As if the Last Tsar exhibition at the Science Museum wasn’t enough of a treat, London is now getting a Romanov double whammy with a new exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. Russia, Royalty and the Romanovs has glitz, it has glamour, and it has a generous helping of Russian bling. The exhibition celebrates the…
Home Futures at the Design Museum
Fans of Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle, Tomorrow’s World (which returns to BBC4 later this month) and sci-fi film Back to the Future will be delighted with the Design Museum’s latest immersive exhibition: Home Futures. It’s not about the future, but rather about how we once imagined design would impact the world in and outside the home….
Strawberry Hill: Walpole’s Lost Treasures come home
How on earth do you track 150 paintings, sculptures, furniture and curiosities which were dispersed 176 years ago after the great “sale of the century?” You hire art super-sleuth Silvia Davoli, that’s how. And you know Horace Walpole would be tickled pink (or probably red, a colour he used lavishly and liberally) to see his…
Londoness Loves October 2018
It’s a big birthday for me this month, so I’m taking a deep breath as I head into a very busy celebratory October. It’s always been my favourite month (how surprising, I hear you say?) but it’s more about the smells, the colours and the cosiness of a month where the leaves turn from burnt…
My favourite London restaurants
Want to eat like a Londoner? Here are some of my favourite restaurants in London, the ones where you might see me hanging out. There’s everything from Michelin star restaurants to London historical haunts, tasty fish and chips joints and even an Indian cafe where you can eat famous bhajias. If you’re visiting London and…
The Last Tsar: Blood and Revolution – Science Museum
A new exhibition at the Science Museum in London originated a few years ago, when a curator discovered a crate buried in the museum’s vast archive. Inside, she found 22 photograph albums of the Russian Imperial family, taken between 1908 and 1916, and so began the journey of The Last Tsar: Blood and Revolution. Marking 100…
Shaken and Stirred – London’s Fastest Speedboat
I’d like to say this is going to be a cultural post, but in all honesty, it’s going to have some adrenaline thrown in with a dash of James Bond. Having said that, you get to see London’s most iconic sights with me, something I don’t talk about very often, as I prefer to showcase…
Londoness Loves September 2018
Pencils are sharpened, shoes are buffed, and raincoats make their re-appearance on the coat rack this month. It’s back to school, or as they call it in France, la rentrée, (the return). It’s been a quiet, heat-filled summer in London, but now it’s time for a good harvest of autumnal theatre, art, opera and music,…
Covent Garden in a day
Covent Garden is London’s living theatre, a canvas of the city’s enchanting past and its immersive present. It was once Nell Gwynn’s playground with her King, and home to the oldest theatre in London with its 500 ghosts of theatre past. Eliza Doolittle sold flowers to Mr Henry Higgins outside St Paul’s Church, the first…
The Swanky Savoy Hotel
She’s the hostess with the mostess, London’s grande dame who has partied through two world wars and slept with movie stars, politicians and royalty. Today, the Savoy Hotel in London is celebrating her 129th birthday and if her walls could talk, they would whisper about the great and the godly and the bold and the…