The rise and rise of the super gym: how to work out in style November 12, 2012 I remember a time when “posh gym membership” meant you were given a towel on arrival. Nothing so modest nowadays. We’ve moved on to scuba diving in your lunch hour, technology that allows you to measure and track every heartbeat and swim stroke, both in and out of the club, and chilled eucalyptus towels on [...]
Chrysan: lost in translation? November 12, 2012 RESTAURANT CHRYSAN 1 Snowden Street, EC2A 2DQ Tel: 020 3657 4777 FOOD **** SERVICE **** ATMOSPHERE ** Cost for two people with drinks: £160 A FRIEND of mine has recently taken up learning Japanese. So, last month, I found myself spending a surreal afternoon watching a Japanese detective drama series, Deka Kurokawa Suzuki, which really [...]
Why making a business out of wine is no mean feat November 12, 2012 THERE CAN be something very impersonal about buying a bottle of wine. You pull something off a shelf with a nice label and some fancy writing and take pot luck. Even if it’s delicious, you don’t really know a great deal about it. There may be a few uninformative notes on the back, perhaps a [...]
Some like it hot November 12, 2012 Hot punches are not in vogue. However, while it might not look as impressive as coolly flipping your cocktail down to freezing, a warm cocktail can better suit our intemperate climate. Even more tainted than the suggestion of a hot cocktail is the practice of making a punch. Punches are all too often the desperate [...]
Tom Aikens: The comeback kid November 11, 2012 TOM AIKENS is tired, and it shows. It’s 9am on a Friday morning and he’s already clocked up 72 hours during the week, working in his hugely successful eponymous Michelin-starred restaurant in Chelsea. For a chef, those kinds of hours are standard but Aikens has had to work particularly hard this last few years after [...]
India 10 years on: The rise of a tourism superpower November 11, 2012 INDIA DRAMATICALLY straddles the ancient and modern worlds: as well as having a space programme, it is home to layers of ancient civilisations, leaving an intricate cultural legacy. But an under-developed service sector used to make it difficult to enjoy India as a holidaymaker. I wanted to find out if the tourist industry was keeping [...]
London & Stamford makes offer for Metric November 9, 2012 Property investment company London & Stamford today made a £209m takeover offer for developer Metric Property Investments, three days after announcing they were in advanced discussions to merge their businesses. London & Stamford is offering 0.94 of its shares for every Metric share. Under the terms of the merger, Metric would own 25 per cent [...]
Housing lifted by government scheme boost November 8, 2012 MORTGAGE lending climbed rapidly through the third quarter and into October, two sets of data showed yesterday, as the Funding for Lending scheme finally appeared to be having an impact on lending. This came in tandem with a reversal in the downward house price trend of the past few months, revealed by another set of [...]
London house price growth set to outstrip rest of UK for years November 8, 2012 London house price growth will be well ahead of the UK average for at least the next five years, estate agent Savills predicted yesterday. Central London housing will get 25.6 per cent more expensive over the five years to the end of 2017, the estate agent said, compared to 10.2 per cent growth in the [...]
Alan Bennett’s People is a riotous but touching sideways look at England November 8, 2012 THEATRE PEOPLE The Lyttleton at the National Theatre **** Alan Bennett’s new play, People, slips effortlessly into the canon of his work, with its saucy “Blackpool postcard” humour and undercurrent of resentment and despair. It takes place in a wonderfully rendered, decaying stately home – all mouldy dust-jackets and shards of sunlight creeping through moth-eaten [...]