5 ways to get your nature fix in London

As I type this, Soho is sunny. Not just a-few-weak winter-rays sunny, but a glorious, blazing, Vitamin D fest that has us sweating …

London’s Top 10 Cultural Cafés

People watching is one of the greatest pleasures a big city affords. It’s especially good when practiced from a warm corner with a flat white …

Reading London

I grew up in the Oxfordshire countryside and spent my formative years running half-naked in fields, riding resentful ponies and reading on a scratchy blanket …

Jazz, meet word

If you asked any London culture vulture to identify the hottest trends in the capital this spring, jazz and spoken word are both likely to …

Silk and the city

It’s whispering down the catwalk at Somerset House for London Fashion Week. It’s caressed by every tourist nipping into Liberty’s for an iconic paisley scarf. …

In Residence: Beowulf

This season, the British Library is all about the manuscripts. The gorgeous artworks in ‘Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination’ – its big winter exhibition …

Future Folk

It was an unlikely pairing. You wouldn’t expect the sort of edgy, urban international hipsters that attend SXSW – the music, film, and technology festival …

In Residence: Madonna del Prato

Perhaps the recession makes us eager to feel we’re getting more for our money. Perhaps James Cameron, Peter Jackson and the other masters of the …

Speakeasy season

The envelope was black, the address handwritten in silver calligraphy. Inside nestled a small, shining graphite key on a thin black cord. This was, the …

Are you ready to be a member?

When it comes to London arts and culture, membership is a rather fraught concept. On one hand it seems inimical to the spirit of the …

Two by two

Now here’s an idea. A socio-techno-enviro-biblical idea, which are often pretty good ones.

A rather excellent man I know vaguely from various social media shenanigans, …

Oo oo aa aa

‘No me, no my, no self, no soul. No me, no my. No me, no my.’

The venerable Ajahn Poh, seventy-eight year old abbot of …

Home

On the verge of heading back off to disconnected bliss in the Aegean for a couple of weeks, I’ve abruptly realised that London is …

The perfect asparagus

First, let’s get the wee thing out of the way.

You have to learn to love it, that grassy, glucosey, honey-sulphur …

Ghost village

It took me a while to parse the poetry of the urban landscape. As a devoted scholar of the free verse of a frost-tipped field, …