Opinion: Is Bournville Village the key the solving the housing crisis? February 4, 2017 There’s nothing new about employers building houses for their employees. George Cadbury wanted to build a place full of green spaces, where industrial workers could thrive, away from city pollution. By 1895, 143 cottages had been built and Bournville Village was born. Another business industrialist with similar philanthropic ideals was the ‘soap king’ Lord Lever [...]
Picture perfect: A photography tour of the Caribbean island of St Lucia February 3, 2017 So if my aperture is f/3.5 and my shutter speed is 1/125th of a second, what should my ISO be if I want to properly expose this image?” “Four…hun…dred?” I ventured timidly. “Nooooo,” Kirk said, as we took a pew in a cathedral in Castries. To the casual passerby, he must have sounded like he [...]
Interiors: Pick up the perfect craft piece at Collect at the Saatchi Gallery this weekend February 3, 2017 Do you need a stunning centrepiece for the coffee table? Or a trio of pots for the console, or a stunning piece of art glass for a spot-lit plinth? This weekend the Collect fair at the Saatchi Gallery, the “Frieze” of the craft world, brings 37 galleries together from across the globe in a selling [...]
New Builds: New homes on sale this weekend in London in East Finchley, Stratford, Greenwich, Hampstead and Notting Hill February 3, 2017 Ethan Drive, East Finchley £1.25m to £1.75m Sporty families will like these new four and five bedroom detached houses opposite the Chandos Lawn Tennis Club. Finchley Cricket Club and Pure Gym, where buyers will get a year’s family membership. Set in a private gated road, they come with modern luxuries like Hacker kitchens, underfloor heating [...]
The Long Weekend: The alpine retreat of Le Grand Bellevue is an ice-cool luxury break February 3, 2017 Gstaad is everything you could wish for in a traditional alpine town: chocolate-box wooden chalets, pine trees, mountain air, glaciers among the peaks and the clanging of cow bells as the dairy herds come in for milking. A handful of grandes dames hotels, called the palace hotels, continue to attract the jet-set for winter sports, [...]
Plan ahead for Valentines day and book yourself a table: The restaurants that serve London’s poshest dishes February 3, 2017 Sometimes, pie and mash just won't do. Here are some of London's poshest dishes. Fancy. Beef Wellington at The Ritz Restaurant The beef Wellington at The Ritz must be ordered to share between two people but oh, what a magnificent dish, and one of the greatest British dishes. Its perfect latticed pastry is a dark, [...]
JLR has lovingly updated its original Range Rover Classic – and it can be yours, for £135,000 February 3, 2017 If you're a British car buff, here's one to get your engine revving: as part of its "Reborn" series, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has lovingly recreated the original Range Rover Classic – and it's absolutely gorgeous. The restored car, in Bahama Gold, features a V8 petrol engine and 132 brake horsepower. Want one of your own? [...]
Fantastic Mr Fox at Hammersmith Lyric review: stage musical is good, dirty fun February 2, 2017 Roald Dahl’s fabulously lurid stories translate well to musical theatre, and since the runaway success of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Tim Minchin’s Matilda, we can no doubt look forward to a production line of singing Witches and Twits and Dirty Beasts. The latest to get the treatment is Fantastic Mr Fox, in a [...]
I didn’t cry when my own father died but I will mourn the end of the Resident Evil franchise of terrible films February 2, 2017 There’s a point early on in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter – around the time when Milla Jovovich is riding along a motorway in her zombie-proof battle tank – where the film reaches critical levels of schlock, a sort of self-aware tipping point after which the rest of this mad ordeal makes a strange kind [...]
The way you drink your coffee says a lot about your age February 2, 2017 Believe it or not – the way you like your coffee depends on your age, and the more millennial you are, the more adventurous you are with your coffee choices, according to a new study. Espresso machine maker Eversys found older generations of coffee drinkers prefer to keep things basic and stick to traditional brews, [...]