Last updated on February 18th, 2021Tucked behind the Selfridges department store in Marylebone is the Wallace Collection, one of my favourite London haunts. It’s an eighteenth-century city pile with a jaw-dropping art collection and a 500-strong furniture depository which would make Marie Antoinette feel perfectly at home. It’s a sea of crimson red, rococo gold,…
A History of the Savoy Hotel | 10 Secrets about “London’s Greatest Hotel”
Last updated on June 2nd, 2021The Savoy Hotel in London is the hostess with the mostest, London’s grande dame who has partied through two world wars and slept with movie stars, politicians and royalty. If her walls could talk, they would whisper about the great and the godly and the bold and the beautiful that…
Prince and Patron at Buckingham Palace
Last updated on March 9th, 2019It’s hard to pick a favourite at Prince and Patron, Buckingham Palace, an exhibition marking the 70th birthday of His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales. The 100 works which have been stuffed into the Palace’s Ball Supper Room were personally chosen by the Prince from the Royal Collection, the…
A Guide to Royal Ascot
Last updated on May 27th, 2021Royal Ascot is one of the highlights of the London season and an event to which I look forward to every year. I know nothing about horses, gambling or how to wear a hat, but I do enjoy British traditions and a glass or two, maybe even three, of a…
Splendours of the Subcontinent – Queen’s Gallery
Last updated on October 22nd, 2020When I went to India, I came back with a couple of silk rugs and my most treasured collection of Ganesha statues. Shame I didn’t know any Maharajas, as I might have returned with some souvenirs the likes of which you have never seen. That is, until now. In a…
Victorian Afternoon Tea at the V & A Museum
Last updated on June 1st, 2018The Victorian Afternoon Tea at the Victoria and Albert Museum had me at seed cake. These two words always bring my childhood back in a whoosh of nostalgia wrapped in a cocoon of Englishness. If seed cake was good enough for Bilbo Baggins and his Unexpected Party, then it’s good…
Charles I at the Royal Academy
Last updated on April 22nd, 2018Drum roll please, I am about to tell you about an exhibition worth curtsying for, a show fit for royalty. It has pomp, it has circumstance, and its hero is the bad boy of the British royal family, the king who takes the prize for being the first, and last,…
Afternoon Tea at the Houses of Parliament
Last updated on February 3rd, 2020The Palace of Westminster, or Houses of Parliament as it’s commonly referred to, is one of London’s ultimate tourist hot spots, even if Big Ben is hibernating for the next three years whilst he gets a makeover. When I first arrived in London in the late 1980s, I would count…
King of Bling: Charles II at the Queen’s Gallery
Last updated on September 13th, 2018The English weren’t as partial to the chopping of a royal head as the French were, but the story of this exhibition starts with the trial of Charles I, the ill-fated king whose head was to be severed from his body on the 30 January 1649. Fast forward to 1660…
So Long and Farewell Lord Mayor of London
Last updated on March 5th, 2021The Lord Mayor of London, Andrew Parmley, and I go back a long way. To 2003 precisely when he was known simply as Dr Parmley, or Dr P. I would be invited to his office on an all-too regular basis to discuss the very bad behaviour of my eldest, Clarissa….