On Friday night we learnt the shocking news that the Cambridge academic and author Jason Arday had died. In the days since, much of the argument has focused on the campaign of media attention that preceded his death: who pursued him, why they did it, whether racism played a part and whether the media went too far.
Those are legitimate questions. But they risk letting the rest of us off too easily. Because the mob is not simply “the media”. The mob is us.
I have been fascinated for years by what happens to people who find themselves at the centre of scandals. Some time ago I interviewed a series of people whose lives had been blown apart by public disgrace: Tom Hayes, the former UBS and Citigroup trader jailed over allegedly fixing the Libor rate (his conviction has since been overturned); Camila Batmanghelidjh of Kids Company; peers caught up in the expenses scandal; and others who went, almost overnight, from prominence to notoriety.
Their cases were very different. Some had plainly done things that deserved scrutiny, while others believed they had been completely unfairly treated. What united them was the experience of being annihilated by the scandal machine.
From the Victorians’ love of gossip columns to Profumo, Jeremy Thorpe, Monica Lewinsky right up to Peter Mandelson and now Jason Arday, the public has always been riveted by a scandal and for hundreds of years the modus operandi hasn’t changed, though, since the inception of pay-by-click media and social media, the medium has become considerably more all-encompassing and violent.
We tend to talk about this machine as though it belongs to Fleet Street. It doesn’t. It is a partnership between publishers and audience, and the digital age has made that relationship more intimate, measurable and ruthless than ever. Social media has added a Wild West terrain. And increasingly, we’re all complicit.
When I first worked in newspapers, editors could make an educated guess about what readers liked. Sales figures told you whether the paper as a whole had performed well. Today editors know almost instantly which story you clicked on, how long you spent reading it, and whether you shared it.
This has transformed journalism. It has also exposed an uncomfortable truth: our appetite for scandal is never-ending. The financial model produces feeding frenzies: in a world where the currency is clicks, media companies replicate the stories people are most interested in.
If a story about a disgraced celebrity, politician, banker or academic performs spectacularly, there will be another. And another. Rival outlets pile in because their own data tells them readers cannot get enough. Social media then adds a second, less accountable layer: denunciation, mockery, amateur investigation, demands for sackings and gleeful excavation of every past mistake.
We are all a part of this. Every click you make is a vote for more.
The dictionary definition of scandal is ‘an action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong and causing general public outrage’. What could be better for an age when everyone is more outraged than ever. Everyone is perpetually offended and the sides in our real or imagined culture wars are getting more and more entrenched.
The public’s adoration of scandal, though, is of course hardly new. Oscar Wilde complained that where men once had the rack, they had acquired the press instead.
What has changed since his day is the velocity, scale and permanence of negative news cycles.
A scandal once had physical limits: a finite number of pages in a newspaper and a finite number of bulletins in a day. The internet has infinite space and infinite memory. A story can be updated ten times, reframed by twenty publications, dissected across social media and permanently attached to someone’s name by Google.
During this time the perpetuator of the scandal can expect to be subjected to considerable public vitriol, often far more so than people who have committed far worse crimes.
We find ourselves at a strange moral contradiction. We pride ourselves on being kinder and more sophisticated about mental health, more alive to trauma, bullying and public humiliation. Yet when somebody becomes the designated villain of the week, much of that sensitivity disappears.
Usually, the protagonists of scandals do deserve scrutiny. And this bit matters. A free press must be able to investigate people in positions of power. Institutions must be challenged. Lies, fraud, hypocrisy and abuse cannot be protected by appeals to kindness. The alternative - a society in which journalists are frightened to expose wrongdoing - is much worse. I was pretty shocked to see people posting on Instagram the names of all the journalists who had written about Arday and appealing for information about their lives. The media has to be able to hold powerful people and institutions to account. Why not spend a bit of time in the places in the world without a free media darlings and let me know how much you like it there.

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Regular readers of Letter from London will remember that a few months ago, in what was a pretty shocking incident, five people were stabbed on my road. I wrote about it here, commenting that one of the many disconcerting aspects of the ordeal was the total silence from the police afterwards.
I wrote to my MP, Rupa Huq complaining about it, and to her credit she called me the other day and invited me and a few other Acton residents to meet the local police last Friday to discuss crime in our local area.

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It was an interesting morning. I knew the figures, but had not properly appreciated the staggering extent to which police numbers and resources have been cut in the capital over recent years. I complained that I never saw police around, despite Acton being one of the remaining 27 Metropolitan Police front counters (police stations where the public can walk up to a desk) remaining across London. In 2007 there were 154 police front counters, now there are just 27. Between 2008 and 2024, 130 front-counter locations closed to the public; at 92 of those sites, the buildings were subsequently disposed of and are no longer part of the Met estate.
It’s an extraordinary contraction in the physical presence of policing in London and honestly I find the rationale behind such extreme cuts to the police extremely hard to understand.
The polite, intelligent and humane officers told us that only a tiny number of them were responsible for covering North Acton, which explained why I so rarely see any. They also described the extraordinarily frustrating position they now find themselves in where prisons are completely at capacity and due to the other crisis in our courts, if they arrest someone they might very well be back out on the streets hours later, while their cases take years crawling through the system.
With that conversation still very much in my mind, I was fascinated by a piece in The Observer this weekend by its political editor Rachel Sylvester.
Sylvester has been reporting on one of the most interesting prison experiments I’ve come across in years. At Wandsworth and Pentonville, two notoriously troubled London prisons, individual wings have been transformed using ideas borrowed from Sweden and Norway, with far greater emphasis on rehabilitation, purposeful activity and the relationship between prisoners and the officers guarding them.
I have always thought that one of the things future generations will be most shocked by about our generation is the way we treat people in prison. Not because people shouldn’t be punished for committing crimes, but because it is difficult to see what we achieve by locking somebody in a filthy cell for most of the day, surrounding them with drugs, extreme violence and despair, and then expecting them to emerge equipped to lead a normal life. (Did you ever watch Time on BBCiplayer? Countless ex-prisoners came forward to say it was an extraordinarily realistic portrayal of what British prisons are like, which I found horrifying. I can honestly say the scene where someone is attacked with boiling sugar water has never really left me).
Whatever you think of how prisoners should be treated, what we’re doing currently isn’t working. The latest Ministry of Justice figures show 40.6% of adults released from custody were proven to have reoffended within a year; among those released from sentences of less than 12 months, the figure is 68.2%. No wonder the prisons are so full if prisoners keep coming back all the time.

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Travelling around London every day, I see people in every kind of religious clothing. But it’s only when I see a visibly Jewish man in a kippah, or a child in a Jewish school uniform, that I find myself worrying about their safety. Friends have told me that they have had to pay for security for their children’s Jewish schools, which, as incredible as it is to believe, routinely station private security guards at entry points during drop-off, pick-up, and school hours. Jewish friends have emigrated to other countries because they don’t feel London is a safe place for them anymore, while others say they want to leave but don’t know where else to go. Stories of children bullied, ostracised and abused at London schools and universities because of their Jewish ethnicity are heartbreaking, and all too common. According to research, around one in five Jewish people living in Britain have considered emigrating because of antisemitism.
So it saddened me, but didn’t surprise me that antisemitism in London has surged to near-record levels, according to new data out today from the Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors antisemitism in the UK.
The charity, which collects reports from victims, witnesses, police forces and partner organisations before verifying incidents that meet its criteria, recorded 994 anti-Jewish hate incidents in Greater London during the first six months of 2026, a 24 per cent increase compared to the previous year.
Since the atrocities of October 7, Jewish people have increasingly felt under siege in London, with the line between criticising Israel and abuse of British Jews becoming less and less distinct.
Barnet, the north London borough home to the UK’s largest Jewish community recorded 469 incidents, almost half the capital’s total. Elsewhere, Westminster recorded 75 incidents, Camden 73, Hackney 55 and Haringey 25. The figures mean London accounted for more than half of the 1,926 antisemitic incidents recorded across the UK between January and June this year.
The problem we face is that anti-Jewish attitudes have seeped into so many areas of officialdom in London where despite so many tragic conflicts around the world, so many people are only transfixed by one.
Take the first full meeting of Hackney council since the Greens swept to power in May, when a small group of pro-Israel demonstrators gathered outside the town hall to be met by protesters in keffiyehs. One woman threw eggs at them before being taken away by police. “We were called genociders, baby killers, terrorists and told we should go back to where we came from,” one of the group, Sharon, told my former colleague Nicole Lampert, who has done more than almost anyone in the British media to keep the growth of antisemitism in Britain in the public eye.
Inside the chamber, the council voted to begin the process of ending Hackney’s 58-year twinning arrangement with Haifa (you’ve probably read about this - in an act of horrifying insensitivity the date issued to Haifa to reply to call to cut twinning ties was October 7. Hackney’s mayor subsequently apologised for what she called a “serious mistake” and extended the deadline.) During the debate, Green councillor Florence Schechter said something that made me very uncomfortable:

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I have to say I feel much lighter and more positive about Britain with Andy Burnham in charge.
This clip of him talking to a care home resident yesterday was just lovely. The elderly man expresses surprise at there being yet another Prime Minister (a feeling we call all relate to, see my favourite comedian right now Ali Woods’ hilarious clip) and says ‘They keep changing every five minutes’. Burnham handled it with good grace and humour.
I like that he studied English Literature at University (sign of a good person, although I would say that), we share the same favourite poet in Philip Larkin and I agree with a lot of what he says. Thank god he’s going to help pubs, hospitality and nightlife which all took such a punishment beating from the last lot. Pubs are part of our culture, he says, and we must save them. Amen to that.
I also love the north of England, and think he’s right, we have neglected it for too long.
I began to feel really depressed by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves’ dour negative energy and anti-British policies. I started to think they hated Britain and a lot of British people. I don’t understand how they got away with saying that if elected they wouldn’t raise taxes on working people, and then raised taxes by £66 billion a year.
I know Burnham’s about to massively raise taxes again too, which I think is a terrible, terrible decision, but now I’ve left my highly paid job the awful truth is I don’t care as much. When it’s you working 12-hour days answering emails late at night and at weekends, getting home too exhausted to be a decent parent and suffering under endless deadlines, having to pay a marginal rate of 62 per cent tax on your earnings is unbelievably galling and demotivating. Especially when you have no savings and can’t afford to move house, because of stamp duty, and the knowledge that everything you spend your already taxed-to-death money on from petrol to clothing to cosmetics to meals out is all taxed again too. (sidenote: having a job is also very expensive).
When it’s some other poor chump doing it, you care less. And that’s the problem we face in Britain. Everyone has got in the habit of thinking someone else will pick up the bill and that high earners are an endless cash cow. But they can’t and they won’t sadly, and that’s why record numbers of millionaires and high earners are fleeing the country.
According to recent research by the Adam Smith Institute there are currently fewer millionaires in Britain than at any time since the financial crisis
They’re leaving the UK for a number of reasons, including high levels of current taxation, threats of further increases (including a wealth tax), and a culture which many say is hostile to wealth-creators.
I personally despair of the prevalent attitude in Britain today that rich people are somehow greedy or don’t pay their fair share when a lot of them contribute so much.
Many millionaires are wealth creators who set up businesses, employ people and fund Britain’s public services. Never forget that the top 1 per cent of earners pay 29.1 per cent of income tax. When they leave they’re gone forever and the rest of us have to pay more.
We already are. I think it’s obscene that the 40 per cent higher tax rate now begins at just £50,270 because of frozen tax thresholds.
I see businesses closing down all the time in London and whenever I ask why people tell me endless taxes including punitive business rates and government meddling makes running a small business in 2026 unviable.
Anyway, for all Keir and Rachel’s fighting talk on socialism and those with the broadest shoulders etc, I was struck by this year’s royal accounts. As two of the three Royal Trustees, they signed off on a Sovereign Grant of £137 million for 2026–27.
The Royal Household spent £37 million on payroll and other staff costs in 2025–26. The number of royal staff funded by the Sovereign Grant has risen from 491 in 2021–22 to 563 today, an increase of nearly 15 per cent in four years, courtesy of the poor beleaguered taxpayer.
Meanwhile, the Crown Estate’s administrative expenses rose from £70 million to £88 million in a single year. Its chief executive received total remuneration of £2.3 million, compared with the equivalent of £517,000 when he began in 2019, while the workforce rose from 868 to 972.
These are eye-watering increases at precisely the moment when the government was telling everybody else to tighten their belts. Trust me, these people always want their honours, and the royals still wield enormous power. But it makes a mockery of their all-for-the-people act.
I also hate the fact that Keir Starmer said he wouldn’t produce a resignation honours list, calling such lists “very hard to justify.” But of course, as he prepared to leave Downing Street a list of 26 new life peers was announced. He constantly said before coming leader that he would abolish the House of Lords but during his tenure created over 85 Labour life peerages. It was that kind of double standard that I came to really dislike about him.
Burnham will, I’m sure, bring his own disappointments and shortcomings, we’ve had enough PMs now to know that they all do. But he seems human, he can communicate, he doesn’t upset me or depress me when he talks, he seems to love Britain and understand that British culture deserves preserving. I can almost feel the collective sigh of relief that he’s in charge, and I feel it too.

Lastly, it would feel remiss in this column not to mention the awful fires raging across Europe this summer. I send all my best wishes and sympathy for everyone affected.

That’s this week’s Letter from London. If you enjoyed this article please leave a comment or hit like to help me conquer the Substack algorithm.

LETTER PICKS Five things worth your time this week

GO Everyone is talking about the play 1536 which is a razor-sharp, darkly comic historical drama following three young women in rural Essex as the ripples of Anne Boleyn’s trial and execution by Henry VIII change the behavior of the men around them. After a completely sold-out premiere run at the Almeida Theatre, it transferred to the West End’s Ambassadors Theatre for a critically acclaimed, star-studded run co-produced by Margot Robbie. I’m desperate to see it, I’ve heard it’s amazing and I love a word of mouth hit.

EAT: Brasserie Olivia is the new all-day French brasserie in Chelsea. I’m tempted by the homemade croissants, stuffed gougères and egg gribiche sandwich, and by the downstairs Venus Bar, which sounds exactly louche enough for a late-summer evening.

NOTICE: How quiet London becomes at the end of July. The roads empty, the WhatsApp groups fall silent and, for a few glorious weeks, the city belongs to those of us left behind. Bliss.

BUY: A proper folding fan. Considerably more elegant than the electronic contraptions that have somehow become this summer’s status symbol. This one by KhuKhu is my favourite, although it’s £129 and who knows what the weather will be like next week. Victoria Beckham also has some great ones.

WATCH: I’m watching Tip Toe on Channel 4, Russell T Davies’s dark and increasingly unsettling drama starring Alan Cumming as the flamboyant owner of a bar in Manchester and David Morrissey as his nasty but weirdly compelling next-door neighbour. It begins as a neighbourly dispute and becomes something much more sinister. It lapses into political polemic in places but actually I quite like that and am learning while watching.

ASK ME: What is the one London place you selfishly hope never becomes fashionable?Churchfield Road near where I live in Acton. It has good coffee, independent shops, a proper butcher and just enough scruffiness to keep it human. I live in fear of somebody declaring it “the new Notting Hill” (pretty unlikely tbf) and ruining the whole thing.

This summer is proving to be one of our hottest ever, and I’m a total beach addict so this week I thought I’d devote my newsletter to the only sensible thing to do on a hot summer’s day: get out of London and into the deep blue sea. These are my favourite beaches within an hour or two of the capital - some sandy, some pebbly, some chic, some gloriously old-fashioned – and all worth the escape.

West Wittering

If you want proper pale sand, dunes, beach huts and a serene atmosphere, West Wittering is the one. It is not the easiest by train, which is probably why it has managed to stay so unspoilt. The main beach is lovely, but anyone in the know hangs out around the corner at East Head, which is by far the better escape: wilder, emptier, and more beautiful, with those great rolling dunes. The main beach has all the amenities you could wish for. Go to 2xs.co.uk for all windsurfing, kite-surfing, paddleboards and surf equipment. Take your towel and a picnic and a wonderful day is guaranteed.

How to get there: Best by car, WW is around two hours from west London depending on traffic. By train, go to Chichester and then take a taxi or bus to the beach.

Where to eat: The Wittering is a great nearby option for a proper post-beach lunch or early supper: seasonal plates, a lovely garden with a pizza oven and a BBQ. The Anchor Bleu in nearby Bosham is a traditional family-run harbourside pub with bags of character the locals all love. If it’s a picnic you’re after pop into Berries on Tap to pick up fruit, bread, scotch eggs plus other treats and milk from their vending machine.

If you want to stay: Luxury boltholes has a phenomenal design-led selection of places to rent in the area, whether you want a period property to sleep eleven or somewhere cosy for two. They also provide an outstanding concierge service to make sure everything runs smoothly during your stay. Kate and Ed who run it are two of the loveliest people you’ll ever meet and nothing is too much trouble for them. They’re also the best guides to the local area.

Don’t forget to scroll to the end for all my picks of what to do see eat and read in London this week in Letter Picks

Folkestone

I visited Folkestone recently and was so impressed with all of its independent cafes, shops and quirky vibe. It has become one of the great Kent coast’s best glow-ups: still a bit raw around the edges, but now with art, restaurants, a lovely market and a great sauna and hot tub place on the beach, Sea Scrub Sauna which would be a great option if you don’t get the weather right. Folkestone is brilliant for a day trip because you can be there ridiculously quickly from St Pancras, then wander between the beach, the creative quarter and the harbour. People always slag off billionaires, but Roger de Haan has invested £100 million into Folkestone and completely transformed it. He deserves a medal.

How to get there: The high-speed train from St Pancras to Folkestone Central takes just under an hour. From there, walk or take a short cab down to the harbour.

Where to eat: Rocksalt if you want the polished version: seafood, glass, sea views, the whole thing. For something more relaxed, eat your way around the Harbour Arm and have a drink at the lighthouse.

If you want to stay: Shoreline Beach House by Bloom Stays comes highly recommended or try The London and Paris Hotel

Climping

Climping is one of my absolute favourites. It’s got it all, smaller bucket and spade areas and then a big long proper beach for when you want something quieter and more elemental, all wind, shingle, sea grass and big skies. The perfect place for walking, clearing your head and pretending for a few hours that your inbox does not exist. At the East End there’s an area for naturists – go for it.

How to get there: Best by car, around two hours from London. You can also go by train to Littlehampton or Arundel and take a taxi, but honestly this is one of those times when the car wins.

Where to eat: The 17th century pub The Black Horse is a great option or try The Oystercatcher in nearby characterful Littlehampton. People rave about The Lamb in the nearby exquisite village of Angmering too. It’s well worth a wander through the very pretty village either way.

If you want to stay: Bailiffscourt is the dream: a medieval-style country-house hotel with gardens, spa, lounges, a proper restaurant and a truly fascinating history. Book lunch, afternoon tea or a room for the night and make the whole thing feel like a proper escape.

Pagham Beach

Pagham is the place for when you want the sea without the seaside performance: no pier, no amusement arcades and remarkably little fuss. The beach is a long sweep of shingle, backed by old-fashioned beach houses and fishing boats pulled up above the tide. Just along the coast Pagham Harbour is one of the best places in Sussex for birdwatching and a gloriously windswept walk.

How to get there: It’s around two hours from London by car. By train, travel from Victoria to Bognor Regis and take a taxi for the final stretch.

Where to eat: For lunch, drive towards Sidlesham for The Crab & Lobster, a properly good country pub with locally-sourced seafood, a garden and loads of atmosphere.

If you want to stay: The Harbour hotel in Chichester is a great and the perfect place to explore one of west Sussex’s loveliest towns.

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Camber West

One of the few genuinely sandy beaches within plausible distance of London, Camber West is a stunning expanse of soft golden sand and boasts the only sand dunes in East Sussex. Located just east of the historic town of Rye, it’s renowned for its peaceful atmosphere, shallow waters, and designated kitesurfing zones. It is an ideal spot for family beach days, nature walks, and water sports. The tide moves rapidly across the sand flats, so check the tide times and keep an eye on children in the water.

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Five people were stabbed on my road last month. It happened in Acton on a Friday afternoon: five men taken to hospital, and a 26-year-old arrested that evening on suspicion of grievous bodily harm and drug offences. The police put out a short statement promising extra patrols and inviting anyone worried to come and speak to officers. And then the trail went cold. No word on whether he was charged or released, no account of what the fight had been about, nothing to tell the thousands of us living nearby whether this was a private quarrel or something the rest of us should fear.

I contacted our local MP, Rupa Huq, asking why we’d heard nothing. To her credit she came back to me, though only to say she hadn’t yet managed to reach the relevant officer. That was weeks ago, I’ve heard nothing since. I haven’t seen a police officer around either.
Meanwhile, the rumours are flying around - about who did it, and why, and whether it was random or targeted. Either way, it all happened very publicly and was very much the kind of thing your child could innocently walk into. It was an incredibly dramatic scene when it happened with a helicopter, lines of police vans, a massive area cordoned off with police taking everyone’s name. I’d guess that all cost at least £100,000 and it struck me, why should we all pay for this, not the perpetrator? It was horrible having to explain to children what was going on, and I resented having to.

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I know London is a vast metropolis, but Acton, where I live, is a real community, and everyone knows everyone. We have local WhatsApp groups with thousands of people on them, where people are generous with their time and advice plus all the usual local social media groups. We are also one of the few London boroughs left with an actual, staffed police station. It would be so easy for the police to communicate with us all more.
The attack was shocking and upsetting, but the total silence from the police or authorities was in some ways just as bad, with the implicit message that these things happen, everyone should simply move on without being told anything. Don’t ask awkward questions.

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Then you read about the police confronting the photographer Alastair Hilton when he was out having a pint in neighbouring Chiswick, giving him a sinister lecture because he had tweeted that it was wrong that the council had stopped pubs being allowed outside tables on the river (he’s absolutely right of course) and you can’t help but think: what on earth are the police up to?
A few Saturdays ago, a car drove into five pedestrians outside the M&S on Ealing Broadway, a mile or so up the road. A 34-year-old man, Timir Ahmed Mohamed, was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after he was stopped nearby. He was charged on 28 June 2026 with five counts of attempted murder, as well as dangerous driving, failing to stop, failing to provide a breath specimen and criminal damage. The police were careful to say the case wasn’t being treated as terrorism, but are we allowed to ask why he did it? Or what his circumstances were before he did? These incidents seem to be growing across Europe. It would be good to at least understand what’s behind it all. Again, silence.
I’ve started saying things to my children like “don’t walk too close to the road, in case someone tries to drive into you” - alongside the routine advice about not looking mad looking people in the eye, and not fighting back if someone tries to take something from you in case they’re carrying a knife. I resent having to teach them all of this and I find myself wondering whether it’s responsible to bring children up in this environment. Anecdotally, more and more people with kids are leaving London citing crime as the main concern and I understand why.

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Sadiq Khan is spending £7 million to fight disinformation online about London being so dangerous, and I understand that London has become a lightning rod for the global right - shorthand for liberalism and multiculturalism gone mad, a lawless dystopia of phone snatchings and stabbings. That’s obviously not right, but equally, it’s pointless to deny that London feels more dangerous than it used to. I know we have one of the lowest murder rates in the Western world and crime is apparently going down, but anecdotally crime generally, and stabbings feel more and more commonplace. London records an average of roughly 40 knife-related offenses per day, according to statistics compiled by the Metropolitan Police and the Office for National Statistics. Those are the ones that are reported. So the actual number would be much higher.
A rape is reported in London every hour - a grim enough statistic before you remember it counts only the rapes that are reported. Vast numbers of women never go to the police at all; Rape Crisis estimates only around one in six who are raped do. And who can blame them, when so few reports ever end in a conviction, and the cases that do go forward can take years to reach court. My friend with a teenage daughter says she and her friends don’t feel safe in pubs or bars so just go to each other’s houses. When I was a teen in London it would never have crossed our minds that we were in any danger from going to pubs.
Back to the Acton multiple stabbing suspect. Despite the extraordinary spectacle when it all happened, we haven’t heard since whether he was charged, bailed, released under investigation, or eliminated from enquiries. We have no idea what it was all about or whether it’s likely to happen again.
And the whole thing has led me to think that London’s problem is not only crime. It is the collapse of confidence after crime: the sense that the state appears in force for the emergency, then vanishes for the aftermath. Londoners are being asked to tolerate frightening public disorder without the basic reassurance, visibility and accountability that make city life feel like it is being governed responsibly. That makes us all of us living here feel uneasy.

That’s this week’s Letter from London. If you enjoy my work I would be so delighted if you became a paid subscriber. If you do decide to do so please do it on the web page not the app because prices for some reason are much higher on the app. Please do leave a comment or just press the heart button as the algorithm rewards all engagement. See below for the best things to do in London this month.

LETTER PICKS

GO: I visited Treasure House Fair for the first time last week, a beautiful art antiques and design fair at Royal Hospital Chelsea. Firmdale Hotels took over all of the Fair’s dining spaces, I dined at Brumus Brasserie and had a good old gossip with my old friend the fashion writer extraordinaire Victoria Moss (read her excellent Substack here

everything is content

Live, love, content. A weekly newsletter about fashion, mindless cultural ephemera and maybe sometimes other things.

By Victoria Moss

We feasted on prawn cocktail, beef carpaccio and the most beautiful crab washed down with an ice-cold glass of champagne, surrounded by characterful interiors by Kit Kemp. One for your diary for next summer, in the meantime Brumus is at the Haymarket Hotel. Can’t recommend highly enough. Brumus, Haymarket Hotel

GO: A brilliant excuse to eat your way around SE15, Peckham Weekend is back for its third year, with 19 local restaurants, bars and cafés offering £10 specials, and £1 from each dish going to Peckham Pantry, a charity which supports low-income families. Start at Mr Bao for barbecued mackerel, then make your way through the neighbourhood: Forza Wine for cauliflower fritti, Peckham Cellars for fried squid brioche, Ganapati for dosa, and wherever else takes your fancy. The joy of this one is that it’s not a polished corporate “food festival” but a proper neighbourhood celebration: delicious, lively and all for a good cause. July 24–26; mrbao.co.uk

GO: A neighbourhood jazz festival, which is exactly the sort of thing London does best, De Beauvoir Jazz Festival takes over streets, churches, pubs and local spaces across De Beauvoir Town, Hackney and Islington, bringing together international, UK and local musicians. Highlights include Sam Amidon at St Peter’s Church, Theon Cross at The Block Party, Adrian Cox and Giacomo Smith’s Clarinet Summit, and Joe Webb’s 7-A-Side. This is one of those small, community-made events that makes living in London special . July 10–12; debeauvoirjazzfestival.co.uk

BUY: I love these hats by Bask + Groove. The brand was founded by Ibiza resident Monty Gammond in 2023, inspired by a lifelong love of music and a belief in timeless design over passing trends. Super sustainable, every hat is crafted from toquilla straw, a natural fibre woven using a centuries-old Ecuadorian tradition that can be traced back to the Incas. What’s not to love? Classic Natural £180

ASK ME: A reader asked me for my favourite London swimming spot. My first choice for a swim in London is Tooting Bec Lido every time. It’s the UK’s largest outside freshwater pool at 91m in length. A swim here is unbelievably refreshing and the art deco design is very pleasing too. Go before midday to avoid crowds. Tooting Bec Lido

I’ve been hearing great things about the Bush Theatre for years and had tried to go a month or so ago. When we arrived there was a trigger warning at the entrance: the play I’d booked contained several harrowing scenes and a storyline about someone dying of cancer. I’m normally allergic to trigger warnings, but I was inordinately grateful for this one, and asked whether we could swop our tickets for the Olivier award-winning The P Word. So I took my 14-year-old son on Saturday night, and found myself having dodged one kind of discomfort only to be handed a far more interesting one.
The theatre, housed in the old library on the Uxbridge Road, has a buzzy bar and a wonderful room lined with hundreds of plays. It would be a great venue for a date or somewhere to go and work during the day. It is always jarring how white and middle-class progressive London theatre audiences tend to be, so it was a pleasure to see such a young, diverse house at the Bush.

Waleed Akhtar’s two-hander - which premiered here in 2022, won its Olivier the following year, and has returned this summer with new lines sharpened for the current political weather - is about homophobia within Islam, racism within the gay community, and Britain’s asylum system.
Bilal, played by Akhtar, is a British Pakistani bullied at school for being brown, chubby and gay, who has remade himself into a Grindr-addicted gym bunny, changed his name to Billy, and chases hook-ups with white men. His is a world of corporate-sponsored Pride, virtue-signalling colleagues he suspects of being covertly racist, and endless, sometimes degrading, app-fuelled sexual encounters than never lead to the relationship he craves.

Zafar, played by Esh Alladi, is claiming asylum in the UK; his lover was murdered by his own father when he discovered them having sex, and the same fate awaits him if he’s returned to his village near Lahore. He lives an impoverished existence in council accommodation in Hounslow, advised by his lawyer to shore up his case by photographing himself in an LGBTQ+ scene that couldn’t feel more foreign to him.
Ingeniously directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike, the two men are entirely unaware of each other for the first half, narrating their lives from opposite sides of the stage. Max Johns’ set does the heavy lifting here: a circle split into two halves that slowly revolve, the gap between them never quite closing, two Londoners in completely different Britains. When they finally collide at Pride, the play becomes a romance.
It’s very clever - and cleverer still when you realise the Bush’s main house is a bare, flexible room reconfigured for every production, and for the most part it works.
Then, in the final stretch, the fiction breaks. The Bollywood ending the play has been teasing is snatched away, and the actors step out of character to read real names and statistics at us. It’s a bold move and a divisive one, I could feel the room split between those moved by it and those, like me, who felt the drama had already made the case more powerfully than any data could. When a play trusts its characters for eighty minutes and then reaches for a spreadsheet, it’s worth asking what it thinks we missed.

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And then there was the cheering. When Bilal and Zafar agreed how many bad things England has done, the house erupted in cheers - and I wondered why a room full of beneficiaries of one of the most tolerant societies on earth was quite so eager to despise it. Zafar’s predicament is not trivial; the play is right that it’s harrowing, and a country that takes a man fleeing that seriously and offers him refuge is doing something genuinely good. If I arrived in Pakistan bereft and penniless, would I be housed, fed, given money each month and a free lawyer to help me navigate their legal system? In a country where gay men are murdered just for being gay, does English culture really seem so egregious?

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Another seismic week for London. Yet another Prime Minister on the way, and another heatwave that feels concerningly hot. I’m writing from sunny Spain where I’ve come to spend a few days with my parents. I thought I’d take advantage of the fact that I have some time at the moment and should make sure I’m spending it on quality time with the people I love. I know it’s a massive cliché that however old you are as soon as you return back to the family home you revert to your teenage self but let’s face it, it’s true. I have raised my voice a few times in irritation, and had it done back to me. I put a wet sandy towel on my mother’s clean washing and I wouldn’t say she exactly screamed at me, but it felt close, and I was immediately a sulky teenager again.

I’ve been reading The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, which so far is great, if you like Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout I think you’d like this too. Next on my list are two I must have read three or four times each, Vanished Years by Rupert Everett and Lynn Barber’s seminal Education. If I get time I’ll re-read Martin Amis’ memoir Experience which is in my top ten books of all time.
Every week in Letter from London I list all the most fun things to do in the capital that week at the end of the letter, but because I often paywall the last part it’s not always available to everyone and maybe, just maybe, not everyone makes it to the end of my newsletter every week (Can you imagine?). So, I thought this week I’d spoil you with the ultimate guide for summer in the capital and hopefully tempt some of you to upgrade your subscription with my incredible recommendations – I know, cunning of me. From the best outdoor pools to the hottest books and most sought-after restaurants and insider tips for London in the summer, here goes, and don’t forget, if you have a paid subscription to LfL you get this stuff EVERY WEEK.

EATING

Canal, Westbourne Park. Seasonal small plates and a ‘table cheeseburger’. The nice stretches of the Grand Union Canal are one of London’s great summer secrets and a seat on the terrace here on a warm evening is hard to beat. Arrive early, order something cold and watch the narrowboats drift by. Canal

Petersham Nurseries, Richmond. An absolute must on a summer’s day and the fields around it are perfect for a picnic too. I tend to go to the café rather than the much more formal restaurant as I don’t want lunch to take ages on a hot day. The shop is amazing for interesting things to put in your garden and your home. Petersham Nurseries

The Elderflower Press, Hammersmith. As a west London girl nothing gives me greater joy than a sunny day spent walking by the river in Hammersmith where I grew up. This café is a dream. Delicious salads, quiches coffees and cakes to eat in or take away. One of my all-time favourite places. The Elderflower Press

The Waterman’s Arms, Barnes. Regular readers of LfL know I love this place and it’s position on the river in Barnes makes for a great sunny day out. The Waterman’s Arms

Kubo Garden, Hackney Wick. A walk around Hackney Wick is high on my list of things I love to do in London in the summer. Pick up a bánh mì from Kubo Garden and explore the canals, street art and converted warehouses. Continue along the Lea towards Walthamstow Marshes if you’re feeling energetic. Kubo Garden

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Rochelle Canteen, Shoreditch. Hidden inside a former school playground, Margot Henderson’s Rochelle Canteen feels like one of London’s best-kept secrets and is high up in my top five London restaurants. Seasonal British cooking served in a quiet courtyard that somehow manages to make you forget you’re in the middle of east London. 10/10 no notes. Rochelle Canteen

The Towpath Cafe, Haggerston. A tiny waterside café on Regent’s Canal where half the pleasure is watching cyclists, dog walkers and paddleboarders glide past while you linger over lunch, the Towpath Café Haggerston is always a good idea. The Towpath Cafe

The River Cafe, Hammersmith. A table on the terrace of the The River Café is the ultimate summer ticket. Fresh pasta, and Italian delicacies like crab tagliarini and roasted wild sea bass. Leave room for homemade gelato. Not cheap, but worth it, especially on a special occasion. The River Cafe

SWIMMING

One of the best things about London is our lidos. You’ve got Brockwell park Lido, Tooting Bec Lido (my absolute fave, an art deco gem and it’s HUGE, best first thing before it gets seriously crowded, London Fields Lido, Charlton Lido, Finchley Lido and Richmond Lido.
We’ve also got the fantastic open air pool in the Oasis Sports centre in Covent Garden and of course the iconic pools at Hampstead Heath, plus open-water swimming in the Serpentine. For something even more adventurous, head east. Open-water swimming in the Royal Docks feels surprisingly continental and offers some of the best skyline views in the city.
One of the most exciting additions to London’s swimming scene this summer is Sea Lanes Canary Wharf, London’s first Olympic sized floating lido. With saunas, a clubhouse hot showers and lockers.
And this summer, for the first time in decades, Londoners can legally swim in a designated section of the Thames near Teddington lock. Water quality is monitored weekly by the Environment Agency through the end of the swimming season in late September.
Or if you’re not so much of a wild swimmer, head over to the Berkeley Rooftop, as the popular Capri in the City poolside pop-up returns for the summer. The rooftop is transformed with lemon trees, Mediterranean-inspired décor and a menu celebrating the dolce vita life style. Feast on grilled courgette trofie pasta with pistachio and the Amalfi lemon sorbet served in the best way, inside a lemon. Minimum spend £50 per person and sunbeds on a first come first served basis.
I spend a lot of time on the Acton riviera at the massive wonderful outdoor pool at David Lloyd. Having an outdoor pool at a gym near you is life-changing.

ON THE THAMES

Paddleboarding in Richmond is sublime on a sunny day. The stretch between Richmond and Teddington is one of the prettiest parts of the river, lined with willows, rowing clubs, grand houses and the occasional heron. Drift past Marble Hill House, wave at walkers on the towpath and enjoy the rare sensation of seeing London at a much slower pace. If you’re a beginner, don’t worry, the river is relatively calm here and there are plenty of companies offering lessons and equipment hire. I’m not particularly good and I’ve never fallen in.

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Most people associate sailing with the Solent or the south coast, but London has a surprisingly vibrant sailing scene. The Docklands Sailing and Watersports Centre in the Isle of Dogs offers beginner courses throughout the summer and is a fantastic way to spend a weekend. There is something deeply satisfying about learning how to harness the wind and navigate a boat, particularly with the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf rising around you.

If there is one sport synonymous with the Thames, it's rowing. The river is its spiritual home and summer is the perfect time to give it a go. Clubs from Putney to Richmond offer introductory sessions for complete beginners, and you'll quickly gain a new appreciation for the extraordinary skill of the rowers who seem to glide effortlessly along the water. The stretch between Putney and Mortlake, famous for hosting the Boat Race, is particularly atmospheric. Be warned though: what looks graceful from the riverbank is considerably harder than it appears.

CULTURE

The hottest exhibition of the summer is Frida Kahlo at the Tate Modern. Bringing together paintings, photographs and personal artefacts, it explores how Frida Kahlo transformed herself from an artist into one of the most recognisable cultural figures in the world. Expect queues, excellent tote bags and a great many flower crowns.

Midnight matinees at the Globe Theatre are nothing less than magical. You can choose between A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It and watch the sun darken over the river. Nothing feels more quintessentially London than this.

The Barbican’s outdoor cinema is another summer favourite. Films under the stars inside one of London’s most dramatic architectural settings, yes please. Brutalism has never looked better than when illuminated by a giant cinema screen on a balmy evening.

The Somerset House Summer Series remains one of the capital’s most civilised cultural traditions. Music in a magnificent eighteenth-century courtyard, a drink in hand and the sun slowly setting behind the grand façade. The line-up is always eclectic, but half the pleasure is simply being there.

The Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre is a total joy on a hot summer’s night. Arrive early, spread out a picnic in the park and settle in as daylight gradually gives way to dusk. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about outdoor theatre and nowhere does it better than Regent’s Park.

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Festival-wise choose between BST Hyde Park, All Points East, Pride, and make sure you don’t miss Notting Hill Carnival this year – it’s the 60th anniversary so particularly special

We’ve also got Wimbledon, obvs. Even if you don’t have tickets, the atmosphere around SW19 is infectious and watching the action from Henman Hill with a punnet of strawberries feels like a very British summer ritual.

And best of all, we’ve got the World Cup. There is nothing quite like a major international tournament in London. Pub gardens overflow, strangers become temporary friends and for a few glorious weeks the entire country convinces itself that football really might be coming home. Come on England!

SUMMER READS

Everyone’s talking about John of John, the third novel by Booker Prize-winning Scottish-American author Douglas Stuart. The book tells the story of Cal, a young art school graduate who is forced to return from Edinburgh to his remote, tight-knit island community to face his domineering father, John. The book explores religious devotion, the strains of father-son relationships, the isolation of rural life, and the hidden realities of queer men in repressive communities. I’ll be reading.

The new Maggie Farrell, Land sounds phenomenal. It’s a sweeping, historical and political family saga set in 1865 that follows an Irish mapmaker, Tomás who is tasked by the British to survey post-Famine Ireland and instead draws a dissident, true map of the land and its history.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, regular LfL readers know how I feel about this book, it’s exceptional.

Cool Machine by Number one New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead is pitched as an ‘exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York’. Think capitalism, criminal adventures and heists.

Big Little Truths, by Liane Moriarty, the sequel to Big Little Lies, promises to be the summer page turner

Lázár, by 23-year-old Swiss author Nelio Biedermann is getting mentioned by all the right people. A gothic family saga, it traces the dramatic decline of an aristocratic Hungarian family across three generations from the waning days of the Habsburg Empire to the 1956 anti-communist revolution. I haven’t read it yet.

Whistler, by Ann Patchett also a lot of buzz around it. I’ve never read anything by Patchett strangely so I’ll try this one.

By the way, do you know of a great independent London bookshop I can link to for online book purchases? I’d love to support someone who needs it.

That’s this week’s Letter from London. Join my subscriber chat and tell me what you’re looking forward to doing in the capital this summer.

London is one of the most beautiful cities ever built. Not because it was planned by a single genius, but because generation after generation left behind something worth keeping. The Romans gave us walls. The medieval city gave us churches and guild halls; Christopher Wren rebuilt London after the Great Fire; the Georgians gave us terraces and squares so elegant that tourists still photograph them centuries later, and the Victorians gave us railway stations that look like cathedrals. And then, in the last fifty years, we seem to have forgotten entirely how to build beautifully.
From my office window in Acton I can see tower blocks multiplying rapidly all at different heights like a game of 3D Tetris. Buildings that look less as though they were designed by architects than built by clumsy toddlers playing with Lego.
Endless glass, metal, coloured cladding, brutish reinforcements. Walking around feels like you’re in a dystopian hellscape where at any point one of the giant transformer buildings might come to life and crush you like a nightmarish scene from The Day of the Triffids. Nothing about these buildings are sympathetic to the city’s architectural style. There is also a complete homogeneity to them, looking at them you could be anywhere.

Of course, we need more housing in London, and if these were all affordable flats built to help solve the housing crisis I could understand it. But the truth is that the majority (69%) of new housing developments are for the private market, often marketed as high-end or “luxury” to meet profit margins, and marketed abroad.
In a decision that I completely understand, because it was stopping any homes being built at all, Sadiq Khan watered down the imperative for developers building housing developments to provide 35 per cent social housing and capped it at 20 per cent. But anecdotally, I hear developers are struggling to make even that lower proportion work.
‘The industry responds by creating increasingly ungainly structures, more and more cheaply,’ says Ben Derbyshire, architect and current chair of HTA Design LLP and a former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects. ‘Add salami slicing of procurement where different designers are commissioned for successive phases, and aesthetic coherence disappears too.
‘That has been exacerbated by a tendency to milk the private sector beyond its capacity to pay for exacting and not always sensible standards, whilst also providing for public good (including social housing) which the state used to pay for. We have ended up with less for everyone. This is truly a false economy and I argue that if you want high quality living accommodation for the urban poor, you need to make public money available for it. With so little being built either for sale or social rent, more and more people end up in hotels and HMOs which in the end costs the public purse much more. It's time for a radical re-think.’
Of course, this isn’t just about building, but whether Britain still believes in itself. Which development built since 2000 will Londoners be campaigning to save in 2226? I can’t think of one.
John Darlington, Director of Projects for World Monuments Britain agrees. ‘London is an ancient place. It has been around for over two millennia, from its Roman origins as Londinium, by way of Viking Lundenwic and Saxon Lundenburh through to elegant Georgian squares and statements of Victorian civic pride. Each of those periods has added a new architectural dimension to the city, deepening the warp and weft of its character.
’It is also a refreshingly modern city, drawing inspiration from its past but not beholden to it. Nothing ever stays the same and it is healthy to challenge what has happened before. Every generation has the right to leave its own mark on the capital, just as previous generations did. But there is a difference between architecture that engages with London’s past and architecture that ignores it. The danger is not change. The danger is uniformity. When buildings could stand as easily in Doha, Shenzhen or Singapore as they could on the Thames, London begins to lose the very quality that makes it special. It becomes Anywhereville. The Romans had a name for that quality: genius loci - the spirit of place. It is the distinctive character that makes somewhere unmistakably itself. London’s future depends not on resisting change, but on ensuring that every new layer added to the city strengthens rather than diminishes that spirit. Buildings can be replaced. A city’s genius loci cannot.’
The problem isn't that Britain has run out of talented architects. It is that architects no longer appear to be the people making the decisions. The modern city is increasingly shaped by spreadsheets rather than vision. Buildings are optimised for planning approval, construction costs and investor returns rather than beauty, permanence or civic pride.

Thomas Heatherwick, whose project Humanise campaigns to end the spread of boring soulless buildings says, ‘The answer isn’t too hard or expensive to achieve. We don’t need buildings to be crazy shapes to be generous to society. It’s fine to build boxes. We just need to focus a little love on the bottom two floors of the outsides of these boxes. We need to design the windows and walls and doorways to have more joy, details, plants and fascination. Rather than destroying them again in a generation, because no one cares about them, these will be the joyful places your great-great granddaughter will fight to save, and instead want to restore, renovate and care for.’
Rather than focusing on the attractiveness of our architecture, we seem hell-bent on turning our beautiful city from one of the wonders of the western world into some kind of bootleg Dubai-on-Thames.
It seems amoral to besmirch a city like ours, which is filled with architectural masterpieces by visionaries like Wren who created St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Hospital Chelsea, the Old Royal Naval College Greenwich, and the south front of Hampton Court Palace, not to mention the 50 other churches he built, altered or rebuilt after the Great Fire of London. Works of art each and every one, and he and his protégé Hawksmoor created more.

We are also spoilt in our great capital with an abundance of exquisite Georgian town houses. What could be more visually pleasing than the sight of an immaculate row of perfect red brick Georgian houses with their symmetrical and handsome sash windows and semi-circular fan lights above the door?
Fournier Street in Spitalfields where the great artist duo Gilbert and George live is for me the pinnacle of Georgian craftsmanship and splendour. Who could come away from a visit to that Street without their heart singing with joy at the sheer beauty of it?

Following the Industrial Revolution, the Victorian era was defined by its intricate and elaborate architectural styles. St. Pancras Station, Tower Bridge and the Houses of Parliament are perfect examples of Victorian grandeur, designed in a Gothic style.
The Victorian era also brought with it the introduction of mass housing, which is why most of us in London will have many examples of Victorian architecture on our street. These houses were built for the burgeoning middle-classes who were for the first time becoming financially comfortable. Such a tradition of building for the masses was maintained throughout the Edwardian and inter-war periods where detached and semi-detached houses characterise so much of our suburban landscape.
Some of the most famous examples of post-war architecture in London include the Barbican, which was built on an area destroyed by the Blitz, as well as Trellick Tower, designed by brutalist architect Erno Goldfinger in 1972. Whether you love or hate brutalism – I love it – these distinctive and characterful towers were thoughtfully built with inhabitants in mind and have stood the test of time.

Advocates of our new towers say they regenerate areas socially and culturally. But anyone who has spent more than three minutes in North Acton or Nine Elms and experiences the spiritually desolate atmosphere of these buildings and their generic shops knows this is complete fiction.

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I’ve spent the last 25 years building a career in the media. I didn’t know anyone when I started out and no one ever sat me down and gave me any advice. It’s a tough profession to navigate, and it’s getting even harder to break into. Most of what I know I learned by getting it wrong, repeatedly, in front of people. So here is everything I wish I’d been told, offered in the spirit of sparing someone a few of the bruises.

1) Work hard at school. When I was hiring I never once looked at anyone’s GCSEs, but A-levels matter, because they’re the first evidence that someone can keep trying at something over years rather than weeks. Should you go to university? Honestly, I’m not sure. I learnt very little in my three years studying English literature at UCL that I hadn’t already learned in school. I’m in touch with very few people I met there (I’m talking one or two people I see less than once a year). I think we received around eight hours of teaching a week – hardly worth getting in £50k worth of debt for.
But, university opens you up in clever ways, and gives you the time to work out who you are and, I would argue, this can make you a more open-minded, interesting person. If you’ve got three brilliant A-Levels and a passion, I’d highly recommend it. Otherwise, employers these days will completely understand why you gave it a miss. You don’t need a degree for media and journalists don’t think highly of media degrees I’m afraid. (However, if you find a course that will teach you all of the essentials of starting a podcast and growing a video channel and analysing data and moving fast on social - all the practical hands-on elements of modern media, I would grab it with both hands).

2) Your first job is almost certainly not the job you want. Do it brilliantly anyway. Work like mad, get on with as many people as you can without becoming exhausting about it, keep a sense of humour, and don’t whine about the dull tasks, because the dull tasks are how you learn. You are the least important person in the building and everything anyone hands you is a chance to prove otherwise. You know almost nothing yet. That isn’t an insult, it’s just the truth. Be humble.

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3) Someone senior will be short with you, or cold, or will fail entirely to notice your obvious dazzling brilliance. Don’t take it to heart. They are probably drowning, and your work probably wasn’t as good as you thought, for reasons you can’t yet see because you can’t see much yet. If you’re told to re-do something, say thank you, re-do it, and save the crying for the bus home. None of this is personal (yet, by the end it will be). When you’re a senior executive you need to be able to give people brief and honest feedback (good or bad) without any emotions coming anywhere near the conversation. When you are that person always giving feedback you’ll understand how important this is. ‘Thank you, I’ll do it now’ is an expression that can’t be over-used.

4) Go in. Yes, the commute is daylight robbery; my last full month of office travel cost me £154. Go in anyway. When you have the least to offer, being there is most of what you’ve got. Half the meetings worth being in the room for are the ones nobody invites you to, and you get into them by being visible and available the moment someone needs a spare pair of hands. Occasionally, when you’re in the office your boss will have a job they can’t find anyone else to do and with a massive stroke of luck through sheer desperation they will give this to you. These opportunities to shine are vanishingly rare and you need to be visible for your name to be chosen. And in a job market this brutal, with entry-level roles vanishing by the week, simply turning up tells people you’re invested.

5) Network. Meeting people for lunches and coffees is a wonderful way to build lifelong contacts and business friendships. These will be invaluable for the rest of your career. When you have a lot of friends in your industry your work is so much more fulfilling. Naturally, the more people you know the more people might think of you when an exciting new job comes up. Contacts are currency. Being well-connected is a massive string to your bow. As someone whose happy place is sitting behind a computer, it took me a long time to work out that a successful networking evening can be worth a week’s work in the office – at least. Many of the friends I made through work are now my favourite people, and you get to meet them on work time. A win-win.

6) Once you’ve established yourself as an unbelievably helpful good egg who will always stay late to support a colleague or cancel plans once an office crisis comes up, you can move to the next level. Try and find someone whose career you admire in the office and make yourself indispensable to them (this person is probably your manager). At times in these relationships it can be tempting to think you are doing a lot of their job for them, but this is the wrong way to think. They are allowing you to learn how to do the job you want and this is an amazing gift. Do as much of their work as they will allow you to do. Be grateful.

7) Be nice to everyone. You don’t know what people are going through. However stressed you are, there is never an excuse to take it out on someone more junior than you and if you ever do this you should immediately apologise. Have a moral code of how you treat people and never let the stresses or culture of your workplace affect this. When mistakes happen accept the blame gracefully and never try to blame others. Everyone makes mistakes, it’s how you react to them that matters.
Occasionally, I’m talking once a year, you can tell someone to F off. This should be used sparingly and never on someone junior to you, but we’re all human and sometimes people completely take the piss. Show the world you’re not a doormat. People will notice you doing this and know not to push you too far.

8) You hate your colleague or even worse your boss, what do you do? This is hard and unfortunately this will definitely happen, probably quite often. I coined the term ‘psycho-distancing’ which is when you don’t let someone you strongly dislike/hate affect you emotionally. Keep them at as big a distance as possible. There are always a few unbelievably annoying people in offices that you will need to learn to distance yourself from. If desperate and it won’t harm your career too much to be rude to them, see No 7. Usually it would harm your career sadly so suck it up. They’re probably under pressure somewhere in their life you don’t understand. In five years time, they’ll be a funny story. It’s hard though, probably the hardest part of trying to navigate your career.
Sometimes you might feel your boss just hates you. Check with colleagues your fears aren’t irrational and if not, look for a different job.

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For the last ten years I’ve been working flat-out, latterly as Chief Content Officer of the Evening Standard. By the end I was in charge of everything from the digital operation - including a 24 hour a day news website, video channels, social channels, over 15 newsletters - to editing a weekly paper, to maintaining excellent relationships with stakeholders and external contacts, to helping bring in commercial revenue. It was important I was regularly out at events representing the company and I needed to hold my own events. I managed a big team and any problems anyone had would inevitably cross my desk.

For years, I had to be at my desk at 7am in Liverpool Street, and often still be out at a work event that night. At 9pm daily, including weekends, I’d sign off the news splash for the website and I was always on call if a big story broke. It was a job that required relentless stamina and focus. I could work from home here and there, but mainly I was at my desk in the office, I needed to lead from the front.
I also have two children, who are now 7 and 14. And of course, when I was weighing up whether or not to leave my job, spending more time with them was a major factor.
When you’re a working mother you often feel guilty that you’re not spending enough time with your children. I was always conscious that mothers who didn’t work, or were able to work from home much more might judge me for not making the football match, or the talk about the school trip, or making the cake for the cake sale, or never helping with the PTA or the second-hand clothes sale, or helping with anything, really. I was always conscious that there are two types of mothers – those that work and those that don’t. Was I wrong to feel that judgement sometimes, that there were two camps and I was in the morally dubious one? I’m honestly not sure.
I thought I was a pretty good mother anyway. Understanding, emotionally available, upbeat, predictable, no mood swings. All of which might be true, and none of which is quite the same as being there. There were better mothers out there, measured in the only currency that really counts with a young child, which is time and emotional presence.

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I began to wonder whether my USP as a mother (say yes to everything – the extra ice-cream, more TV, an unwise number of sweets) might be because I was tired and the sound of kids crying upsets me, so it was easier for me, not better for them, to always give in. Plus, because I didn’t have so much time with them, I wanted it to be perfect and that meant them being happy. I always say it’s because I wasn’t disciplined really as a child, so I don’t know how to do discipline, that I let the kids slightly walk all over me and more often than not get their own way. But was I just being lazy? Or has it just taken a long time for the penny to drop that spoiling your child and letting them do what they want all the time isn’t a kind thing to do.
Although during those years I was a very busy mother, I was still a good mother. And I wasn’t doing it all alone, far from it. My husband has always done half of everything with me and I also had the world’s best nanny whose kind, sunny nature adds so much to all of our lives.
But I wasn’t perfect and I definitely have regrets.

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London restaurants have become pretty expensive, for all the reasons we know and understand. I spent over £150 recently at a new opening which I won’t name and shame because I went on the Sunday of a bank holiday weekend, so it wouldn’t be fair. But despite rave reviews by the critics it was expensive and bad. Then, the other day I went to THE MOST AMAZING Chinese restaurant on the Goldhawk road that my friend the food writer Ben McCormack had recommended to me called Mr Dumpling and for £50 for two (admittedly we shared a beer two starters and a main, but still) I had one of the best Chinese meals of my life. LfL readers, you must go. Anyway, that inspired me to ask some brilliant London food writers to recommend some cheap and chic London eats for those days when you want to eat something delicious AND affordable. You’re welcome! I’d love to hear all of your favourites in the comments.

Ben McCormack
@mrbenmccormack

Bleecker Burger

I was tempted to put McDonald’s on this list; years ago, a personal trainer told me that the Double Cheeseburger gives the most protein per penny on the high street, plus Delia Smith says that McDonald’s is delicious if you’re in the right mood. But the patties at Bleecker are even more delicious and just about give change from a tenner – though I always find that one is never enough. Order the blue cheeseburger for the most flavour and, if you do eat two, you won’t need a side order of fries.
Various locations, bleecker.co.uk

Paul Rothe & Son

Family-owned since 1900, this Marylebone classic could appear in any number of best lists, not just cheap eats: best British, best cafés and, obviously, best sandwiches. This is not the place to come for cross-cultural flavour combinations held in artisan sourdough – instead, it’s all about coronation chicken or egg mayonnaise and anchovy ladled onto doorstep slices of squishy white bread, chased down with a bag of crisps and a slice of millionaire’s shortbread. Eat in and it feels like an English version of Katz’s Delicatessen.
35 Marylebone Lane, London, W1U 2NN @paulrotheandson

Regency Café

Fifteen or so years ago I rented a flat in Dolphin Square, the famous 1930s block of flats in Pimlico. I blame the Regency for the two stone in weight I gained in the 18 months that I lived down the road. Fears that the recent change in ownership would turn the Regency into a Disneyfied version of a greasy spoon have proved unfounded. The full English is still the best fry-up in London, though perhaps lay off the fried bread and chips if you don’t want to pile on the pounds like I did (also don’t eat here twice a day, no matter how close you live).
17-19 Regency Street, London, SW1P 4BY, regencycafe.co.uk

Xi’an BiangBiang Noodles

There are four branches of this north Chinese noodle specialist in central London; I’ve only chosen the South Ken outpost because it’s closest to where I live. Unusually for a Chinese restaurant, Xi’an BiangBiang are all dog friendly, which makes the Gloucester Road branch very handy after a circuit of Kensington Gardens. I always order the pork dumplings in spicy sauce then the dandan noodles with pork mince; Barney my cockapoo always gets plenty of strokes from the lovely staff, and often a bowl of poached chicken on the house.
29 Gloucester Road, London, SW7 4PL, xianbiangbiangnoodles.com

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Sam Wilson
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Substack: baldflavours.substack.com

Scotti’s Snack Bar (Everything under a tenner)
With floors like a bloomed chocolate bar and no menu, Scotti’s Snack Bar has been doing the Lord’s work since 1967. Family owned, brother Al and Max preside over the Bob Mortimer of London joints — a National Treasure, only unloved by categorically bad people. Above all, it’s cappelletti in brodo that embodies Scotti’s love for the craft and its customer, taking days to prepare, resulting in a crystal-clear broth constellated with chicken fat and bobbing with textbook pasta work, served simply with a buttered, crusty white roll. You cannot spend a better £7 anywhere else in this neck of the woods. 38 Clerkenwell Green, London EC1R 0DU

Suuyar (£10-15)
Kolawole Ajayi’s original pitch on Chourmet Road in Peckham is my favourite, producing the finest suya in London to date. It’s slices of beef marinated in a peanut-based rub, fortified with garlic, ginger, a wisp of cloves, fistfuls of chilli, and several other secret ingredients, which are smoked then barbecued. A similar seasoning called yaji—like a dehydrated peanut satay sauce—is then applied throughout the cooking process, with Kolawole doting on it at every stage. You can’t miss it—follow your nose toward the smog of spice and rendering beef fat, and you’ll soon find a queue of devoted regulars and the curious, drooling, uninitiated.
Read the review | 150C Rye Lane, Choumert Rd, London SE15 4RZ www.suuyar.com

Chinese Gourmet (£8-£15)

Just south of Canary Wharf, among all the glass, steel, concrete and Gilets, is Chinese Gourmet—a dinky little wooden shed on the Isle of Dogs rattling out Xi’an and Sichuan dishes to a people who likely cannot believe their luck. The kitchen puts the freneticism of an ‘80s stock exchange to shame: amidst the clatter and steam is the slap of noodles, hand-pulled to order; the thud and tremor of cleavers, all set to the white noise of deep-fat fryers. Get the chunky beef with belts of biang biang noodles, the rou jia mo with pork belly, cumin lamb noodles and prawn wontons, resembling brains vac-packed in silk. Wash it down with a sour plum juice.
Read the review | 60 Skylines Village, London E14 9TS

Antonio’s deli (around a tenner)

If you’ve got a tenner and a nonna missing from your life, go and see Priscilla at Antonio Caffè & Restaurant. Making use of the flood defences of imported Italian stock, Priscilla and the team are taking care of Lewisham like family. The slabs of lasagne are legendary, as are the absolute units of arancini, and Priscilla’s vegetable and lentil soup is rumoured to have healing properties. The ‘pasta with sausage and friarelli’ is a constant go-to: thick coins of Tuscan sausage laced with turnip greens are jumbled with whatever short(ish) patsa there is. For something sweet, get the ciambella—imagine powdered-sugar doughnuts, made by somebody who actually loves you
Read the review | 25 Lewis Grove, London SE13 6BG www.antoniodelicatessen.co.uk

Amira Arasteh
@Amira58

1. Lanzhou Lamian Noodle Bar, Leicester Square
Almost incognito, for reasons of its Leicester Square location (neighbours include Angus Steakhouse and Wok To Walk) and its unassuming shop front. I recently took a friend and despite knowing me, my taste in food and solid food recommendations (cough, modesty, hi, hello 👋), she had dubious written all over her face. Another story as soon as the steaming bowls of beef noodles arrived, however. Even the lady taking our order, transformed her hurried demeanor into a huge smile when she realised what we ordered. Sliced and stewed beef lamian, by the way. Throw in a lamb skewer as a snack. https://www.noodlebaronline.co.uk (around £12)

2. Dotori, Finsbury Park

Whether you’re stumbling out of Rowan’s, grabbing a pre-game bite or have made the journey especially for food, Dotori has your back. The Korean Japanese restaurant has long been renowned for good food that’ll far from break the bank. Choose from dishes such as tteok-bokki, donburi, jjige, bibimbap, sushi and more – and unlike many places in the city, forget the heart palpitations as you wait for the bill. Its no frills, mind, and cash only – but it hasn’t disappointed in 15+ years.
💰 £11 for a bibimbap. Dotori

3. ICCO, Fitzrovia

Italians, shoot me now, I can already see the looks of complete horror as I openly admit: I don’t think a pizza needs to be Neapolitan or sourdough to satisfy. There, I said it. With pizza places opening left, right and centre across the city, prices are often a reflection of viral trends and rent costs, ICCO in Fitzrovia is an institution and the pizza starts from £3.95.
💰 £3.95 for a marinara pizza. Icco.com

4. Zeytoona, Bethal Green
With street food costs rising along with everything else at the moment, a humble sandwich can end up being £10-15 nowadays. At Zeytoona, a Palestinian spot in Bethnal Green, you can still grab yourself a good falafel wrap for a fiver. Simple but satisfying – and you can always add halloumi for £1 more. .
💰 £5 for a falafel wrap.

Margaux Black


The Baring, Shoreditch
This place is not considered a “cheap eat” usually, however they do a weekday lunch special that most definitely fits into this category. It’s a beautifully done up gastro-pub by Shoreditch Park, filled with natural light and very cozy, the smaller sister restaurant to the Kerfield Arms in South London. It’s £12 or £15 with a glass of house wine or a pint, what the special is changes about once a month but it has truly never been a disappointment and is an absolute steal. Ideal for a work from home Friday lunch. The Baring

Toconoco, Haggerston
Toconoco is a tiny Japanese cafe in Haggerston right on the canal. It has a real family feel; in fact, they advertise themselves as kid-friendly. To be honest, that usually wouldn’t be a selling point for me, so the fact that I love it says a lot about the food! Their onigiri are made fresh and are so freaking tasty. They also serve Ochazuke, which is one of my favorite Japanese dishes - a light tea and broth mixture poured over rice - and it’s surprisingly hard to find elsewhere. It’s just simple, clean, authentic Japanese food. Toconoco.com

Mersin Tantuni, Dalston
I only discovered this place recently and I’m actually annoyed with myself, considering I’ve lived in the area for nearly four years. It’s a family-run Turkish spot with excellent quality, friendly service, and big personalities from the owners; it really feels like you’re dining in someone’s home. They offer a £5 Tantuni (a small, spiced meat wrap) that is incredibly flavorful. Their yogurt-covered version was actually featured by Yotam Ottolenghi; a clipping of which the owner will proudly show you! Mersin Tantuni

The Macbeth
The venue itself isn’t new, but it’s new as a place I’d recommend for a meal. What was once a standard pub is now serving stellar Portuguese and Northern Spanish food at a great price. The prawn fritters are moreish, and they serve a fantastic Bifana; the famous pork sandwich Anthony Bourdain raved about in No Reservations years ago. (I’ve actually eaten at the original spot in Lisbon, and this pub does a stellar version). Between that and the peri-peri chicken, you can’t go wrong. The vibe is laid-back and comfortable, but the food quality is seriously impressive and affordable.
The Macbeth

Rebecca Seal
www.welldonenewsletter.com

Bancone
There’s not much better, to me, than sitting at the counter at Bancone Covent Garden, on my own, with a glass of white wine and a plate of silk handkerchiefs (wide ribbons of handmade egg pasta) dressed with an egg yolk and walnut butter (£13.50). Bancone

The Blythe Hill Tavern
As proper old-school boozers become harder and harder to find, it’s nice to see one which has innovated just enough but not too much to lose its character (or regulars). The Blythe Hill Tavern is just down the road from where I live in South London, on the border of Catford and Forest Hill, and instead of going bouji, they kept the pints, crisps, beer mats and shirt-and-tie barmen, and a couple of years ago invited Van Dough, an excellent sourdough pizza van (with a wood-fired oven inside) to park in the front yard every Thursday and Friday evening. The Blythe Hill Tavern

Tonkotsu
There are branches of Tonkotsu scattered all over London, but my favourite is the one perched above Rye Lane in Peckham. Not only are the noodles unfinishably generous and very good value, but they also do kids’ bento boxes that are customisable and suitable for the fussiest of smaller foodies. Tonkotsu.com

Ganapati
Loud, bright, colourful and occasionally mildly chaotic, Ganapati serves south Indian inspired dishes - I can never resist the masala dosa (£14.50) and a side of buttery dal. Ganapati.com

Kara Buffrey
Kara Buffrey Instagram

My London cheap eats roundup would probably have to start with Lina Stores - fresh pasta, genuinely classy interiors and consistently brilliant dishes without the eye-watering prices you normally get in central London. My go-to order is the Tagliolini con Limone di Amalfi e Zucchine, which is somehow still only around £8 for a really generous portion of pasta.

Manthan in Mayfair is another standout. Some of the dishes were honestly better than meals I’ve had at Michelin-starred restaurants, and considering the area, the pricing is surprisingly reasonable. Easily one of the best-value Indian spots in central London. Their four-course set lunch menu is £35.00 and includes dishes like Tandoori Salmon and Duck Seekh Kebab, which feels kind of absurd (and amazing!)

Rudy’s Pizza deserves a mention too because it absolutely slaps every single time. One of the nicest chain restaurants around and somewhere I end up going back to constantly - a proper Neapolitan pizza done right. My favourite is the Triple Pepperoni, which comes in under £16 and is massive, genuinely enough for two meals if you’re not starving.

Another favourite of mine is The Pepper Tree, a cute little Thai spot local to Clapham where I live. It’s family-owned, has been there for years and still feels like a neighbourhood gem. They also do a brilliant set lunch menu for £12.90, which includes prawn crackers, a starter, a main dish and a soft drink. My usual order is the drunken noodles, and the portions are huge so there’s almost always enough left over for the next day. They also own Eco - a charming restaurant around the corner which is also excellent value

Sudi Pigott
@sudifoodie
Www.sudibetterfoodie.substack.com

Le Garrick: French bistro 40 years young with excellent and huge Moule’s frites £18.00 in heart of Covent Garden

Le Cafe by Nicolas Rouzard in Burlington Arcade with divine decor that looks like it’s been designed by a haut patissier (it has, Nicolas Rouzard also runs pastry at The Connaught) the artichoke & mushroom soup in a brioche is haute comfort and a meal in itself £15.

Italo in Vauxhall is owned by Charlie, father of hip chef Jackson Boxer, has brilliant daily specials like a massive pan bagnat (salade nicoise sandwich) for £12 with plenty of anchovies (as author of newly published ‘Consider the Anchovy: a journey in pursuit of the little fish with the big flavour’ I feel duty bound to single out an anchovy dish). Attracts a hip, arty crowd with plenty of outdoor seating by Bennington Square garden.

Plus The Georgian in Balham for main course size starters including chicken livers with onion and pomegranate £13

That’s probably enough recommendations for the week so no editor’s picks this week. Comment if you got this far and noticed!

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Two years after winning an election landslide, Labour is polling at around 18 per cent, the lowest ever recorded for a governing party in modern British polling history. They can console themselves that if they’re about as popular as Lib Dems at a Millwall match, Keir Starmer has reached new, unfathomable levels of unpopularity, so much so that entire columns are now dedicated to working out why. At the football, at the darts, the chorus is the same: Keir Starmer’s a wanker.
Labour’s biggest problem is that everyone hates them for different reasons - the Gaza contingent, farmers, small business owners, publicans. The list goes on. The people who hate Labour the most, however, who feel most disenfranchised from the party, are the working class. Considering the Labour party was invented with the sole reason of championing them, this really is an existential problem.

Writing recently in Spiked, Tim Black put it well: Labour “is a party whose disdain for the views, values and demands of the nation’s working-class heartlands runs through it like Brighton through a stick of rock.”
The local elections were carnage. In London, Labour lost control of more than half its boroughs, and outer London is becoming politically volatile in ways the party still doesn’t seem to understand. Nowhere was this clearer than Havering, where Reform swept to power in one of the most dramatic results of the night. In outer east London, voters increasingly feel Labour has no grasp of the daily realities of crime, housing pressure, stretched public services and suburban aspiration.

We are about to see the Labour psychodrama play out in Makerfield, which Andy Burnham hopes to win to challenge Starmer for the leadership. Long seen as a safe seat, Wigan’s Makerfield has been Labour’s since its creation in 1983. This month, Reform won every council ward in the constituency, taking around half the vote. Labour trailed on little more than a quarter. Could Burnham be their knight in shining armour?

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Certainly he has the easy charm and charisma Starmer is so lacking, and he’s the only politician who enjoys positive poll ratings. His success as Manchester Mayor and his popularity in the North could certainly threaten Reform’s stranglehold. In a recent YouGov poll, 34 per cent of people said they thought Burnham would do a better job than Starmer.
He also appears to also be able to cross idealogical borders. Recent polling by Stack Data Strategy found that over 30 per cent of current Green voters would be more likely to vote Labour if Burnham was in charge, as well as 19 per cent who said they would otherwise vote for Farage. Crucially, he is untainted by two torrid years of government for the Labour government.
In an act of brilliant political swordsmanship, Wes Streeting came out at the weekend and said Britain should rejoin the EU, something Burnham has said he dreams of, ensuring that Reform focuses on Labour’s position on European membership in a constituency where around 65 per cent voted Leave. This puts his arch rival Burnham in the invidious position of having to choose whether to side with the wider Labour membership, which is overwhelmingly pro-EU, or with voters in Makerfield. This is a treacherous tight-rope walk that is becoming painfully familiar to a party at odds with a growing portion of its formerly core base.
Reform has a natural strength in the white, working-class, post-industrial north. At the general election, Farage’s party won more votes in Makerfield than in any other Labour seat. And that presents a conundrum for a party whose language about Reform often sounds morally contemptuous of millions of former Labour voters. Labour MPs are quick to slam Reform as “divisive”, “toxic” ‘“far-right” with “dangerous right-wing politics”, but at some point, treating it as a hate-filled fringe movement becomes impossible when entire towns, councils and former heartlands are voting for it.
The problem is that Labour is run by highly educated metropolitan professionals who feel instinctive cultural disdain for the tastes, anxieties and aspirations of ordinary working people.

and instead becoming a party whose values appeal more to more affluent voters. At the 2024 election, for the first time ever, the ratio of Labour’s vote share among the richest voters (earning over £70,000) to the poorest (under £30,000) was larger than any other major party.
Despite their competitive fetishisation of their own working-class upbringings, the party’s MPs can’t seem to connect with actual working-class people, or even recognise who they are or what they want. Culture-washed and reprogrammed by Oxbridge, the price of their university-delivered social mobility is to be entirely adrift from the often disappointingly unprogressive priorities in ordinary voters lives.
Most have no experience whatsoever of the private sector, the engine that drives the economy, going straight from university into charity or think-tank roles, or straight into politics. They don’t understand how enterprise works and are suspicious of strivers. Burnham, who went straight into politics from Cambridge, is no different in this respect.
His comments in an interview with the New Statesman last year when he said that the government had to "get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets" aren’t encouraging, and his enthusiasm for higher taxes and increased government spending won’t necessarily be attractive to voters already buckling under record taxes.
For London, a change of direction would be welcome, but it isn’t certain Burnham isn’t offering something worse. The capital has always been Britain’s great aspiration machine. But increasingly, working people here feel punished by Labour - taxed to breaking point, their anxieties about crime dismissed as “right-wing narratives”. Knife crime, phone theft, shoplifting and anti-social behaviour are intensely lived realities in the outer boroughs, where Labour now feels less like a party championing working people than the political wing of the graduate metropolitan managerial class.

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Look at the tube, where so many people don’t pay that those who do must shoulder record fares to subsidise a system being brazenly cheated. Look at high-street shops where shoplifting on a record scale goes unpunished. Look at the sky-rocketing levels of phone theft, about which police say they can do nothing.
There is a growing sense that Labour is on the side of the wrong people and that working-class discomfort is treated as moral failure. This is why ULEZ became such a psychologically huge issue in outer London. Not because people “love pollution”, but because decisions were being made about their lives by affluent metropolitan people who neither understand nor experience them. The grooming gangs scandal is another example. It is incredible to many people, including the working-class communities who suffered most, that Labour figures still seem to think even discussing it is to give in to a far-right narrative.
If Burnham is to recapture respect from this demographic he’s going to have to change the party’s direction on policies which affect them, and fast.

That’s this week’s Letter from London. The Substack algorithm rewards any engagement whatsoever I’d love it if you could press the heart button or comment on this piece.

LETTER PICKS Things worth your time this week

SWIM: In exciting news, as of this month you can now officially swim in a designated section of the River Thames near Richmond. The stretch at Ham and Kingston is London’s first official, monitored wild swimming site, open for the season until September. Perfect for a boiling bank holiday weekend…

GO: The Nova Music Festival Exhibition is an immersive recreation of the October 7 atrocity. A must-see. www.novaexhibition.com

EAT Jackson Boxer, of Brunswick House, Dove and Orasay, is one of London’s most exciting chefs and his new Exmouth Market modern European restaurant Vesper is getting rave reviews.

WATCH: All 13 episodes of Kenneth Clark’s landmark 1969 series Civilisation are available on BBC iPlayer, allowing you to explore his quite extraordinary panoramic perspective on Western art and philosophy. You’ll thank me after, possibly not always during.

ASK ME What’s the best reclamation and antique shop in London? I can’t choose between Lassco and Retrouvious. Absolute treasure-troves. lassco.co.uk; retrouvious.com

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“I think the issue is that you’re too thin. And the thing is, it’s not funny if you’re too thin, it’s just Sex and the City all over again… if we lose it, we don’t have a clear voice.”

This is Jenni Konner, Lena Dunham’s then-best-friend and production partner, talking to her in the early days of filming Girls. It is one of the most revealing sentences in Dunham’s new memoir Famesick, and it’s to Dunham’s credit that she includes it. The horrible thing about it is not that Konner said it, but that she was right. The body was the differentiator. Girls was sold as realism, but realism was in many ways really just the alibi for the body. Without the body there was a show but it was Carrie Bradshaw again, and nobody needed that.
I wasn’t sure if I’d enjoy Lena Denham’s new memoir Famesick. I didn’t watch Girls at the time. I hated Sex and the City. I thought it’s portrayal of women as drawn in relation to their relationships/encounters with men and their obsession with shopping was reductive beyond belief and, dare I say it… unintelligent. Carrie’s moronic homilies at the end of every episode honestly made me want to vomit.
So when I saw a new version, for millennials - but, guess what, the protagonist this time isn’t thin (!), I developed a subliminal allergic reaction and didn’t watch it and didn’t like the way Lena Dunham was treated by the media but also didn’t understand her and so didn’t get involved. When your job is dissecting culture and celebrities you can of course pick and choose to some extent, although with hindsight I can see the Lena Dunham phenomena was quite a big thing to largely ignore.

For anyone else who wasn’t entirely paying attention, at the age of 24 Lena Dunham wrote directed and starred in HBOs drama Girls, known for its raw, often uncomfortable, and realistic portrayal of four young women in their twenties navigating life, careers, and relationships in New York City. Broadcast between 2012 and 2017, The show gained staggering amounts of attention for its examination of body politics and female sexuality, as well as a surprising amount of criticism. Lena Dunham widely became the accepted voice of her millennial generation and stratospherically famous as well as, less understandably, really hated. She was labelled racist, even a paedophile (!) and subjected to endless attacks about her body. The media frenzy and commentary around it all was ugly – even the ‘pioneering feminist website’ Jezebel put out a bounty for unretouched versions of a Vogue shoot she did to body-shame her. Which is really sick, because fat has always been a feminist issue.
Almost a decade later, her memoir Famesick is her way of reclaiming her narrative.
At first I was slightly repelled by it all and wrote on notes ‘Does anyone else find Famesick nauseating?’. But then I watched Girls and I got her a bit more so I deleted that note and carried on reading, and my goodness, she’s fascinating isn’t she. Not just for her, but what her experience teaches us about where we are as women.
Dunham is a case study in something the media, which is to say, in some part, me, has spent a long time profiting from. Confessional writing by women, especially confessional writing with a humiliating angle, traffics.
I know because I’ve commissioned it. A woman writing candidly about her body, he]r sex life, her failures as a mother, her abortion, her eating disorder, her humiliation, delivers numbers and engagement.

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Look at the front of our most popular national newspaper and not every day, but a lot of them, you’ll see a very defined pattern. Big important news story, then at the top of the splash, a woman saying something that is often presented as humiliating or ridiculous. I must declare responsibility here, I’m complicit in this. I’ve worked at a lot of these places, I’ve played the game. But it also makes me uncomfortable. Men don’t really do this. Why is that?
If you write these pieces you should be paid significantly more than you are, because everyone clicks and everyone stays on the page.
Dunham is a master of the form. Whether it’s sex, or feelings about her body, she really goes there. And while I admire her for it, it concerns me too. Because I don’t want women to define themselves entirely by their feelings about sex and their bodies and the way other people perceive them, and while a lot of what she says is incredibly valid and real and worth saying, there is a lot of that.
Sylvia Plath is usually credited for being the high priestess of female confessional writing, but Plath inherited the form from Virginia Woolf, who was the first to break the silence on the things it was ‘unfitting for a woman to say’ - her sexuality, her mental illness, abuse. The line runs from Woolf through Plath through Joan Didion through Tracey Emin through Liz Jones, and you can argue about whether it’s a tradition or a trap, but you can’t argue that it isn’t one of the most powerful continuous currents in women’s writing and art of the last hundred years. The thing that’s changed, and changed very recently, is the economics of it.
Woolf wrote her confessions in essays a few thousand people read. Plath wrote hers in poems. Didion built a forty-year career on the form and was, by the standards of her era, a giant. None of them were operating inside a system that could measure, in real time, exactly how many strangers had clicked. We are. The female confessional, in its current iteration, is no longer a literary tradition. It is a content category. It has a CPM. The more candid and exposing the disclosure, the better the content performs.

There’s a passage in Famesick that struck me. Dunham writes: ‘what I wanted was to be degraded, humiliated, punished just for the desire to be wanted’. It’s offered in the book as a confession about sex, and it is one. But read it again with the rest in mind. It is also, almost exactly, a description of the deal the confessional economy offers. Humiliation in exchange for the proof that you are wanted, that you trafficked, that you trended, that the dashboard moved. People were interested.
The reason she was punished so disproportionately is because she was so good at it. She was the most successful practitioner of a form that, with the explosion of social media and the internet, was being industrialised, and the punishment for being good at it turned out to be that the woman, the body, was deconstructed, examined, magnified, and returned to her in pieces.

In many ways, Dunham is a feminist icon of sorts, in others she is problematic. One of the reasons her work became contentious is that for all Girls’ apparent radicalism, the show remained focused on male attention. The women were no longer glossy fantasy figures like Carrie Bradshaw, elegantly floating through Manhattan in designer shoes, but nor had they escaped the central question: do men want me? Girls replaced gloss with realism, but the emotional architecture remained remarkably similar. Sex in Girls is awkward, transactional, humiliating, occasionally frightening, but still overwhelmingly important. The women’s identities are continually refracted through how men perceive them, reject them, desire them or fail to desire them.

There’s a horrible irony in that the thing that was so exciting in Girls – a woman depicted as a sexual being on screen who had a non-traditional body-shape, has actually brought Denham so much anguish and in many ways in terms of the brickbats she endured publicly, really came to define her in a way that is so unpleasant and regressive. I suppose it was naïve to think that a famous, successful woman could ever be allowed to break that unfathomable, unbreakable taboo.
I listened to Monica Lewinsky’s podcast ‘Reclaiming’ where she interviewed Dunham (this in itself an uncomfortable pairing – one has faced a lifetime of slut-shaming, the other continually fat-shamed – how far have we women come from our archtetypes?). When they weren’t gushing over each other (‘A fellow blow job queen and I never dreamed that I would meet the best’) it was an interesting conversation, although kind of painful how so much of it was related to their sex lives and how they have been perceived, although again, Dunham said something that stayed with me about Girls too, that I thought was notable: ‘It’s interesting to look back on Girls because I realise all of the sex, even though there’s lots of it and many iterations, is awkward, embarrassing, bordering on terrifying.’ What happened to sexual liberation?

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Dunham’s feminism also arrived at a moment when feminism itself was becoming intensely autobiographical. Earlier feminist movements had often focused on structures: work, money, reproduction, power, legal inequality. By the 2010s, feminism online increasingly revolved around the self - my trauma, my body, my experience, my sex life, my shame. Dunham became the avatar for that shift. She turned female interiority into spectacle with extraordinary skill. But it’s not clear that it moved us forward in a positive way.
Dunham embodied the idea that visibility itself was inherently radical. By putting a body onscreen that television had historically excluded, she bravely and commendably challenged conventional ideas about desirability and femininity, something for which we should be grateful. But it backfired, somehow, and this is the concerning part, Dunham’s body became the mechanism through which scrutiny intensified: and once again a woman was dissected and ridiculed through her physicality.
There is another tension in Famesick and underneath the entire Dunham phenomenon of female radical candour. She was architect and victim of a culture that increasingly demanded women turn themselves inside out in public. She understood that female self-exposure had immense cultural and economic value online. She benefited enormously from that system while also being psychologically brutalised by it. The culture devoured her not because she failed at the role it assigned her, but because she performed it too successfully. There was never really a version of this story in which she came out intact.

That’s this week’s Letter from London. If you have thoughts about what I have written I’d love to hear them in the comments. The Substack algorithm rewards any engagement whatsoever so if you enjoyed this please press the heart button

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LETTER PICKS Things worth your time this week

GO Indian artist T. Venkanna showcases a new series of paintings which question sexual imagination and how this is intertwined with freedom, repression and societal norms, at Studio Voltaire, SW4 from 17 May

EAT I finally made it to V&A East, which gave me so much happiness, and visited the new Jikoni there. The menu is original and creative - curry leaf crumpet, ginger pie, anyone? Yes please. J’adore. https://www.jikonilondon.com/cafejikoni

BUY: I don’t know about you but my mind is now getting focused on where to find the best swimsuits for summer. I’ve set my heart on this one. Burberry x Hunza G Faye Check-Trim Swimsuit and Scrunchie Set £325, Selfridges.com

WATCH: Amandaland, for the lols. BBC1player

LISTEN: Pivot with Kara Swisher and Prof Galloway. I’m obsessed with these two and always feel a million times better informed after listening to this podcast. apple.com

NOTICE: Politics fatigue. Are we really going to have six Prime Ministers in seven years? Make it stop.

ASK ME A reader asked me for the best framer in London. Reflections on the Uxbridge road is excellent, whether it’s your kids paintings you want framed or an antique print. Highly recommend. https://www.instagram.com/reflectionsframing/

A friend of mine recently turned down a promotion that would have taken her salary comfortably over £100,000. Not because she didn’t want the job or because she lacked ambition, but because the extra stress simply wasn’t worth the amount of extra money she’d actually take home, because so much of the rise would simply go in tax.
Ten years ago that would have sounded absurd. In London in 2026, it’s becoming more and more common.
Something unsettling is happening in the city’s professional middle class. They’re earning what should be great salaries, but they’re left feeling that after punitive tax rates, they have nothing left at the end of every month and they’re getting increasingly resentful.
Some tell me they quit their high stress jobs because they were paying so much tax it wasn’t worth it. Some are moving to other countries.
It’s not just their jobs, others tell me they would like to move house into a better area, but they can’t because they’d have to immediately give the government tens of thousands of pounds in stamp duty, which they refuse to do. So they’re stuck.
These aren’t people living extravagant lives. They’re not travelling first class or collecting Birkin bags. They’re professionals with decent salaries, working long hours, paying eye-watering childcare bills and mortgages, and discovering that the more they earn, the less sense their financial situations seem to make. They don’t have savings, have nothing left at the end of the month and they are wondering if the hard work and stress is all worth it.

Couples earning six figure sums each are quietly leaving London because they can’t afford to move area, their local comprehensive feels chaotic and unsafe and, after the VAT hike, private school is no longer affordable for two children.
Cue the world’s smallest violin, you might say, and you wouldn’t be alone at sneering.
In Britain it has become perfectly acceptable, fashionable even, to dislike anyone doing reasonably well. The national mood has curdled into something where the only sympathetic economic story is one of struggle. If you’re a middle-class graduate trying to get ahead, you’re assumed to be doing fine and therefore fair game.
Friends have confided to me that worse than that, it feels like the government hates people like them, dreaded net contributors, with their bourgeois attitudes and modest aspirations.
Rachel Reeves is always saying those with ‘the broadest shoulders’ should bear the biggest burden, but a lot of people in this situation feel like they don’t have any more to give.
Britain’s tax burden is now the highest it has been since the Second World War, and a remarkable share of it falls not on the ultra-wealthy but on people with demanding jobs. The sort of people who answer emails at midnight, take calls on holiday, manage teams, juggle childcare logistics and generally keep large parts of the economy running.
In other words: the HENRYs — High Earners, Not Rich Yet.

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The HENRY lifestyle sounds glamorous until you actually do the sums. A big salary usually comes with a big job: constant availability, high pressure, difficult decisions and long hours. But by the time the tax system has finished with you, the financial rewards look surprisingly modest.
Take someone earning £150,000 with a Plan 2 student loan: income tax alone comes to roughly £50,000; National insurance adds another £5,000; Student loan repayments are between £9 - 11,000.
So once income tax, national insurance and student loan repayments are accounted for, well over £60,000 disappears before you’ve even paid a bill. Add council tax, fuel duty, stamp duty and the rest of the quiet but deadly army of British taxes and duties, and you can easily find yourself paying tens of thousands more to the state in one form or another. It’s madness.
You hear this conversation everywhere now, at school gates, in WhatsApp groups of exhausted working parents trying to co-ordinate nursery pick-ups.
It’s the sort of calculation that made ambitious young professionals look at places like Dubai and think: maybe I’ll just go there for a few years. Dubai is admittedly not looking as attractive now, but don’t think they won’t go somewhere else instead. You can sneer at that impulse, but it isn’t hard to understand.
For high achievers, London is becoming a city where it’s impossible to make any financial progress.

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The middle classes are also growing increasingly uncomfortable about what kind of societal model they are enabling. Everyone wants a generous welfare state but government spending on welfare feels unregulated and reckless. Is it right that 600,000 households now earn more on benefits than they would on the minimum wage? We’re spending £8-9 billion per month just to service government debt. The whole system feels out of control and subsidising the chaos doesn’t feel very rewarding.
Several friends now joke that the optimal London salary is £99,999 - just ambitious enough to survive, but not ambitious enough to trigger the tax system’s booby traps.
Earning six figures is widely seen as a milestone. In practice, it triggers one of the most punitive marginal tax rates in the system. Between £100,000 and £125,140 your personal allowance is gradually withdrawn, creating an effective marginal tax rate of around 60 per cent, and that’s before National Insurance.
The result is a bizarre incentive structure where plenty of professionals actively try not to earn more than £100,000.
Childcare rules make it even stranger. Once one parent earns above that level, families lose access to generous childcare support worth thousands of pounds a year, where nursery fees for a toddler routinely run between £1,200 and £1,800 a month.
And the squeeze isn’t just affecting the well-paid.
Because income tax thresholds have been frozen since 2021, inflation is dragging more and more salaries into higher tax bands. The 40 per cent rate begins at £50,270, a number that sounds large until you realise it is already within reach of senior teachers, experienced nurses, police officers and electricians.
By the end of the decade, the average salary in London could easily brush up against the higher-rate band. In other words, what used to count as “high earners” increasingly looks like the professional middle class.
None of this means Britain shouldn’t have a progressive tax system. Of course it should. But where as ours is progressive in theory, in practice a mix of frozen thresholds, hidden marginal rates and benefit cliffs is creating a growing sense among London’s professional middle class that working harder no longer meaningfully improves their lives.
The UK’s public finances rely heavily on a relatively small group of high-earning professionals, people who work long hours, take on stressful jobs and pay a disproportionate share of the tax bill. Quietly, many of them are starting to change their behaviour.
If the people doing the most to drive the economy increasingly decide the effort isn’t worth it, London may discover that squeezing the middle class comes with unwanted consequences.

That’s this week’s letter from London.

If you’re navigating the same strange financial arithmetic of modern city life, do write and tell me your stories. Any engagement at all is very helpful for the algorithm so please do press like if you enjoyed this article.

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LETTER PICKS Five things worth your time this week

GO Henry Moore: Monumental Nature. The largest outdoor exhibition of Moore’s work, featuring over 100 pieces including massive bronze figures. At Kew Gardens, which is always a delight, from 9 May

READ Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe. Groundbreaking African literature, listed on Time’s ‘100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005’. You won’t regret reading this book.

EAT One of my absolute favourite spots for a chic lunch is Jose Pizarro at the Royal Academy. Amazing tapas, divine setting.

NOTICE In a highly unexpected development Michael Barrymore is now a fave on TikTok among young Londoners. In a twist literally no one could have predicted he has 4.3 million followers on the app tuning in to his chill Devon life with his cute dog Lara. That’s showbusiness!

ASK ME A reader asked me for my top recommendation for my favourite London hotel for under £300 a night. The Limetree hotel in Belgravia is one of the capital’s best kept secrets. Great decor, relaxed vibe, excellent location and pretty excellent prices, too.

Ask me your London questions in the subscriber chat

I still love Philip Larkin, have no qualms over David Bowie and enjoy the music of Kanye West. I don’t like cancel culture and understand the need to separate the art from the artist. So why do I feel so uncomfortable at the thought of so many people rushing to see the new Michael Jackson biopic, Michael?
The film, which stars Jackson’s nephew Jaafar Jackson as Michael, follows the star’s rise to fame with the Jackson 5 through to his solo career, with the story ending in 1988 before the first child molestation accusations against Jackson surfaced. This wasn’t purely an editorial choice: the original screenplay had dramatised the 1993 molestation lawsuit, but those sequences had to be removed after producers discovered a clause in the settlement with the young accuser that barred his depiction in film or television. “Which is kind of like ending an O.J. Simpson biopic with him winning the Heisman Trophy,” the critic Sean Burns wrote in a review. Fair.
The film has been savaged by critics here and overseas. Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian gave it two stars: ‘It’s like a 127-minute trailer montage assembling every music-movie cliche you can think of…a frustratingly shallow, inert picture, a kind of cruise-ship entertainment’. The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey described the film in her one-star review as a ‘ghoulish, soulless cash grab’. She compared Michael to other recent music biopics, commenting that ‘the line between “cinema” and “merchandise” has come close to being obliterated’.

And yet, Michael, in what must be one of the most notable disconnects between reviews and ticket sales, is a box office juggernaut, collecting roughly $217 million over its opening weekend and shattering the record for the biggest biopic opening of all time. Isn’t it extraordinary that in a world in which Roald Dahl needs a trigger warning and people blanche on the mere mention of JK Rowling, audiences are lapping up films that glorify a man who allegedly sexually abused very young children?
Amazingly, some movie people have said that by leaving out the molestation claims, fans have been encouraged to watch the film with their families, without having to worry about the more ‘depressing’ parts of the story.

Certainly, no one could accuse the Michael Jackson estate, who co-financed the film along with Universal Pictures and Lionsgate, of scrimping on it. The film boasts extensive visual effects - Mr Jackson’s pet chimpanzee Bubbles and pet python Muscles were both digitally created at huge expense; including reshoots and the 400 people who worked on it, the budget soared to about $200 million.
But the movie has also brought new challenges to Jackson’s name and posthumous businesses.
Four members of the Cascio family, who had a long association with Jackson, filed a lawsuit in February saying that the star repeatedly sexually assaulted them when they were children. They detailed their claims in an interview with The New York Times on the same day the film opened.
The Cascio family, who have always been described as Jackson’s second family and who defended the star for more than two decades, have now come out to say that all five children now allege they were groomed and psychologically manipulated to protect Jackson, and trained from childhood to defend him whenever allegations of misconduct arose.
Four of the five siblings say in a lawsuit and in an interview with The New York Times that Jackson had repeatedly sexually assaulted each of them. (The fifth sibling, Frank, has filed similar claims separately in arbitration.)
Aldo Cascio, 35, alleges in court filings and in the interview that he was around seven and in bed with Mr Jackson one day, playing a Game Boy, when Mr Jackson began sexually assaulting him. He said the abuse continued for years, and he eventually became aware that what he was enduring was wrong. But he said he so convinced himself that he could never disclose it that he came to believe: “I’m just going to live to die.”

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Court documents say the abuse happened at a variety of places, including Mr Jackson’s home, on trips and during tour stops.
It was apparently when the siblings saw the Leaving Neverland documentary that they were suddenly ‘deprogrammed,’ they say, and forced to confront the reality of their experiences with Jackson. Released by HBO in 2019, the film focused on the accounts of two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who came forward with separate lawsuits a few years after Jackson’s death that accused him of having abused them as children. The Michael Jackson estate strenuously denies all allegations.

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I’ve been conscious recently of the fact that I seem to have stopped reading. I go to bookshops and buy books, all covered in praise for the author, but never finish any of them, preferring instead to watch TV in the evenings or take a deep unsatisfying pointless wasteful dive into my phone. I’ve always been a voracious reader and it saddens me to see the habit fade. I don’t want to be a tragic phone junkie staring soullessly into an illuminated oblong. I want to consume great literature and expand my mind by experiencing incredible lives told from varying viewpoints.

If this is you too, may I prescribe Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling, a Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Meaning. Based on his viral New Yorker article, “A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld’, this is, finally, a book to lose yourself in, to rush back to at any and every possible moment, to get lost in deep into the night. Radden Keefe has accomplished a brilliant alchemy with this book, it’s simultaneously a page-turner, a book that perfectly captures the spirit of the age, and a deeply sensitive study of parental love and the impossibility of ever really knowing your children. It’s so moving in parts that I would have to stop and pause while reading it, tears rolling down my cheeks. It’s also a book about London, and what’s happened to it, and why.

At 2.23am on 29 November 2019, a 19-year-old called Zac Brettler jumped off the balcony on one of the luxury flats on London’s Riverwalk complex. We only know this because the complex happens to be opposite MI6 and his jump was caught in grainy footage on their surveillance cameras. Had Zac not clipped his hip on the embankment wall on his descent, he might have lived. The flat was lived in by a gangster called Verinder Sharma, AKA Indian Dave, who was inside the flat when this all happened. An autopsy later revealed Brettler’s jaw was broken when he jumped. Zac’s shirtless corpse, lying face down in the Thames mud, wasn’t identified for another five days.
The coroner ruled the death an ‘open verdict’; The Metropolitan police conducted a cataclysmically poor investigation where key witnesses went uncalled, and vital evidence was ignored or discarded. To read this book is to rage at the wilful incompetence of the police, which is one of the reasons Brettler’s hugely likeable and sympathetic parents Matthew, who worked in finance, and Rachelle, a freelance journalist, agreed to the writing of this book.
Rachelle and Matthew believe that it was at Mill Hill school in North London that their son, who had a casual relationship with the truth and loved telling tall stories, began to spiral. He hadn’t wanted to go to Mill Hill, but hadn’t got into more academic schools, something the Brettlers think had a significant impact on him. He wasn’t used to mixing with all of the super-rich international kids he encountered at Mill Hill, and exposure to them had an effect. He started to lie about himself and how much money he had. One day he was spotted leaving school in a limousine, which when quizzed by his parents said he had paid for himself as he wanted to know how it would feel.
After a violent episode when he was 18, Rachelle takes Zac to a psychiatrist. ‘He’s very attracted towards power and danger and consequently quite vulnerable,’ she says. The psychiatrist agrees that Zac shows traits of ‘a strong asocial narcissistic flavour’ and ‘a potentially dangerous lack of insight and skewed norms of behaviour.’

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Unbeknownst to his parents, Zac becomes friends with a conman in his 40s called Akbar Shamji, the bankrupt son of a wealthy criminal, who introduces him to the much more dangerous London gangster and enforcer Verinder Sharma. Zac is careful to always meet Shamji outside the Candy’s development in Knightbridge One Hyde Park, where he says he owns a flat. Zac tells them he is the son of an oligarch, that his father has just died and he’s set to inherit £200 million. He tells them his name is Zac Ismailov, a name he borrows from a woman who lives across the street from where he really lives with his parents in a flat in Maida Vale. They take him to Oswald’s, the Dorchester, Annabel’s and 5 Hertford Street. Gradually, then very suddenly, they lose their patience. ‘I’m highly sceptical about this 205 million,’ Akbar told Verinder in one voice memo. ‘Is anything fucking real?’
On the night of Zac’s death Akbar sent a text to an associate stating, “I have just been heating up knives and clearing up blood,” along with another message saying, “Sh*t’s about to go wrong”. But of course, this wasn’t the kind of thing that would lead the Met police to think anything suspicious of Akbar. And, despite blood-like smears on the bathroom and bedroom walls of the apartment, the police completely dismiss out of hand the possibility that Brettler had been attacked with a knife, and didn’t test the blood. This, despite the fact that in the minutes before dying Zac had googled what to do with skin burns. From start to finish the book is a sickening indictment of police incompetence.
Radden Keefe’s own, far more comprehensive investigation into what actually happened that night, takes the reader on a fascinating journey across London’s underbelly, where dirty money meets the capital’s criminal underworld. Zac’s death is also of course a parable of the capital’s decay, as the city sells itself to the highest bidder, making it clear to the world that it doesn’t care where the money comes from. There’s a wonderful passage about London’s decline — ‘the malign power of the metropolis – the empty mansions, the offshore accounts, the tainted riches, the anonymous shell companies, the amoral businessmen, the predatory thugs, the incompetent authorities, the grandeur of all those dazzling surfaces obscuring a world of shadow.’
‘London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan’ Boris Johnson, who was Mayor of London at the time, boasted in 2014. ‘We’re proud of that.’ But this book asks bigger questions about that money and its indelible corrosive effect.
The most moving parts of the book are those which deal with the Brettler’s desperate odyssey to find out what happened to their beloved son in his last few hours, their never-ending search for meaning in this terrible tragedy that has befallen them. It’s about them trying to get to know their son, and their attempt to love him whatever his flaws, posthumously. There are also beautiful parts about their parents, and strange things in their lives that probably caused generational trauma, and may well have informed the person Zac became.
Radden Keefe has the rare skill of being able to look at a situation from seventeen different angles, and explore all in a way that is both humane and highly readable. It really is a heartbreaking story. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

That’s this week’s Letter From London. What are your thoughts? Tell me in the comments or join my subscriber chat to discuss. Any engagement is really helpful and much appreciated.

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LETTER PICKS Five things worth your time this week

GO The Last Princesses of Punjab. The exhibition offers an intimate look into lives shaped by Empire, focusing on the women whose destinies were violently and irrevocably transformed by it. Fascinating. At Kensington Palace

READ I’m now reading Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe about the Sacklers and the Opioid crisis. It isn’t a subject I’m as attracted to, but so far it’s great.

EAT I went to Celeste, the new Notting Hill outpost of Maison Estelle. Great food, fun atmosphere, I recommend. Profiteroles are my favourite pudding bar none and these ones are to die for.

BUY: This creaseless linen dress from MEANDEM is pretty cool, don’t you think? £250

NOTICE I’m hearing a lot anecdotally about people being evicted from their rental properties in advance of the new laws for landlords which come in on 1 May. If only we had a government which had the real-world experience to see the potential unintended consequences of their policies.

ASK ME A reader asked me what plays I’m excited about right now. I’m booked into see Rosamund Pike in Inter Alia in a few weeks, and there’s no other play I’m more excited to see.

Scroll to the end of the article to read Editor’s Picks of what to do in London this week

If you consume enough social media, you could be forgiven for thinking that London has tipped into a dystopian nightmare. Online, videos of masked teenagers on e-bikes and luxury watch robberies ricochet around X, amplified by voices on the populist right. The picture painted is vivid: out of control youths, wealthy elites fleeing, tourists preyed upon, knives everywhere.
Our mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan, is rightly concerned about London’s growing reputation as a city that is spiralling into lawlessness. He says he believes that London is targeted because “we are a progressive, liberal, diverse city, but we’re also incredibly successful, and that’s why these guys talk us down.”

Khan says that social media companies are profiting from an ‘outrage economy’ driven by a ‘a dark blizzard of disinformation’. Research published by City Hall shows that extreme right-wing and Russian-aligned groups are using artificial intelligence, bots and content farms in Nigeria and Sri Lanka to drive social media narratives that London is in decline. This research comes from Khan’s own office which has more than a little skin in the game, so it does make you question it slightly. And it’s certainly not the whole story.
Over the last few weeks we have witnessed hundreds of youths, some with knives, others letting off fireworks, rampaging on Clapham High Street. There was looting and violence, police were completely outnumbered and residents were terrified. In a separate incident an 80-year-old woman was stabbed outside her house in Shooters Hill. And, in a scenario every parent dreads, a beautiful young man, Finbar Sullivan was stabbed in a senseless attack when he went for an evening walk on Primrose Hill.
Based on data from the Metropolitan Police, a rape offence is reported in London roughly every hour - an incredible, horrifying statistic. The police are a vanishingly rare sight on London streets. And yet, most people go about their lives in London without incident.
Can all these things be true at once, how dangerous is London really?
The answer depends on whether you’re looking at perception, headline crime, or long-term data. And like most big-city crime stories, the truth is more complicated than either side would like you to think.
The idea that London has spiralled out of control rests on three pillars.
First: high-profile crime. When former Formula One champion Jenson Button and his wife had £250,000 worth of valuables snatched outside King’s Cross St Pancras, it reinforced the image of brazen street criminals targeting the wealthy. In January, socialite Shafira Huang reportedly lost more than £10 million in bespoke jewellery during a burglary at her Primrose Hill mansion and Tom Cruise reportedly abandoned his £35 million penthouse in Knightsbridge in the same month due to rising security concerns after a “daylight robbery” by machete-wielding thieves on a watch shop near his home. Also in Knightsbridge, the luxury resale boutique Sellier released footage of masked men ransacking its store, declaring: “London has just turned into something crazy.”

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Second: theft. Last year, The New York Times dubbed London the “global hub for phone theft.” A Freedom of Information request showed mobile phone thefts rising from 91,481 in 2019 to 117,211 in 2024. Only about one per cent of those cases result in a charge or conviction. If you’ve had your phone snatched by someone on an e-bike, that statistic feels less like data and more like abandonment.
Third: knife crime. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), “sharp instrument offences” in London rose from 9,752 in 2015/16 to 16,344 in 2024/25 — a ten-year high. The capital accounts for nearly a third of knife crime nationwide, with 15,689 offences recorded in the 12 months to June. However, recent data also shows that knife crime has fallen in some 2025 reporting periods and that measurement is complex – rising totals don’t necessarily mean more violent stabbings. Though we do have those.

Reports of the disorder in Clapham went far and wide

Add to that a 54 per cent annual rise in shoplifting, a jump in sexual offences from 16,147 in 2015/16 to 26,803 in 2024/25, and nearly 952,000 recorded crimes in 2024/25 (about 106 per 1,000 residents), up from 89 per 1,000 in 2016/17 and the city sounds like it is sliding backwards.
Now consider a different dataset.
In 2025, London recorded 97 murders — down 36 per cent from 153 in 2019, and 11 per cent fewer than 2024. It is the lowest murder rate per capita since 1997 when modern records began. Teenage murders fell to eight — matching a low last seen in 2012 and down 73 per cent from the 30 teenage victims recorded in 2021. Homicides of under-25s are at their lowest this century.
Despite a population that has grown from 8.7 million in 2016 to an estimated 9.8 million in 2025, the murder rate stands at 1.1 per 100,000 people.
To put that in perspective:
New York City: 2.8 - 3.6
Los Angeles: nearly 6
Chicago: 11
Paris: about 1.6
Berlin: above 3
By global standards — including many cities routinely described as safe — London’s homicide rate is low. That does not mean London is crime-free. It does mean that the most serious form of violence is trending downward, not upward.

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The tension in London’s crime story lies in the divergence between lethal violence and everyday disorder. Murder — the crime that most shapes a city’s global reputation — is at historic lows per capita. At the same time, visible, opportunistic crimes are rising. Phone theft. Shoplifting. Luxury watch robberies. Knife-enabled threats.
These offences are less likely to kill you, but more likely to happen to you.
That distinction matters psychologically. Most Londoners will never be victims of murder. Many know someone who has had a phone stolen.
When only one per cent of phone thefts lead to charges, it sends a signal — whether fair or not — that some crimes are effectively decriminalised. Public confidence erodes not because the city is awash in blood, but because the low-level frictions of urban life feel unmanaged.
Another overlooked factor is scale. London has added roughly 1.1 million people since 2016 — a 12.6 per cent rise. In absolute terms, more people means more incidents. The crime rate per 1,000 residents has increased from 89 in 2016/17 to 106 in 2024/25. That is a real increase. But it is not a total descent into disorder.
Big cities concentrate wealth and poverty. London is one of the richest urban centres in Europe — and inequality remains stark. Expensive watches, flagship boutiques, and £10 million jewellery collections co-exist with deprivation, crippling youth unemployment and housing shortages. Depending on your political viewpoint, crime is instigated by necessity, or opportunity.
So why has London become a symbol in social media culture wars?
For critics like Donald Trump, London serves as shorthand for liberal decline — multiculturalism gone wrong, progressive governance failing at public safety. For Sadiq Khan, the narrative is also political. He has argued that the capital is targeted precisely because it is “a progressive, liberal, diverse city” — and a successful one.
Both narratives contain self-interest. One uses London as cautionary tale; the other as resilience story. The truth is less ideological. Crime trends in London resemble those in many Western cities: post-pandemic spikes in certain categories, structural declines in homicide, rising retail theft, more reporting of sexual offences, and persistent concern about youth violence.
London is neither utopia nor urban war zone.
There is also the question of media economics. A stabbing in Harlesden travels further online than a year without murder in Walthamstow. A masked robbery in Knightsbridge fits neatly into a 30-second clip. A slow, statistical decline in homicide does not. Social media collapses scale. A single violent incident can overwhelm the emotional response of an entire metropolis.
That City Hall research claims that extreme right-wing networks as well as pro-Beijing, pro-Kremlin and Maga-aligned groups are behind a lot of the anti-London content online. When you think that 51 per cent of all internet traffic is generated by bots, this seems more than plausible.
In reality, most Londoners commute, work, socialise and raise families without incident. Tourists still arrive in record numbers. Restaurants remain booked, elite private schools remain just as hard to gain access to and property sells (not as easily as it once did, and not for the same prices, but it sells).
If London were truly “lawless,” its economic fundamentals would reflect that. They don’t. But it would be equally naïve to dismiss concerns. Perception does not arise from nowhere.
When everyday crime feels visible and consequences feel rare, people infer disorder. They adjust behaviour — don’t wear the expensive jewellery, don’t text near the kerb, don’t take the night bus. That behavioural adaptation reinforces the sense that something is wrong, even if data says otherwise.
So, how dangerous is London really?
If by “dangerous” we mean “at risk of being murdered,” London is statistically one of the safer major cities in the Western world. If we mean “at risk of having a phone stolen,” the odds are higher — and rising. If we mean “descending into violent chaos,” the data does not support that claim, although our rape statistics are truly frightening. If we mean “experiencing real challenges with visible street crime and enforcement,” that is undeniably true. London today is a paradox: historically low murder rates alongside historically high anxiety.
The city’s danger is less about lethal violence than about trust — trust in policing, trust in consequences, trust that public space is governed. When that trust weakens, even modest crime increases loom large.
London is a vast, unequal, resilient, imperfect city. It is safer than its loudest critics claim. It is more troubled than its defenders admit.
In the age of viral fear, perception can have more impact than reality — and once that shift happens, statistics struggle to catch up.

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That’s this week’s Letter From London. What are your thoughts? Tell me in the comments or join my subscriber chat to discuss.

LETTER PICKS Five things worth your time this week

GO Unbelievably excitingly, The V&A East museum opens this Saturday in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Located on Aquatic Walk, it’s inaugural paid exhibition "The Music is Black: A British Story" looks well worth a visit.

READ I’m currently diving into London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe. It’s a work of art. No notes.

EAT If you’ve never been to Maggie Jones you really must. A much-loved haunt among Kensington locals for over 40 years, this is one of the few London restaurants that has survived the decades. Cosy, rustic, informal serving classic hearty fare, it was a favourite of Princess Margaret. If you’re having an affair or dating a celebrity, the uber discreet private booths are perfect for you.

NOTICE London is now full of people shivering in tank tops and jean shorts. I love how Londoners always show such enthusiasm for the beginning of summer. These are my people.

ASK ME A reader asked me for my top recommendation for a spring/summer coat for men. This navy trench with a fireman clasp and a corduroy collar is just perfect. And £99.99 is a great price for a piece that looks a lot more expensive.

https://www.zara.com/uk/en/technical-quilted-trench-coat-with-fireman-clasp-p03918160.html?v1=499958224&v2=2606109

Pubs are London’s living museums, and the places where the city’s culture-shapers, power-brokers and personalities quietly collide. Deals are floated, new media ventures conceived, reputations made and occasionally blemished over a pint. Sadly, this government has given them a mad and completely undeserved punishment beating and so many have called last orders in the last year. All the more reason to treat them as essential civic infrastructure rather than optional indulgence. And if you want to understand how London really works, start here.
So where will you actually bump into the person who will commission your genius podcast idea, bestselling novel, or simply turn you into the media personality the universe always intended you to be?
Here’s where the capital’s media elite actually drink…

The French House

A time-travel back to the bohemian London of the 60s when Soho was a haven of glorious licentiousness and gentle sleaze. Playboys, poets, flaneurs, quick thinkers and hard drinkers all frequent this classic Soho watering hole, as do the people looking to harness their talent. Beer is served only in halves, champagne by the glass. Phones, quite rightly, are banned. Suggesting a meeting here is a flex.

49 Dean Street, W1D 5BG; www.frenchhousesoho.com

The Nag’s Head

Belgravia, but not as you expect it. One of the most characterful pubs in London, deeply atmospheric, gloriously old-fashioned, and completely uninterested in trends.
The sort of place editors retreat to for an understated lunch with someone they really want to talk to and spend proper time with.

53 Kinnerton Street, SW1X 8ED; 020 7235 1135

The Raglan

E17’s coolest address right now. Indian-Irish small plates, exceptional roasts, and a Guinness that holds its own against the Devonshire. Run by Muireach Shankey-Smith and the Shankey’s team — warm, buzzy, and full of people on the up.

199 Shernhall St, E17 9HX; @theraglan_e17

The Devonshire

Editors, columnists, influencers, restaurant critics… everyone passes through at some point. The Guinness is considered the city’s best, the upstairs grill is exceptional, and Oisin the owner is a big character who everyone knows and loves. Even on a quiet day in Soho, this place will be rammed. Aspiring media types dream of being ushered into the invitation-only Green Room, accessed by a not-so-secret passageway through the bar.

17 Denman St, Soho, London W1D 7HW; devonshiresoho.co.uk

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The Anglesea Arms

Set on one of west London’s prettiest pastel-lined streets, this is a pub that understands its role perfectly: warm, civilised, quietly excellent. The food is genuinely outstanding — as good for a midweek reset as it is for a long, restorative Sunday lunch. The clientele is understated but influential.

35 Wingate Street, W6 OUR; 020 8749 1291; www.angleseaarmspub.co.uk

The Waterman’s Arms

On the river in Barnes, this establishment was recently named the Standard’s top London pub, and with good reason. Run by Joe, co-founder of Patty & Bun and one of London’s great hospitality operators, it manages that rare thing: serious food without losing the soul of a proper pub. I haven’t been to his other pub, The Shaston Arms on Ganton St, Soho, but must. Expect to see media names at both.

375 Lonsdale Road, SW13 9PY; 0204 529 8970; www.watermansarms.co.uk

The Camberwell Arms

If you’re a South Londoner this is your boozer. If not, it’s worth the trek. This is the gastro pubs dream of being. Everyone who’s anyone passes through at some point. Incredibly, there’s a set lunch for £20.

65 Camberwell Church St, London SE5 8TR; the camberwellarms.co.uk

The Harwood Arms

A Michelin star, but no fuss. The great and the bad cross town for the roast beef which is, quite simply, last-meal-on-earth territory.

Walham Grove, SW6 1Q; www.harwoodarms.com

The Pelican

Notting Hill done properly. Candlelight, great food, bags of character and plenty of chaos unfolding with the smokers outside to keep it interesting. Perfect for a long summer’s evening. London’s power-brokers often hold their dinners in the private dining room.

45 All Saints Road, W11 1HE; www.thepelicanw11.com

Princess Louise

The capital is blessed with an abundance of 19th-century gin palaces, but this one is pretty special. Cornicing, intricate tiling, polished banquettes, pillars, etched glass, this pub has the impression of being preserved in aspic. And the creative crowd which flocks in from Holborn is brilliantly eclectic; this is London at its most theatrical. Pull up a stool, indulge in the best people watching the city can offer you and be transported back to the days of Hogarth while scouring the crowd for famous theatre and literary agents. Chin chin.

208 High Holborn, WC1V 7EP; www.princesslouiseholborn.co.uk

That’s this week’s Letter From London. I’d love you to send me your favourite London pubs and I’ll publish them all with your handles. Just post them in the comments.

LETTER PICKS Five things worth your time this week

GO Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art at the V&A
The UK’s first exhibition on Elsa Schiaparelli celebrates the innovative designer's influence, and the fashion house’s groundbreaking origins from the 1920s to present day. Until November

READ Ronan Farrow has spent the last year and a half investigating Open AI and Sam Altman with his co-author Andrew Marantz. They interviewed more than 100 people and trawled through endless documents and insider information. The resulting piece makes for illuminating, and frightening reading. Read it in the New Yorker.

EAT See above!

NOTICE The finance world has divided into two camps, those that invested in oil, and those that backed crypto. Very, very different moods right now.

ASK ME A reader asked me for my favourite antique shop in west London. Pimlico road has an incredible selection of names, as does Lillie road. But if I had to pick one it would be The Lacquer Chest on Kensington Church Street. It’s especially good for gifts around the £200 mark.

Ask me your London questions in my subscriber chat.

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