Toast the City: Who will win Best Bar? October 22, 2025 The Toast the City Awards are here to celebrate the very best in hospitality of placemaking in the Square Mile. On the eve of the big night, we are highlighting each of the 138 finalists who have beaten off competition from more than 2,000 entrants. This is a category close to our heart: Best Bar, [...]
Toast the City finalists: Who will win Best Restaurant? October 22, 2025 The Toast the City Awards are here to celebrate the very best in hospitality of placemaking in the Square Mile. On the eve of the big night, we are highlighting each of the 138 finalists who have beaten off competition from more than 2,000 entrants. Next up is the Best Restaurant category, a hotly contested [...]
UK investment: Optimism from Expo Real 2025 October 22, 2025 I recently returned from Expo Real in Munich, where I joined colleagues from the City of London Corporation and a UK cities delegation committed to one clear goal: To drive global investment into the UK and deliver the growth this country needs. But the competition is fierce. Cities like New York and Singapore are not [...]
Good luck to my fellow Toast the City award nominees! October 21, 2025 It is the day of City AM’s Toast the City Awards, celebrating the hospitality and placemaking that makes the Square Mile great. I could not be more proud to be attending, as both a judge and a nominee. I would like to reach out ahead of the event to wish all the best to everyone [...]
Aston Martin DBX S review: Our favourite luxury SUV October 21, 2025 When Aston Martin introduced the DBX707 in 2022, it expected this faster, more expensive model to account for 50 percent of DBX sales. Instead, fully 90 percent of customers plumped for the 707hp newcomer, and the original 550hp DBX was discontinued soon afterwards. The message was clear: Aston Martin buyers wanted more performance and they [...]
Rolls-Royce Corniche Shooting Brake review: Estate of the art October 21, 2025 Niels van Roij looks every inch the English gentleman. The Dutch-born designer is wearing an immaculately cut tweed suit with leather-lined pockets, topped off with a green woolen tie. Only later do I realise that identical fabrics were used to trim the Rolls-Royce waiting outside. “I have a suit created to celebrate each car, using [...]
Liverpool Street Chop House: Should you go over Hawksmoor, Boisdale? October 20, 2025 The closure of Threadneedle Street’s M Restaurant earlier this year, after a decade slinging the capital’s finest steak, was a genuine blow. One of the restaurants that helped the Square Mile shake off its stuffy reputation, it combined a meticulous, scholarly appreciation of meat with a sense of fun, even whimsy. Robot waiters, wine vending [...]
Apple Watch Series 11 review: More of the same, but better! October 20, 2025 Were you to sit the Apple Watch Series 11 on a table beside the Series 10 and the Series 9 and probably the Series 8, you would be hard-pressed to spot the difference. You can imagine a row of watches overlaid on the famous meme from the American version of The Office: “Corporate needs you [...]
Exploring the cannabis farms of wild, untamed Canada October 20, 2025 In Boundary Country in British Columbia, Canada, mountain ranges give way to impossibly wide valleys. Inhabitants range from descendants of Doukhobor settlers, a radical and pacifist Russian sect, to those from the varying First Nations groups. Fortunes were made down forgotten mines that never managed to truly alter the feeling of this wilderness. Many of [...]
Fabulous! Pop these bottles this World Champagne Day October 20, 2025 A day worth celebrating, 24th October is World Champagne Day, as if anyone needs an excuse to pop a bottle! Hundreds of years ago the wine in Champagne was still and pinky-red – a world away from what we associate with the region now. Bubbles were considered a fault, exploding the weaker bottles made for [...]