By: Steve Dinneen

Life&Style Editor I'm the editor of City A.M. The Magazine, and editor of the daily newspaper's Life&Style section. We cover food, wine, going out, culture, technology and travel. I'm also the head judge of our Toast the City awards that celebrates hospitality in the Square Mile. Find me on X @steve_dinneen

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Simon Stålenhag’s haunting painted stories in Things From the Flood are science fiction at its most beautiful

October 3, 2016

Dystopian science fiction is often filled with explosions and sirens, chaos and pain. But the Swedish illustrator Simon Stålenhag’s work captures a different face of the future. His work is characterised by stillness and melancholy, a sense of good things having passed. His astonishingly good Tales From the Loop, published last year, imagined an alternate [...]
The Machine at Barbican is a darkly funny immersive theatre experience with added circus tricks

October 3, 2016

Immersive theatre often promises more than it can deliver, held back not by the imagination of the production but the temperament of the audience. The most effective ones – Secret Cinema, Punch Drunk Theatre – tend to be hours long, giving the audience time to let their guard down. The Machine instead attempts to turn [...]
Bedwyr Williams’ The Gulch at The Barbican is brilliantly weird

September 29, 2016

You’re greeted at the entrance of the Barbican’s Curve gallery with a polite warning: “If you want to perform – sing, dance, that kind of thing – please be respectful of other visitors”. I wasn’t tempted to burst into song, but it’s a suitably surreal way to enter this brilliantly weird exhibition. This site-specific installation [...]
Floyd Collins at Wilton’s Music Hall review: clever staging and a strong cast can’t mask this poor musical

September 29, 2016

Floyd Collins is a musical about a man stuck in a hole, and there were moments during this production that I felt like I was down there with him, waiting interminably in the darkness for the sweet release of death. Despite a strong cast and clever staging, exceptionally poor pacing makes Adam Guettel’s musical – [...]
Ember game on iOS is a brilliant Diablo type RPG that delivers Stranger Things-levels of nostalgia

September 28, 2016

There is nothing in the slightest bit original about Ember and that is its greatest asset. It’s a dose of nostalgia as intense and satisfying as Stranger Things, aimed at a generation who grew up playing Tolkien-esque swords and sorcery games. It weaves together a tapestry of cliches so pronounced it feels as warm and [...]
My house: Hairdresser to the stars Paul Edmonds, whose clients include Emma Thompson and Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks, tells us about his brutalist home

September 27, 2016

Hairdresser to the stars Paul Edmonds, who is soon to open a salon in Battersea Power Station, talks about his brutalist house in Lambeth I must be drawn to brutalist architecture – I used to live in the Barbican. I can remember my grandmother visiting and saying it looked like a prison; she couldn’t believe [...]
The glorious bus stops of the former USSR, as shot by photographer Peter Ortner

September 26, 2016

Even in the often stifling artistic conditions that existed in the outer reaches of the Soviet Union, creativity found a way. While Soviet architects experimented with startling modernist buildings in Mother Russia, the outposts largely had to settle for endlessly repeating brutalist tower-blocks, each one as punishingly grey as the last. Municipal buildings – and [...]
Julius Shulman: the photographer who helped to define LA

September 26, 2016

Many architects have made their mark on a place, planting seeds of creation that go on to define a street or neighbourhood. A select few become synonymous with a certain style, or even an entire city. But not many shape the way people think about an entire state; Julius Shulman achieved just that without designing [...]
Forget houses, why not live in the world’s most expensive van, or up a tree, or under the ocean?

September 26, 2016

People are always nattering on about “the property market” and “having a roof over your head” and “why have you not been paying the mortgage?” But do we really need houses? Could we just go and live, say, at the bottom of the ocean, or in a cave, or maybe just in the back of [...]
Forget houses, why not live in the world’s most expensive van, or up a tree, or under the ocean?

September 26, 2016

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Starmer not told Mandelson was denied security clearance

Trump-hating Fifa World Cup fans should have costs paid if denied visa

Avenue Q is wonderfully lawless chaos (with very rude puppets)

By: Steve Dinneen

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