Cradle baby alligators and zoom along the Everglades in a weird boat – it’s Florida baby! September 23, 2016 F lorida has a fearsome reputation for hurricanes, alligators and hanging chads, but in this vast sea of crazy, there is an island of tranquility. Its name is Fort Lauderdale. Long established as a place to go for fun in the sun, with a long sandy beach, the wild beauty of the Everglades, and easy [...]
Focus On Regent’s Park: Celebrity-packed Nash terraces and luscious parklands make NW1 “super-prime” London September 23, 2016 If you want to go celebrity spotting in London, you could do a lot worse than Regent’s Park. High profile residents of this historic area surrounding the royal park of the same name include Damien Hirst, Christian Candy, Gwen Stefani, Jamie Oliver and Kate Moss, not to mention all the Middle Eastern royalty and Russian [...]
Interiors: We pick our top five exhibitors at Decorex 2016, London’s 39-year-old interior design festival September 23, 2016 London Basin Company When interior designer Anna Callis couldn’t find painterly handfinished porcelain basins for her commissions, she and her daughter Nathalie decided to have them made. The results she now sells online are eyecatching, exotic, high-quality porcelain washbasins, for around £600. Made in the home of porcelain, China, in 8-10 weeks, each of the 10 [...]
Holiday Homes: We fly out to Tenerife and find a volcanic paradise that’s a far cry from high rise tower blocks September 23, 2016 Tenerife was once synonymous with cheap package holidays and unsightly high rise tower blocks. Lately, however, the volcanic paradise isn’t just a place where baby boomers go to burn – it’s also where they go to buy. According to Spanish Property Insight, the Spanish property market has grown 23 per cent since 2015 – the [...]
Garden Bridge designer unveils a ‘stairway to nowhere’ – for New York September 23, 2016 The designer behind London’s Garden Bridge project over the River Thames, which continues to stir much controversy here, has unveiled another ambitious project. Thomas Heatherwick’s latest design, titled ‘Vessel’, was unveiled in New York last week. It depicts an enormous honeycomb-like structure with a free-standing collection of multi-level staircases. But the scheme is set to [...]
The Girl With All the Gifts review: this spiritual successor to 28 Days Later has plenty of bite September 22, 2016 This spiritual successor to 28 Days Later is an excellent example of pared-back British horror film-making. It follows Melanie, a bright young girl who just happens to be a zombie. She lives on a military base with other zombie kids who are dressed in Abu Graib-style jumpsuits and strapped into wheelchairs. They’re part of an [...]
Dinner at The Twits at The Vaults is impressively immersive, but the food is as bad as it looks September 22, 2016 Dinner at The Twits invites you into the dining room of Roald Dahl’s most hideous creations, with the chef’s special being lashings of nostalgia. The Vaults at Waterloo has a revolving door of left-field productions, but this is the best use of the space I’ve seen, with real attention to detail in the creation of [...]
No Man’s Land at Wyndham’s Theatre, starring Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen is one of the plays of the year September 22, 2016 Once every few years a production comes together that just feels right – the actors perfectly suited, the timing impeccable. No Man’s Land, starring Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, is one of those plays. Pinter’s 1974 work about two old soaks, one a rich man of letters, the other a flat-broke poet, could have been [...]
Abstract Expressionism at Royal Academy: These rarely travelled loans and invigorating, bombastic artworks resonate strongly with today’s fractured world September 22, 2016 This superlative show is huge in every sense: big themes, giant icons of mid century art, enormous canvases, and no small amount of ambition on the Royal Academy’s part, tackling an often shied from movement – or ‘ism’ – which was last explored in such a survey in the UK back in 1959. Even for [...]
Little Men review: A powerful and deeply moving story of young friendship in hard times September 22, 2016 When a family inherits a building in a rapidly gentrifying area of Brooklyn, the resulting feud between its long-standing tenant and its new owners forms the agonisingly corrosive backdrop against which two young teenagers attempt to maintain their new friendship. Comparisons to Romeo and Juliet would suggest a degree of melodrama and forced sentimentality that [...]