Buy a fraction of St Lucia paradise April 15, 2010 THE Caribbean can be a paradise for second homes: but you have to choose wisely. You don’t want to end up in a tourist trap or an area that has been overdeveloped. And if buying into a new development, you want to be sure it’s managed well and properly financed. The new residences and villas [...]
Find beauty on the Welsh coast April 15, 2010 SECOND home hunters with a bit of cash have tended to gravitate towards destinations such as the Cotswolds and Cornwall. Great minds think alike and because of this, those areas have become over-crowded and pricey to boot. So perhaps it’s time to think outside the box, and there are few places better – or more [...]
Rickie’s return just misses the mark April 15, 2010 Film CEMETERY JUNCTION Cert: 15 HAVING proved he can make it in Hollywood, Ricky Gervais has brought a whole load of Tinseltown gloss back with him for this tale of small-town kids in the Seventies. Written and directed by Gervais and old mucker Stephen Merchant, the film is polished, conventional and formulaic to the degree [...]
He’s seen off his own PM, but now the chancellor must beat the Tories April 14, 2010 WHEN all politicians around him are losing their heads, Alistair Darling is intent on keeping his. Having seen off an attempt to replace him with Gordon Brown’s favourite apparatchik Ed Balls – who wanted to use Labour’s final Budget to make vote-winning spending promises – the famously low-key chancellor says the new enemies of prudence [...]
WHAT THE OTHER PAPERS SAY THIS MORNING April 12, 2010 FINANCIAL TIMES TOP CITY SKYSCRAPER FOR SALE Tower 42, the tallest occupied skyscraper in the City, will be put up for sale as booming prices return to London’s commercial property market. The 600ft former NatWest tower near the Bank of England is expected to fetch more than £300m ($461m) when its owners, Hermes Real Estate [...]
Happy Easter for West End April 5, 2010 POOR weather and early spring sales offers from retailers drove at least 2m shoppers to the West End over the Bank holiday weekend. Some retailers are understood to have recorded double-digit sales growth on the Friday, although trading did slow down over Saturday and Easter Monday, according to the New West End Company – which [...]
British Land secures 465,000 square feet of London lettings as market turns March 31, 2010 RECESSION-HIT London remains a magnet for office occupiers, property company British Land showed yesterday, after announcing 465,000 square feet of new lettings since February, hiking its occupancy to 92 per cent. The real estate investment trust said it had let 117,000 square feet at its 10 Triton Street project in London’s West End to Aegis [...]
What Westfield tells us about UK Plc March 28, 2010 IF you want to understand what is happening to the economy, you could do worse than to check out the Westfield shopping centre in West London on a weekend. The place was packed to the rafters on Saturday afternoon, with long queues in front of every single one of the dozens of restaurants and cafes; [...]
American-style glitz and glam come sailing into Barcelona March 28, 2010 WHATEVER the brand values are that the W Hotel group holds dear, subtlety probably sits low on the list. Take, for instance, the way it classes its rooms. Not for W those fuddy-duddy words like Superior (meaning bog-standard) and Deluxe – instead, W offers you Mega rooms and Fabulous rooms, or if you want a [...]
Beat the blues with a slice of Caribbean sun March 25, 2010 WINTER is finally over, and the sun has been reminding us all of its existence in the past week or so. If you are already thinking ahead to next year and wondering how you will get through another few months of darkness and “snow days”, there’s a solution: buy a home in the Caribbean. Barbados [...]