke to me, I had to wait a while for the specs to be made until I could get my nose under them. Patience is key, but the result has been a transformation.

They are by far the most important piece of clothing I own (nobody sees the Bremont watch that my father gave me, as it hides under my cuff). They define my image and make me feel better and prouder of myself.

This feature originally appeared in the November 5, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Eggs, eggs, eggs. Soft boiled with toast ‘soldiers’, scrambled, fried or poached. Breakfast owes them everything. Their versatility makes them one of the most beloved ingredients of a British pantry. From pickled, to devilled and truffled, to mercilessly deep fried until golden and delicious, there’s always a new way to eat an egg.

Selflessly, this Easter, I eschewed my usual devouring of one million chocolate iterations and instead pushed my stomach to the limit to bring you the ultimate guide to London’s most innovative eggs. Let’s get cracking.

What? Devilled eggs

Where? Rita’s, Soho

Devilled eggs, the sexiest sounding and most 1970s looking eggs of all, are done to perfection at Rita’s. Founded in 2012, the independent restaurant is led by head chef and owner Gabriel Pryce and beverage director Missy Flynn. ‘We use toban-djan in our devilled eggs,’ says Gabriel, and the Chinese fermented chili bean paste certainly makes them stand out from the crowd.

They are so popular that some customers flock to Rita’s especially for one. ‘One woman has been eating them since 2014,’ Gabriel told The Observer last year, which makes sense, because they are by far the best devilled eggs I have ever had the pleasure of hungrily gulping down. Slightly spicy and indulgently creamy, this is a new twist on a classic egg recipe that comes with a welcome tang, and is well worth a trip into Soho.

Or, try your hand at whipping them up at home…

Ingredients

• 10 medium eggs
• 1.5 heaped tablespoons of toban-djan
• 1 heaped tablespoon of mayonnaise
• 1 bunch of chives finely chopped
• 2 tsp toasted sesame seeds
• Sesame oil

Method

• Boil the eggs for 14 minutes then chill in ice water
• Peel the eggs and carefully cut them in half with a thin bladed knife
• Gently remove the firm yolks and add them to a blender with the mayonnaise and toban-djan. Keep the whites on a tray in the fridge
• Blend the yolk mix until smooth and silky and transfer to a piping bag (or use a spoon to gently fill them in if you don’t have one)
• Fill each egg white with the yolk mix and top each one with a sprinkle of chives, sesame seeds and a splash of sesame oil

What? Lobster omelette

Where? The Goring, Victoria

The hotel HRH The Princess of Wales spent the night in before her wedding is undoubtedly fit for royalty. As is their signature dish, the best-selling lobster omelette. Rich and indulgent, the budget meal beloved by Gwen from Gavin & Stacey reaches new heights of luxury in this dish from the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant. Sadly, executive chef Graham Squire is not an egg man. ‘Couldn’t think of anything worse,’ he tells me. ‘The smell of a boiled egg really upsets me. We make huge amounts of egg truffle mayonnaise mix for sandwiches and that mix itself, I will not taste it. I just cannot stand eggs.’

Fortunately, Graham is a consummate professional and kindly offers to show me how to make their lobster omelette anyway. They use Clarence Court eggs (the Financial Times of the egg world; well regarded for their quality, tinged a different colour from the rest and ‘quite pricey’ to quote Graham). Typically they sell about 24 a day which, I can confirm, is because they are utterly delicious.

Ingredients

• 150g butter
• 150g flour
• 180g egg yolk
• 450g lobster stock stock (buy or make your own)
• 15g Dijon mustard
• 90g grated parmesan
• 300g milk
• 750g double cream
• 18g Malden salt
• A tablespoon of white wine shallots (prep beforehand)
• A splash of lobster oil (alternatively use rape seed oil)
• 240g fresh cooked lobster meat
• 12 eggs
• Salt
• Pepper
• A sprinkling of dill

Method

• Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the flour and salt, and mix on the heat. After a while, a smooth paste should form and come away from the sides of the pan
• Add in the lobster stock, milk and half of the cream, Continue to cook out as for béchamel sauce, stirring continuously, over a low heat for around 5 minutes.
• Remove from the heat and add the egg yolk, mustard and parmesan. Mix until smooth, then allow to cool. Whip the other half of the cream and fold into the cooler sauce (do not over work)
• Preheat your oven to 220°C, leaving the door open
• Using three eggs per omelette, lightly beat in a bowl, seasoning with salt and pepper. Add a small amount of white wine shallots and a splash of lobster oil. Slowly cook in a non-stick pan, folding constantly until an omelette begins to form, but is still runny on top. Gently place the omelette onto a small ovenproof dish, runny side up. Continue four times for individual omelettes
• Place 60g of lobster meat on top of each of the omelette, add a generous spoonful of the thermidor on top of that and spread across
• Place the omelette in the oven and grill for about 5 minutes, leaving the grill door open until golden brown.
• Serve immediately, garnished with a piece of lobster and some dill

What? Egg hopper

Where? Hoppers, Soho

Nowhere is eating an egg more fun than at Hoppers. With four London outposts, this Sri Lankan and South Indian restaurant is led by its co-founder Karan Gokani and is much loved for its namesake dish — particularly its egg hopper. Traditionally a breakfast dish, it is somewhere between a poppadom and a savoury pancake. Making a hopper requires years of practice and specialised kitchen equipment. ‘There's a real art to it. We've got a couple of guys in the team that are specialists,’ says Karan. Best eaten with a curry and Pol Sambol, a Sri Lankan coconut relish.

What? Scotch egg

Where? Claridge’s Bakery, Mayfair

The heartiest dish on my egg list, the Scotch egg at Claridge’s Bakery is second to none. ‘The shape and using a great quality egg — and patience,’ are the keys to success, Gary Cutcliffe from the bakery tells me. Sophia Lambo, another baker, can make up to 80 of these at Claridge’s every day. Nutmeg, she tells me, is crucial to getting the flavour just right, as are Japanese breadcrumbs for the eggs’ crunchy coating. Claridge’s uses Cacklebean eggs, laid by Arlington white chickens, for their Scotch eggs. ‘They’re a stunning egg and the yolk is so, so vibrantly orange,’ Gary gushes. At the bakery they use a deep fat fryer but a good alternative at home would be shallow frying in a bit of oil before finishing it off in the air fryer or the oven, he says.

Ingredients

• 500g good quality sausage meat
• 3g fresh sage, finely chopped
• 1 tsp olive oil
• 6g fine sea salt
• 50g shallots, finely chopped
• 3g fresh thyme, picked leaves and finely chopped
• Pinch nutmeg, finely grated
• Pinch ground white pepper
• 100g plain white flour
• 8 eggs (5 whole and three beaten separately)
• 150g Japanese panko breadcrumbs

Method

• Heat a small saucepan on medium/low heat with olive oil. Add in the shallots and start to cook with no colour, stirring continuously for about 5 minutes. Add in the remaining ingredients and cook for a further minute before removing from the heat. You will need to chill this mixture in a bowl in the fridge before adding in the sausage meat. It is important the mixture and sausage meat are cold before mixing these together. Once fully combined, leave in the bowl in the fridge until needed
• When boiling the eggs use 5 Cacklebean eggs, stored at room temperature. Bring a pan of water to a rolling boil before gently adding in the eggs, trying to avoid any cracks. Cook the eggs for 7 minutes, then remove and submerge into a bowl of ice water to chill. Once cold, carefully peel the eggs leaving them whole without breaking into the white part of the egg
• Take the cold sausage mix and divide equally into 5 balls. Take one ball into your hand and evenly flatten across your palm. Add one egg to the centre of your palm and wrap the mixture around the egg. Finish by gently shaping the sausage meat around the egg into an even ‘egg’ shape before putting onto a plate. Continue to wrap the 4 remaining eggs and add to the plate
• Then pané the Scotch egg. Place the flour, three eggs beaten and panko breadcrumbs into separate bowls. Working one at a time, coat the sausage meat eggs in the flour, then add this into the beaten egg and finally coat the egg with the breadcrumbs, taking care to drip the excess beaten egg before adding to the breadcrumbs. You will now need to add the Scotch egg back into the beaten egg for a second coating before rolling through the breadcrumbs for a final time to create an even coating
• Repeat this stage for the remaining Scotch eggs.
• Using either a deep fat fryer or pan of oil on top of the stove, heat the oil to 160°C. Gently add in the eggs and set a timer for 10 minutes before removing them onto a piece of kitchen roll. If you have a temperature probe, this can be inserted into the meat casing and should read a minimum of 70°C. Allow the Scotch eggs to rest until cool
• These can be enjoyed warm or can be chilled in the fridge and enjoyed cold the following day

What? Pickled egg

Where? Whole Beast, Brixton

Not for the faint hearted when it comes to egg eating, Whole Beast’s pickled egg packs a punch and takes a good amount of time to make. Partners Sam and Alicja Bryant describe their Brixton restaurant as a ‘nose-to-tail, live fire concept’. Their pickled egg is a staple of the menu, and one of the only vegetarian items on it to boot. ‘The idea came from the pub The Southampton Arms in Hampstead Heath,’ Sam says. ‘There was a jar of pickled eggs behind the bar. A few of us were in there and we said: “Shall we just get one as, like, a rogue choice?”.’ They were surprised by the many accompaniments that came with it and immediately sold on the idea. ‘We put it on our menu as a bit of a laugh as we thought no one would order it, but we sell so many,’ Sam says. They sell about 30 on a Saturday night.

What? Truffled eggs

Where? The Devonshire, Soho

The Devonshire is known for its Guinness, and the crowd of gilet-clad finance bros that frequent its smoking area. But I think it should really be known for its truffled eggs. Only available on their private dining menu, co-founder and chef Ashley Palmer-Watts says carrying this out at home can be done with a poached or fried egg, ‘which I think would be equally as delicious as our way’. If there are any spare eggs after a service the chefs are very keen to scarf one down, I am told. After ‘scarfing’ one down myself I can confirm that I would high-vault any amount of Guinness-drinking finance bros at the restaurants threshold and gatecrash even the most exclusive private dining party to scarf down another myself. Eggs at their most beautiful.

What? Egg mayonnaise

Where? Bistro Freddie, Shoreditch

Bistro Freddie’s head chef Alex Henderson does an egg mayonnaise like no other. ‘I’ve eaten way too many during my time here,’ she laughs. They probably sell about 20 servings a day. ‘We use a really good quality egg: free range, lovely yellow yolk. We season it with salt and a little bit of pepper,’ she says, revealing her top tips for a quality egg mayonnaise. They also top with whole anchovies, perfect for any seafood fan — a high-quality take on a classic egg recipe, and probably the simplest to make at home from my egg-cellent list.

Ingredients

• As many eggs as you like
• High quality anchovies
• 1 egg yolk
• 25g Dijon mustard
• 17g malt vinegar
• Some ice
• 270ml sunflower oil
• 5g salt
• A small amount of pepper

Method

• In a Thermomix blend together the yolk, Dijon, malt vinegar, ice and egg salt. Slowly trickle in the sunflower oil until a thick emulsified mayo forms
• Boil the eggs in boiling water for 6.5 minutes. Cut the egg in half, season with black pepper and Maldon salt
• Assemble the dish by putting a small spoon of mayonnaise on the bottom of the plate for the egg to sit on. Add a generous spoon of mayo on top of each egg followed by a good quality anchovy

The annual Oxford vs Cambridge University Boat Race is upon us, and that prompts three obvious questions. Who will win? Why do people who didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge care who wins? And what would it be like to live in one of those lovely houses you see them row past?

I definitely can't help with question one, and question two has always puzzled me too — but care people do. Millions tune in to watch each year, and I suppose that rooting for an arbitrary seat of learning that you didn't go to is no different to, say, Liverpool FC having millions of fans who've never set foot on Merseyside.

Question three, though, is right in the Country Life sweetspot. So, ahead of the event that is officially entitled The CHANEL J12 Boat Race, here's a look at six of those lovely houses on the banks of the Boat Race route from Putney to Mortlake on the River Thames.

Putney Bridge — £4,950,000

This grand and beautiful sitting room has a wonderful view of the Thames at Putney, where the race begins.

But this is a home that has far more to offer than just its proximity to the River Thames: three storeys and over 3,000sq ft of space is a rare find in this part of London — the agents call it 'waterfront living at its absolute best'.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures.

Fulham — £3,250,000

For Boat Race fans, there is surely only thing better than being able to watch the action while literally still in bed — and that is to do so while in your house on Oxbridge Terrace.

The three-bedroom house is one of five in this converted building right on the waterfront with uninterrupted views of the River Thames. It's also close to the action, and in particular Munster Village, a small area of boutique cafes and shops.

For sale via Nested — see more details.

Hammersmith Bridge, Chiswick side — £2,500,000

You really can just sit on your own sofa and see the Boat Race go by from this house in a little enclave in Chiswick called Strand-on-the-Green. It's the sort of charming, tucked away London spot where Richard Curtis should set a rom-com.

The house is just as quirky and fun as you'd hope of what is as close as you'll find to a beach house on the Thames, though there's a bit of work to be done.

For sale via Knight Frank — see more details and pictures.

Hammersmith Bridge, Barnes side — £1,350,000

Barnes is one of the loveliest — but also one of the priciest — parts of south-west London, so to find a home this close to the waterside at 'only' £1.35 million is actually pretty good, particularly when it's a mansion flat of great quality.

As the pictures show, it's beautifully kept, has three balconies, and access to the communal gardens. The mature trees add to the beauty of those gardens — and given that the Boat Race usually takes place before the leaves come out, you'll still get a good view of the action on the water each year.

For sale via Chestertons — see more details and pictures.

Chiswick — £5,250,000

Okay, so you can't see the river from the main living space in this gorgeous Chiswick house — but what a great place to sit while watching it on TV. And then, as the rowers approach, you can dash out to the balcony and enjoy this fabulous river view.

A house this size, in this postcode, with this big of a garden is a real treat — and probably the pick of the homes on this page for life on the other 51 non-Boat Race weeks of the year.

For sale via Knight Frank — see more details and pictures.

Mortlake — £825,000

Finishing on a high note — for Boat Race on-the-nose terms, if not for plushness of accommodation — is this two-bedroom flat in Boatrace Court. Really. That's what it's called: Boatrace Court, and it has a sensational view of the River Thames at Mortlake.

It may not be the prettiest buildings, but it does have over 1,200sq ft, two bedrooms and a substantially more affordable price tag than the other homes on this page — and the best view of the finish line.

For sale via Chestertons — see more details and pictures.

London wine bars have been through various different iterations since the 1990s, from the dimly lit dens with Keith Floyd-esque owners (who would take their ancient Volvos over to France every three months and bring them back groaning with claret) to the house-music-blasting All Bar One emulators and, briefly, the dangerously formatted pay-to-play venues with Coravin-powered vending machines.

Right now Parisian-inspired bar a vins are firmly in the ascendant, boasting left-of-centre wine lists and cheffy but accessible menus. They’re synonymous with east London: Hackney, Dalston, Clapton and Stoke Newington dominate most ‘best of’ lists. Not this one, though — here’s where to go for a really interesting and, dare we say it, cool drink in Zone One.

Lower Wine

The Cut, which runs beneath the Southwark side of Waterloo, never used to be much of a destination in its own right, but it’s had a significant spruce-up in recent years and is now home to the hidden gem that is Lower Wine, a wonderfully cosy and well stocked bottle shop slash bar.

Handily situated for the Old and Young Vics and the Southbank, it has a seriously impressive list, with Champagne-method wines a bit of a speciality: when we visited a Monmouthshire Pet Nat (a cloudy, gently sparkling fizz) by Ancre Hill was a standout.

Marjorie’s

Carnaby Street caught wine-lovers’ attention with the arrival of the ever-excellent Bar Crispin, with its grower Champagnes and seasonal small plates.

Now it has Marjorie’s too, a chic bar a vins occupying the former site of the mystifying Hawaiian burger bar. Brilliantly buzzy and staffed by a team with plenty of vinous know-how, it has an all-French list and an ambitious kitchen: think a savoury rocher alongside a glass of aromatic white, or blushing strips of bavette with a bearnaise-like egg-yolk emulsion to go with your chilled red.

Groups can book a roomy eight-seater table downstairs.

Farm Shop Wine Bar

All hail Artfarm, the independent hospitality group that has brought the fun back to Mayfair with The Audley, Mount St Restaurant above it, and delicatessen Farm Shop. Beneath (and alongside) the latter is what for my money is one of central London’s best all-round wine bars, with vibes as good as its list.

Pull up a chair in either the original cellar, which gets busy straight after work, or the upstairs former butcher, which is better for a date. Wines are mostly from small producers, including the in-house Maid of Bruton fizz, and the food is superb, with British cheeses and charcuterie as well as larger dishes like a roast chicken sharing board and proper puds.

Warning: depending on what time you visit, it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation to blow the budget on some provisions from the deli on your way out.

Bar Daskal

Where to drink in Borough Market without hordes of tourists spoiling the experience? Keep your blood pressure within a sensible range by heading for Bar Daskal, tucked away in the stylish and atmospheric new Borough Yards development.

A homage to childhood summers the owners spent on Mallorca, there’s an entirely Spanish list, with sherries (a real strength) cropping up on the cocktail menu too: look out for the Cosecha, a blend of Palo Cortado and Manzanilla with dry vermouth and prune. Gildas, smoked olives and tortilla wedges round things off nicely.

The Black Duke

A glass of Pol Roger for £5? Do not adjust your sets: the new cellar bar beneath south London legend Brunswick House is already an industry favourite for good reason. Its looks are handsomely Georgian, but the wine list is up to the minute, with plenty of interesting choices from independent producers all available by the glass or bottle, along with some excellent alcohol-free options and said bargain fizz between 6pm and 8pm.

Food-wise you’re spoilt for choice, with a ham, cheddar and boudin noir ‘bikini’ toastie and Brunswick House’s famous griddled wild garlic potato bread among the hits. This one’s only open from Tuesday to Thursday, so plan ahead.

Gordon’s

You could never call it a hidden gem in the traditional sense – the queue speaks for itself – but I’m including Gordon’s here because I think a lot of people (including me, until recently) have forgotten just how good it really is.

Scene of countless first dates since it opened in 1890, the Pepysian cellar beneath Charing Cross has now expanded out into a very smart heated terrace, and the tome-like wine list includes some exceptionally drinkable newer styles along with the buttery white burgundies and jammy riojas. The approachable staff really know their stuff.

Bar Brasso

Behind the new American Embassy in Nine Elms, in what is otherwise one of London’s most ghostly new developments, is Robin Gill’s unfailingly enjoyable Irish-American restaurant Darby’s, with a winning line in oysters and live jazz — and next door, under the same management, there’s now Bar Brasso.

Styling itself as an all-day ‘cicchetti and tapas bar’, it draws inspiration from Venice’s bacari and San Sebastian’s stand-up joints: you will eat exceedingly well here whatever time you visit, with porcini arancini, bolognese on toast and olive oil-drizzled chocolate mousse.

But what about the wines? Uniformly excellent, with supremely quaffable house red, white and orange on tap, as well as a strong selection of vermouths.

Noble Rot Mayfair

Each of the three Noble Rots is well worth your time (and the almost inevitable sore head). The Lamb’s Conduit Street original has buckets of Dickensian charm, while Soho revives the rakish spirit of The Gay Hussar, the restaurant it once housed. If you’re looking for somewhere with a little less through traffic, though, choose the Mayfair branch, which is well hidden in Shepherd Market’s warren of streets.

The restaurant section books up quickly, but both the upstairs and downstairs bars welcome walk-ins, with much of the main menu on offer alongside an unrivalled selection of sips and pours (several unusual sparkling wines, full bodied French whites and a Greek rose were among the standouts when we last visited).

Our advice? Recover from a trying bout of Christmas shopping with a festive glass of red and one of the legendary Noble Rot bread baskets all to yourself.

The Remedy

Another ideal refuge from the mayhem of Oxford Circus: flee due north and you’ll find this long-established spot hidden away just below Great Portland Street. The Remedy has all the best bits of an old-school wine bar – seats you can sink into, chalet-esque cosiness and an unapologetically Gallic bias – along with a refreshingly modern list, with highlights including some of the criminally underrated wines from the Savoie region.

The menu is appropriately rib-sticking: dumplings, a fancy cassoulet, cheeses from La Fromagerie.

Bar Flor

This place is five minutes brisk walk from Victoria station, but from the moment you step inside you’ll feel like you’re thousands of miles away — in a fashionable quarter of Barcelona, specifically, nibbling on gildas with a glass of chilled fino to hand.

Tucked away above Wildflowers in Newson’s Yard on Pimlico Road, Bar Flor follows in its restaurant sibling’s cool modern European footsteps, with small plates and cocktails alongside a thoughtfully put together wine list.

As the name suggests, fortified wines are a speciality (flor is the film of yeast which forms on the surface of sherries), but the regular list is also full of gems from small Spanish producers. Food-wise, don’t miss Wildflowers’ famous ‘holiday potatoes’, here reimagined as a riff on patatas bravas.

Gambit Bar

Here, for once, is a hidden gem that’s genuinely hidden. Gambit Bar takes a bit of finding – it’s under The Newman, Fitzrovia’s latest hotel opening – but your efforts will be handsomely repaid.

The supremely comfortable subterranean bar feels more like New York than London, with properly swish Dorothy Parker-era Manhattan decor and a 1970s soul soundtrack courtesy of the resident DJs.

The wine list globe-trots without being overwhelmingly dense; toasty Rathfinny Classic Cuvee and a deliciously bright dry Riesling are among the by-the-glass standouts.

Make a pitstop here before a Scandi-accented dinner upstairs at Brasserie Angelica, or make a night of it down here with oysters, devilled eggs and caviar blinis.

On a bright, sunny autumn afternoon on October 30, 1849, Prince Albert and his two eldest children, eight-year-old Victoria, the Princess Royal and her seven-year-old brother Edward, the Prince of Wales, boarded the Royal Barge at Whitehall Landing.

Waiting for them onboard were, among others, the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, Home Secretary Sir George Grey, and 24 Royal Watermen waiting to row the illustrious party east along the River Thames to the City of London.

Crowds jostled for position on the banks and bridges hoping to catch a glimpse of Queen Victoria’s husband and two of their children. And the reason for all this pomp and ceremony? It was to open the architectural and engineering marvel that was the London Coal Exchange—one of the first cast-iron, purpose-built office buildings in the world.

Situated on Lower Thames Street, opposite the-then Billingsgate Fish Market (as an aside, the smell was said to permeate the iron heart of its brand new neighbour), the spectacular building featured a central rotunda some 60 feet in diameter that rose up 74 feet to a vast iron and glass dome. Clamped onto the circular walls were three cast-iron balconies that provided access to rented offices for traders and merchants in the trading of that other driver of Victorian progress, coal.

No expense was spared when it came to decorating the unique building. The walls were festooned in encaustic depictions of jolly coal-miners by artist Frederick Sang and artworks of fossilised flora and fauna, discovered by the men toiling in dark underground pits.

The central trading floor was designed to look like a maritime compass, and constructed from 4,000 pieces of rare wood, sourced from across the UK, including black oak from the depths of the Tyne. A dagger blade at the heart of a decorative City of London shield was carved from a mulberry tree said to have been planted by Peter the Great (1672-1725) (who spent sometime honing his craft as a shipwright at Deptford Dockyard).

Prince Albert, well known for his progressive ideas, was suitably impressed. Following the opening speeches and ceremonies, the Prince and chosen guests sat down to an impressive buffet of hot roast beef, hot roast chicken, hot roast pheasant and hot roast peahen, washed down with vintage sherry.

Like so many other buildings across the country, the Coal Exchange suffered damage during the Second World War. It wasn’t, however, fatal. Instead, progress was to be the building's downfall.

In the middle of the 1950s, the capital's city planners decided to build a ‘motorway’ through it, to ease the congestion on the clogged roads. However, one of the obstacles standing firmly in the way was the Coal Exchange. Country Life joined a campaign to save the historically-important structure.

Mark Girouard was permitted to photograph the building in 1958 and joined other prestigious voices such as Sir John Betjemen urging the authorities to change course. Sadly, their pleas fell on deaf ears and, in 1962, the unique, Grade II-listed structure was dismantled for scrap. A large slab of concrete and tarmacadam was laid in the building's place, though care was taken to preserve a Roman hypocaust that was first discovered at the site in 1848.

Even as the Victorian wonder was being taken down, international efforts were being made to preserve parts of it. There was talk of shipping the iron rotunda to the Melbourne Cultural Centre in Australia, supported by Russell Hitchcock, a world-leading authority on 19th-century architecture who pleaded: 'It is a monument of international importance. It can bear comparison with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, or the Pantheon in Rome.' Sadly, the damage had already been done.

However, two small parts of the groundbreaking building do still exist. If you ever find yourself sitting in traffic on Victoria Embankment, look out for two, Portland stone plinths (a clue: they're placed just after the junction for Temple Place). The plinths mark the boundary of the City of London and on top of them are two dragons that once decorated the eaves above the entrance to the London Coal Exchange.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

One of the most complex practical challenges facing major museums today is the management of entrances. It’s not only that the demands of security, access, information and circulation for millions of visitors are difficult to satisfy, but that they keep growing.

One institution presently confronting this issue is the British Museum and the character of its imposing entrance façade makes this unusually complicated. It was famously designed by Robert Smirke, the youngest of a triumvirate of architects — with John Soane and John Nash — who succeeded to the portfolio of James Wyatt, Surveyor General of the King’s Works, in 1813.

At this time, with additions such as the Townley Collection (1805), the Elgin Marbles (1816) and the Royal Library (1823), the British Museum was bursting at the seams. In 1823–24, therefore, the Museum Trustees began to discuss a replacement building. What Nash or Soane might have made of this commission we can never know, but we still live with Smirke’s response: a monumental Greek Revival design.

The new British Museum was laid out around two courts. One was enclosed on all four sides as a central garden and the other — which stood open on one side — formed the entrance or South Court. Nothing in Regency London compared to the sheer scale of this entrance composition and even the modern visitor cannot fail to be impressed by the South Court temple frontage with its ranks of columns.

On a site constrained by enclosing terraces of houses, however, Smirke’s use of space quickly looked prodigal. By 1857, his garden court had been infilled with the celebrated Reading Room designed by his brother, Sydney Smirke. Since 2000, this space has been partially revived with great success as the Great Court, which helps provide the necessary facilities and orientation for the millions of visitors who come to the museum each year. Now, however, more space is being claimed for their reception both in the South Court and to the rear of the building.

For some years now, there has been a temporary and unsightly visitor pavilion in both places, together with barriers for queuing. No one will lament their disappearance. The British Museum wants to create new pavilions in more permanent materials, but again on a temporary basis. Everyone acknowledges the need and, with a promised lifespan of 10 years, the proposals are seemingly being waved through the system.

Athena, however, thinks that intended changes to the South Court should be subject to more critical scrutiny. Here, both the proposed pavilion and the associated landscaping seem at odds with Smirke’s bold vision. Added to which, Athena is by nature suspicious of temporary structures; they have a tendency to cast permanent shadows. Indeed, that’s exactly what the existing pavilions seem to have done.

This is an international institution, a great Regency building and a public face of London. It deserves something better.

Afternoon tea was conceived, first and foremost, as a respite: taking pause of post-lunch activities to line one’s stomach again as dinner kept being pushed back. Urbanisation in the 19th century jettisoned the rules of rural life, lived in tune with sunrise and sunset, and London-bound aristos found they could eat dinner at 9pm unencumbered. (How Spanish.)

In recent years, it’s had a facelift, thanks, in part, to the introduction of National Afternoon Tea Week (which normally falls in August). High-end hotels appeared to heed the renaissance: last year, at The Rosewood, executive pastry chef Mark Perkins launched an Art Afternoon Tea, a spin on the classic offering with Japanese teas and cakes inspired by the artist Katsushika Hokusai.

Country Life, as ever, was ahead of the curve, having launched its very own tea column in January 2024. If afternoon tea is often dismissed as belonging to the ladies who lunch, consider this: Maison François, the famed St James’s restaurant headed by chef Matthew Ryle, has started serving one between 2.30pm and 5.30pm. Who needs a power lunch?

aristos found they could eat dinner at 9pm unencumbered. (How Spanish.)

In recent years, it’s had a facelift, thanks, in part, to the introduction of National Afternoon Tea Week (which normally falls in August). High-end hotels appeared to heed the renaissance: last year, at The Rosewood, executive pastry chef Mark Perkins launched an Art Afternoon Tea, a spin on the classic offering with Japanese teas and cakes inspired by the artist Katsushika Hokusai.

Country Life, as ever, was ahead of the curve, having launched its very own tea column in January 2024. If afternoon tea is often dismissed as belonging to the ladies who lunch, consider this: Maison François, the famed St James’s restaurant headed by chef Matthew Ryle, has started serving one between 2.30pm and 5.30pm. Who needs a power lunch?

Tea at Jean-Georges at The Connaught

You'd be hard pushed to find a more elegant spot to while away the afternoon than The Connaught, where afternoon tea is served daily between 2.30pm and 6.30pm overlooking Mount Street.

The set-up is supremely chic, with exquisitely dainty classic finger sandwiches and seasonal patisserie, but there's a real sense of fun here, too: we particularly appreciated the chocolate-topped biscuit in the shape of the hotel's sighthound mascot.

The star of the globetrotting selection of teas is The Connaught's own rich Assam-style blend, grown on the Tregothnan Estate in Cornwall; non-drinkers can also order flutes of deliciously toasty alcohol-free Hojicha Sparkling Tea.

If you're visiting at the weekend, you'll be able to enjoy a recital from the hotel's resident harpist. Emma Hughes

Afternoon tea starts at The Connaught starts from £85 per person, or from £95 with a glass of Billecart-Salmon Brut Réserve NV.

Seventy Five at Liberty

Afternoon tea at Liberty’s flagship restaurant, Seventy Five, is served: an interlude amid an afternoon of fabric-, clothes- and candle-shopping (the Cire Trudon aisle is the best of any department store).

The moment you slump into the (William Morris-upholstered) banquettes, tucked away somewhere on the second floor — I had to ask staff to redirect me there after missing it, twice — you enter a mindset of repose. You pop down your shopping bags, your glasses and that tired old head of yours as the throbbing baseline of people on the shop floor and in the world beyond (read: Soho) fades, almost miraculously, in a matter of seconds.

You are greeted and attended upon and all in all feel like a King. A Coronation chicken ‘sandwich’ is served with Earl Grey-flavoured raisins, on brioche bread (in the manner of a lobster roll) and the savoury course rounded off with a hot smoked Chalkstream trout encased in a delicate filo tart, and topped with trout roe.

The scones — plain and buttermilk — come fresh from the oven and served with a deliciously light clotted cream (jam always comes second).

Then comes the sweet course, which is a true explosion of taste: almost too much. Bring your kids, who have a higher tolerance for this sort of thing. Will Hosie

Afternoon tea at Seventy Five starts from £50 per person.

The Secrets & Spies Afternoon Tea at Raffles London at the OWO

Such is the elegance and the intricacies of the interiors of Raffles at the Old War Office (OWO) that it takes quite a lot to discourage you from getting lost in the ceiling. For the best part of 120 years, this building was the workplace for some of the most famous names in Britain, such as T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), Ian Fleming, and Sir Winston Churchill. Imagine the secrets that have been whispered in these halls.

Spycraft is all about distraction and deceit, and while the afternoon tea at Raffles OWO is distracting (and surely it must be, considering the interiors), it is no lie to say it is as delicious as it is playful. Sandwiches are stuffed and served with precision, and the scones sag under the weight of jam and cream. The tea menu itself is a delight and a welcome break from the over-consumed muck that is English Breakfast. Presentation occurs with all the decorum you would expect from a ritual as traditional as this.

But every performance needs its showstopper. Here, it is the sweets, which lean heavily on the espionage associated with the OWO. The legacies of Odette Sansom, Christine Granville, Virginia Goillot and Vera Atkins — female spies of distinction — have been preserved in sugar, fruit, chocolate and sponge, while the Time to Spy cake, shaped like a pocket watch, can make time stand still.

Who knew that afternoon tea could be so much fun? Well, the secret is out now. James Fisher

The Secrets & Spies Afternoon Tea at Raffles London at the OWO starts at £85 per person, and is served daily, 12pm–5pm.

Tea at The Ritz

Afternoon tea at The Ritz epitomises the unhurried, relaxed ritual — yet most definitely refines it. Served in the Palm Court since 1906, the setting — all gilt, mirrors and crown mouldings — transports you back to another time. A strict dress code still applies: no trainers, no sportswear, and gentlemen in jackets and ties. The waiters, in tailcoats, dance through the space; cups are topped up before you notice they’re empty, plates whisked away unnoticed. My Mum summarised it best: ‘They really know what they’re doing’.

There are more than 20 teas to choose from and six types of sandwich, each filling perfectly paired with a different bread (the ham was my favourite). There’s also a cake trolley with two daily specials (the kitchen bakes 30 Victoria sponge cakes every day), alongside warm scones and patisserie: blueberry cheesecake; banoffee parcels of joy; raspberry mousse in white chocolate. It’s playful, delicate, and delicious and all served to the soundtrack of live piano music. Flo Allen

Tea at The Ritz starts from £81 for adults and £59 for children, and it’s served five times a day (11.30am, 1.30pm, 3.30pm, 5.30pm and 7.30pm). Booking is essential.

Petersham Nurseries

Afternoon tea at Petersham Nurseries is a very green affair — firstly, because last year the restaurant was awarded a Michelin Green star for the fifth year running, and secondly because it’s served in their Garden Room, a greenhouse festooned with hanging plants.

Their seasonal Vegan Afternoon Tea is a triumph, with palpable attention to detail in every bite. Highlights include the tofu cream on sourdough, so flavoursome it’ll make you forget every boring tofu experience you’ve ever had, and the zucchini and feta tartlet — fresh and light with a beautifully browned pastry.

The standout, however, has to be the sweets: strawberry mousse cake, a warming apricot frangipane tartlet, a truly sensational meringue (made with chickpea water), and raspberry cheesecake with a coconut base. The scones are cloud-like and the tea list extensive. Try the Rosebud — the flowers are grown just metres away in the kitchen garden. Caitlin Barr

The vegan afternoon tea at Petersham Nurseries starts from £60 per person or £70 with Prosecco or a delightfully tart plum Bellini.

Fortnum & Mason

As someone with a gluten intolerance, the words ‘afternoon tea’ are usually a cause for sorrow: tiers of exquisitely crafted miniature cakes and painstakingly uniform sandwiches reminding me of the things I can no longer enjoy. But at Fortnum & Mason, not so. The eau de nil bastion of all things deliciously British provides for all.

Alongside their standard afternoon tea, they also provide an entirely savoury option — think wild mushroom profiteroles — a vegetarian offering, and one made without gluten. Served with a glass of bubbles and a tea of your choice from the extensive menu (I opted for black tea with fig) my meal was excellent.

Of the sandwiches, the smoked trout with cream cheese was a favourite (I had to have seconds). This was followed by a scone and a selection of delicious patisseries (the blackcurrant mousse was delicious) and macaroons to finish. Each bite was a delight and I’d definitely visit again. Lotte Brundle

The gluten-free afternoon tea at Fortnum & Mason starts from £84 per person.

The Adria

Afternoon teas at London hotels can sometimes make you feel like you’re in a highly-glorified canteen: a giant space with dozens of other people sitting at tables around you, all eating the same thing. Tea at The Adria is pretty much the complete opposite: it feels more like popping into a friend’s house. On our visit the dining room was set up with just three tables, and Domink Feller’s team were so relaxed and chatty that our party — two adults, two children — were instantly at home within minutes of getting here following our 90-second stroll from the Natural History Museum.

Better than home, actually, unless you also have ten varieties of Newby tea set out in containers to see, smell and touch before choosing which one you’d like to sample first, from the usual Earl Grey and Silver Needle to more exotic choices like Apple Strudel ‘and Strawberry & Mango (both delicious).

Finger- and open-sandwiches, similarly, offered a mix. There were regular options — smoked salmon with caviar — but also some more unusual options, including a sublime smoked chicken with sage mayonnaise, and a more, ahem, ‘challenging’ mushroom and chestnut on harissa bread. (The hotel is also justly renowned for its outstanding gluten-free afternoon tea, something far too few places take seriously.)

The younger ones (on our table and one of the others) were delighted by teddy bear-shaped jam sandwiches, accompanied by a real teddy to take home. And everybody was delighted by the scones which were, quite simply, the best I’ve ever had at an afternoon tea. Toby Keel

Afternoon tea at The Adria starts from £55 per person, £65 including a glass of Champagne, or £62 with a glass of sparkling Saicho tea.

The Kensington

The Kensington is the queen of themed afternoon teas, typically inspired by whatever blockbuster exhibition is on at the V&A Museum. At the moment, they’re serving up a lavishly decadent version, best suited to diners with a bold sweet tooth, in honour of Marie Antoinette Style.

Treats that subtly nod to the last French queen include strawberry génoise sponges with vanilla Chantilly, blackberry and lemon tartlets, pastel-perfect macarons oozing chocolate ganache, and a rather elegant Le Brise de la Dauphine lemon shortbread.

To help counter the sugar rush, there are sophisticated sandwiches such as pastrami with horseradish cream, French chicken tarragon, and a bright pink brioche roll filled with avocado purée, and sun-dried tomatoes and feta. Buttery plain and fruit scones are served, of course, alongside clotted cream and jam — reassuringly simple after the flamboyant flavours of the patisserie selection.

The tea menu is impressive — more exotic than traditional — and while the upgraded option of Charles Heidsieck Champagne is tempting, I recommend the surprisingly good Queen’s Coupe cocktail. The gin fizz-based concoction, served in a coupe, is finished with raspberry dust (a word or warning, don’t get it on your fingers because it’s a bit sticky).

This afternoon tea is as theatrical as its namesake’s passion for drama. Each morsel is jam-packed with flavour, but it’s the presentation and design that take centre stage. The lemon shortbread, for example, features a painstakingly intricate piped design of a ball gown. Stripy pink and white chocolate panels, edible flowers and billowing mousse make this afternoon tea a real feast for the eyes… and perhaps a visit to the dentist afterwards. Emma Earnshaw.

Afternoon tea at the Kensington starts from £59 per person, £73 with Champagne or The Queen’s Coupe.

In 1851, a young Yorkshireman named William Whiteley came to London to see the Great Exhibition. Bowled over by what he saw, he resolved to come back as soon as he could. Within the year, he returned, with £10 in his pocket and determined to make his fortune.

This modern Dick Whittington started small, working for a drapery in the City until 1863, when he determined that he'd learned enough — and saved enough — to open his own business. The result was Whiteleys, at 31 Westbourne Grove, where Notting Hill meets Bayswater.

Four years later, he'd expanded his small drapery into a row of 17 shops. Within its first decade, Whiteleys was employing over 1,500 people, building a department store that was one of the largest and grandest in the world.

The shop's name became a byword for shopping in style. P.G. Wodehouse refers to it in several of his stories, and when Professor Henry Higgins seds Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady to go out and buy a new dress, he he instructs her not go to Harrods or Selfridges, but to Whiteleys.

With the ups came downs, not least several fires — the worst of which, in 1887, gutted the original premises

Whiteley bounced back quickly, building the current site: an emporium on Queensway which was said to be the largest in the world. Queen Victoria herself was a fan: the shop was awarded an unsolicited Royal Warrant in 1890, an unprecedented move at the time for the turreted and domed silhouette established itself as a prime landmark, celebrated in the novels of P. G. Wodehouse as well as George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.

But tragedy still played a part in the history of the shop. In 1907, William Whiteley was shot dead at the age of 75 by man claiming to be his illegitimate son. The murder took place in Whiteley's own shop.

The shop continued to flourish for half a century in its founders absence, but would end up struggling in the second half of the 20th century. The so-called ‘Harrods of Bayswater’ suffered in the post-war years and closed in 1981.

Despite re-emerging as a shopping centre in 1989, the retail future for the Grade II-listed building looked bleak and it closed for a major redevelopment in 2018.

Following a £1.5 billion makeover by Foster + Partners, the building, now renamed The Whiteley, has been converted into a 139 apartments. And very swish they are too.

To date, 76% of residences have sold, but some prime homes are still available — among them a two-bedroom duplex apartment designed by Maoliosa Murray with Art Deco influences. It's on the market for £8.95 million via Knight Frank and Savills.

There are plenty of other options still for sale, too — not least the five-bedroom penthouse with a terrace from where you can see the shop's iconic dome. It's on the market at £39.5 million.

On-site amenities include a 20m swimming pool, a gym, a padel court and a Six Senses spa (there are also Six Senses-branded serviced apartments).

It's immensively impressive, and the developers — understandably, given the scale of their investment — are very excited indeed, describing it as 'a complete re-imagining of a historic address of epic scale and proportion, a stone’s throw from Hyde Park,' and adding that it is 'poised to become the capital’s greatest residential and hospitality address.'

There's also good news for those who love the romantic story of London's original department store: The Whiteley will have shops too, with space for 19 retail tenants installed once work is completed.

See more about The Whiteley London or view the property listings at Savills and Knight Frank.

'I’ve always felt that, everything I do, I’m flirting with people’s pain barrier, like a moth to a flame — but I’m always on the right side of that razor-thin line before it tips over into “Oh my God”.’

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen is famous for his way with interior design, but he's arguably just as gifted with words. The line above was just one of many from an interview he gave to Country Life last year; and six months before that he delivered half an hour's worth of similar bon mots when appearing on the Country Life podcast to declare war on retirement homes that are 'beige coffins' that 'smell of cabbage and wee'.

So when a house comes up for sale that has interiors designed by the most celebrated of the televisual world's interior designers, it's always worth a look. Particularly when the place in question is a six-bedroom, detached Georgian home in one of London's biggest green spaces. It's for sale via Dexter's at £2.5 million.

Built in the 1820s, this 'tea caddy' house — as the agents call it — sits on Blackheath Common, a 200-acre green space that runs from Blackheath Village itself down to Greenwich Park, another similarly huge area. Unusually for London, this is a place of sweeping views and vast skies overhead — and, thanks to Llewelyn-Bowen, that continues inside.

The main living space, you see, has the sort of touch viewers of Changing Rooms used to love: a trompe l'oeil ceiling painted with clouds and sky. Surprisingly, given the flamboyant decorator's CV, there are no angels and cherubs painted around the edges. You could always add them yourself, if you'd prefer the vibe to be less Hogwarts enchanted ceiling and more Sistine Chapel.

The rest of the house, it has to be said, is much more ordinary, and we're not quite sure why. Did the budget only stretch to a single Llewelyn-Bowen room? Has the rest of it been 'put back to normal' in later years? Was this once a place of walls slathered in orange paint, hung with curtains of crushed purple velvet? If so, could it be again?

That is a decision for whoever comes here next, and regardless of decoration the new owners will find themselves in possession of a grand, light, spacious family home. The amount of square footage here is impressive, as is the garden, which can be accessed directly from the open-plan kitchen-diner that dominates the lower ground floor.

The location is also a real plus. Blackheath Village is full of interesting shops and cafés, and a pleasant stroll in the other direction across the common gets you to Greenwich, where there's more of the same. A word of warning: a couple of large roads (and several other small ones) do bisect Blackheath Common, but thankfully this house is shielded from the traffic by a row of trees planted opposite.

For sale via Dexters at £2.5 million — see more details.

To cut or not to cut — that is the real gardener’s question. My duelling natures battle out this problem every winter when the seed catalogues hit the doormat with a whoosh. With a small city garden, sunny spots are in high demand and every flower counts. The purist in me knows that a few dozen snipped for a bouquet could clear me out entirely, reducing a seasonal display to crumbs. The hedonist, on the other hand, knows that there is nothing on earth more luxuriant than doing just that. What is a flower lover to do, short of throwing it all away to find a walled garden to heap with peonies and hollyhocks?

I turn, of course, to someone wiser.

On a sunny morning back in September, when the garden roses were in their blousy, second flush, but the hydrangea was just starting to speckle pink with age, I met flower-grower Rosebie Morton of The Real Flower Co. on her farm in Hampshire for a day of revelling in the late summer’s bounty. She and her son Alistair were celebrating the 30th anniversary of the business, hosting a bevy of flower-lovers to tour the farm and feast on a luscious lunch from Tart London. The Real Flower Co. is a forerunner of the modern English cut flower movement, prioritising fragrant, old-fashioned varieties using ecological growing methods — and while Rosebie’s business has bloomed into something of an empire, with a robust business of bouquets by post, multiple farms and London shops, her roots as a grower started simply and her wisdom could inspire even my small-scale garden to produce more.

As we walked through the flower fields, the sun, ever a fickle friend, gave way to showers, and calls for brollies and spare mackintoshes rang out over the rosehips. Those with too-stylish footwear were resoundingly punished, but glasses of English sparkling wine from neighbouring vineyard Raimes put everything back to rights. The farm was verdant and tousled with flowers, a working endeavour rather than simple photo backdrop, with tender annuals cheek-by-jowl with perennials; flowering shrubs alongside herbs; and foliage in polytunnels. The key to a well-rounded, generous selection of cut flowers is a wide range of types of plants — not simply swathes of big bodacious blooms.

These sodden winter days I’m planning the small, sunny south-facing garden outside our new home in the wilds of West London, and while my walled garden visions will have to wait, I’m more determined than ever to just cut some flowers already. I’ll be following Rosebie’s lead and making my approach a many-pronged one. I already have huge, well-established sage and rosemary bushes in need of a good prune, and they make for excellent, fragrant foliage in bouquets. Cut flowers typically worship the sun, so I will focus on those exposed spots in our otherwise neglected garden, adding in much-needed compost to the London clay soil to improve drainage.

There will be a lusty order from Trevor White Roses while it’s still bareroot season, focusing mainly on climbers to make vertical gains on the garden’s brick walls. The repeat-flowering varieties will give months of blooms, and Rosebie started the Real Flower Co growing exclusively roses, so they are known to be a gateway drug. I will proceed with reckless abandon.

I have already sifted through Chilterns Seed’s catalogue and circled the easiest-to-grow, annual cut flowers that go from seed to bloom in a single season. Cosmos 'Purity’ ticks all my boxes — an elegant, old-fashioned shape, tall enough to hold its own in the garden, but so graceful when displayed in a vase. Ammi majus is brilliant in both a border (its lace-like flower heads look very appealing threaded through permanent planting) and a glass vessel. When it comes to fragrance, nothing beats the feathery, pink Dianthus plumarius ‘Rainbow Loveliness’. Pop it in a pot in a sunny spot, and a single stem on your nightstand to perfume the whole bedroom. And for the truly lazy, there are nasturtiums whose little kernels can just be pushed directly into the earth and forgotten about. You will be unfairly rewarded with cascades of jewel-toned gems until the first frost. I particularly fancy the climbing sort, such as Tropaeolum majus 'Milkmaid'. A warning: they will heave themselves over a fence like our neighbour's cat if given half a chance.

Dahlias are a must if you have the sun and I surely won’t be able to resist a few tubers. (Seattle! Santa Claus! Who comes up with these names?) Then there are the lilies and bulbs I’ve dug from our old garden, too, without mentioning the daphne I’m after, and oh, should we get a Philadelphus? It is a dangerous, delicious thing to imagine a cutting garden in winter — similar to going food shopping while ravenous. You might as well just add another packet of seeds to your virtual shopping basket and figure it out later. This year the vases, fingers crossed, will be full.

Sometimes a string of words just sticks in your head. 'Smoother than a bubble bath with Roger Moore' is stuck in mine, ever since I read it in Adam Hay-Nicholls's piece about a new Rolls-Royce a year or so ago. Every time I see or hear anything about the late, great actor, there it is: 'smoother than a bubble bath with Roger Moore' pops into my head, read (of course) in the cheesy-smarmy-tongue-in-cheek voice of 007 himself.

Moore was more than just Bond, of course: he appeared in over 100 films and TV shows in a career spanning seven decades, and many of the roles (notably The Saint) would have been enough in their own right to make him a household name. But to many, Moore is Bond: he took a role played as tough and sardonic by Sean Connery and while never matching the physicality of his predecessor, he made 007 it smooth, charming and fun.

And so today, with Sir Roger's former London pad on the market, all I can think of is the smoothness of a man dubbed 'one of nature's true gentlemen'. And that leads to one question about his flat: what's the bathtub like?

The answer is this:

The bathtub in question is part of the three-bedroom flat on Eaton Square in Belgravia, a glorious, late-Georgian space that's roughly equidistant from Buckingham Palace, Harrods and Sloane Square. As you might expect, property here doesn't come cheap: this duplex apartment, split over the third and fourth floors of the building, is priced at £5.75 million.

Entire houses here generally sit in the £15 million price bracket, and even for someone as successful as Sir Roger — who was paid £1 million for 1972's Live and Let Die alone — having an apartment is plenty. Especially as it was only a part-time home for a man who, rather famously, became a tax exile in 1978, spending most of the rest of his life in Monaco and Switzerland.

The flat is laid out fairly simply: a spacious hallway with sweeping staircase leads to a large reception room looking out to the front, and a knocked-through kitchen and dining room, with balcony, at the back.

At just under 2,000sq ft it's not a large place, but it's more than the average pied-a-terre, and could happily accommodate a small family.

Above, two of the three bedrooms are en-suite, with the master suite at the back of the house having the aforementioned bathtub.

A bubble bath with Roger Moore wouldn't be particularly smooth today, of course, primarily because he died in 2017 at the age of 89. But his legacy lives on, especially for those who grew up with him as Ian Fleming's iconic creation.

They say your favourite 007 is always the first you ever see reaching for his Walther PPK, and for millions across the world Moore will be the man who defined James Bond. Yet as you'd expect from this old smoothie, his knowing self-deprecation was part of the charm: right to the last, he claimed to have been only the fourth-best actor at playing the part. In terms of pure acting chops, that might be true; but none of the others ever made us smile like Roger did.

Roger Moore's former flat on Eaton Square is for sale at £5.75 million via Knight Frank — see more details.

Craft has become a buzz word. For the past decade, the profile of the handmade has been rising, even attracting big business, as luxury brands, food and drinks companies extol the talent of their artisans. How to define ‘craft’, however, is open to debate.

Once celebrated not only as producers of everyday objects, but also as artists, artisans gradually came to be seen as the skilled makers of functional items, who often used traditional materials and forms. Their work, although lauded by William Morris and the Arts-and-Crafts Movement in their rejection of the mass produced, increasingly fell out of favour. Artisans were skilled, yes, but what they did was not considered part of any intellectual debate or significant storytelling. Craft was not art.

Today, however, it has a very different status. The thrust now is on using materials and objects to investigate ideas and concepts and to tell meaningful stories about contemporary life. Craft is underpinned by intellectual investigation, powerful narrative and the development of materials and processes — head, heart and hand. ‘Contemporary craft is storytelling; about old methods and new materials; about the maker’s ideas and heritage,’ explains metalsmith Ane Christensen.

As a society, we no longer know how things are made. We do not perform or even witness the alchemy of materials being transformed into objects. We have, as Karl Marx predicted, been removed from the means of production, so the public is now fascinated by the process of making. It’s no wonder that luxury brands fall over themselves to imbue their products with the notion of the handmade.

Craft also appeals on a haptic level. Humans are hardwired to interpret the world by touch, yet, for many of us, this is reduced to tapping computer keys and moving a mouse. We miss that sensory input and handmade objects can give it to us. ‘In a digital world, we long for the tangible, meaningful and tactile,’ suggests Christensen. The lack of that routine stimulation accounts not only for the rise in interest in cooking and the growing number of people attending pottery classes or knitting bees, but in the desire to hold handmade objects.

T. F. Chan, the new director of the Craft Council’s forthcoming Collect Fair, an international selling exhibition of the best of contemporary craft, now in its 22nd iteration, maintains that: ‘As we become increasingly enmeshed in the digital world, craft helps us reconnect with the physical: tactility, material intelligence, the ingenuity of the human hand. Contemporary craft feels particularly compelling as it reframes time-honoured traditions through fresh imagination. It gives us an opportunity to create work that is unmistakably of our time, that future generations can look back on with admiration.’

By its very nature, the handmade implies something unique — which, since the dawn of the 2000s, has proven to be a significant draw for those who can afford mass-produced objects, but want to stand out, a trend amplified by social media. The value of provenance has grown and knowing the stories of a piece of work and its maker adds value for the buyer, who becomes a collector. Grasping that full story has also become ever-more important in a world polluted by fake news, fake truths and — increasingly — artificial intelligence. ‘Talking to people involved in tech about AI,’ says cultural consultant Jenny White, ‘there is a growing sense of distrust. That means that there is a revived desire for authenticity, so craft is seen as real and tangible. Seeing the work in front of you is the antidote to AI and the world we can’t control and to which we haven’t given consent.’

Craft relates to the human, the individual and the personal. It is high quality, intelligent and beautifully constructed. The work of many of today’s makers not only has meaning, but it is shaped by hand, with skill. It looks good, feels good and can be used, sitting on the continuum between fine art and design — and, interestingly, leading fine artists have jumped on the bandwagon to use craft skills in their own work, albeit not always successfully. Craft is still considerably more affordable than fine art—something Christensen maintains ought to change. ‘[It] needs to be seen on a level with fine art, as an investment that can hold its value.’

That is seemingly the direction of travel: ‘Look at the prices of craft objects in auction houses, they’re going up and up and up,’ notes Simon Fraser, director of the MA Design at Central Saint Martins, London. ‘Craft is moving into a collectible, socially acceptable phase.’ He sees design shop JW Anderson’s establishment of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, for ‘newness, excellence and artistic merit in modern craft’, rewarding the winner with €50,000, as an important influence in making craft desirable. (This year’s Loewe Prize exhibition will take place at the National Gallery Singapore from mid May.)

Until prices go up, interesting and affordable work will be on show at the Collect Fair (February 27 – March 1), with some 40 galleries, not only from the UK, but also from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China, as well as European contributions from Ireland and Poland. ‘Craft,’ believes Chan, ‘is having a moment because it pushes back against our culture of disposability.

In this era of abundance and stimulation, people are yearning for artworks and objects that genuinely enrich and elevate our lives — made with care, rich with meaning and able to stand the test of time.’

If there is such a thing as a rock-and-roll baker, then it is surely Richard Hart. For the past two decades, he’s travelled the globe, won industry plaudits galore and set up a string of award-winning bakeries around the world — but with his tattoos, stubble and fondness for swearing, he comes across more like an East End geezer than Britain’s most lauded baker. He’s attracted his share of controversy, too — he recently offended half of Mexico by asserting it doesn’t ‘have much of a bread culture’ — which makes his latest project, a British-themed bakery at one of London’s landmark hotels, Claridge’s, all the more surprising.

‘It's funny, because I've never actually been a baker in England,’ he says, rubbing a hand through his beard. ‘I lived in the [US] for eleven years, Copenhagen for six, now I'm in Mexico. But I've wanted to come back to the UK since I left. It's just taken a long time to come to fruition.’

Richard has certainly had a peripatetic career. Having fallen in love with sourdough in the mid 2000s in California while working at Ubuntu and Della Fattoria, he later became head baker at San Francisco’s renowned Tartine, where he stayed for seven years. In 2018, he set up Hart Bageri in Copenhagen with the experimental Danish chef René Redzepi, and since 2022, he’s been based in Mexico City, where he runs Green Rhino with his partner, tea maestro Henrietta Lovell. As if that wasn’t enough, his most recent book, Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Making, won the baking category for the James Beard Book Award in 2025.

His latest project is tucked away on Brook’s Mews, a backstreet behind Claridge’s, hitherto favoured by celebrities making incognito entrances and exits to the hotel. The idea for the bakery has been in the works for years, Richard explains. Several years ago, one of his chefs made him a giant Double Decker — his favourite chocolate bar — as a birthday surprise. This got him thinking about all the sweet treats he loved as a child, and how they have almost entirely fallen out of fashion with today’s bakers, who seem to be obsessed with fancy French patisseries and San Francisco-style sourdough.

‘To be honest, I wish more British bakers would look at what we used to have,’ he says. ‘We all loved Mr. Kipling's as a kid. I remember going to my grandparents for hot toast with butter and marmalade. To look at those things from the past and give them a new life is really exciting for me. Those food memories are a wonderful thing, you know. They’re like magic.’

An ever-so-British bakery seems a natural fit for Claridge’s, and browsing the shelves induces an instant hit of childhood nostalgia. Alongside the granary loaves, country bloomers and Marmite cheese straws are tea-room treats straight from a village fête: jammy dodgers, iced fingers, Bakewell tarts, lardy cakes, fruit turnovers, walnut whips. Of course, this being a Richard Hart bakery, everything is baked to perfection, prepared with the kind of reverence and attention to detail a French boulanger would devote to their baguettes, eclairs, madeleines and macarons. But it hasn’t been without challenges.

‘The thing is, French pastries all look amazing, but English baked goods typically don’t,’ Richard says, ever the provocateur. ‘A Belgian bun is actually pretty ugly, you know? Making it look nice is a real challenge.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘I've also got an issue with scones. In my opinion, a scone has to be baked and then eaten. It's perfect in that moment. A scone that sits too long is just sad. That’s why we don’t sell them.’

Richard insisted from the start that the design of the bakery should be open-plan to allow customers to watch the bakers at work and smell the aromas: toasted malt, browning sugar, the yeasty richness of fresh-baked bread. Since opening its doors in January 2026, it’s proved predictably popular, especially with non-British customers — for many of whom it’s their first taste of a jammy dodger or malted milk loaf. Does he think its success has been helped by the global popularity of The Great British Bake Off? ‘Of course,’ he laughs. ‘Paul Hollywood visited one of my bakeries a few years ago, and my mum still basically feels like it was the highlight of my career.’

The difference with his takes on these quintessentially British bakes, Richard says, is that whereas traditional recipes typically used fast-acting instant yeast, he employs different methods of fermentation to make them more digestible. Most crucial of all is the flour: Richard buys all his from the same Italian supplier he’s been working with for years, Molino Paulo Mariani, a family-run mill in Le Marche, a few miles from the Adriatic coast.

‘The first time I visited, I’d never seen anything so beautiful,’ he says. ‘Each piece of wheat had different root systems, different root structures. There were butterflies and bugs flying around. It felt like I’d died and gone to baker's heaven. I'm sure there’s some amazing wheat grown in Britain, but I haven't even looked because I love the people I work with. If you're a baker and you're buying wheat, you need to go and figure out where it’s coming from.’

While there are currently no plans to expand the bakery to other locations, as ever with Richard Hart, the cogs are already whirring. ‘There’s so many places we could go with it,’ he says. ‘I mean, imagine it being like an old, comfy lounge, like your nan’s front room. How good would that be?’

For now, however, he’s happy just to get his head down and bake.

‘Being a baker teaches you humility,’ he says. ‘Today, my bread could be great; tomorrow it could be terrible. Bread has life. It needs nurturing, love, attention. There's a mystery to it which makes it exciting. Something happened in the universe that day to make it work, but it’s impossible to replicate. And like everyone, sometimes I screw it up. Twenty years later, I've literally got my head stuck in a mix every day, you know, still trying to make that perfect loaf.’

London Design Week takes place at the Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour, from March 9–13, offering the opportunity to see new launches from more than 135 showrooms plus pop-up house guests, and enjoy an inspiring programme of events.

Here's what to look out for:

Light touch

Birdie Fortescue’s pop-up stand showcases the Vasanti lighting collection of sculptural lamp bases, from £155 each, and patterned shades, from £85 each.

Pattern play

Explore new fabric and wallpaper designs by the Cotswold interior designer and textile artist Cinny Aumonier, on show at the Tissus d’Hélène showroom. The range includes Raine wallpaper in Baked Apple, £305 per 10m roll, inspired by an 18th-century Indian motifs.

Heritage collection

In celebration of its 150th anniversary, the House of Liberty unveils a wallpaper range inspired by its extraordinary design archive, priced from £110 per m. The full glory of the collection — and the latest fabric offerings — can be enjoyed at the Rubelli showroom

Sleeping beauties

Drawing on her knowledge of antiques and instinctive understanding of classical design, Henriette von Stockhausen (above) of VSP Interiors is launching a furniture collection in collaboration with specialist maker Oficina Inglesa. Recognising that antique pieces often present challenges of scale and proportion in modern homes, they have shared their expertise to create a collection of four-poster beds, coronas, bedside tables and chairs to suit today’s interiors. Handcrafted to order, these twin Beaulieu coronas are painted in a VSP custom colour and cost from £2,352 each.

Expressive design

Launching at West One Bathrooms is a collection of elegant tiles by leading American design company Studio McGee in collaboration with tile specialist Ann Sacks. Available in five colours and in square-edge and playfully scalloped formats, the Ashton Meadows collection of ceramic tiles costs from £270 per sq m.

Super women

What can be learnt from the achievements of the world’s greatest female designers and tastemakers, such as Eileen Gray (right)? Which has created the most valuable legacy?

Come and find out at an inspiring event on the first day of London Design Week at 10.30am on Monday, March 9 featuring the interior designer Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay and Anahita Rigby, Tat London founder Charlie Porter and Jennifer Manners, founder of the eponymous rug brand. It will be moderated by Country Life’s Giles Kime and hosted by Hector Finch.

Entry is free. Hector Finch, Design Centre East, Third Floor Chelsea Harbour Design Centre, Lots Road, London SW10 0XF.

The curated home

Join journalist and author India Knight (above), interior designers Jojo Barr of House Nine and Trilbey Gordon of Trilbey Gordon Design + Interiors as they chat to The Times and The Sunday Times interiors editor Katrina Burroughs about rooms that have a story to tell — and the joys of daring experimentation in design.

After the talk, India will sign copies of her book, Home: How to Love it, Live in it, and Find Joy in it (Fig Tree, £22). Thursday, March 12, 11.30am–12.30pm, at the Talk Theatre, Design Club, Second Floor, Design Centre East, tickets cost £10 each. Visit the Design Centre website to book.

The magic of Kit Kemp

On Monday, March 9 from 3pm–4pm, join internationally renowned interior designer and founder of Firmdale Hotels Kit Kemp in conversation with Giles Kime, Executive Editor of Country Life, as they explore her distinctive approach to interiors.

Drawing on her new book, Design Stories, Kit reveals the ideas, inspirations and experience that bring her spaces to life. Reflecting on the relationship between art and interiors and the scope of her family-run practice, which spans hotel and domestic interiors, new builds and the design of textile and ceramic collections, this is a rare opportunity to hear from one of the most influential figures in design.

Afterwards, she will be signing copies of Design Stories (£45, Rizzoli). Talk Theatre, Design Club, Second Floor, Design Centre East. To book tickets, which cost £10, visit the Design Centre website.

This feature originally appeared in the February 18, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Suite Sloane in Chelsea’s chic ...At Sloane may be the most intimate room to book this Valentine’s. Located in the original ‘Best Bedroom’ of Edwin Thomas Hall’s Victorian mansion, it is the finest, and most sensual, of its 30 rooms.

The hotel is a relatively new venture. It opened in the September of 2023 after a six year renovation and is slimly advertised (it doesn’t even have a sign outside) preferring to be the go-to for ‘those in the know’. It is a collaboration between the designer Francois-Joseph Graf, the hotelier Jean-Louis Costes (responsible for the legendary Hotel Costes in Paris) and the 300-year-old Cadogan Estate. Overlooking Sloane Square and the surprisingly quiet Sloane Gardens Street, Suite Sloane can be linked with an adjoining room to become a two-bedroom apartment that can accommodate up to four people, but it is much better suited for a romantic couple’s trip, I think.

‘The hotel has been created with couples in mind’ the staff say — and it is easy to see why. Its 46 square metres includes a luxuriously soft king bed (flanked either side by discreet boxes of, ahem, tissues), a spacious bathtub for two and a hidden ‘mistress door’ that only opens from inside the decadent mahogany walk-in wardrobe. ‘It’s unusual for hotels to actively encourage affairs,’ one staff member joked of the unique feature, the entrance to which can only be spotted once you already know it’s there and is decorated with black and white photographs of Julie Andrews, Josephine Baker, Marisa Berenson and Cecil Beaton.

Strawberries, a bottle of Louis Roederer Champagne in an ice bucket, and a handwritten note greeted us. The lighting was flatteringly dim — always key for romance — and could be made more so by a mere click of the ‘Love’ button on the room’s bedside control panel. There was music softly playing over the speaker system and, if you somehow wanted to set the mood even more, guests can indulge in ‘Pillow Talk’ prompt cards to spark intimate conversations, or purchase a small ‘Partner’ kit if they saw fit.

If guests do decide to remove their clothing — which this room seems to suggest they should — they can revel in being confronted with their own naked image practically every which way they turn. It’s a bit like being in an extremely sensual hall of mirrors: without the risk of a scary clown jumping out (unless you’d invited one to come in through the mistress door). This becomes less surprising when you consider that Vincent Guerre, who was involved in the restoration of the Hall of Mirrors at the Château de Versailles, also supplied and installed old mirrors in the rooms at ...At Sloane, a considerable amount of which are located in Suite Sloane. Even the shower and the toilet door have floor-to-ceiling mirrors. It’s an excellent booking indeed for the body-confident traveller.

The five-star private home is not only elegantly suggestive, but homely too: no doubt due to the French artisans that helped create it. Elegant vases of white roses are perched on the coffee table as well as on the dresser in the bathroom, which has white, black and yellow flooring courtesy of London Mosaic. The room itself is a mix of dark wood furnishings, floral motifs reminiscent of the Arts-and-Crafts movement, which the Chelsea area has a longstanding relationship with, and kooky books (including The Art of Wallpaper: Morris & Co. in Context and The Star Wars Archives: Episodes IV-VI). Upholsterer Alexandre Phelippeau’s French workshop has given the furniture a personal touch and chairs sourced from the antiques dealer Paul Teebes and reupholstered by Phelippea make for plenty of comfy seating (much of it cheetah print).

Glorious light is let in through stained glass windows, the structure for which was manufactured by Maison Meilleur, and created and installed by Ateliers Loire Chartres. Monochrome photographs, curated by Westside London, are the show-stopper; while lounging on the bed, couples can be put in mind of other great pairings — Jean Marias and Jean Cocteau on the set of Beauty and the Beast, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Barkleys of Broadway, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, and Roger Vadim and Brigitte Bardot.

Putting that aside, the sheer variety of tipples in the hotel room’s bar are enough to set the mood on their own, for even the most buttoned-up couple. The only thing that could have made it perfect would have been doing away with the troublesome iPad that is used to control the temperature, blinds and TV, in favour of a good old-fashioned remote.

Room rates are subject to enquiry and may vary. For enquiries, please visit ...At Sloane’s website.

Last week, Athena called into question the generosity of the £1.5 billion capital spending promised by the Government to heritage and cultural organisations over the next five years. She would add that, in one important respect, the investment doesn’t address a fundamental problem within the sector.

The Secretary of State, Lisa Nandy, is explicit that the £1.5 billion is intended to make up the shortfall caused by ‘over a decade of underfunding in England’s much loved community assets’ — by which she means our leading cultural institutions. In other words, the money is going to help bring them back physically to the condition they should be in had they been properly funded. Nandy then goes on to say that in return for this cash ‘we expect cultural organisations to open their doors wider, reach new and more diverse audiences, reflect the communities they serve and ensure that excellence is no longer concentrated in a small number of postcodes, but is genuinely spread across the country. Public investment must deliver public value’.

That’s all perfectly reasonable, but she does not explain where the money is to come from for these organisations to extend their reach. No less than the buildings, the staff of many cultural institutions have also been seriously neglected over a long period of time by the same process of under-funding. This point has been made by Mike Clancy, general secretary of the Prospect Union, which represents experts in the public and private sectors: ‘This sector is facing an ongoing and intractable crisis in pay and retention which has to be addressed. We need a model for day-to-day spending that allows for sustainable workforce planning, pays these highly qualified experts what they are worth and enables our institutions to employ enough of the right people to keep sites and collections open to the public and show them in the best way possible.’

In other words, Nandy seems to think the £1.5 billion is all Britain’s cultural organisations need in order to deliver ‘public value’, ignoring the fact that they will have to continue to rely on a seriously underpaid workforce underpinned by large numbers of volunteers, who are themselves dealing with a cost-of-living crisis.

In Athena’s view, this funding should be part of what the sector needs above all, but seems unlikely to get: an integrated Government strategy for sustainability of the Arts in Britain. This would involve, for example, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) engaging with the Treasury to find meaningful incentives for philanthropy by private individuals and companies, as well as collaborating with the departments for education and health to explore ways of drawing in new audiences and unlocking fresh sources of funding. Tragically, she doubts that the DCMS has the clout to achieve anything of the kind.

Whatever the case, without such initiatives, money will be spent on Arts buildings, but who will be left to run them?

This feature originally appeared in the February 4, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The vast majority of lost mansions in the UK were demolished because of three reasons: war, fire or death duties that were imposed on estate-owning families throughout the 20th century. The latter is partly to blame for the demise of London’s Dorchester House — though Country Life dramatically decreed in a February 25, 1928, article that her fate had instead been sealed by 'the English Capitalists'.

Dorchester House was grand. Very grand — built on the site of another demolished building, on the capital's exclusive Park Lane, overlooking Hyde Park. Construction on the 40-bedroom behemoth began in 1849 for the exceptionally wealthy Capt Robert Stayner Holford (he'd inherited more than £1 million (about £97 million today) from an uncle), MP for East Gloucestershire, owner of Westonbirt House, founder of Westonbirt Arboretum and a voracious collector of fine art. Designed by architect Lewis Vulliamy and inspired by Rome’s Villa Farnesina, it featured an imposing porte-cochère with which to welcome visitors into the jaw-dropping marble entrance hall.

The hall and its grand staircase were said to have cost more than £30,000 (about £2.9 million) and featured Derbyshire alabaster balustrading. Each step was a different colour marble and the vast columns supporting the whole structure were carved out of pink granite

Holford and Vulliamy (who sought the advice of Sir Edwin Landseer while creating two arches in the saloon through which to view the marble masterpiece) contracted the finest artisans to work on the interior decoration. The library was hung with green damask silk and a huge, handwoven Axminster carpet laid on the floor. Sir Coutts Lindsay painted friezes in the Red Drawing Room and Signor Anglinatti decorated the ceilings in both this and the Green Drawing Room. No expense was spared — even when it came to one designer, Alfred Stevens, whose attention to the minutest of details pushed the generous Holford to his very limits.

Stevens — whose quality and execution of work was, according to Country Life’s Christopher Hussey, on par with Michelangelo — took a staggering 10 years to complete a chimneypiece in the saloon. In May 1870, the usually Holford put pen to paper: ‘Had I known that the saloon chimney piece would have cost so large a sum as £1,800 [£187.500], I should, while admiring its beauty, have been content with good form and less ornament.'

However, Holford did not terminate Stevens's contract and the work in the dining room continued until the latter died, mid-project, in 1875. When Holford discovered that Stevens had left a few small bequests to some poverty-stricken acquaintances, but no funds with which to honour them, Holford closed his account with a final payment of £100 (about £10,000 today) in the hope that they might receive something.

Dorchester House became, for a while, a hotspot for late-Victorian society. The balls thrown inside its walls were attended by royalty, including the then Princess of Wales (later Queen Alexandra).

Holford, who took great pleasure in showing off his impressive collection of art, died in 1892 and left the grand palace to his son, Sir George, an equerry to the royal household and, according the Manchester Evening News 'one of the best looking men in the kingdom'. Despite his handsomeness, Holford preferred the quiet life to grand state balls and parties, dedicating his spare time to collecting and tending to orchids.

He occasionally resided at the property, but, in 1905, rented it out to Whitelaw Reid, the American ambassador to London whose visitors included Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A press picture from 1910 shows former President Theodore Roosevelt (a regular visitor) departing the house the day the death of Edward VII was announced. The stars and stripes is at half-mast.

In 1912, Reid died and the house returned to Sir George. Two years later, he handed it over to the Government to use as a hospital for the duration of the First World War. Sir George was registered as living in the house in the 1921 census, but his tenure was not to last much longer. He died in 1926, leaving Dorchester House and Westonbirt to the Earl of Morley. Morley was already in a dire financial position having already inherited vast debts from both his father and grandfather and so he immediately put both properties up for sale. Dorchester House was only 70 years old, but already considered too old-fashioned to be worth salvaging — though there were 40 bedrooms, it had only five bathrooms. After a sale to a hotel syndicate was announced, Country Life mourned its imminent destruction:

‘A country that lives on capital, treating Death Duties as income, must not expect monuments of individualism to survive. Had the late Lord Leverhulme been alive and still contemplating he founding of a museum, as he was when he bought Grosvenor House, Dorchester House might have been spared. Had the Italian Government found it convenient to pay an extra £100,000, Italy would have had as worthy an embassy as England can offer, and London could have kept one of its noblest palaces. If Lady Beecham, in her gallant effort to house national opera, had also procured that last £100,000, the building would have been largely preserved.’

As was always the case, a huge pre-demolition sale was held. The vast staircase has depreciated in value quicker than a newly-released iPhone, selling in six individual pieces for a dismal £293. The Evening News reported that most bids were lower than the cost of removal. Solid oak doors, for example, fetched £3 3s (roughly £170).

The wrecking balls moved in as soon as the sale had finished and by 1931, The Dorchester Hotel had risen from its ashes. The luxury accommodation still stands proud in the footprint of Holford’s dream some 95 years later.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. An additional 50,000 assets from the historic archive are scheduled to be added this year — with completion expected in Summer 2025. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

The first billet-doux I ever received came from the boys in Year 3. They’d decided to pose as a girl in our class named Emma, whose beautiful handwriting they’d done a fine job of replicating. I was led to believe that Emma wanted to hold my hand, sit next to me at lunch and perhaps invite me for a playdate after school, so swaggered towards her in the courtyard after reading class to declare that my feelings were mutual and we should get married. She is now and I am not.

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, one might do well to reacquaint oneself with calligraphy. Whether it’s the cost of living crisis or the cult of ‘authenticity’, couples are turning away from material gifts and rediscovering the joy of love letters. According to Pinterest, an online curation platform allowing users to create moodboards around a certain theme — think of it as the digital equivalent of a scrapbook — the search for images relating to stamps and handwritten letters has shot up by 105% and 45%, respectively. Pinterest is a surprisingly underrated trend forecaster: over the past six years, 88% of its style predictions have come true. Society, it seems, is once more turning to pen and paper as a means of romantic expression.

Nowhere is this trend clearer than at Claridge's, where Montblanc is launching a new line of Meisterstück pens this week (the collection is aptly titled 'Romeo & Juliet'). From tomorrow, guests and visitors will head to the newly set-up 'Poet's Corner' in the Art Deco lobby, where Charlie Child — the hotel's newly minted 'poet-in-residence' — will compose complementary love lyrics all week and post them to your beloved. And they said romance was dead!

Institutions are picking up on this, too. A new exhibition at the National Archives in Richmond puts on show some of history’s most notorious love letters, including one from Catherine Howard to her paramour Thomas Culpeper that would end up serving as evidence of her infidelity, leading to her execution. Romantic epistles, of course, have been around since time immemorial; during the excavation of Nippur in modern-day Iraq, Victorian explorers unearthed a Sumerian cuneiform terracotta tablet on which were inscribed love lyrics dating back to 2030BC.

Since then, love letters have served as a cornerstone of courtly ritual (a lady and her knight would liaise via handwritten notes), redefined entire kingdoms (Henry VIII’s missives to Anne Boleyn led to the creation of the Church of England) and inspired epistolary novels such as Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which was famously adapted for the silver screen in 1988.

As evidenced by Howard’s demise, however, love letters sometimes cause more trouble than they’re worth. In her case, matters of the heart literally became matters of the head. On Substack, users continue to extol the epistle’s courtly virtues, posting snippets by the genre’s most beloved exponents in the runup to February 14 (‘I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia,’ mused Vita Sackville-West; ‘We get old and get used to each other,’ wrote Johnny Cash to June Carter). Write a love letter, by all means — but be careful what you wish for.

This feature originally appeared in the February 4, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In Josh Safdie’s 2019 neo-noir thriller, Uncut Gems, Adam Sandler plays a jeweller in New York’s Diamond District named Howard Ratner. His declining fortunes seem to turn suddenly after he receives an Ethiopian black opal matrix from an associate. The stone doesn’t look much — Esquire once called it ‘a tarry, shimmering button’ — yet, as he gazes into it, eyes wide and grin wider still, he realises, as do we, that this is an object of truly sensational value.

Black opals, which are more delicate than diamonds, form when water and silicone dioxide evaporate from the cracks of sandstone. The darker the body tone, the more desirable the opal. They are notoriously hard to find, which explains why Howard is reluctant to lend it to basketball champion Kevin Garnett, who conveniently finds himself in the store right as the opal gets delivered.

The sportsman believes it to be his lucky charm, Heaven-sent. After much smooth-talking, Sandler's character hands it over to him on the condition that it’s for one night only. Kevin has a game on and he’s feeling himself; inspired by his blind self-belief, Howard places a bet on his team winning. The gamble pays off. Howard rubs his hands together. He’s made a killing and the opal will be his again tomorrow.

Or so he thinks. Kevin and his entourage, naturally, have other plans, kickstarting a chain of events that ends in chaos and tragedy. Yet the story of how the London Museum (formerly Museum of London) came into the possession of the Cheapside Hoard is stranger and more dramatic, still.

The Hoard is the most significant collection of Tudor and Stuart jewels ever found, a veritable anthology of treasures acquired via different trade routes. Its story, to this day, remains one of London’s most beguiling. A treasure chest containing the jewels was discovered on June 18, 1912, at a time when a growing urban population was transforming the cityscape. Old homes were being razed to clear the way for mansion flats and, in order to build up, developers had to build down, laying more solid foundations deep into the ground.

Workers were expected to excavate several tons of London clay per day, which often meant having to dig right down to Roman level. As each layer of history was diligently removed, new artefacts would reveal themselves to labourers: a portal to an era in which various goods had been buried or left behind. No era fascinated the Edwardians more than the Elizabethan age — so you can imagine the delight of the two workmen who came across the Cheapside Hoard as they dug out the new foundations for Wakefield House that summer.

Wakefield House was built as a headquarters of the industrial tycoon Charles Cheers Wakefield and rose where the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths once did. This was the professional association of jewellers who had previously occupied the area and whose legacy is still felt today in the name of nearby arteries (think Goldsmith Street). It is here that I meet Victoria Shepherd, a historian and the author of Stony Jack and the Lost Jewels of Cheapside (Oneworld, £20). Ahead of the extant jewels’ much anticipated unveiling at the newly rehomed London Museum later this year, she’s come up with a new theory about when, and why, these might have been buried here.

The ‘Stony Jack’ in her title refers to George Fabian Lawrence, an antiquarian dealer and legendary figure of the age. The labourers who uncovered the Cheapside Hoard could easily have made off with the bounty, Victoria claims; instead, they took it to Stony Jack, who operated out of a pawn shop in Wandsworth. The story is positively Uncut Gems-esque: ‘They dropped concrete footballs, lumps of clay, onto Stony Jack’s desk’, says one account — from whence poured countless jewels made of diamonds, rubies and sapphires. In total, the Cheapside Hoard consisted of nearly 500 pieces, including rings, brooches, necklaces, a salt cellar and a watch encased in a Colombian emerald the size of a small apple.

Over the years, Stony Jack had forged strong relationships with London’s builders, who trusted both his expertise and character when it came to evaluating the worth of their finds. He was known to pay people cash down, no questions asked, and typically sold the valuable works on to museums. His primary options for the Cheapside Hoard were the London Museum and the Guildhall; he favoured the first, in its infancy at the time, having been established in 1911. Soon enough, the museum named Stony Jack its Inspector of Excavations.

The uncovering and eventual traffic of the Hoard in 1912 inspired all sorts of conspiracy theories. Why, indeed, had it been buried in the first place? Why had no one come to retrieve it before then? It has long been believed that the Interregnum was to blame: the political and religious upheaval of the 17th century meant it was perfectly conceivable that a goldsmith might have had to flee town and leave his wealth behind. Victoria’s tale of the Cheapside Hoard, published last June, builds on this theory.

When studying an archival lease document for William Taylor, who took the premises on the site near Goldsmiths Row in 1654, she noticed a passing reference to one Francis Simpson, identified as the property’s previous leaseholder and a jeweller who supplied fashionable pieces to the Court, as well as more modest ones to the mercantile class. He had refused to renew his lease in 1641, on the basis that the structural improvements he’d made to the building as leaseholder were enough to offset the costs. The Goldsmiths’ Company did not accept this explanation and Simpson ended up having to pay rent, on top of fines he had accrued when trying to cut corners.

Then came the Civil War: Simpson, who was a staunch Royalist, fled London for Oxford, where he became Charles I’s royal jeweller. Throughout this time, he refused to pay rent on the shop in Cheapside because that would have meant lining the coffers of a now Republican parliament.

After the Sequestration Committee was set up, the bailiffs came to his premises to requisition the property. His staff of artisans, who had been manning the shop in his absence, promptly hid the jewels ‘somewhere out of the way, at the back of the building, butting up to the boundary with the neighbouring property in a sturdy, brick-lined cellar,’ Victoria writes.

When Oxford surrendered to the Parliamentarians, Simpson was sent to prison. Yet he came back to London after the Restoration had taken place, ready to reclaim his shop and its hidden treasures and wrestle it off whoever occupied the premises at present. Ultimately, however, Simpson was hampered by debt and the Goldsmiths’ Company did not permit him to take out a lease on its watch again.

He returned to his role as royal jeweller and was in town when the Great Fire of 1666 engulfed the City. Cheapside went up in flames and, according to Victoria, Simpson would have believed the Hoard was lost forever. He didn’t realise, however, exactly how well, deeply and safely it had been hidden. No one would, in fact, until 246 years later.

Simpson, believes Victoria, was thus the mystery architect of the Cheapside Hoard, carefully acquiring and remodelling the collection over several decades, according to the fashion of the age. Why he didn’t take the jewels with him to Oxford might raise a few eyebrows, but Ms Shepherd has a theory for this, too. ‘He was, at the time, making diamond-heavy decorations to the highest possible specification for the Royal Court and the pieces and loose stones in the Hoard were, with a few exceptions, not sufficiently grandiose for his work in progress.’

The hero of her book, however, is Stony Jack, of whom she produces one of the most complete portraits to date. He was ‘a clairvoyant’, she argues: someone who could slip seamlessly between the past and the present, peer into a gemstone and understand its provenance in the manner of a mystic (or, indeed, of Kevin Garnett).

We know today that the collection drew from Burma, Colombia and the Persian Gulf, the fruit of budding trade routes to the New World and the Far East. Remarkably, ‘the less ostentatious jewels are some of the most interesting,’ as Victoria notes, ‘because many of them depict myths and symbols loaded with superstition’.

The London Museum was the primary beneficiary of Stony Jack’s antiques trade and holds the single largest slice of the Cheapside Hoard since it was discovered. Some of it was still on display when the museum closed its previous site in 2022, but much of it was on loan or stored underground in the vaults. This year, the full collection will go on show for the first time after the museum reopens on Smithfield, increasing its surface area from roughly 4¼ to 6¾ acres. Victoria, for one, is thrilled: if Edwardian England was in thrall to the tale of the Hoard, it’s one of those London legends to which time has been unkind — until now. Seeing it in all its glory after uncovering the true story, it seems as if this tale might have a far happier ending than that of Uncut Gems.

The London Museum, Smithfield, reopens in late 2026. Visit their website for more information.

This feature originally appeared in the February 4, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

My perfumer, Anna, is one of three who work at Floris, one of the world’s oldest and most distinguished perfumers. She is a scent sensei; an Olympic-level smeller. She tells me if a colleague came into the store wearing a scent that wasn’t Floris she’d nose it out straight away. Sniffer dogs fear her.

I am visiting the shop on Jermyn Street to have a bespoke scent made. I first heard about this service because my Dad’s girlfriend gave it to him as a present. He came back on the train from London, the heart and home of Floris since 1730, reeking of ‘Mojo 61’ — the name of his signature scent — and self confidence.

Anna began by telling me a bit about the centuries-old perfumery. It was founded by Juan Famenias Floris who moved over from Menorca and began selling combs, shaving products and perfumes with his wife Elizabeth in 1730, in the shop which used to double as the family home and remains Floris’ headquarters today. It is still run by their descendents, now in their ninth generation (although their surname has changed to Bodenham). ‘It’s a lovely thing, because we only have this one store, so although we’re a large brand, we are not diluted. It all has to come from here,’ Anna says.

In 1820, Floris received a Royal Warrant (which went on to become one of many) as Smooth Pointed Comb Maker to George IV. Their interest in creating perfumes gradually grew and in 1863 Florence Nightingale penned a letter to one ‘Mr Floris’, thanking him for the ‘beautiful sweet-swelling nosegays’. Sir Winston Churchill purchased fragrances from the company in 1934 (including a bottle of the brand’s Special No. 127 Eau de Toilette, which is a ‘refreshing citrus blend of bergamot and orange’, if you wanted to know what he smelt like). Marilyn Monroe also shopped at Floris and Ian Fleming was a regular customer, and even wrote about the perfumer in his 1995 novel Moonraker. He was partial to No.89 Eau de Toilette, another citrusy medley.

‘One of the greatest privileges for me is that we have these fragrances that go back 200 years, and it gives you an idea what was going on in that time. Not just: these are the facts, but really: these are the feelings,’ says Anna. ‘Perfumes reflect the zeitgeist of the time.’ She thinks a couple of years ago the trend was for very lactone (milky and creamy) and comforting scents ‘for an anxious time where people needed things that were quite reassuring’. Now she thinks people are more drawn to gourmand scents, ‘really sugary: salted caramel, coffee, rich, deep, all these things’.

We are sitting in the perfumery, which is where the artisans at Floris have always created their scents. It is a dark wood-panelled room with navy curtains and seat cushions and a grand yet well-loved wooden desk that divides myself and Anna. This is where she will do her work. There is a sense of majesty about the room, and magic too, as vials of potion-like scents line the glass-fronted cabinet behind her. ‘We are going to be making a custom fragrance, around your skin,’ Anna tells me, explaining how scent changes when it’s applied to flesh. I hadn’t put any perfume on that morning; Anna congratulates me on this.

Many perfumers have a background in chemistry, but Anna studied the science of the senses and, after finding that she had a particular interest in olfactory, went on to study perfumery and psychotherapy. ‘I’ve been trying to mold the two together ever since,’ she says. She asks me what I typically wear. My answer (‘Um, there’s a dark blue one that was a gift. And Jo Malone something, maybe nectarine? And a large body spray from The Body Shop which I sometimes use. Something in the peachy family, I think’) doesn’t deter her. ‘Is it floral?’ she asks, of my primary perfume. I nod. ‘Woody?’

‘No,’ I reply. ‘It’s strong.’

‘This is where we’re going to get into interesting territory,’ Anna says with a smile, ‘because language in smell is tricky … I had a woman just this morning who had mentioned the word fresh three or four times, and I realised quite quickly that what she was noticing as fresh is not at all what I would have introduced as fresh, if she left me to our own devices. It's really important that I understand what you mean, and the best way to do that is when we're smelling together.’

She goes on to say, very kindly, that it’s not an issue that I can’t remember the scents I already have, as we are going to create something unique. ‘I tend to go for things that are kind of like autumn colours,’ I offer, keen to be understood. ‘Woody and grounded, not super sweet, quite rich, but not overpowering. Like a stone fruit.’ I elaborate. ‘But NOT cinnamon. And I like the idea of a sort of androgynous smell.’

She nods her head, and begins to pluck down a few bottles. ‘We begin by choosing a foundation. Citrus, floral, woody or amber. We are going to go through these together and you must say if there’s something that you like. Only say if it’s something you’d wear, because there will be plenty of fragrances that you like but which are not for you,’ she says, sagely. ‘Then we will whittle that selection down, however big it is, to just two. We will test them on your hand and choose one, and build everything else from there.’ Herein begins a process of fervent sniffing. I do it blind, Anna keeping the labels of the scents hidden from me so I can’t be influenced by what I think I’ll like. ‘People think something's masculine or feminine based on the picture of the lady or the man on the box,’ she says.

Turns out, I am very good at knowing what I don’t like. ‘Too manly,’ I say to one. ‘Too powderly for me, like an old person’s blusher compact,’ I deem another. ‘God no, that’s like Marzipan,’ is a further remark. ‘That’s a bit of me,’ I say, finally, to a scent Anna afterwards informs me was created for Queen Victoria’s wedding day. Clearly I have a right regal hooter.

I wonder if I’m being too definitive. ‘No,’ Anna says. ‘It’s harder with someone who says yes to everything.’ The process is long and we get to chatting as we smell, about our upbringings, our careers, our love lives, gender and what our patronus’ would be if we were in Harry Potter (Anna’s would be a dolphin). You couldn’t be in this kind of job if you weren’t curious about people.

Before we slim my selection of base scents down to two, she advises I take a ‘nose break’, as I am beginning to be overwhelmed by the scent of the alcohol in each vial, rather than the scent itself. To remedy this, she suggests more alcohol, of a different kind, and fetches some Champagne. ‘The bubbles help,’ she says. ‘Although the same effect could be achieved with sparkling water.’ I opt for Champagne, keen to get the authentic Floris experience. She sprays the final two scents on the backs of my hands and I smell, deciding on the left one. It’s warm and sunshiny.

‘Now for the fun part — the accords,’ Anna says. ‘This is where we get to characterize your scent even more, giving it even more personality and individuality. I will show you a selection that could potentially work but it’s always going to be led by you.’ We begin again, sniffing our way ever closer to our goal: Eau de Lotte. She shows me one that’s an instant hit. ‘That’s really interesting,’ I say.

‘That’s fig,’ Anna replies. My mother has always loved figs and we have a fig tree at our family home. It can’t be a coincidence. Olfactory is one of the strongest triggers of memory there is. Anna asks me to smell a vial which contains musk. ‘It’s a really interesting one, some people can smell it and some people can't.’ I can, but am indifferent. ‘Do you think you're looking for something a bit more complicated?’ Anna asks. I say yes. She then suggests a smell that I immediately identify as lavender and deem ‘too granny’. Cardamon, however, is an instant hit. It smells tasty, like the feeling of getting a bit drunk at a bougie bar. Anna suddenly, and alarmingly insightfully, observes: ‘I'm starting to notice that you're drawn to fragrances that are a little bit bizarre and weird, but actually the ones that you would wear on yourself are perhaps a little bit more, just calmer.’ It’s starting to feel a bit like therapy. She gets me to sniff my own unscented skin between each scent, so that my nose doesn’t get too confused. Eventually we get there.

She blends the mixture, muttering quietly as she does so about the various quantities of each scent, and spraying it on patches on my arms, hands and wrists so that we can both smell it on me, at various stages during the process. We add a few drops of vanilla, then of smoke, then frankincense and myrrh, and finally cassis for a kick. After several rounds, and when I almost don’t have any arm left to sniff, we are there. She asks me to name my creation. The base is jasmine, and it is heavily imbued with fig. Combined with the fact that making it together felt like a sort of spirited dance, or searching for a missing jigsaw piece, I go for ‘Jig’. It is a punchy, sweet, playful word — exactly how it smells.

It’s a wonderful experience, so it’s no surprise it’s ‘98% gifted’ according to Anna’s estimation. ‘Usually for anniversaries, weddings or birthdays.’ My brain is swimming with things I wish I had asked, and Champagne, and my nose heady with Jig, but I manage to sneak in one final question as Anna is bottling our creation in a classy bottle with a golden lid. I am desperate to know what her signature scent is. Is she woody and earthy? Floral and light? Bizarre — like some of the scents I turned down earlier? Or something else entirely. ‘I haven’t made one,’ she says with a shrug. ‘None of the perfumers have.’

‘Why?’ I implore, utterly baffled by her answer.

‘Because I think we wouldn’t know where to stop.’

An appointment for one at Floris costs £750 and lasts for approximately two hours, or you can opt to go with a loved one for £1,250. This session lasts three hours. For more information visit Floris's website.

I doubt there’s ever been a busier year for five-star hotel openings in London than 2026, from Cambridge House, Auberge Collection, the centrepiece of the Reuben Brothers’ £1 billion Piccadilly Estate regeneration, to The Newman in Fitzrovia (‘I wasn’t allowed to take pictures, but the cocktail bar is absolutely incredible,’ said a colleague via WhatsApp, mid hard-hat tour). Two have decided to anchor their properties next to or inside renowned London locations: The Zetter Bloomsbury, which shares a brick wall with the British Museum, and the Waldorf Astoria London Admiralty Arch, respectively.

Others of note include St Regis London, The Shepherd Mayfair, and St Clement Hotel at 180 The Thames — Nick Jones’s first hotel project outside the now flailing Soho House brand.

Despite reports that the removal of VAT-free shopping for international visitors is driving high-spending tourists to Paris and Milan and right-wing politicians’ protestations that London is a ‘hellscape’, the hospitality industry clearly believes London still exudes a certain allure. In an interview with the Financial Times in late 2025, Sadiq Khan accused the naysayers of trying to tear down London because it’s ‘diverse, progressive, liberal, multicultural and incredibly successful’. Jules Perowne, founder and CEO consultancy firm Perowne International, is more matter of fact: ‘The plan for these properties was made years ago because London is a critical location on the map of any international hotel group.’ However, she finishes on a high: ‘The future looks bright for London.’

Best of the global rest

The UK

• Hope, Scotland WildLand’s conservation empire is expanding with Hope, which opens in the Highlands this May, comprising a hunting lodge-turned-hotel and a clutch of self-catering cottages, with activities such as guided wildlife tracking
• Kabn Cairngorms, Scotland These luxury, off-grid cabins in the Cairngorms National Park will each come with a kitchen, woodburning stove and e-bikes for exploring when they open in September
• Teffont House, Wiltshire In July, the Beckford Group (behind South-West favourite Beckford Canteen in Bath) opens the doors to its first hotel in the Nadder Valley — complete with a croquet lawn and treatment cabin
• The Gallivant Littlestone Beach, Kent The Gallivant Littlestone Beach is a seaside bolthole, with interiors inspired by the Hamptons in the 1920s. It opens this summer and we recommend booking early given the success of sister hotel The Gallivant near Rye in East Sussex
• Wildhive Eshott Hall, Northumberland The Wildhive Collection’s second country-house hotel opens this summer. Rooms will be spread across the Georgian manor house, former stable and woodland cabins

Europe

• Château la Commaraine, Beaune, France This 12th-century estate, within Burgundy’s UNESCO World Heritage area, will reopen in March after a four-year restoration. As well as a vineyard, the château has a cuverie
• Nordelaia Sur Mer, Beaulieu-sur-Mer, France Nordelaia Sur Mer follows in the footsteps of a sister hotel of the same name in Piedmont, Italy. It opens this spring with a rooftop terrace, tapas-style restaurant and outdoor pool
• Na Praia, Comporta, Portugal The brains behind São Lourenço do Barroca in the heart of Portugal’s Alentejo region, an estate and working farm owned by the same family for 200 years, have turned their attention to coastal retreat Na Praia, near Comporta (na praia means ‘on the beach’ in Portuguese). The suites, houses and villas — opening in May — border a nature reserve

• La Réserve Firenze, Florence, Italy This 15th-century palazzo has been reimagined as six apartments by a French couple, with French hotel group La Réserve (above). Choose between city or river views and join the owners for tennis at their home on the city outskirts. It opens in June
• Orient Express Corinthian, the Mediterranean The world’s largest sailing yacht embarks on its maiden Mediterranean voyage this June. Think handsome cabins, food by Michelin-starred chef Yannick Alléno and a Guerlain spa

The Americas

• White Elephant Aspen, Colorado, USA A White Elephant outpost opens later this year in the US’s glitziest ski resort, stuffed full of bespoke furniture and contemporary art
• Chablé Valle de Guadalupe, Mexico Chablé is a homegrown Mexican hotel group with standout properties in the Yucatán and Riviera Maya. Its latest venture is in the emerging wine region of Baja California Norte and opens in late 2026
• Voaara Grenadines, Palm Island, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Hot on the heels of Voaara Madagascar comes a property in the Caribbean with beach bungalows and Spanish-Mediterranean cuisine. It opens in December

Africa

• Hoanib Elephant Camp, Namibia This tented camp by Natural Selection opens in remote Kaokoland in May, offering a chance to interact with the region’s desert-adapted elephants
• Erebero Hills Lodge, Uganda This Asilia Africa lodge on the fringes of the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, well placed for gorilla trekking, opens in September with eight hillside suites and a pool deck
• Singita Elela Lodge, Botswana Singita’s first venture in Botswana, opening in December, will combine next-level service with exclusive access to 420,000 acres of protected wilderness in the Okavango Delta

Asia

• Aqua Lares, Seychelles From this month, the ultra-luxury expedition yacht Aqua Lares will offer itineraries around the Seychelles — as well as extended voyages in the Zanzibar archipelago
• Capella Kyoto, Japan Inspired by traditional machiya (a wooden townhouse), this hotel is close to Kenninji, Kyoto’s oldest Zen temple, in the Miyagawa-cho district. It opens this spring
• The Malkai, Oman This trio of extraordinary camps on the coastal plains of Barka, the Al Hajar mountains and Sharqiyah Sands is launched in September. Guests will be ferried between them in bespoke Land Rovers

If you read my reviews in Country Life, you’ll know that my list of restaurant ‘icks’ — turn-offs guaranteed to set me against a place — is fairly extensive. (Yes, my diamond shoes are pinching.) Any attempt at humour in the lavatories is one, being asked how the food is when I’ve only just taken a bite of something is another.

Until recently, I counted chefs’ tables, where you sit either at or near the pass where the plates come out and are given a running commentary on the proceedings, among them. They’re an introvert’s nightmare that interfere with the real business of dining out, viz demolishing the bread basket.

On one memorably mortifying occasion, the chef of a very serious east London restaurant brought out a belching vat of kimchi, which he then plonked down in front of us to illustrate a lecture on fermentation. At that point, we were still waiting for the wine list.

The whole rigmarole has always reminded me of watching a burlesque show, in that nobody in the room is actually having as much fun as they’re pretending to. However, recently the (chefs’) tables have been turned: denizens of the new breed feel more like a lock-in than a fayn dayning beauty pageant.

The Goring, SW1, home to one of the capital’s most reassuringly traditional dining rooms, has opened up its subterranean kitchen to guests with a counter that seats up to six. Over plentiful glasses of Champagne, we unobtrusively watched Graham Squire and his brigade working their magic before going back upstairs to eat: a genuinely exciting peek behind the curtain that made us even more appreciative of the meal that followed.

Another favourite, Ravinder Bhogal’s jewel-box-like Jikoni in Marylebone, W1, has an eight-seater table by the pass that feels as if you’re dining in the kitchen of a very stylish, generous and relaxed friend: you happily tuck into prawn toast Scotch eggs with banana ketchup and chalkstream trout and bulgar wheat tartare surrounded by labelled tupperware boxes of spices.

In the cellar of what was a Soho boozer in the 18th century, meanwhile, low-lit 12-seater Evelyn’s Table, W1, is going from strength to strength: you’re inches away from the kitchen and the cooking is mightily impressive, but the whole experience somehow remains unfussy, let-your-hair-down fun.

Now, where did that bread basket go?


Ask people about rewilding and they tend to picture country estates: the grounds of a great house, agricultural land, open moorland. ‘Successful rewilding projects need scale,’ says landscape designer Adam Hunt. Rarely, therefore, do we consider cities.

Yet these are leading the way in biodiversity recovery — and may continue to do so. Sir David Attenborough explores this in a recent BBC documentary, Wild London, as he follows animals across the capital, from peregrine falcons nesting atop the Houses of Parliament to leopard slugs and their oddly mesmeric copulation. Our royal history means that large swathes of parkland were set aside for hunting and, to this day, keep London looking green. The main takeaway, however, is to do with our gardens: rewilding, more often than not, starts in our own backyard.

This was the idea at the heart of the inaugural Wilding Gardens conference, held last week at the University of Manchester. ‘We want this to be about the joy of seeing a dragonfly above your pond in Bristol,’ says panellist Lulu Urquhart, who won Best in Show at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2022, together with Adam, for a garden built around a beaver dam. Britain’s gardens amount to roughly two million acres of land — 1.2 times the size of Devon. According to Adam, we ought to understand these not as secluded ecosystems, but as components of a larger network in which birds, insects and even larger mammals move freely.

Back to London, which has more gardens per square mile than any other capital. The city has already become a hotspot for ‘hedgehog highways’, with garden owners putting holes in their fences to allow the creatures to travel from one to another, to mate. Since 2000, their numbers have declined faster in the country than in the city; now, there are urban areas where their numbers even seem to be increasing.

Nonetheless, Britain remains among the three most biodiversity-depleted countries in Europe. The other two are Ireland and Malta, fellow islands where individualism (read: nimbyism) tends to take hold. If an Englishman’s home is his castle, the garden too often is his moat: a barrier between him and the natural world and a shelter from true wilderness. When I told a fellow Londoner about hedgehog highways, his face quickly turned sour: what if these unwittingly made life easier for rats?

Yet Nature has a way of keeping itself in check, Lulu notes. Look after the fox, or even the serpent (there are plenty slithering around Regent's Park), and they’ll keep the rats’ numbers down.

The word ‘Glastonbury’ tends to inspire more than a flinch from readers. The heady stench of soil, alcohol and sweat is enough to turn most people off. For some, the issue is political: last summer, Spectator columnist Rod Liddle wrote that dropping a bomb on Worthy Farm would solve most of Britain’s problems. He was joking, supposedly.

Yet this particular story, as so many about live music do, begins here in Somerset, three days into the 2025 festival, on a warm and fuzzy Saturday night. The crowds surrounding The Other Stage are euphoric, amid the sort of atmosphere that contradicts the idea that young people today are boring, depressed or incapable of having fun. Everyone is here: teenagers, old punks, lone wanderers and hip parents. And they’re all here for jazz.

Performing at Glastonbury’s second largest venue is Ezra Collective, a name that may be familiar to readers who follow the paces of contemporary music, although many older jazzheads in the field seem never to have heard of the band until today. Even they know, however, that it is not one to miss: they’ve looked it up on Google after seeing it on the line-up, seen the word ‘jazz’, together with a slew of critical praise, and decided to witness what all the fuss is about.

Ezra Collective is made up of five players: Femi Koleoso on drums, his brother TJ on bass, Joe Armon-Jones on keys, Ife Ogunjobi on trumpet and tenor saxophonist James Mollison. They formed in 2012 at Tomorrow’s Warriors, a jazz youth programme founded in 1991 by Janine Irons and Gary Crosby, who, in 2018, became the first ever jazz musician to be awarded a Queen’s Medal for Music.

Ezra Collective is no stranger to breaking new ground, either: in 2023, the group became the first jazz act to win the Mercury Prize, for the album Where I’m Meant To Be, as well as the first to ever win the Brit award for Group of the Year in 2025.

Jazz music has always made a case for revolution, its origins harking back to a time when African-American slaves had recently become emancipated. Blending their own musical traditions, such as ragtime and blues, with European harmonies and rhythms from the West Indies, the very roots of jazz sought to stretch across divides. If music is often said to be about bringing people together, perhaps no other genre fosters connection more convincingly than this one.

Jazz is also the gentleman’s genre of choice, seducing not only by its sound, but by its swagger — a cultivated cool that threads from Harlem’s smoke-laced clubs to the polished drawing rooms of Mayfair. Because it offers a rare combination of emotional improvisation and structural sophistication, it provides something of a mirror to the kind of man who reads James Baldwin by day and sips Bourbon to Coltrane by night.

As American music critic Ted Gioia once wrote, jazz is ‘the sound of surprise’: one that demands both attention and understanding. These are qualities the discerning male listener has historically prized. Jazz isn’t merely music, it’s a posture — one that signals depth, taste and sophistication.

The conduct of the crowd at Glastonbury doesn’t immediately scream ‘gentlemanly’ in the same way, although this is perhaps the magic of today’s jazz artists: they dabble less in the performative glamour of yesteryear’s practitioners and focus instead on the genre’s primal creative instincts. Ezra Collective’s concerts take a groove-first, lecture-later approach, unleashing the crowd and demanding that everyone take part. A true gentleman, although stoic, knows when to let loose. And, crucially, he can’t resist a dance.

Today’s jazz is a genre of multiple declensions. Some of it blends into funk; some leans more into soul. Jazz can also serve as a secondary flavour, there to infuse something more dominant, such as gospel. This is the case for Gabriels, a blues group that formed in Los Angeles, California, US, and is often cited by connoisseurs as one of the most exciting bands of the past five years. Alexis Petridis, The Guardian’s admired music critic, named its debut record Angels & Queens Part I as one of 2022’s albums of the year.

A pseudo-intellectual might argue that a jazz hybrid is not really jazz, but that’s a tough call to make, considering the genre’s origins. Fortunately, there seems to be little left of this old-school snobbery — and, fittingly, jazz is no longer confined to the hallowed halls of Ronnie Scott’s, W1, or the fictional jazz club from 1994’s The Fast Show, run by the hilariously pretentious Louis Balfour (played by John Thomson). Although intimate venues are still popular — and the preferred choice for many — what is significant about this particular jazz renaissance is the fact that it can pack out stadiums. An artist such as Raye, recognised as having single-handedly revived soul for the airwaves and whose style draws heavily on jazz, sold out the O2 Arena in 2024.

It seems almost inevitable that jazz would experience a renaissance after the pandemic. As people ventured back out into the world — into pubs, clubs or what was left of either — they found joy and freedom in music that was less structured and more esoteric. People were craving whatever they couldn’t get from Spotify or TikTok: namely, volume.

‘Jazz is the kind of music that doesn’t really hide anywhere,’ explains aficionado Charlie Hills, a writer and photographer. When going out still felt like a dare, a sound that bordered on the excessive scratched an itch. ‘Jazz is also a genre that leaves no room for insincerity,’ he adds. It’s honest, unrestrained and relies on instinct as much as cultivable skill.

There’s also a nostalgic element: returning to jazz is a bit like returning to an analogue instrument, such as a film camera, or reading a hard copy of a book. For many, it’s a welcome escape from the algorithm and our more widely digitally addled lives.

For others, however, jazz is part and parcel with the algorithm. An essential voice of contemporary jazz is the Icelandic-Chinese singer Laufey, the Billie Holiday of Instagram, spinning smoky ballads for millions of streaming fans — who, judging by their age, would have been 11 during lockdown and are now experts in bossa nova chord progressions. Her 2023 album, Bewitched, has become one of Spotify’s most-streamed jazz records of the decade. In May 2024, she sold out the Royal Albert Hall.

Despite this democratisation of the genre, jazz can still inspire a club-like mentality, giving a significant boost to smaller venues and private members’ clubs — dozens of which have opened in London since the pandemic. The House of KOKO in Camden, NW1, was founded in 2022 off the back of its namesake concert hall: a famed live-music venue that had previously welcomed shows by Prince and Madonna. ‘We host a range of artists in Ellen’s, our jazz speakeasy in The House of KOKO,’ explains Nick Lewis, the club’s head of music. ‘It’s always fully booked, two shows a week’, the demographic a broad spectrum of people in their twenties all the way to those aged 50 or more.

‘Jazz is an ever evolving art form,’ Nick continues, ‘and at its best is a reflection of the now. We’re delighted to continue to champion and host most, if not all, of the leading jazz players who are part of the genre’s resurgence in Britain.’ These include Ezra Collective and Gabriels, together with other talents, such as Nubya Garcia, Theon Cross and Sheila Maurice-Grey (of the band Kokoroko).

Since the pandemic, many have tended to favour smaller venues, somewhere with more intimacy or the contemporary equivalent of a speakeasy. Jazz is a major part of this shift, just as it was 100 years ago when the 1920s roared to life amid prohibition and the fizz and wreckage of the First World War. ‘People really want to dance at the moment,’ Charlie says. As in the 1920s, the cultural mood is maximalist — the French name for the Roaring Twenties was les années folles: the crazy years — and if music is the principle verse of this new Jazz Age, it’s not the only one. In literature, the past few years have seen an appetite emerge for a new Great Gatsby-esque epic. In that camp are authors such as Andrew O’Hagan, whose 2024 novel Caledonian Road offers a panoramic exposé of London’s criminal underbelly and its wily intersections into society’s upper echelons; or Sally Rooney, whose explorations of love, class and modern courtship have been adapted for television.

This is alongside a vogue for biographies of men with more than Gatsby-esque levels of wealth: Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk (2023), say, or Michael Wolff’s indefatigable exposés of the inner workings of the Murdoch media empire — the most recent instalment of which was The Fall, in the same year. In film, too, there’s been a noticeable return to the epic in recent years: think Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning Oppenheimer (2023) and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024).

Perhaps the most convincing epic of our time, however, is another piece of music — and its surrounding concert tour. A few hours after Ezra Collective left The Other Stage, it was Charli XCX’s turn to bring down the house, burning the neon-green flag she’d deployed as a backdrop in every one of her concerts since last September. Her culture-lassoing 2024 album Brat (a crafty ode to clubbing interspersed with revelatory takes on female friendship and imposter syndrome) and its Brat tour have inspired a global, era-defining movement among the youth, running somewhat parallel to the jazz renaissance, despite offering a starkly different sound: ultra-modern, electronic, almost alien.

What people admire in both jazz and the genre known as hyperpop, Charlie explains, is their mutual exhibition of ‘excess and technicality’. This is not music that is easy to produce; nor does it tend to be easy on the ears. It is deliberately noisy, thrilling and chaotic — and inspires the same feelings of joy, abandon and fellowship. The culture has spoken.

Last May, Tate Modern celebrated its 25th birthday with a gala in the Turbine Hall: a raucous affair attended by artists Sir Grayson Perry, Sir Antony Gormley and Dame Tracey Emin. Food was prepared by the River Café’s Ruthie Rogers and guests enjoyed a performance by the Pet Shop Boys.

As Hollywood stars Daniel Craig and Reese Witherspoon mingled over Champagne, Maria Balshaw, the director of the gallery, was fielding questions about Tate Modern’s future. Accounts for 2023–24 revealed yet another deficit budget approved by the trustees, ‘due to self-generating income not increasing at the same pace as the cost base post-Pandemic’. Last March, Tate Galleries cut 7% of its workforce.

When asked whether free entry to Tate Modern’s permanent collection could one day be revoked, Balshaw said ‘I very much hope not’; yet she didn’t rule out the matter. Acknowledging these difficulties, the group’s état major launched an endowment fund with the goal of reaching £150 million by 2030. This has been touted as ‘one of the most ambitious campaigns of its kind’, designed to support exhibition programmes, research and public reach. Charlotte Mullins, art critic and former editor of V&A Magazine, describes this target as ‘ambitious, but achievable’. Then came September.

News that the National Gallery had received not one, but two landmark donations, worth £150 million each, sent shockwaves through Tate’s upper echelons. Donations came from the Julia Rausing Trust and Michael Moritz’s Crank-start foundation and, with an extra £75 million from the National Gallery Trust, will enable the completion of a new building behind the Sainsbury wing by the early 2030s. Billed ‘Project Domani’, the extra space will allow the National Gallery to grow its permanent collection beyond the remit of pre-20th-century art — something its director, Gabriele Finaldi, has been keen to do for years.

Not only does this risk eroding Tate Modern’s hegemony on works post-1900, but it also places the museum front and centre of the cultural consciousness. The lark is ascending. The National Gallery enjoyed a wildly successful 2025, which saw the previous year’s 200th anniversary celebrations reach across to May, when the permanent collection was rehung to great acclaim and the Sainsbury wing finally reopened after years of renovations, granting the museum a new entrance.

Although Tate Modern is, technically, also on the rise (its visitor numbers, albeit down 27% from 2019, have been up year-on-year since 2022), it has struggled to win back its historic audience of young European visitors — who, Balshaw believes, have been negatively affected by Covid and Brexit. Since September 26 last year, the gallery has stayed open until 9pm each Friday and Saturday in the hope of wooing young viewers. This would prove to be one of Balshaw’s final moves for the museum: last month, it was announced that she would leave Tate Modern in April, confirming the upheaval previously hinted at by the gallery’s closest observers.

Could Project Domani throw yet another spanner in the works? This remains to be seen. On the one hand, it seems entirely feasible that modern-art audiences might find an expanded collection at Trafalgar Square to be enough and no longer travel south of the river to see works by Dalí or Mark Rothko as often as they once did. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that the National Gallery would be able to add that many blockbuster paintings to its collection, given the astronomical costs of modern art. Michael Hall, former editor-in-chief of Burlington and Apollo magazines and Country Life’s erstwhile Architectural Editor, explains that ‘the National Gallery only ever buys masterpieces and notable Continental works from the early 20th century are extremely expensive’.

Despite the gallery’s recently inflated endowment, £375 million goes only so far when it comes to acquiring, say, a handful of Magrittes or Picassos. ‘I don’t think Tate will be having sleepless nights just yet,’ agrees Dr Mullins. Moreover, ‘the modern and contemporary wing will never be the dominant reason to visit the National Gallery — not when the Wilton Diptych, Stubbs’s Whistlejacket, Gentileschi’s self-portrait, Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed and all those Impressionists are on the walls’.

One major advantage boasted by the Tate Galleries is volume: their collection is roughly 30 times the size of the National Gallery’s. Works have swapped hands between the two before (on which, more shortly) and it seems likely the National Gallery’s top brass would try to schmooze Tate or even come knocking at the door of its multiple museums in the hope of borrowing back pictures it had previously handed over.

Indeed, both institutions are historically intertwined: Tate exists in part because the National Gallery did not have enough storage space to accommodate the collection of 19th-century sugar merchant Henry Tate, which led to the creation of what was then the National Gallery of British Art, later Tate Gallery, now Tate Britain (Tates Modern, St Ives and Liverpool would come much later). At the time, the National Gallery bequeathed several works from its own collection, including more than 100 by Turner, to the young rival museum in Pimlico. In 1996, an agreement was drafted to cement the dividing line between Tate and National collections. The line was 1900: any European art from before that date would sit in the National Gallery and any after that would go to Tate Modern (which, although not yet open, had already been earmarked for development in the former Bankside Power Station). Tate Britain, meanwhile, would hold onto British art across both time periods.

These various boundaries were never cut and dried, however. They were indications; goalposts; even Tate was able to recognise the National Gallery’s right to acquire 20th-century works by artists typically associated with the 19th (think Cézanne or Renoir). Over time, the latter has nimbly circumvented the agreement’s finer points: in the early 2000s, it hosted an artist-in-residence scheme inviting contemporary artists to show their work alongside the permanent collection and has partnered, over the years, with Richard Long, Paula Rego and David Hockney; in 2025, Ming Wong took the role.

Even when it comes to British art, ‘the National Gallery has never made its approach to collecting terribly clear,’ says Hall, allowing it to dip into waters typically seen as belonging to Tate Britain. Tensions between Tate and the National Gallery came to a head when the latter hosted a landmark Picasso exhibition in 2007. The press, then as now, agrees: it should have gone to Tate Modern. Now, the National Gallery’s promise to grow its modern-art collection has reopened old wounds.

The press, however, has also pointed out that anyone surprised by these developments must have been turning a blind eye. The National Gallery’s ambitions have been ‘hiding in plain sight for years,’ wrote Michael Prodger in Apollo, reminding readers that the museum’s intention is to take viewers through ‘a history of painting’. Speaking on this matter following his appointment in 2015, Finaldi said: ‘As time moves on, 1900 seems increasingly remote and less related to how we think about periods of history and art history... It is slightly frustrating to reach 1900 and then not go on.’

How should the National Gallery go about building its new collection? ‘The relationship between art’s historical past and the present is an important one for most artists and it will be fascinating to see how the new collection at the National Gallery is shaped,’ says Dr Mullins. An approach that illuminates these perspectives would also propose something quite different to ‘Tate’s forward-looking approach,’ she believes: ‘our past informs our future, so why not hunt out artists who explore this fully, such as Mickalene Thomas, Kerry James Marshall and Hew Locke?’

One should remember that, more than being rivals, Tate Modern, Tate Britain and the National Gallery are first and foremost public institutions. ‘All receive funding from the Department for Culture, Media & Sport,’ says Hall, ‘and they communicate closely with one another.’ With at least five years to go before the National Gallery unveils its new wing, Tate Modern still has time to recuperate and restrategise. Sources close to both suggest that, although gritted teeth are to be expected, the National Gallery’s latest evolution is unlikely to devolve into a full-blown row. ‘It depends how silly the trustees wish to get,’ one says.

The architects shortlisted for Project Domani were announced last month. Among them are Farshid Moussavi, Foster & Partners and Kengo Kuma, with the finalist to be announced in April. The new wing will back onto Leicester Square in a spot currently occupied by St Vincent House, a Brutalist edifice due for demolition that the National Gallery acquired 30 years ago and which currently houses a hotel and office complex.

Londoners who have long avoided Leicester Square for anything other than film premieres hope that revitalising this patch of the West End will improve prospects for both the neighbourhood and the gallery within it. As the National Gallery prepares to build big, Tate Modern will seek to make the most of its own existing infrastructure — what one source calls the museum’s ‘gung-ho extension from 10 or so years ago’. The primary culprit here is The Tanks, open since 2016 and billed as providing ‘a permanent gallery for live art, performances and film and video work from the Tate collection’ — a status that, so far, the gallery has under-exploited. ‘They’ve fallen off the radar for most people,’ confirms Hall, but this creates an opportunity.

Dr Mullins, for her part, believes ‘the Tate Galleries need to concentrate on how to present their collection to an audience that filters the world through social media, rather than make the London sites any larger. Traditional displays of Modernist art on white walls are less enticing to Millennials and Gen Z than the immersive installations of artists such as Yayoi Kusama.’ As it stands, Tate Modern’s 2026 programme is one for the ages, with two blockbuster shows on Dame Tracey Emin (February 26–August 31) and Frida Kahlo (from June 25).

The Tate Galleries would do well to capitalise on this — and, from there, raise a lot more money.

A luxurious London pad is an absolute necessity for the likes of dandy Algernon Moncrieff in Oscar Wilde’s iconic play The Importance of Being Ernest. 130 years after its first performance it's enduringly popular; for proof of that, one need look no further than the Noël Coward Theatre. The show has just finished a run there, which starred Stephen Fry and received rave reviews, despite being first performed in 1895. And now, for the real fans of the play among us, the chance to live a truly Wilde life has arrived.

Algernon's bachelor pad was no fictional creation, but instead an apartment at 14 Half Moon Street in Mayfair. At the time the play was written, the house — a Georgian terrace erected in 1730 — was owned by the Gannon family, and divided into what the Victorians called 'bachelor's chambers'. Many of Wilde's circle lived in these lodgings and others on the same street.

In the days since then, the building has seen many more changes, briefly being used as offices after the Second World War. In 2008 the building was changed back into its original form, a 5,000sq ft townhouse, and ten years ago it became what is almost certainly the planet's grandest student digs (of which more later). Now, it's on the market via Beauchamp Estates at £14 million.

It's elegant and genteel now, but in Wilde's day Half Moon Street was a hotpot of Bohemian life in London, centred on the tavern and lodgings Fleming’s at number 10 (now the extremely upmarket Fleming’s Mayfair Hotel). The playwright regularly spent time here partying with his friends and collaborators, away from his wife and children back in Chelsea; his friend, confidant and lover Robbie Ross lived on the road at number 40.

Even before Wilde's time, Half Moon Street — and specifically number 14 — had attracted the great and the good. James Boswell, Dr Johnson's biographer, lived here in the 18th century, while the fascinating Irish courtesan Lola Montez based herself here while in London in the mid 19th century. The First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon lived here, as did poet Hugh Walpole and the famed actor and costumier Reggie de Veulle.

In 2016, the house's history took a new turn as it was bought by a millionaire from the United Arab Emirates, who picked it up for £13.5 million as a place for his daughter to live while studying at the London School of Economics.

If you find it incredible that someone could spend so much on student accommodation, you're not alone. 'It's mad, isn't it?' agent Jeremy Gee told The Times. 'But we’ve seen it before plenty of times.'

And, frankly, if you've got an eight-figure budget for a student home, then why not? After all, the steam room, cinema, cocktail bars (yes, plural) and chic roof garden look absolutely ideal for unwinding after a long hard day of lectures.

So, if you have a child in need of a luxury student pad, the 5,017 square foot apartment is for sale for £14 million, and is in immaculate condition. If you're worried about the practicalities of living in a seven-storey building, you'll be thrilled to hear that it comes with a 'secret lift', with doors disguised as wardrobes on each floor. Gee added to The Times this is a residential feature that is ‘essential for any buyer from the Middle East’. I’m sure the bachelor Algernon Moncrieff, with his penchant for leading a double life, would have also been a fan.

14 Half Moon Street is for sale with Beauchamp Estates — see more details.

To be clear, I’m not mad. I love London in the sun — the early rays of spring, that first rush to the beer garden, those sultry golden evenings. Unbeatable stuff. But I simply cannot countenance being a fair-weather fan of this fine city. It is, for me, a place to cherish come rain or shine. And given there’s plenty of rain (although, statistically, much less than you’d think) it’s high time we learned to embrace the thing so much of the world knows us for.

On the topic of romantic rain in London, who can forget the classic denouement-in-a-deluge to Four Weddings and a Funeral filmed on Highbury Terrace (outside number 22 if you were wondering) which made the phrase ‘Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed’ a classic. Despite Andie MacDowell’s questionable line read, it showed the great London downpour to be something of charm rather than chagrin.

Long before that, in 1970, USA-born jazz singer Blossom Dearie was enamoured enough to write a whole song about the charm of our drizzly city, aptly titled ‘I Like London In The Rain’ in which she trills:

‘I like London in the rain

Wet umbrellas in the rain

The other couples arm in arm

London drizzle has its charm

Winds are blowingLights are glowingFalling rain

I like London in the rain

Streets like mirrors in the rain

Turn the city upside down

Liquid pictures of the town’

In fact, the festive season really reaffirms Dearie’s point. As I write, I can see street lamps reflected along the pavement’s sheen like a Saul Leiter photograph come to twinkling life. Take an evening taxi ride through town at this time of year — after a couple of martinis, preferably — and the raindrop smeared windows make the whole scene look like you’re drifting through some multi-coloured cosmos. People do cling to each other as they stroll down the street. Children splash in puddles. Dog-walkers huddle under trees. It’s all very alluring. In film-making they deliberately hose down the streets on a set to create more textural, reflective backdrops — a ‘wet down’ they call it. Currently we get one almost daily and I am, as they say, here for it. Let me tell you why…

The best cosy pubs and restaurants

We’ll start with the obvious attraction of a rainy day: the excuse to duck in somewhere warm to ‘wait for it to stop’. This is what pubs are for — and we have an embarrassment of riches in that department.

On a drizzly day, I have a particular affinity for the bay window that overhangs the River Thames at the Captain Kidd in Wapping. It’s piratic and ancient and, as raindrops trickle down the glass and the river roils below, it feels like a timeless shelter. More centrally, the newly spruced Shaston Arms in Soho is compact and comforting (especially if you order the beer-battered onion rings with whipped cod’s roe), and nearby the charming Old Coffee House has a roaring fire to warm up beside. In Fitzrovia, the bijou Newman Arms has a suitably heartening upstairs pie room, and the Lore of the Land has the cosy interiors and filling fare of a country inn.

Restaurants too provide respite. Rules’s winter garden will spirit you away to more tropical climes — in decor at least. After a wet walk in Richmond Park a retreat to Petersham Nurseries can’t be bettered. If a weekend jaunt around Mayfair’s shops is interrupted by showers, navigate to Il Gattopardo for a well-priced (for Mayfair) Italian feast. And if you’ve really been soaked through, embrace the current crop of fiery Thai restaurants heating up the London scene: Khao Bird in Soho, Platapian in Soho, Speedboat Bar on Portobello Road, Farang in Highbury, and Som Saa in Spitalfields will ward off any chills.

The best places to hunker down in

It can be easy to take it for granted that most of our best museums and galleries are absolutely free, but not when you get caught in a shower. You’ll be grateful for the likes of Bermondsey’s White Cube: once a swimming pool, now thankfully much drier and just the right size for a sub-one hour browse. Or the Barbican, which assumes peak Brutalist form in the rain. You can admire some less dishevelled figures at the National Portrait Gallery. Mayfair is awash with galleries to dash into. The Horniman Museum is lovably eclectic and has a skyline-surveying outdoor bandstand to admire the city from. Come for the shelter, stay for the cultural enrichment basically.

There are also rain-enforced retail breaks; a little pit-stop to ‘look for presents’ or so you claim. There are some comforting options here: the charming Victoriana of Burlington Arcade, the well-curated wooden maze of Liberty, Assouline’s bookshop-with-a-bar on Piccadilly, the heady scents of Perfumer H on Chiltern Street, and the tactile delights of Tekla’s new Marylebone High Street flagship (where you can pick up an oh-so-soft towel if you’ve really been caught out) to name but a few.

The best spas and saunas

If an unexpected rainstorm has you wishing to warm up and wind down then a spot of pampering could, quite fairly, be in order.

From a South Bank stroll, the sleek subterranean Agua spa at the Sea Containers is an easy escape route. Designed by Tom Dixon to feel like a space-age cocoon, it offers a range of massages, signature facials and a cryo body treatment designed to soothe weary legs. At the Corinthia, there are four whole floors devoted to spa soothing, including a dedicated thermal floor housing a mosaic-tiled steam room and an impressive amphitheatre sauna, two pools and a marble ice fountain for cooling down. The Newman hotel in Fitzrovia opens its doors this year and also sports a rather impressive Nordic-inspired subterranean spa, as well as a penthouse with a skyline-view sauna. For more sauna-ing with a view, the jetty at the front of Battersea Power Station is home to Drip until the end of January; three classic wooden saunas and three ice baths looking over the Thames and the iconic power station itself.

The best outdoor swim spots

Swimming in the rain is one of life’s great pleasures, actually. (See also: a hot tub in the snow). So embrace the weather and take an outdoor dip. You’ll find some gems out in the suburbs: between Bushy Park and the river is Hampton Pool, blissfully heated at this time of year, and in south-east London, Beckenham Place Park offers a wilder experience in its specially created swimming lake. More centrally you have the Art Deco charms of Parliament Hill Lido, and Herne Hill’s Brockwell Lido now has a few sauna pods to warm up in after a drizzly dip.

On a related note, a boat-ride in the rain can be similarly bracing — take a Thames Clipper down to Greenwich and brave the outdoor deck for a more refreshing commute.

The best cinemas

Perhaps not as visceral as a swim, but a spontaneous weather-enforced cinema trip is a pleasure nonetheless. And the idyll is one with sumptuous sofa seating, a decent snack selection, and a bar if possible. Islington’s Screen on the Green, the Electric in Notting Hill, Picturehouse Central on Shaftesbury Avenue, and the Curzon Mayfair tick all those boxes. Plus there’s the BFI, the National Theatre and the rest of the South Bank Centre offering riverside respite from the rain with all manner of year-round cultural programming.

The best late night bars and jazz spots

If late-night London in the rain needed a soundtrack, jazz would be a good starting point. In Soho, Ronnie’s in the rain is a classic — its neon sign luring you from damp streets into that iconic room that’s hosted everyone from Miles Davis to Nina Simone to Sonny Rollins to Prince to, yes, Blossom Dearie. Down at Vauxhall riverside’s brick-built bastion, Brunswick House, a charming candlelit basement bar has sprung to life with live jazz every Tuesday should it get a bit bleak above ground.

If you can swing entry to Camden’s House of Koko, Ellen’s does a fine line in jazz and blues each week. Or swap soundtracks entirely and dry yourself off at a packed hoedown at the Fat Badger, Notting Hill’s most in-demand late-night hideaway with its curiously effective country-and-western house band.

What to wear

Ah, now this is the fun part. Of course, if you’re really caught unawares, rain can be a day-ruiner. But right now it’s to be expected so kit yourself out accordingly.

A sturdy, wood-handled umbrella by heritage makers Swaine is a most useful accessory all winter long. Or, if you prefer to keep your hands free, opt for a tried and tested waterproof-jacket-and-hat combo. Waxed versions of both from Barbour need little introduction. (Mulberry even has a waxed backpack to keep your essentials reassuringly dry).

For women who prefer something less technical and more elegant, Belgravia-based brand The Fold have more elegant water-repellent macs and trenches perfect for this time of year. Staying with the trenchcoat, Burberry’s classic is classic for a reason and is enjoying another reboot under Daniel Lee’s current stewardship. Chanel even have a fun logo-reveal version, the unmistakable interlocked Cs only appearing once the coat gets wet.

As for footwear, Hunter’s chic ankle wellies and Hermes’s iconic jumping boots will never let you down, or for an edgier take, Doc Martens now make rain boots too.

Keep your four-legged companion dry with a waterproof dog jacket from Le Chameau.

Through the looking glass

Desborough mirror, British Museum

Found in Northamptonshire, the Desborough mirror is a high-quality example of the Celtic ‘mirror style’. One side of the circular bronze sheet would have been highly polished; the other is decorated with a complex array of patterns based on segments of circles created with a pair of compasses. The result is an elaborate design that was clearly executed with great care, each line being cut freehand into the metal a little more than 2,000 years ago. The Celts are believed to have been connected tribes who spanned the length of the Atlantic coast, from Portugal and Spain up into Ireland and mainland Britain. The British Museum houses many significant artefacts intricately decorated with anthropomorphic forms and swirling vegetal designs — confirmation that art was firmly embedded in the Celtic way of life.

On a wing and a prayer

Lindisfarne Gospels, British Library

On the remote island of Lindisfarne, off the Northumberland coast, Eadfrith began the long and arduous task of completing his illuminated manuscript in AD715. He was Bishop of Lindisfarne and had set his mind to creating a lavishly illustrated copy of the four gospels. At his death in 721, the Lindisfarne Gospels, as they are now known, were unfinished, but the completed pages are some of the most ornate and complex ever produced. Eadfrith wrote the text in Latin on 259 leaves of vellum. Prefacing each gospel are ‘carpet’ pages, dazzlingly intricate designs centred on Christian crosses. In borders and boxed-out sections, ribbonwork birds appear, their bodies elongated into convoluted knots, their beaked heads biting their own necks to form elegant arabesques. Originally, the Lindisfarne Gospels would have reposed on the altar of Lindisfarne church, but, following attacks by the Vikings at the end of the 8th century, they were safely evacuated and today can be seen in the British Library in London.

Checkmate

The Lewis Chessmen, split between the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland, and the British Museum

The Lewis chess pieces are tiny in stature — no more than 4in tall — but they command your attention. Carved from walrus ivory and sperm-whale tooth, they are richly detailed. Hefty kings and queens sit on their thrones, swords laid across passive laps. By comparison, the warders (rooks) are ready for battle — several bite their shields in anticipation, like ancient berserkers, who notoriously fought naked to intimidate their opponents. There are also clean-shaven bishops with tall croziers and knights in battle armour on stocky horses. By the time these pieces were made in 12th-century Trondheim, Norway, the expansion of Christianity had ensured that the bishop supplanted the earlier war elephant in the game. The chessmen were buried on Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, when the island was part of the Norwegian empire, and only found in the early 19th century.

Skull and bones

The Ambassadors, Hans Holbein the Younger, National Gallery

A perennial favourite at the National Gallery in London is Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1533 double portrait The Ambassadors. Jean de Dinteville and Bishop Georges de Selve were close friends and are shown standing on either side of a table loaded with scientific equipment and religious texts. The picture was painted in London the year in which Henry VIII broke free of the Catholic Church and married Anne Boleyn. The snapped string on the lute suggests harmonious discord and the mathematical treatise is open to the page on division, but the strangest addition is the slick of brown and cream paint across the floor — only when you squat down on the right side does it make sense, morphing into a large skull that hovers in front of the men. Despite appearances, it seems to suggest, these men will soon be dust. Only Christ — visible on a tiny silver crucifix top left behind the curtain — lives forever.

Don’t lose your head

Apotheosis of James I, Rubens, Banqueting House

Standing inside Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House will give you vertigo. The ceiling is 55ft high and is home to nine paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, whose dizzying feats of trompe l’oeil have you ascending to Heaven together with James I. Today, you can book a tour to see them, but, when Rubens’s paintings were first installed in 1636, this room would have been used for the highest diplomatic negotiations. The Banqueting House formed part of Whitehall Palace, the main residence of British kings and queens from 1530 until it was destroyed by fire in 1698. Only this building survived. Rubens was a diplomat, as well as an artist, and this commission was finalised after he arrived in London to broker a peace deal on behalf of the King of Spain. It was requested by Charles I to commemorate the reign of his father. Ironically, it was the last thing that Charles saw as he walked to the executioner’s block after losing the Civil War.

A brush with greatness

Self-portrait with her husband and son, Mary Beale, Museum of the Home

Today, Mary Beale’s self-portrait with her husband and son (1660) is on display at the Museum of the Home in London, but it would have originally hung in the artist’s four-storey townhouse off Fleet Street (and later in her Pall Mall studio and home in fashionable St James’s). In it, we see her husband and son forming a domestic circle through their interlocking hands, with Beale pointing to herself and looking directly at us — if it is a painting you are after, she infers, you should be in no doubt that you should be speaking to the woman of the house. Beale supported her husband, Charles, and sons Bartholomew and Charles Jnr through her studio practice, specialising in portraiture. Charles Snr was her studio manager, keeping the books and preparing canvases, and her sons started out as models, before graduating to becoming her assistants.

An Englishman’s home is his castle

Sir John Soane’s Museum

This Wunderkammer of a museum never ceases to fascinate. From the Egyptian sarcophagus of King Seti I in the Sepulchral Chamber to the concertinaed Picture Room that includes William Hogarth’s ‘A Rake’s Progress’ (about 1734) and Canaletto’s Riva degli Schiavoni (1735), it is packed with sculptures, prints, architectural models, books and curios. Sir John Soane was a neo-Classical architect who accumulated antiquities and works of art at such a rate that he had to buy the house next door (then a stable block behind and finally another neighbouring house) to accommodate it. After falling out with his son, he disinherited him, leaving the museum and its contents to the nation. It opened in 1837.

The greatest gift

Turner Bequest, Tate Britain

Joseph Mallord William Turner raced out of the blocks to join the Royal Academy Schools at 14 and become the youngest ever Academician at 26 (Constable had to wait until his fifties to be so rewarded). He roamed the British Isles and beyond, filling 300 sketchbooks with views that he shaped and honed into paintings in his London studio. Harnessing the Sublime and the Picturesque, he was deft in oil and watercolour, as well as at translating his landscapes into prints. The Turner Bequest remains the largest single donation of works by an artist to the nation. It was originally given to the National Gallery, where his Dido building Carthage (1815) and Sun Rising through Vapour (before 1807) remain on display with paintings by Claude (as stipulated in Turner’s will). However, the rest of the 300 paintings and 30,000 sketches and watercolours are now housed in the Clore Gallery at Tate Britain.

The greatest horror

Human Laundry, Belsen: April 1945, Doris Zinkeisen, Imperial War Museum

Doris Zinkeisen had been a portrait painter and theatre designer in 1920s London, but with the onset of the Second World War she became an Official War Artist, one of only 52 women to be appointed, against 350 men. When the British liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, she was the first artist to witness its horrors. Some 60,000 prisoners a hair’s breadth from death were crammed in, next to thousands of corpses. ‘The shock of Belsen was never to be forgotten,’ she wrote home. Paintings such as Human Laundry, Belsen: April 1945 are moving portrayals of the skeletal bodies she encountered and the work of the Red Cross in trying to save the lives of those who had escaped death.

In the same boat

Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, Yinka Shonibare, Royal Museums Greenwich

Outside the National Maritime Museum in London is a three-masted ship with brightly coloured sails made from African batik fabric. It is a scaled-down copy of Nelson’s flagship HMS Victory, encased in a huge bottle. Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010) was made by Yinka Shonibare, who uses batik fabric in his work to signify the complex identities of British Nigerians such as himself. Batik fabrics were first made in Indonesia, before the technique was imported to Europe and colonial Africa in the 19th century. As Nigeria regained its independence from British rule in 1960, her people embraced the textile art form as symbolic of African nationhood, adding another layer to its identity. Since the 1990s, Shonibare has used batik to clothe headless mannequins, as the sails of colonial vessels and for the covers of Imperial (and immigrant) texts, asking us to consider the complexity of being British in a post-colonial world.

Follow the links for our other instalments of this series which look at the East of England and Ireland.

This feature originally appeared in the December 31, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Much has been written recently about ‘the new Chelsea’, real-estate speak for an area whose fortunes are turning after falling out of favour with the young and beautiful. Some have put the area’s newfound chutzpah down to Martino’s, a recently opened restaurant from the team behind The Dover that has induced a westbound migration among London’s see-and-be-seen foodies. Others have explained it via the pendulum effect: now that Hackney house prices are about the same as Earl’s Court’s, young people have decided that, actually, the Royal Borough ain’t so bad after all.

The true reason, however, comes down to downsizing. Long-time residents of the area have decided they don’t wish to pay mansion tax and are better off converting their houses into flats to sell to plucky youngsters for less than £2 million. This is, ironically, a good thing: it means that supply in central London can finally catch up with demand and that young people are flocking back to areas they’d previously deserted in order to rent before they buy — a test drive, of sorts.

According to the Financial Times, however, we really ought to be looking at ‘the new Notting Hill’: four little words that might well trigger an eye roll, not least because it's not so long ago that Bruton in Somerset had that exact same title conferred upon it. Unlike Bruton, however, the 'new Notting Hill' turns out to be the same old Notting Hill, but experiencing a resurgence in popularity.

As with Chelsea, the tide is once more turning in favour of a younger crowd. On Golborne and Portobello Roads and the perennially fashionable Westbourne Grove is a spree of new shops (sorry, ‘boutiques’) for the clever and the curious — or, at least, those who look the part. Just down the road on Arundel Gardens — one of Notting Hill’s most picture-perfect streets — a pair of apartments are for sale at the moment.

Two bits of good news: firstly, all are way below the mansion tax threshold, and secondly, the pastel-hued buildings beloved by tourists are on the opposite pavement. You can rest easy knowing that the Instagrammers’ heads, and camera lenses, will all be turned in the other direction.

The example on the market via Strutt & Parker at £1.05 million is a ground-floor apartment (wretched words! but read on) that benefits from its own private entrance.

This is a flat which enjoys remarkable ceiling height, a generous entertaining space, a kitchen and a master bedroom, with built-in wardrobes and a bathroom with both bath and shower. The private, south-facing garden backs onto a larger, communal garden where a certain American film star and English bookseller might once have had a dalliance.

What really makes this apartment stand out, however, are the finishes. This is a soulful and thoughtfully designed flat that’s perfect for a second or third-time buyer moving up in the world. Or, indeed, for anyone downsizing.

For those who need a little more space, an extra £50,000 will see you move up to the other flat on the market at the moment, being sold by Knight Frank and Marsh Parsons. It’s not quite so exotic inside, but has around 20% more floor space and an extra bedroom.

And either way, you’ll have one of the most sought-after addresses in west London, and easy access to the rest of the capital via the stations at Ladbroke Grove (which offers quick access to Paddington and King’s Cross via the Circle Line) and Notting Hill Gate (10 minutes to Bond Street on the Central Line).

The one-bedroom flat on Arundel Gardens is for sale at £1.05 million via Strutt & Parker. The two-bedroom flat is being sold by Knight Frank and Marsh Parsons at £1.1 million.

A version of this feature appears in the January 7, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Think of the riverbanks of London and you immediately bring to mind the embankments, the gleaming monuments of stone that came as part of the transformational sewage system installed by the Victorian engineers.

Head just a few miles out from the centre of town, and everything changes — and by the time you get to Kew, Chiswick and Richmond, things look very different. Trees and parks feed right down to the water, and stretches of sand appear when the tide begins to go out. It's not quite a rural idyll, with bridges carrying railway lines and dual carriageways criss-crossing the water, but it feels a world away from what lies further east.

Right at the heart of this lies a spot called Strand-on-the-Green. Once a medieval fishing village, it's now a historic conservation area right on the river, sandwiched between Chiswick and Gunnersbury Park, and looking across the water to Kew. A few of the homes here are literally on waterfront, and one of them happens to have come up for sale. It's probably the nearest thing you'll find to a beach house in London; the asking price, via Knight Frank, is £2.5 million.

This four-bedroom home is originally Georgian, but has been extended and updated over the years to get it to its current layout over three floors. On the lower ground floor you'll find two bedrooms plus a huge playroom — over 32ft long — which currently houses a pool table and a fine collection of Lego models.

Above on the ground floor you'll find the front sitting room with that beautiful view of the river, another reception room, and a huge kitchen-diner that stretches deep into the back of the house, leading via french windows into the garden.

On the first floor are two more bedrooms and a good-sized family bathroom, as well as access to the storage in the eaves. While £2.5 million is a lot in the national context, in this postcode you're getting a lot for your money. And on top of that, given that the house came up for auction in December but didn't sell, there's probably scope for discussion over the price.

All this brings us to the caveats. This has been a much-loved home for the current owners, who've been here more than two decades, but as the pictures show there is now work to be done. And no matter how much decorating you'll do, you'll have to be happy living in house that overlooks, and is overlooked by, Kew Railway Bridge.

The final issue is proximity to the river, which is both the house's biggest selling point and biggest question mark: you (and your surveyor) will have to satisfy yourself that when high tides or flooding come to this part of London, the house will stay sound and dry. Don't be too worried — the buildings here seem to shrug off all sorts of conditions — but expert advice is, as always, recommended.

For those who are happy with all that, it's a lovely-looking house in a great position, in a neighbourhood with a wonderful, vibrant community life — plus you'll get to sit on your sofa and spot the seals playing in the Thames.

For sale via Knight Frank with a guide price of £2.5 million — see more details.

Secret Smokehouse began like many fine artisan endeavours: in a garden shed. A decade on from these humble beginnings, its founder Max Bergius has fully revived the art of cold and hot smoking salmon (and trout, haddock, mackerel, mussels and kippers). The convivial Scotsman grew up near Oban, Argyll and Bute: a region famed for its abundance of wonderful seafood (‘langoustine, lobsters, brown crabs, mackerel… all beautifully sweet’). Traipsing up and down the coast, he would see ‘all these little smokehouses, run by old fishermen, one-man bands. They were clamped onto the sides of the houses. There was nothing pretty about it; just fish hanging, wrapped in newspapers’.

At the age of 19, he moved to London, working in marketing and PR for 15 years before a moment of self-realisation saw a return to his father’s home in Loch Awe. Taking some old pallets, he built a makeshift smoker and approached the local fish farm for donations of trout to his DIY cause. ‘The deal they gave me was: “Whatever you smoke, give us half back, and we’ll give it to the lads,”’ says Max. The lads, he confirms, were delighted.

Having returned south once again and bought a house in Stepney, a part of the East End with a rich lineage of smokehouses, Max enrolled in a fishmongering course at Billingsgate Market (‘my filleting was hideously bad’) and began smoking fish in his shed. Then, after successfully hawking his wares to the regulars at his local boozer — ‘like something from the Wild West; you’d go in and all the music would stop’ — the penny finally dropped that he might have a full-time business on his hands.

Six months later, the shed was swapped for a railway arch on Mentmore Terrace in London Fields, E8 — just down the street from Secret Smokehouse’s current, larger unit — as orders ramped up and extra room was needed. Despite starting out with trout, the public’s predilection for salmon won out. ‘Everybody knows salmon,’ Max says with a cheerful shrug. That includes the raft of top-tier chefs and restaurants he now supplies: Wiltons, Claude Bosi, The Fat Duck, Quo Vadis, Nathan Outlaw and The Ritz among them, many gained through word of mouth, as well as employing the genial approach of dropping off sides of salmon to kitchens unannounced and saying: ‘Let me know!’

Brilliant smoked fish, he explains, starts with sourcing. Secret Smokehouse buys high-welfare farmed Scottish salmon (occasionally from technically advanced and super-sustainable land-based fish farms), which is whizzed to London by truck — as opposed to the industrially sea-farmed salmon, air-freighted from Norway or Chile, ubiquitous to cheaper products.

When it arrives at Mentmore Terrace, it is hand-filletted and covered with a dry salt cure, which is left to work its magic for a top-secret amount of time. The fillets are then rinsed and moved to a set of steel units, where they’re smoked with smouldering oak sawdust for another mystery period. (‘All secrets! But it’s a gentle process.’). A slower, cooler smoke avoids the chewy outer layer, or pellicle, you sometimes get with cheaper fish that’s been violently smogged for a swift turnaround. The fillets are then refrigerated, pin-boned by hand and trimmed, before being portioned for shop and online sales or prepared to a client’s requirements. They’re marvellous: firmly textured, subtly fragrant and with an ocean-deep flavour.

The difference between good and bad smoked salmon comes down to the old chestnuts of scale and market economics. Supermarkets favour mechanised production and minimal ingredient costs, whereas artisans such as Max are dogmatic about provenance, hand-processing and producing only limited quantities (about 30 tons of fish a year, he estimates; a supermarket might be more like 250,000).

The artisanal remit extends past mere eating, too. Not only does Secret Smokehouse’s signature product, its ‘London Cure’ salmon, have Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) status — meaning it has been made to traditional metrics within the boroughs of Newham, Hackney or Tower Hamlets — it’s also the world’s only B-Corp certified smokehouse, meeting strict sustainability criteria. The team, too, is tiny; only 12 people do everything.

Despite the skyrocketing demand for his product over the past decade, Max has no desire to expand the business. ‘We’re sticking to our ethos, which is to do one thing well.’

London comes alive at Christmas — some would say too alive. The West End, a chaotic place at the best of times, turns into something resembling Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, the misleadingly titled triptych at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain, that warns against excessive pleasure and offers in its third panel a vision of Hell. For something closer to home, simply head to Soho, where thousands run amok in search of Christmas bargains (spoiler: there aren’t any).

A few might go see a pantomime instead, hoping to escape the chaos for a grand total of three hours before re-entering the fray in a more tolerable state of inebriation. Others flock to Bond Street in the hope of nabbing a couple of last-minute candles as gifts. (They won’t.) Unsuspecting visitors are told the Christmas lights on the King’s Road are better than those in the West End and are, to varying degrees, horrified when they find everyone — yes, everyone — has been told exactly the same thing.

I am not saying any of us should be blamed for the London Christmas hell-scape. We have all, at some point, been part of it, unwilling contributors swept up in the seasonal frenzy. One of the more quixotic assignments in my previous job involved buying Sir Ian McKellen a coat from Casablanca (the brand, not the Moroccan city) and delivering it to his dressing room when he was on stage at the Duke of York’s Theatre, playing Mother Goose, on a Thursday evening in mid December. I am the guiltiest party of all.

Too few people know how to do Christmas right, whether they’re travelling into London for the holidays or living here all year round. One should be able to get the shopping done far from the madding crowd or grab a drink at the pub without having to fight your way in (or worse, having to queue). At times, the crowds are simply unavoidable, but with gems hidden all over the city, a handful of Londoners know exactly where to go to embrace fully the Christmas spirit and avoid the sort of situation that inevitably conjures the Ghost of Christmas Past. Our insider’s guide should helpfully cover the basics, with a few extra tips thrown in for good measure.

Will Hosie's top tips

1. Skip the crowds at Regent Street and get your gifts from Shepherd Market. These backstreets of Mayfair are a treasure trove of rare bookshops (Heywood Hill, Maggs Bros), cigar shops (Birley, Fumar) and watch dealers (Vertex, Watches of Mayfair). The real gem, however, is Simon Carter, a menswear designer from whom I once bought a pair of wine-bottle-shaped cuff-links for my father. They currently sell these in the shape of acorns, seahorses and even British passports. The perfect gift.
2. Avoid the lines at the National Gallery by going on a Friday evening. The museum exceptionally stays open until 9pm, a fact surprisingly few people seem to have caught onto despite the headline-making rehang, which really has changed the game.
3. Head to The Royal Hospital Chelsea for the city’s best Christmas carols. Home to the Chelsea Pensioners, the Christopher Wren-designed building hosts what insiders believe to be the best carol concerts of the festive season, on December 10 and 18. Book now to avoid disappointment.
4. Buy your tree from Pines And Needles. The company operates no fewer than 41 locations across the city and further afield on a temporary basis, each year, from St John’s Church in Notting Hill to the foot of Highgate Wood. The trees are consistently healthy and fragrant.
5. Grabbing a bite before seeing a play? Theatreland is full to the brim with excellent pre-theatre menus, but with most shows these days beginning as early as 7pm, you’re better off going for dinner after the performance. If you can handle your spice, Speedboat Bar is just the ticket.

6. The best day to go to the theatre is Tuesday and the best value-for-money seats are always at the back of the stalls.
7. Impress visiting family members by taking them to The Connaught Bar, one of the few Mayfair addresses that strikes the right balance between elegance and ceremony. Order the martini or, during the game season, the aptly named Game Changer cocktail, which blends sloe gin, homemade bergamot and tonka-bean syrup, topped with one of the bar’s signature aromatic sprays.
8. When it comes to treating yourself, there’s nowhere quite like The Ritz Restaurant. The executive chef, John Williams, is the son of a fisherman and one of the only restaurateurs who has successfully married British ingredients with the techniques of haute cuisine. His menu would not look out of place in some of the top fine-dining establishments in Paris, France, yet it’s also somewhere that serves its own sourdough, made in-house with Guinness, straight from the oven. Even the crème de la crème of British luxury knows it needs those extra comforts thrown in.
9. The best mince pies are found at Aldi. Enough said.
10. London has had a spate of luxury openings since the end of the pandemic: visitors are more spoilt for choice now than they ever were. The best new hotel is The Emory; the sexiest is At Sloane.
11. Besides the festivities, Christmas is also a time to unwind. Lily Collins is a fan of Martine De Richeville, whose spas offer the best massage in the city from locations in Marylebone and Kensington.
12. The prettiest frosts are found in Richmond Park. Go early in the morning when most people are still asleep.
13. Watching a Christmas classic on the silver screen is now possible, thanks to Close-Up cinema. This 40-seat arthouse cinema in Shoreditch allows you to connect your laptop to the projector and view anything from old classics to Netflix originals. I discovered its existence earlier this year when a friend arranged a special viewing there for the season finale of The White Lotus. A find.
14. Cycling, even in winter, is the easiest mode of transport to get around. Simply make sure you wrap up warm and wear a helmet.
15. Whatever you do, don’t leave your Christmas shopping to the last minute.

Will Hosie's favourite pubs

• The Camberwell Arms: Even beyond the roast lunches, this might be London’s favourite pub: cosy, yet buzzing, with a great wine list to boot. Chef patron Mike Davies breathed new, gastronomical life into this 19th-century building when he took over the kitchen in 2014 and it has been the pride of Camberwell ever since
• The Harwood Arms: Described by The Guardian in 2009 as the ‘handsome and precocious’ lovechild of Notting Hill’s The Ledbury and Berkshire’s The Pot Kiln, London’s only Michelin-starred gastropub is almost impossible to beat, 16 years on. Book for 2pm and settle in for the afternoon
• Marksman: Shoreditch’s answer to The Harwood Arms, Marksman draws a more hip and stereotypically east London demographic: expect L. F. Markey workmen’s jackets and Blundstone boots and waiters named Hugo and Ben. An anthropological study that might not taste as sweet were the food any less delicious than it is
• The Duke of Hamilton: You’ve heard of The Spaniards Inn and The Holly Bush, but both are rammed this time of year. The lamb shoulder at the Duke of Hamilton is reason enough to crown it Hampstead’s best pub. Ideal after a walk on the Heath

This feature originally appeared in the December 3, 2025 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.