25
Layton Williams is the biggest star in the West End. He’ll soon be the talk of Hollywood
The fabulous octogenarians redefining old age
Meet the people getting microchipped for productivity
No. 86
What happens when you eat the world’s hottest chilli? And why on earth would you want to?
GROWING UP WITH ADOLESCENCE TO ADULTHOOD –
It is not every day you are invited to spend the night in a posh retirement community – so when the email landed in my inbox, I immediately packed a bag. The opulent palace I checked into – essentially a five star hotel for the elderly – is a far cry from where most older people will spend their twilight years but it sent me tumbling down an existential rabbit hole, pondering how my generation may one day live out our dotage. Read about it on P42. My feature fits neatly into the theme of this issue, which is how the social and technological trends emerging today may play out in the years to come. On P32 Anna Moloney speaks to the people hoping to revolutionise the world of work through techniques that seem straight out of hit TV show Severance, including microchipping employees.
On P36 Lucy Kenningham grapples with the issue of gentrification, exploring how towns and cities are shifting under the weight of changing demographics, told through the prism of Margate, perhaps the oddest town in the country.
And on P24 our cover star Erin Doherty speaks candidly about the issues affecting the nation’s boys and young men, as probed in her excellent new show Adolescence. Ralph Jones even asks how changing attitudes to aesthetics are creeping into the ultratraditional world of gravestone design in his excellent feature on P46. Fancy Mickey Mouse on your memorial? Then read on. Strange times call for strange magazine features – enjoy!
– STEVE DINNEEN
14: THE SPICE OF LIFE
The Carolina Reaper is the world’s spiciest chilli. We bite down and instantly regret our choices.
20: DINING DIPLOMACY
Why are mealtimes so fraught with arguments? We explore the psychology behind culinary clashes.
36: THE TOWN EMIN BUILT
Margate is either the poster child for gentrification or the sick man of England. Or perhaps it’s both.
42: THE TWILIGHT SAGA
We’re approaching a retirement catastrophe. We check into a later living home for a glimpse of the future.
18: LAST SUPPER
Gordon Warnecke, star of 1980s drama My Beautiful Laundrette, on what he’d eat for his last meal.
56: WATCHES
We catch up with Mike France, the co-founder of Christopher Ward and head of the British watch revolution.
70: TRAVEL
It started with a Tiktok – and ended in a tailor shop in Hong Kong. We fly out to get measured up.
76: STARGAZING
Feeling small against the backdrop of the galaxy has soothed humanity for millennia. Here’s how to do it properly.
ANNA MOLONEY is a features writer at City AM. On P32 she explores the strange and sinister world of the companies offering to microchip people in the name of capitalism
RALPH JONES is a stand-up comedian, journalist and author. On P46 he takes a walk through the stillness of the cemetery to gravely read the stones and ask: who makes these?
JAMIE WINDUST is a writer, public speaker and model. On P23 they head into town to break the final taboo: dining solo. But why do people fear eating by themselves?
LUCY KENNINGHAM is a freelance features writer. On P36 she takes a deep dive into Margate, Britain’s weirdest town, where gentrification hasn’t quite knocked off its rough edges
ADAM HAY-NICHOLLS is our motoring editor. On P80 he jets to Africa to drive the new Chinese SUV threatening to eat the lunch of European car manufacturers
ADAM BLOODWORTH is City AM The Magazine’s deputy editor. On P24 he meets Adolescence star Erin Doherty, and on P66 he visits a Caribbean island turned AI hub
For more great articles go to cityam.com. For a digital version of The Magazine go to cityam.com/the-magazine
EDITORIAL TEAM:
Steve Dinneen Editor-in-chief Adam Bloodworth Deputy Editor
Billy Breton Creative Director Chris Stopien Deputy Creative Director Andy Blackmore Picture Editor Alex Doak Watch Editor Adam Hay-Nicholls Motoring Editor Tom Matuszewski Illustrator Anna Moloney Books Editor
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For sales enquiries contact commercial@cityam.com. City AM The Magazine is published by City AM, 107 Cheapside, EC2V 6DN. Some products and websites promoted in this magazine are owned and distributed by City AM parent company The Hut Group
Playwright NAOMI WESTERMAN found photos of her feet on a fetish website. Then she found pictures of the most powerful man in theatre...
Ihave no idea how a celebrity foot fetish website found my personal Instagram. Somehow a bunch of random snapshots in which I happen to be shoeless did it for some people. Not many people, to be fair: the good burghers of celebrityfeetdotcom rated me a measly one out of five toes – everyone’s a critic! How did I find out about this? Well, let me tell you a shameful secret: every single person who works in theatre Googles themselves, and we all lie about it. When I started as a playwright eight years ago I never really expected to be written about but work came quickly, and a wave of reviews – mostly positive! – duly followed. Because I enjoy pain, I set up a Google News Alert for my own name so I could monitor them all. Everyone told me this was a bad idea. And it turned out they were probably right because one day I received an alert informing me that my name had appeared on a website called Celebrity Foot Wiki, an encyclopedia comprehensively documenting, like dead butterflies pinned on a board, the feet of every woman nebulously in the public eye. I clicked the link. Of course I did. And there they were: my bare feet, poking out from the bottom of my tartan winter pyjamas. It hadn’t occurred to me that this innocent snapshot of me relaxing on my sofa on the morning of my birthday could be a turn-on, something to be pored over in the grubbier quarters of the internet.
I did what every writer – perhaps every woman – does when we’re sexualised but nothing’s really happened: I turned it into a funny anecdote. This came in handy when I started R&D for my current play Puppy, a queer rom-com about two young women who meet and fall in love while dogging, go on to found a feminist porn company, and find themselves accidental political activists when they’re targeted by the government’s proposed porn ban. The play is a trenchant critique of the exploitative and often abusive
Stories from the worlds of culture, technology and design
mainstream porn industry, and the challenges of being a woman and an artist under a system that cannibalises everything we have – our bodies, our sexuality, our art, our trauma – into commodified content. All wrapped up in great British sex comedy. About dogging.
Discovering that a side effect of being a successful playwright is having your foot pics stolen by a fetish site felt like an effective metaphor for the play’s themes, and this became a topic of hot conversation in the rehearsal room. Everyone wanted to explore this site. We happened to have a piece of paper with our casting wish list in front of us, and so by sheer coincidence the first name we typed in was an extraordinary actress whose feet also adorned this website.
She’s a sharp-cheekboned goddess who has played everything from Shakespeare to gritty contemporary drama, and was our dream casting for one of the doggers. She apparently hasn’t been barefoot in many acting roles, because all the photos of her were red carpet pap pics taken at movie premieres or awards ceremonies, wearing stiletto sandals. (I’ve learned a lot about foot fetishism lately: some fetishists are purists and are only interested in bare feet. Some like toes. For some, their thing is the very specific “toe cleavage”.)
Female actors understand the pressure to look a certain way and she looks stunning and polished in every red carpet photo. But she happens to be married to the artistic director of one of London’s most prestigious new writing venues, one of the most powerful men in theatre. No one cares how male directors dress when they walk red carpets so it gave me a jolt to see this man in all his generic black suited-glory appearing alongside her on a foot fetish site.
And then that became the anecdote:
“Did you know that ****** ***** is on a celebrity foot fetish porn site?” But it’s more than a funny anecdote: it’s meaningful. These photos likely originated on a legit image database, and the original caption probably read something like “[theatre director’s name] with wife.” When recontextualised on a fetish site, the caption simply reads “[actress name]”. Our director doesn’t even get an “and husband” credit; he’s simply eradicated. The world of porn is created for and by the male gaze. When I told the artistic director in question all of this, he thought it was hilarious. But the more I told the anecdote, it became less comedic and more a rant about the semiotics of gendered power. I don’t exactly feel exploited by being on this site but I do feel grossed out. How can I demand respect as an artist when I constantly have to worry which new bit of me –professional, persona or physical – will be sexualised? Does the sexual nature of some of my work make some people think I was ‘asking for it’?
I don’t know the answers. But I feel it’s essential that we keep discussing these issues and the problems of gendered double standards. And that’s why I wrote Puppy, and why I’m happy to be able to share these complex issues and questions with an audience.
l Naomi is a playwright whose play BATMAN won the VAULT Festival Origin Award. Her new play Puppy is on until 27 April at the King’s Head Theatre
Forget making deals on the golf course. ANNA MOLONEY has been WFH: working from hairdresser. Welcome to the strange new world of the blowdry business meeting
Do you do this a lot?” I asked, locks swishing as I sauntered out of the hairdressers with a newly-made work contact. She wasn’t on the books at the hairdressers, nor did she work within the beauty/hairdressing/ lifestyle sector. She’d invited me for a blowdry as “something a little different” to getting a coffee. I have very hard to tame hair, and few qualms about being bought, so it was an easy yes.
I’m not the only one. WFH (working from hairdressers) is, it turns out, a thing. That’s not just sending a few Slack messages with your foils in, but actual networking or business meetings taking place in the salon.
A quick survey among my white-collared female friends revealed a spike in invitations for this kind of shenanigans, with blowdrys, manicures and even a UK bank-hosted spa networking experience among the bait. Testimonials ranged from unabashed enthusiasm (“I will take whatever freebie I can get”) to regret (“not worth the small talk”). Most had accepted at least one strange networking invitation, even if only out of curiosity.
Hairdressers themselves have confirmed the trend. Blowdry bar chain Duck and Dry said their salons were increasingly being used for business purposes, with their London spaces now specifically catering to such ventures with large tables to facilitate meetings, the option to specify joint appointments and earlybird bookings for those wanting breakfast meets. Celebrity hairstylist Samantha Cusick, who also owns a chain of salons, similarly said her clients often used their appointments as a chance to catch up with contacts. “It creates an environment where conversations flow naturally,” she explained.
For those with offices near one of Cusick’s salons (Notting Hill, Fitzrovia and the City), she even offers a corporate discount, though I wonder whether it is also a convenient way to keep within expense budgets. And I, for one, am a fan. In a world where corporate lore states that real deals are done on the golf course, not the boardroom, could business blowdrys be the feminist correction many of us have yearned for? Perhaps not. But could they offer some fun on the path to gender equality in the workplace, all on the clock and dime of The Man? That I could get behind. I took up my own invitation for a “blowdry catchup” (though to be clear, I had never met this person before) with initial exhilaration, but as the event loomed closer, I grew apprehensive. What was the purpose of this meeting? Why exactly were we doing it at the hairdressers? Can you look professional with wet hair? Would the hairdressers think we were strange for
holding a meeting while getting our hair done? Would I be able to ask for a quick fringe trim at the same time or would that be taking advantage? It felt rather like I was setting out to cosplay what one thinks a “powerful woman in business” might do, rather than what they actually do.
When I got there, it became clear my counterpart had no such concerns. She greeted me warmly at the door, already caped and ready for the chair. I donned my own gown, we exchanged pleasantries, and then followed the hairdressers, who, blissfully unaware of the strange corporate gymnastics we were doing, and clearly from a different breed of salons to those used to hosting the blow dry meeting, sat us apart. We came together briefly at the sinks, but the soundscape of the salon – the whshhhh, raaaaaaaa, hrmmmmmm, “got any nice holiday plans?” – rendered even an attempt at small talk useless. Instead, we sat peacefully in parallel. Scalps scrubbed, we floated back happily to our separate chairs. Occasionally, I glimpsed her far away, through mirrors of mirrors. Between the whirr of the hairdryer and my stylist asking if I’d prefer big sexy waves or just a subtle bend, I sometimes caught snatches of her conversing with her own hairdresser, who she was happily telling all about her line of work. I wondered whether this exercise might work better if we were to do each others’ hair. But that’s by the by; it was all, for a work meeting, a pleasure. Sign me up for another.
l Anna is books editor at City AM – The Magazine
Has the headline act had its day? In an age where hosting festivals is a perilous business, ADAM BLOODWORTH asks if we’re ready for something a little different
Yoga in the Healing Fields and communal sing-a-longs around the Stone Circle may be more popular than ever at Glastonbury this year, with headline writers and audiences slamming the music line-up as the worst in history.
Founder Michael Eavis has long warned of the high costs of the event, especially when, during the pandemic, he feared he may have to close the wooden gates to his dairy farm for good. Headliners are the most expensive part of the festival experience, with fees for booking the world’s biggest acts running into the hundreds of thousands.
Putting on festivals is getting harder, and it isn’t just major artists disappearing from line-ups, it’s upcoming names too. “Artists should be concerned about the number of festivals that have fallen,” says John Rostron of the Association of Independent Festivals, citing 215 cancelled events over the past five years. “That’s thousands of performance slots that have gone.”
Bands are also being stifled by festivals booking them exclusively, a move that effectively bans artists from touring other events.
But festivals have always been about more than music. It’s an argument I’ve made countless times, if you dare to Google my name, especially when it comes to Glastonbury, which has scores of activities on offer, from yoga to theatre and circus. But more and more events are pivoting away from the headliner format. And as streaming makes our music tastes more varied and diffuse, line-ups are pushing into new territories to cater to niche audiences. This is no bad thing. While you may
not have heard of the acts, I’d argue –for the events that can cobble together the cash to get over the line – ditching big names is bringing far more intrigue to Britain’s fields. It’s a trend Gen Z are on board with: there’s already evidence that younger generations are going to festivals for the broader experience over seeing one or two particular acts.
Secret Garden Party pledged to ditch headliners last year. “They were rallying against the increase in artist headliner costs, making a statement,” says Rostron. And the festival – which was always about fancy dress and getting lost in the woodlands more than sticking to a rigid band-watching agenda
There’s already evidence that younger generations are going to festivals for the broader experience
– only became more radical and boundary-pushing.
It inspired Grassroots Rising, a new event taking place in 2026 on the Cambridgeshire Secret Garden Party site that will incorporate multiple festivals. Organised by Bristol’s Chai Wallahs venue and backed by the Music Venues Trust, the new ‘festival of festivals’ taking place from 18-21 June 2026 will support events that wouldn’t otherwise be viable due to financial constraints.
Creative director Si Chai said: “If we bring six festivals together in one environment, we’re saving around 30-40 per cent on infrastructure costs and transportation. There is also a saving on digital marketing costs because we’ve all built up our own databases. We’ve all got previous ticket buyers, and we can communicate directly to them and market directly to them.” Cash will be raised through a Crowdfunder launching later in the year.
So perhaps not landing a Glastonbury ticket isn’t so bad. It frees you to explore the UK’s other independent festivals, great events like We Out Here in Dorset, Deershed in Yorkshire and 2000 Trees in Gloucestershire, which all need our support – and offer Glastonbury-esque community on a smaller scale.
l Adam is deputy editor of City AM – The Magazine
The Carolina Reaper is the world’s hottest chilli. STEVE DINNEEN takes a giant bite while asking what attracts us to spicy food
feel lightheaded, short of breath and the room has started to spin. Intense waves of heat radiate from my mouth throughout my entire body. The pain is searing, like someone is holding an open flame to my tongue. After a couple of bites my throat starts to swell, my lips are raw, my face has turned a reddishpurple, I am sweating profusely and my eyes are streaming. This is what happens when you eat the hottest chilli pepper money can buy.
In the borderlands where Chinatown meets Theatreland, close to the money-laundering sweet shops and fridge magnet emporiums of Piccadilly, you will find Dave’s Hot Chicken. It has some 250 branches across North America, a smattering of outlets in the Middle East and, as of December, a solitary European venue on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Rupert Street.
Partly thanks to London’s Tiktok community, round-the-block queues have become so ubiquitous that Dave’s now has a permanent nylon rope outside to keep people in line. The draw? The world’s spiciest chicken tenders.
At just before 11am on a grey Friday morning, however, only three builders loiter outside, all clad in high-vis vests, paint spattered boots and jumpers straining to cover vast, round beer bellies. After a few minutes we’re invited into a nondescript food hall that contains fire-engine red furniture and garish, graffitied walls. I’m not here to judge the decor, though. I’m here to beat the record for eating tenders made using the infamous Carolina Reaper chilli. Someone managed two and a half. My goal is three. How hard can it be?
You probably have a picture in your mind’s eye of who might order these absurdly hot creations: lads, lads, lads. And you’d be right. “Yeah, it’s mostly groups of blokes,” says Dave’s manager Oliver Southworth. “They want to take on something spicy and there’s a buzz around the Reaper Tenders. At 4pm, schools and colleges finish and you see hordes of mates come in, egging each other on.” He says he sells 10 to 15 Reaper Tenders an hour, far more than the two or three an hour they sell in an average US restaurant.
Before I’m allowed near one, Southworth says I have
to sign “a little waiver”. According to this (apparently legally binding) document, which unfurls like a little scroll, the side effects of what I’m about to eat could include “sweating, indigestion, shortness of breath, allergic reactions, vomiting and/or diarrhoea… chest pain, heart palpitations, heart attack and stroke.”
Nothing serious, then.
I ask Southworth the worst reaction he’s seen. “There was one poor lad who ended up in the toilet area with his head over the sink. We were really worried about him. His eyes were going. He only ate a bite…”
I sign the waiver – one copy for me, one for them – and Southworth hands me a pair of black rubber gloves so I don’t burn my fingers on the chilli (or, worse, rub it in my eyes). What on earth is it going to do to the delicate membranes of my organs? It’s too late to ponder this now: a waiter is en route with a tray piled with three tenders, a vanilla milkshake and several sachets of honey, which I’m told will help to diffuse the heat (spoilers: they do not).
The tenders are far bigger than I had expected, each one six inches long and a troubling shade of crimson. They’re made by frying chicken and dipping it in a “wet rub” of spices and oil, which is then left to drain. Next it’s tossed in Dave’s proprietary seasoning mix containing the Carolina Reaper chilli (the exact recipe is a secret). The resulting tenders have a subtle but faintly astringent smell; bringing one to my face triggers millions of years of carefully coded instinct: DO NOT EAT. I take a bite.
I have always enjoyed spicy food. As a child of 10 or 11, I remember probing the boundaries of how much I could handle by ordering vindaloos and phaals from our local Mancunian curry houses. The staff, more used to selling these dishes to grown men, seemed to find this strange, bespectacled kid sitting with his parents and shovelling down the hottest curry on the menu hilarious. “You’re invincible,” one waiter laughed as I mopped up the remnants of vindaloo with a naan. “Nothing can kill you, you can do anything!”
I’m not sure I enjoyed eating those curries – I haven’t attempted one that hot in decades – but my fascination with spicy food persisted into adulthood. I’ve travelled through northern China to try dishes made from numbing Sichuan peppercorns and love the intense,
Opposite: Steve feels the burn as he attempts to eat a record number of Dave’s Hot Chicken Reaper Tenders. He completed the challenge – but at what cost?
farmyard kick of a proper Caribbean goat curry. At home I’m never without a selection of hot sauces and I’ll often cook a sliced chilli pepper separately from whatever I’m preparing so I can load up on extra heat without melting my guests.
Fellow chilli nerds speculate that spicy food might be addictive. In response to the burning sensation, your body releases endorphins, giving you a feeling similar to a post-gym buzz.
Neurologically speaking, the pathways for pleasure and pain also happen to overlap; in low doses, the heat of a chilli pepper could be interpreted as enjoyable.
This perhaps explains why the chilli has become a symbol for passion and desire. I remember reading an interview in men’s magazine FHM in the late 1990s in which they’d asked to photograph Britney Spears biting into a cherry, a traditional symbol of virginity. Her team refused but offered to have her pose with a chilli pepper instead, the carnal implications of this fiery fruit clearly not lost upon them. One thing I know for sure is that there’s nothing sexy about the sight of me biting into a Carolina Reaper.
As I finish the first tender, I curse myself for agreeing to this miserable, mindlessly macho pursuit. The only person who looks impressed is a boy of nine or 10 eating at a nearby table, who has spotted the bloke melting under the heat of a thousand suns. The kid looks genuinely starstruck, like he’s witnessed an incredible act of physical fortitude, rather than a man doggedly shovelling down red hot embers so he doesn’t lose face in front of a restaurant manager.
Perhaps I have numbed my pain receptors, but the second tender goes down fairly quickly. Somewhere on the periphery of my sense of taste I can make out a green freshness to the chilli that, were it uncoupled from the heat, might actually be pleasant. While the fire still rages in my mouth, I’m now more concerned about the burning in my stomach. It feels like someone has filled my belly with petrol and tossed in a lit match.
To put my chilli-challenge into perspective, the world record for eating the most raw Carolina Reaper chillies – far hotter than these tenders – was set last year by Canadian Mike Jack, who gobbled down 25 of the things in less than five minutes. Jack is at the spicy tip of a huge wave of chilli-based content. There are hundreds of YouTube and Tiktok channels dedicated to people consuming implausible amounts of spicy food, and millions of amateur imitators. The current king of Chilli Content is Sean Evans: his show Hot Ones sees the youtuber interview
A-list celebrities as they eat various hot sauces and spicy wings. Basketball player Shaquille O’Neal proved to be a bit of a wimp, actor Jennifer Lawrence sobbed through the experience while Bill Murray barely flinched.
The chilli pepper is a fascinating plant, one whose extremely successful defence mechanism has led to it being cultivated across the world for the very thing that was supposed to stop people eating it. It conquered the world, by mistake. The burning sensation, which prevents mammals from grazing on the fruit, is caused by a compound called capsaicin, found in the white pith surrounding the seeds. Capsaicin is an agonist of the TRPV1 receptor in mammals – but not in birds, which can eat as many chilli seeds as they like. Fortuitously, birds also lack damaging mammalian molars and can spread the seeds across a far wider area than land animals. A perfect little eco system, then, until the Aztecs and Mayans started using them in food and medicine some time around 7,000BC.
The UK is not the natural habitat for these hot-climate plants but between Bristol and Bath, on the edge of the Cotswolds, Louise Duck grows a wide range of chilli peppers inside five long polytunnels at Upton Cheyney Chilli Farm. Cultivating chillies here is tricky – Duck has to grow her plants from scratch each year because it’s too expensive to heat the tunnels to keep them alive throughout the winter. She says there’s not much to see at this time of year but come October the farm will be alive with reds, greens and oranges.
Duck says the UK chilli industry has exploded over the last decade but she thinks the macho culture surrounding them – which I’m now guilty of encouraging – is
My stomach is on fire. It feels like someone has filled it with petrol and tossed in a lit match
beginning to fizzle out. The regular tours she hosts at her farm are fairly evenly split along gender lines. “People want to enjoy their food,” she says. “They don’t want something so hot it’s inedible.”
The Carolina Reaper, on the other hand, was deliberately cultivated for its extreme heat. Created in 2012 by Ed Currie, the owner of the PuckerButt Pepper Company, it’s a cross between a Pakistani Naga Viper and a sweet red habanero. The dry climate of South Carolina causes its natural oils to thicken, intensifying its heat.
In 1912, pharmacologist Wilbur Scoville invented a system of rating the hotness of chillies. It’s a fairly scientific endeavour: you dissolve chilli into a solution and then progressively dilute it until human test subjects can no longer feel the sensation of heat. The Carolina Reaper stands at 1.6 million scovilles, making it the hottest chilli you can buy. The only things above it on the scale are Pepper X, another chilli developed by Currie in 2023, whose seeds and pods are not currently for sale, at 2.6 million scovilles; pepper spray at 5.3 million scovilles; pure capsaicin at 15 million scovilles; and the incredibly toxic resiniferatoxin, found in the resinifera cactus, whose mindbending 15 billion scovilles would seriously damage or even kill you.
During my Reaper eating challenge, I’m reminded of a different rating system: the Schmidt Sting Pain Index. Devised by Justin O Schmidt, it involved the American entomologist deliberately subjecting himself to various insect stings and categorising the resulting pain on a scale of one to four. The fourth and highest category included the warrior wasp, whose sting he described as “like being chained in the flow of an active volcano”.
I can relate. As I throw the remains of the final tender into the inflamed hole in my face, the people sitting at an adjacent table offer a half-hearted round of applause. But this is a senseless, pyrrhic victory. I lay my forehead on the cold wood of the table and pray for the pain in my guts to abate. It takes 10 minutes before I can muster the strength to stand, my legs still wobbling as I stagger into the harsh daylight of a Soho afternoon.
The worst is yet to come. Over the next 12 hours, I feel the exact path the chilli follows through my body. Its slow, inexorable slalom through my small and large intestines causes a constant, dull burn. It all culminates later that night in a blindingly painful visit to the bathroom. “Never again,” I whimper into the echoey darkness. “Never again”.
Star of 1980s movie
My Beautiful Laundrette GORDON WARNECKE tells us what he would eat for his last meal on earth
My mum wasn’t a very good cook. My first memories of food are of her making quite traditional British stuff. She came over from Guyana in South America, where she was the youngest of five siblings – her elder sisters did all the cooking so she never learned. She moved over to England at the Windrush time and she learned the British way to make food, which was a bit bland.
I remember my American auntie bought my mum a pressure cooker, which was the death of good cooking. I’d be upstairs doing my homework and there would be that smell of overcooked beef or casseroles. That smell has always remained with me. Thankfully a lot of our friends came from different countries – the West Indies, Germany – and we all had each other over for dinner. That’s when my palate started to change. I remember the first time I had a proper curry, up in Rochdale. I was doing my first acting job and an older Asian actress took me to an Indian restaurant. Suddenly my tastebuds were like, ‘Wow!’ I’d never had anything like that before.
I started to explore cooking at home when I was in my twenties, after I got my first job. My partner is brilliant, she’ll just grab anything from the cupboard and come up with something amazing. We watch cookery programmes together but I go by the book. Some people just throw stuff in but if it says half a teaspoon of salt, I’ll add half a teaspoon of salt. My favourite dishes to cook, because of my mum’s background, are West Indian. I’m always watching programmes on West Indian cooking.
I’m going to combine my last meal with a few things in life I love. I’m a sad Arsenal fan so I’m going to have the first course in a box at the Emirates. I’d invite my son, my partner Hilary and a few Gooner celebs: Sam Mendes, Nick Hornby and Gwyneth Strong from Only Fools and Horses. Back in the day I used to go to Joe Allen’s in Covent Garden, sit at the bar and have a large bloody mary and a few chicken wings, so I’d start my meal with those.
Next I’m going to jump on a plane and fly to a private beach in Turkey, where I’m going to have jerk chicken, which I’d make myself from scratch. I’m a big fan of jerk
chicken with a nice salsa salad on the side. I’m diabetic so I don’t always have rice and peas: chicken and plantain is all you really need. Everything’s got to be fresh and you need to use the correct spices: pimento, scotch bonnet, spring onions, garlic,
I’m a sad Arsenal fan so I’m going to have the first course in a box at the Emirates. I’d invite Gooner celebs Sam Mendes and Nick Hornby
ginger, light soy sauce, a splash of lime, mix it all up, and marinade the chicken overnight. A lot of people put the chicken straight on the barbecue but I think that’s dodgy – it has to be cooked through first. Even though it’s my last night on earth I’ll still play it safe.
Then I’ll fly to Florida for some good bluegrass music, silver sand, and a big American-style cheesecake with blueberries. I’d get it from a bakery: I’m not very good at baking. The only place I’ve found that’s similar to Florida is Liverpool. I just love the people. You cannot walk into a bar without somebody talking to you, but you don’t feel afraid or anything. In London if someone starts talking to you, you’ve got to be careful, but in Liverpool they’re just lovely people. It’s like a republic, it’s got its own identity. I would finish off the meal with a nice, large, really good scotch with one lump of ice and toast humanity.
l Gordon stars in a new short film called Pink, the story of a young man who comes out to his bank robber father
Left to right from top: A bare table is merely a battlefield without any soldiers (picture by Brina Blum); Couples are especially prone to arguing over food; Alf Garnett and his son-in-law Mike argue over Christmas dinner in a scene from Till Death Do Us Part
Why is the dinner table the setting for so many epic family battles? ANNA WOLFE explores the psychology of dining and asks if boomers and Gen-Z are destined to clash over roast potatoes
Sunday lunch, a cherished ritual where families gather to share a meal, exchange pleasantries, and, more often than not, step into a conversational minefield. The table is set, the roast is carved—then, inevitably, someone mentions politics. Maybe climate change. Perhaps a comment on how Elon Musk is ‘misunderstood’.
At one end of the table sits Uncle George, armed with decades of experience and a firm belief that common sense trumps any statistic. Opposite him, Cousin Emily, fresh from a morning scroll through social media, convinced she has the facts on her side and armed with unwavering conviction. The meal begins with polite small talk but gradually, the tone changes, the atmosphere thickens, and before the gravy cools, someone utters the familiar plea:
“Can we please have one nice dinner?”
Sitting down to eat alters social dynamics—the smell of food, the clatter of plates. Even before the first bite, your brain is responding: the cephalic phase primes digestion, while endorphins and oxytocin encourage bonding and trust. But the impact runs deeper than chemistry. Research suggests that shared experiences can subtly synchronise physiological rhythms, like heart rate variability, enhancing cooperation and social coherence. The simple act of eating together doesn’t just bring people to the table – it aligns them, physically and emotionally, in ways they may not even realise. Psychologist Dr Terri Apter, an expert in family dynamics, suggests that family arguments aren’t really about the surface issues. “They’re about identity. Beneath the surface, there’s an unspoken need to be seen as someone whose views matter.”
This explains why even casual debates over lunch can
escalate. When people feel like their perspective is dismissed, it’s not just the topic at hand they’re defending, it’s their sense of relevance. In a setting where everyone is already more alert to social cues, disagreement can feel less like an exchange of ideas and more like a challenge to one’s place at the table.
Food isn’t just about nutrition either. A refused or partially-eaten home-cooked meal can be more than just a culinary critique – it can feel like rejection. As food historian professor Rebecca Earle notes: “Making food for other people involves some degree of emotional investment. That heightens the possibility of conflict.”
So while Uncle George and Cousin Emily’s sparring might feel uniquely frustrating, they’re participating in a ritual as old as the dinner table itself.
“Generational divides at the table have always been visible,” sighs Earle.
Few topics divide a table quite like money. One side bought a house for three years’ salary; the other pays £1,200 a month for a damp shoebox. The British Social Attitudes Survey finds the UK increasingly split on social justice, national identity, and economic fairness. One of the biggest shifts today isn’t just what people believe, but how they decide what counts as true. The family table becomes a microcosm of these information wars. Uncle George trusts a broadsheet, Emily favours an infographic that’s been screenshotted so many times the font has melted. Both are scandalised by the other’s naivety.
Shared meals have long been spaces where identities are reinforced, social roles challenged, and hierarchies negotiated. In ancient Rome, the triclinium was a stage for political influence. Elite Romans used meals strategically, knowing that conversations over food
could achieve what formal meetings could not. Centuries later, Japanese tea ceremonies created a similar dynamic. These ritualised gatherings allowed warriors, merchants and aristocrats to interact more freely. In the 18th century, picnics united the various classes over food in a way that hadn’t quite been seen before. No matter what sort of cash you had in your pocket, all walks of life gathered in the same parks to enjoy a new norm for socialising.
During World War II, the British government introduced state-run communal dining halls to provide affordable, nutritious meals during rationing. While these spaces played an essential role in feeding the population, they also carried an ideological purpose.
As historian Earle explains: “Statesupported canteens in the early 20th century were conceived as spaces to inculcate middle-class norms into workers and children.”
Even in silence, people communicate; through a glance, a shift in posture, the tightening of a jaw
Above: A family sitting around a large table in the 1930s – at some point the generations are destined to clash over politics because some things never change; Below: The only sure-fire way to avoid mealtime conflict is to dine alone (picture by Christopher Jolly)
A similar project unfolded in 1940s Mexico, where the government introduced state-run national restaurants.
“The organisers were very clear that they were designed to ‘inculcate good manners’ into the poorly behaved proletariat,” Earle says. These dining spaces, though intended to promote equality, reinforced societal expectations about behaviour and belonging.
By the 1980s, the Wall Street power lunch reinforced hierarchy through seemingly small, unspoken gestures: who picked the restaurant, who controlled the conversation, who got the final word. “In business lunches, withholding comments is effective because it highlights a violation of the norm,” says Earle. “It becomes a power move.”
Silence has historically been a tool of discipline and control at the table. “In Victorian households, children were meant to be ‘seen and not heard’. That reduced the possibility of younger people arguing with their parents,” Earle says. While words may be withheld, meaning rarely is. Even in silence, people communicate; through a glance, a shift in posture, the tightening of a jaw. A meal might be quiet, but that doesn’t mean nothing is being said. Body language often carries as much weight as the conversation itself. Whether in a boardroom, around the family table, or on a date – where a nervous shirt tug could signal either profound anxiety or head-over-heels infatuation – these unspoken signals shape our interactions in ways we rarely consciously process. For all its tensions, the table is one of the few places where opposing views still have to sit next to each other, where eye contact replaces comment threads, and tone can’t be lost in translation. You won’t fix the world over roast potatoes but you might remember that disagreement isn’t the same as division. And if not? Well, at least the pudding is apolitical (unless someone brings up the sugar tax).
The universe hates solo diners but visiting restaurants by myself remains one of my favourite pastimes
During a recent solo trip to a new wine and oyster bar, I was directed to a dim corner of the restaurant far away from other diners. It was as if the patrons needed to be protected from the sad, friendless clown doing a sudoku and enjoying an alcohol free beer.
As the waiter came over to talk me through the menu he pointed out that “we tend to do sharing platters here, which are for two people rather than one”. But he made a mistake: don’t assume Jamie can’t handle a sharing board of oysters.
Our continued reluctance to dine alone, even as other solo pursuits become more accepted, never ceases to infuriate me. I won’t let my lack of a romantic partner stop me from experiencing all that life has to offer.
When I tell people I like to go out for a meal alone, I’m often met with pity, surprise or incredulity. How does that even wor quite simple – it doesn’t need to be approved by the solo dining ombudsman: you simply walk into a restaurant and ask for a table for one.
Being able to switch off from my phone and do a crossword, or just sit and watch the world go by, is a wonderful experience. We should all learn how to enjoy our own company, especially in a world that pedestals romantic love and overlooks those who skate confidently through life in their own lane. As
a writer, there’s nothing more exciting than being a stylish fly on the wall, listening to the birthday party opposite or the couple on their first date. It’s an exercise in being present in the moment and allowing yourself to drink in your surroundings (as well as your overpriced mocktail).
I’ll often see fellow solo diners, and although we’re strangers we often exchange a knowing nod before returning to our crème brûlées, debunking the myth that time spent alone is inherently lonely.
Should you make a habit of indulging in romantic meals for one, you will inevitably forge connections with those around you, too. If you’re nice to people (and they’re rich) they might even pay for your meal. One time eating out in a fancy restaurant, a family at the next table were trying to take a group photo ‘Ellen at the Oscars’ style. They were scrambling to get everyone in frame so I politely asked if they wanted me to take it for them. They acted as if I had offered to donate a kidney, thanking me profusely.
When I returned to my table and asked for the bill I was flabbergasted to find they had paid for the whole thing as a thank you. If I had known, I would’ve ordered dessert.
So my advice to you should you spot a new restaurant you want to try: don’t wait a month until one of your mates has a night off. Just book a table. Go alone. Live your life. And if you see me sitting in the corner, you’re very welcome to buy me dinner.
Jamie is a writer, model and public speaker; @jamie_windust
Erin Doherty on surviving Adolescence, hating her phone and shrinking away from fame. Interview by ADAM BLOODWORTH
Erin Doherty had already captured the zeitgeist. Her performance as Princess Anne in The Crown had such subtle power it made casting director Nina Gold realise working class people could play aristocrats. Then as crime lord Mary Carr in A Thousand Blows, she was lauded as one of the most versatile actors of her generation. Next came Adolescence, in which Doherty plays a child psychologist interviewing a teenager accused of murder, which blew everything else out of the water.
Doherty leads some of the most harrowing scenes in the mini-series, which has garnered the biggest audience for any streaming TV show in the UK in a single week. It’s become hard to pop to the shops without people asking “have you seen Adolescence?” – and everyone sounds genuinely unnerved. Asking questions about masculinity and online culture, it examines how 13-year-old Jamie could have been driven to commit such an evil crime, and looks at the repercussions on his family. Shot as live, each episode is filmed in a single take, with actors allowed to improvise, making its form almost as interesting as its content. Owen Cooper, who plays Jamie, has already landed the role of young Heathcliff in a forthcoming film adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
Doherty says she was genuinely scared during filming. You can’t turn away from her interrogation, which controversially humanises a murder suspect, but also shows the emotional repercussions on the psychologist.
We start by acknowledging that, by anyone’s standards, it’s been quite the year. “It took a good month to get it out of my system,” says Doherty of Adolescence. “You can’t escape what it’s doing to you, it kind of gets in your bones. There’s no copy and paste formula like, ‘Okay, I’ll do this, and then I’ll be Erin again.’ I was just so consumed and exhausted, just at the level of emotional intensity of this thing.’”
Doherty is propelled by the show’s themes about online radicalisation of young men. “I think we all have to hold ourselves accountable for trying to break the cycle in some way.”
Talking over Zoom, Doherty wears a luminescent blue
jumper and an even brighter smile. Unlike her most famous roles which veer towards austere, she is cheery and incredibly gracious. The first thing she offers is motherly reassurance about the tech issues I’ve had logging onto our call. “It’s so stressful, but you don’t need that anymore – it’s all gone!” Doherty, who is 32, chats effusively about everything from how she hated school to bingeing The Crown and obsessing over her characters. If a PE teacher were to mark her interview style, they’d commend her for “giving 110 per cent.”
Had it not been for Adolescence, her boxing drama A Thousand Blows, released this February on Disney Plus, would still be brewing in the public consciousness.
Doherty’s female crime lord was gently terrifying, with some hilarious lines, and that’s without mentioning the game-changing representation: bad-ass Victorian female gangsters, based on women who actually existed, aren’t classic prime-time fodder. She spent a year filming, then went straight into Adolescence, both with Stephen Graham, who invited her into the latter after being impressed by her work: “I didn’t even read the script,” she says. “Whatever he does is just full of pure heart and love and care. I just knew that it was gonna be so vital; he doesn’t take on projects lightly.”
The show has become the first streaming show ever to top the UK’s weekly TV ratings. “With something so frightening, it’s so easy to avoid it and to just go, ‘What a horrible thing that some people can do, I can’t get my head around it.’ Whereas this show is going, I understand how frightening a prospect that is, but we have to hold ourselves accountable for shining a light and going, ‘How are these events happening?’” says Doherty.
“Especially with our younger generation, we deserve to humanise how they get there, because otherwise, again, they just become this kind of two dimensional evil ‘other’. And actually, I do believe everyone is born a good person. I don’t think people are inherently evil. So it’s always necessary, it’s always worthy of our time to pick at that and go, ‘Oh my God, how did you get there?’”
Chuck in eight West End eight shows a week on top of her promotional schedule for Adolescence (she’s currently starring in the play Unicorns) and despite how she clearly loves talking about the show, she
I don’t think people are inherently evil. It’s always worthy of our time to pick at that and go, ‘Oh my God, how did you get there?’
admits she’s “sooooo readyyyyyy” for a holiday. I suspect her ability to appear affable even when she’s exhausted has helped her schmooze numerous big-wigs on her way up.
You wonder how our brightest Hollywood hope would fare on a sun lounger. Doherty admits she obsesseses over people to a degree that isn’t healthy. “It’s my biggest thing that I battle with,” she says. “I think we’ve all got demons. For me, it manifests as overthinking. I’ll get to the end of the day and I’ll lie in bed and be like, ‘Oh God, I hope that person didn’t take that the wrong way.’”
Because she “grew up a people pleaser”, she has to be careful that this approach doesn’t wear her down. But her ability to overanalyse can yield positive results, working in favour of forthcoming projects. When she researches roles, “I’ll dig and dig and dig and really try to understand and pick up why people behave the way they behave. I could linger on a specific interaction for a week.”
Growing up in Crawley, West Sussex, as a young girl Doherty and her older sister would take acting classes at the weekends. She was the shy one, but nevertheless remembers the experience changing her. “Something flipped through art,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t have to be Erin anymore.’ That was my first lasting impression of what acting and being someone else could do, mentally. I can put that anxiety down for a couple of hours and just let go. There’s not been anything else that I’ve found so freeing. It’s just in me. I don’t know how I would function without this ability to just let go.”
She took a one-year course at the Guildford School of Acting in 2011, not long after leaving school. Studying acting at the Bristol Old Vic, she graduated in 2015 and was first inspired to tread the boards after watching Mike Bartlett’s Earthquakes in London at the National Theatre, a vivid, chaotic interpretative dance number about, amongst other things, climate change.
Call The Midwife and the BBC miniseries of Les Misérables were early roles, but the part that properly propelled her came in 2019 when she was cast as a young Princess Anne in The Crown. Casting director Nina Gold had thought “playing a whole different social class is one of the most difficult things to do convincingly”, but has admitted, “Erin really blew that theory.” She was captivating as the poised young princess, revealing a vividness to the most reluctantly camera-ready of the late Queen’s children. She still binges The Crown, and is obsessed with Imelda Staunton. “I got to meet her the other day. We were working on an audio book, and she is everything you want her to be. I absolutely binged the last series and thought it was phenomenal.”
Looking back to where it all began,
Doherty reminisces about studying musical theatre at her comprehensive school in Crawley. She still has family there, and pops back regularly, but as a whole she cannot wax lyrical about the institution. “I hated school with a passion,” she says. “But the drama department was so pivotal to me.” She’d love to go back and jump in on some lessons. “I have such admiration for teachers but I could never see myself having the skill and ability.”
If not through teaching, she has always been keen to promote the idea of levelling up. Doherty seems genuinely overwhelmed when I read the Nina Gold quote to her. “For her to say something like that, I don’t really know how to deal with that. I’m just grateful she took a chance, and I hope that it encourages other casting directors to keep doing that, because I think without them taking that leap of faith, so many actors wouldn’t get their foot in the door. I think that an actor’s job is to transform.” She’s passionate about “bringing working class actors into the world of screen acting,” and has been inspired by Stephen Graham. “He’s so brilliant at climbing the ladder, looking down and helping people up. That’s so inspiring to me. If I could do what he did for me and is continuing to do for others, I’d be so overjoyed.”
Away from work, Doherty is private, but decompresses by enjoying the small
things. “Walks, family, engaging in normal conversation.” You sense she finds the concept of celebrity so bizarre that describing her downtime is a weird notion in itself. Despite whatever’s been written about her (none of which she reads), success has forced her to “really, really lean into my people. I have a very small circle.” She is happily in a relationship, but contrary to newspaper headlines, her girlfriend “isn’t in the industry”.
You can see why Adolescence appealed. She admits she is “awful” at her phone, always leaving her family on read, and says too many of us are addicted to
technology. “I don’t think I’m doing it right either,” she says of her scarce digital approach. “I feel like there’s got to be a better balance. I’ve just kind of gone the opposite end of the scale.” Of Gen Z, who are growing up internet natives, she has “such empathy.” “It just completely freaks me out. I don’t know how I’d manage.”
I don’t need to know what you think about my work. If you want to come up to me and talk about it, great, but I don’t need to be a part of that conversation online
She shies away from public perceptions about her, and is firm about why: “I just want people to watch the show. I don’t necessarily need to know what you think about it. If you want to come up to me and we’ll talk about it, great, but I don’t need to be a part of that conversation online. That’s not for me.” Instead, her family and set of lifelong friends are her barometer. “They’ll be like, ‘Things are really positive for you. Just know that you’re doing alright.’ I don’t need to look any further. If my people are telling me that it’s all good, then that’s enough.”
As for what’s next, she’s vague, but implies nothing’s firmly on the table yet. She circles back to that much needed holiday, then, on the topic of future roles, offers me a final one of her beautiful thought spirals. “I just like people,” she says. “Trying to figure out why we behave the way we behave, whether that means putting on a corset and walking down the cobbles of East End London or putting on an Adidas tracksuit and exploring what that means in 2025.”
He played the first black Billy Elliot nearly 20 years ago and has become a West End favourite. Now Layton Williams takes on his biggest challenge yet. He speaks to ADAM BLOODWORTH
Iwould hope the 20 years I’ve been in this industry speaks for itself,” says Layton Williams. “And I guess it does! Oh my god, I’ve probably cried about five times today.” Four hours earlier, Williams had been nominated for British theatre’s most prestigious accolade, an Olivier Award, for something completely ridiculous: his role in an X-Rated Titanic parody musical in which he plays an iceberg. Camper than a shopping spree with Joan Collins, and featuring most of her wardrobe, there’s a scattering of old ladies in the audience, but most are drunk twenty-somethings.
It is at best ludicrous and at worst has offended middle England: there have been complaints, but he shrugs them off. “It makes me laugh. Did you not know what you’re getting yourself into? Read about shows before you book them.” But they’re old ladies, Layton! “Bless them.”
Slumped on a couch backstage at the Criterion Theatre and wearing half a face of make-up, Williams wears a baggy black hoodie and black shorts. He’s unrecognisable from the red carpet image that precedes him. Williams is one of the most fashionable breakthrough West End stars, especially after his stint on Strictly Come Dancing in 2023. But as he tells me, he’s 30 now, and not every moment can be fabulous. That is too exhausting. Life these days is “a bit more low key,” he admits. “It’s not all day everyday, slay.”
When he was younger, Williams made history. He was the West End’s first black Billy Elliott and the first black Jamie in
Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. In his adult years, he has sustained the quality of his performances, and has risen to become one of the West End’s fanfavourite talents, most notably as the Emcee in Cabaret, the role du jour in Theatreland right now for actors who want to test themselves and put their own stamp on a character (Williams’ Emcee was – as you might expect –gleefully camp).
So it feels funny that playing a lump of ice is the role that’s being critically lauded. But it is testament to his lifelong confidence that he can make a sillysounding role astoundingly good (I reviewed and gave the show four stars). In one of the most barnstorming moments, he performs Tina Turner’s River Deep Mountain High with such impressive wigs and makeup that it could be the legend herself. Oh, and the singing is alright too. “It actually is so crazy. For the iceberg! Do you know what I mean?”
You get the impression that nothing
I’d return to Strictly, but I’m done with performing. This time I want to be in the judging seat!
touches the sides – or at least that’s how he wants to come off. That’s probably to do with how he was brought up. Growing up as one of eight boys in Bury, Greater Manchester, Williams spent his early years on the Dicky Bird Estate. Put politely, it was a challenging place to grow up queer. There have been shootings, and the drone of the M66 running close by is a defining characteristic.
As a young boy, he passed as a ‘chav’ to fit in with the local boys, but dreamed of escaping. Aged 12, that actually happened when Williams attended an open audition for the role of Billy Elliot and landed the part. He went on to study at the Sylvia Young and Italia Conti acting schools in the capital.
He also landed television roles: aged 13, he starred in the film Beautiful People, and ended up moving in with one of the female producers and her wife.
“They basically brought me up throughout my teenage years. I can’t tell you how beautiful it is to grow up as a queer teenager in a household where it’s normal,” he told The Guardian. “They just let me be me, and I think that’s a big reason why I’m the confident gay man I am now.” Now he lives in London with his boyfriend of nearly two years after the two were set up at Glastonbury by Billie Piper. “We call her our Cupid because I wouldn’t have met James without her!”
Ballroom dancing will remain a mainstay in Williams’ life this summer, when he returns to Blackpool to film The Light Fantastic, a film about the ballroom dancing scene with LGBTQ
legend Rupert Everett and Jeremy Irvine. It’ll be his first major feature and he fizzes with excitement when talking about it, exhibiting the same keenness that must have caught the eyes of casting directors almost 20 years ago. “When I found out they were attached, I was like, fuck!” he says. “It feels like it’s gonna be very special. I can’t remember the last time there was a British musical movie with original music. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, maybe.”
The gag is that his character isn’t a good dancer, so Williams doesn’t need to go into rehearsals, buying him precious time with his family after a six-month stint of eight shows per week in the West End. It’s hard to be close to eight siblings, but his northern life grounds him. Most of them won’t have heard of the Olivier Awards, and he says that’s helpful. “It’s actually really nice. Normal life is so important.”
This has been especially true of late, when troubling fan encounters have made his high profile life feel more than a little uncomfortable. People hanging around outside the theatre and bothering him has been stressful; he’s been vocal on Instagram about avoiding them for his own safety. It comes amid much online conversation about how fandoms can turn toxic; Chappell Roan and Taylor Swift have spoken out about fans whose obsessive behaviour has crossed over into harassment. He looks stern and genuinely uncomfortable when he says: “I need to shake them. I’m just gonna be honest and just say, ‘Listen, you make me feel uncomfortable. Let’s make this work for all of us. But this isn’t riding for me right now, and that’s just the truth.’ I actually am a bit worried currently. Worried that we’re gonna have to do something about
it. I don’t want to cry, like Baby Reindeer, but I need of try and work out how… I don’t know how I’m gonna figure it out, but something needs to be done.”
Strictly was another challenge – viewers and some critics criticised Williams’ casting as a professional dancer but he became a fan hit. That irked the naysayers more. He’d like to return to the
show, only this time as a judge. Speaking about that, his spark and resilience returns. “I want to sit and judge you now, do you know what I mean? Like, I don’t want anyone telling me whether they think this or the other. I want to be in the judging seat!” l Titanique runs until 8 June; london.titaniquemusical.com
How far would you go in the search for improved productivity? ANNA MOLONEY talks to the people undergoing invasive surgery in a bid to stay ahead of the game
As the TV-watching world reels from the conclusion of season two of Severance, it is perhaps comforting to view it from the convenient distance of dystopian science fiction. Set within the mysterious healthcare company Lumon, Severance imagines a world in which office workers can choose to be ‘severed’: a procedure in which a microchip is implanted into the brain to divide memory between work and home. When you are at the office, all memories of your home life are erased, and vice versa. It’s the ultimate work-life balance.
Or so it’s sold. Of course, things turn out to be far more sinister. The workers’ ‘innies’ – their work selves – never see the sun, perform tasks they’re not told the meaning of (“the work is mysterious and important”) and are near-constantly monitored on their whereabouts, wellbeing and quarterly targets. Add to this the psychological torment of feeling as if you’re living in a perpetual loop – with no recollection of downtime, family life or hobbies – and you’ve got the Sisyphus of the desk jockey age, condemned for eternity to a neverending 9-5.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Severance, then, is that its themes are closer to reality than many of us would like to admit.
Consenting to being microchipped by your employer sounds farfetched, but allow me to introduce you to the United States of America. In 2017, a US company got headline writers around the world jostling for clicks after implanting radio-frequency lll
identification (RFID) microchips into the hands of 50 willing employees.
– ‘US company holds ‘party’ to microchip workers’ – ‘US tech company offers to turn employees into cyborgs’ – ‘This firm already microchips employees. Could your ailing relative be next?’
The supervillain chipping firm in question? A vending machine upgrades seller in Wisconsin. The microchips, given out by Three Square Market to its workers – strictly on a voluntary basis – empowered employees to open the building door, sign onto their computers and use the printer, all with a wave of the hand. Quirky, but not exactly groundbreaking.
Indeed, CEO Todd Westby described the whole thing as a rather jolly affair: “It is really convenient having the chip in your hand with all the things it can do,” he told CNBC. “We initially decided to do it just because we thought it was… I guess you could say ‘cool, something different’?” The $300 chips themselves were administered at a merry HQ-hosted “chip party”, with microchips served alongside tortilla chips. Those who opted to be chipped saw themselves as early adopters – this will be normal in five years, they proclaimed.
Of course, those five years have come to pass, and the microchipping revolution has not. But that doesn’t mean it won’t.
Len Noe was an active criminal for most of his life. Diagnosed with a genius IQ in fourth grade, but also having an affinity for ripped jeans and heavy metal, Noe found it hard to fit in while growing up. Motorcycle gangs, where all he had to do was “drink, act like an asshole and ride a motorcycle” offered “instant community”, he says. Here his IQ was also valued – “It opened up a whole world of, how shall we say, opportunity?” – and he found himself spending the majority of his time committing cyber crimes for the gang. “I was very loud, I was very aggressive and I was very scary.”
But around 11 years ago, when holding his newborn granddaughter, he vowed to change. Going from blackhat to whitehat hacker, Noe joined a cybersecurity firm and entered the speaker circuit. Part of his bit was showing people how easy it is to have your phone hacked into. One problem: being found in possession of a hacking tool like a Flipper Zero could be enough to send him to jail. “I’m on a couple of the FBI watch-lists to this day,” he tells me, not without a hint of pride. Not one to compromise on the theatrics of his demos, Noe found a loophole: putting the devices inside of him.
“Once you put technology inside the body, it is covered under the same scope and privacy laws that are contained within GDPR in the EU and HIPAA here in the United States. So I have protections at a governmental level that are, essentially, hackers tools.” Noe tells me this not as someone smug to be pulling the wool over the FBI’s eyes, but with genuine concern at the potential for this to be used by bad actors. Noe, who now has 11 devices inside him, from magnets in his fingers to the key to his crypto wallet, admits he will wear Faraday gloves if he’s likely to be around other hackers, so as to prevent them from compromising his own chips, many of which he’s advertised the exact location of.
But Noe does not regret his openness. A self-referring cyborg, he thinks secrecy is part of the problem. “There are a large number of individuals in the United States
that have these types of implants, but nobody’s talking about it,” he says, citing the bad press around Three Square Market as a key factor in driving the movement underground. “There are companies that are doing it, but nobody’s talking about it publicly because they don’t want the stigma.” Indeed, when I contact Three Square Market former president Patrick McMullan over Linkedin, he is reluctant to talk about microchipping, telling me there is a segment of the population who will dismiss anything he says on the subject.
Noe, by contrast, is clearly comfortable in his own device-ridden skin. “I’m the biggest freak in the room, and that’s okay. I’m good with that.” He comes across as intelligent as he is eccentric. “One of my favorite hobbies is to have somebody put giant hooks in my back and hang from the ceiling,” he tells me early on in our conversation. “An adrenaline rush like no tomorrow!” he enthuses.
I ask if there are any downsides to being a cyborg. “The biggest risk is heavy metal poisoning,” he says, cool as a cucumber. The microchips contain all sorts of corrosive metals, he explains, though they’re encased inside of a biopolymer. “If that becomes compromised, then I can face severe medical complications.”
Another “side effect” is his inability to have MRIs. “Depending on what the implant is, how much actual metal is in it, you do run the risk of it actually ripping out of your body.” Noe is unfazed, but I suspect that could well be a hiccup for more widespread cyborgism.
He doesn’t cite it as an explicit con, but being called the antichrist is also a given for a cyborg, with microchips being branded as a “mark of the beast” by some zealots. Noe, as self-acknowledged though, is an extreme case. Kai Castledine, the founder of London-based KSEC, which is one of the largest distributors of biohacking implants in the world, tells me among the most popular chips are those that simply light up. “People love LEDs.”
Three Square Markets wasn’t the first to introduce employee microchipping, it was just the loudest. The executive who proposed the idea had only come across the tech because of a trip to Sweden. It’s not just a coincidence it was ABBA who agreed to turn themselves into holograms. Swedes, it turns out, thanks to a culture of innovation, high trust in the state and a strong scientific tradition, are really into tech.
Indeed, by the time Three Square Market was making global alarmist headlines, Swedish company Biohax, who provided
the chips for the Midwestern vendors, were already responsible for the implanting of around 3,000 chips. And not just for techy outcasts. Back in its heyday, Biohax was providing chips for the likes of the Swedish national railway and Tui.
When I speak to founder and CEO Jowan Österlund, he is as giddy as you can describe a fully tattooed, bearded man. Biohax had been gaining momentum until a global pandemic set things back. “Covid put me out of business, or perhaps in hibernation –until five weeks ago,” he tells me. In a matter of pure serendipity, he tells me I’d contacted him just as he was getting the band back together. At the time of speaking, Österlund had just raised money at a €10m valuation and had just come back from a visit to Wales’ biomedicine hub the Centre of Excellence, where he is planning to do most of the research, development and manufacturing for his new range of human implants, with the potential to have something out by October.
He is supremely confident, and I can see why. His new chips will not only focus on the convenience of the former range, but the multi trillion-dollar health industry. By tracking biomarkers, Österlund says his chips could provide “predictive and preventative care”.
When I ask Österlund how he will assuage those with data privacy concerns, he evangelises about the product’s ethical credentials. “The most ironic thing is people shouting about dystopia and tracking from their smartphones on social media,” he tells me, arguing that these handheld devices are far more compromising to our privacy than implanted ones. “We will
never work with anyone that would impose this in any way or form. If you’re not promoting self, sovereign identity and empowering the individual, you’re never going to work with us.”
It is easy to assume that people would draw a hard line when it comes to microchipping, but humans can often surprise, and the status quo should not be taken for granted.
Indeed, in the case of Three Square Market, there is something unsettling in the mundanity of it all. Of the seven Glassdoor reviews for the company, only one mentions the chips, and even then with laughable flippancy. The review, headed “Good gig!” reads “Pros: working coffee machine, printers, free swag! Cons: Implanted microchips are a bit too invasive.” The rest of the testimonials are unfazed by the microchipping, musing instead on the competing pros and cons of the workload, salaries and opportunities for career progression. It just goes to show, convenience really is king.
This, perhaps, is what we should really be most alert to: slow creep. We may not be lining up to be microchipped yet, but workplace surveillance has climbed right in front of our eyes. A 2022 Trade Union Congress poll suggested that at least three in five workers had been monitored by an employer. Meanwhile, 81 per cent of British businesses have reported enthusiasm for employee tracking due to its efficacy in clamping down on ‘quiet vacationing’, according to new data from Kinly. A friendly popup in the corner of my screen, reminding me my location, can be tracked via my IP address, which certainly keeps me tiptapping away. By and large, this has been to the detriment of employees and employers. Gallup EMEA managing partner Jeremie Brecheisen tells me the imposition of employee monitoring is not always ill-intentioned by companies, but the erosion of trust – which he cites as integral to workplace wellbeing – leaves everyone in tears. Employers often “overestimate the amount of trust and goodwill that they have”, he tells me.
Severance not only asks if we can separate our work from our lives, but whether we should
Card swipe tracking, keystroke monitors, under-desk sensors, fatigue monitoring, biometric sign-ins, emotionrecognition technology: the world of bossware has already blossomed, often under the guise of care. Worker safety, cybersecurity and employee safeguarding can all be cited in the name of surveillance. Sometimes, the reasons may be even more prosaic. In 2016, The Telegraph cited “environmental sustainability” as its primary motive for
Opposite page: Len Noe’s implanted hands Clockwise from right: Adam Scott’s character Mark Scout in Severance; Lem Noe, a cybercriminal turned implant enthusiast; The first wave of implanted chips were used to pay at vending machines; Biohax founder and CEO Jowan Österlund
installing under-desk occupancy sensors in its newsroom. The organisation was forced to remove the ‘OccupEye’ devices just days later “in the light of feedback” (the likes of which included its slamming as “Big Brother-style surveillance” by the NUJ), though other organisations have picked up on the tech since, thanks to its reputation appearing marginally more palatable in the post-pandemic world, where return to work mandates, as well a cultural retreat from a need to appear ‘woke’, have emboldened companies. Slow creep is happening all around us. As it happens, Three Square Market is an example of a more palatable front too. Its sister company, Turnkey Corrections, specialises in prison security. Its current website, I kid you not, boasts that it is “Putting the AI in jail” with its new prison tech.
Severance not only asks if we can separate our work from our lives, but whether we should. One of the most heinous aspects of the Severed technology is that the workers choose to be severed. So would half of Gen Z, according to a survey conducted by workplace mental health platform Unmind. Perhaps none of these participants actually watched the show, but this is the same generation that supposedly crave dictatorship too, so we should give it some consideration. Work-life balance has become a battleground. When Brewdog’s controversial founder James Watt and his now wife Georgia Toffolo proclaimed their disdain for the work-life balance, instead opting for ‘work-life integration’, many of us scoffed, but this is mainstream rhetoric. ‘Love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life,’ so they say. And we all know instinctively that being happy at work is integral to overall wellbeing. Research from Gallup shows the difference between having a good and bad manager can be the difference between having a heart attack on a Monday or not. The reality of the evolution of the workplace is that, far from trying to sever our lives, it is far more interested in sewing them closer together: beer taps, gym passes, healthcare, tech to track your energy levels, office passes that you commit to your body. “Our job is to taste free air. Your so-called boss may own the clock that taunts you from the wall. But, my friends, the hour is yours,” as Dr Ricken Hale says in Severance. In the show this is framed as self-help prattle but we may too do well to heed it.
Margate is a place of contradictions, at once gentrified and deprived, arty and unloved. We take a deep dive into the strangest town in the UK.
Words: LUCY KENNINGHAM
Photo-journal: ANDY BLACKMORE
Five years ago, some dilapidated public urinals in a park in Margate were sold at auction by the council to a private bidder for £11,000. The shabby little structure is barely visible from the path, a graffitied block hidden behind shrubs with weeds winding through the roof and floor. The original glazed urinals are exposed and crumbling. For half a decade, the former loos have languished.
“It’s the county’s strangest listed building,” says Margate local John Cripps. “Firstly it’s a toilet, and secondly it’s derelict. Why would you buy something and then just leave it?”
Welcome to the UK’s strangest town. Labelled one of the most deprived coastal regions in the country by the Office for National Statistics in 2010, Margate has since undergone a dramatic transformation, illustrated by the various new titles bestowed upon it: Shoreditch-bySea, Hackney Bay, Camden-by-Sea, and even the ‘polyamory capital of the UK’. In 2022, the Cliftonville area of Margate was named Time Out’s ‘Eighth coolest neighbourhood in the world’.
In a sign of the times, the urinals are finally being converted into – what else? – a coffee shop, a project that pledges to preserve the list-worthy decorative metal panels. It’s another win for the hipsters, who already stand accused of hijacking the coastal town.
Last month local punk band CRABS released a track entitled Make Margate Shit Again, cheekily bemoaning the town’s gentrification. Choice lines include:
I miss the days when Dreamland was shuttered / Bring back drunks face down in the gutter /
At least we could afford to pay the rent / Instead of heading to the beach and pitching a tent
And it’s not just locals who are mad: Margate’s transformation has irked the nation more than just about anywhere else. But why the vitriol? Academic Phil Hubbard, who wrote the book Borderlands, writes
that Kent’s coast is often seen as an imagined battleground where our national myths are played out: our relationship with foreigners, our national identity, our values. If Margate is changing, what does it mean?
“People get Margate so wrong,” Aly tells me. She says the independent bookshop where she works is essentially “Margate’s unofficial tourist board” and she spends hours discussing the place. The bookshop was opened in 2019 by a woman who moved to Margate from Mile End, making her a typical DFL – Down From Londoner – an acronym and identity with which all of Margate is familiar. That is to say: Hipsters (“I hate the H word,” hisses Aly). Margate seems to hold a romantic appeal for lost Londoners, she says. “People just kind of wash up here, in a coastal town. But when you come to a small place like this, you can’t escape yourself.”
The Margate Bookshop is a small Georgian building in the Market Square of the Old Town, which is the pinnacle of gentrified Margate. Queer, anti-colonial, translated and other modern books fill the shelves. A notice board advertises community events: life drawing classes, ‘breathwork’ sessions, a story club “championing diverse picture books” for children, pregnancy yoga and “Steph’s supper club” (£35pp, excluding drinks).
Originally from Canterbury, Aly moved here several years ago via East Dulwich. “It’s impossible to describe Margate without saying things like, edgy,” she says, wincing for comic effect. “Edgy” could in this case refer to the crime rate (one of the highest of any UK town, particularly for drugs and violent and sexual offences), the many boarded up shops on the high street or the dilapidated buildings. It does not apply to the bookshop, which is endearingly twee.
“You can only afford to live in Margate now if you work remotely or if you’re a tradesperson or maybe
if you own a local business,” Charlotte tells me over a late afternoon hot chocolate in Turkish bakery-diner Olimpia. She has lived here all her life and works for her dad’s company, which fixes lifts. Charlotte says her property, bought a few years ago, has gone up in value by more than £100,000. Over the last decade house prices in Margate have doubled, although they have plateaued in the last 12 months. People Charlotte went to school with have been priced out. How does she feel about it all?
“What, you mean the gentrification? I don’t mind it, really. It means there are new cocktail bars and places that are more my scene now. I go out and I’ll meet someone from New Zealand, or the Netherlands, and I’m like ‘Why would you want to come here!’ The roads feel less sketchy than when I was a child. I had a boyfriend who used to tell me to run if anyone approached us walking along Northdown Road in the evening.”
The artist Tracey Emin remembers Margate as a “no-go zone” in the 1980s, when she was raped in the town as a young girl. Now Northdown Road has some of the town’s trendiest spots, places like artisan bakery Oust. Close by, the Good Egg, a posh brunch spot stands next to THANET TASTY CHICKEN, which is in turn next to the Christian Book Centre. “Northdown is a bit like Kings Road,” says Aly. “But with more methadone clinics and fewer Vietnamese restaurants.” Charlotte grew up in Margate in the 1990s and noughties, at the height of its erosion. Like many seaside towns, it has been on a ride. The OG seaside town, it became famous due to its accessibility by steamboat from London during the 17th and 18th century, when sea air and sea swimming were very much in vogue. The swanky swim-and-sun resort was home to the first roller coaster in the UK and the first donkey ride along the coast. In 1863, when the train station was
commissioned, the town was full of boarding houses and swanky hotels. But then: The Storm. All Margaters know about The Storm. It hit in 1953, destroying most of the beachside infrastructure. It is the reason Margate, unlike most British coastal towns, is missing a pier. It doesn’t even have a ruined one – it had fully disintegrated by 1998. The catastrophe, along with the dawn of cheap foreign package holidays, sent Margate to the bottom of the list of
All Margaters know about The Storm. It hit in 1953, destroying most of the beachside
aspirational travel destinations.
Ironically, the weight of Margate’s past sometimes holds it back. Attempts to preserve its history – especially its listed buildings – have tended to “limit the growth of modern infrastructure and resulted in a lack of housing,” according to Gemma Collins, who wrote a recent paper comparing the fates of Margate and Glasgow.
This happened with Dreamland, the amusement park that was set to be converted to modern offices and flats in 1993. A year before work was due to begin, the Scenic Railway was designated a Grade II listed building. This marked the first time in history a ride was given listed status, halting the redevelopment. In this case the developers saved themselves some money: in 2008, an arsonist set it on fire. Margate “hasn’t seen the support from the national government that big cities have,” according to former mayor Rob Yates. Indeed, the idea and funding for the town’s flagship attraction, the Turner Contemporary art gallery, was led by Kent
County Council. The Turner opened in 2011, bringing arty tourists from London and further afield, and ever since Margate’s fortunes have changed. The Turner Gallery alone generated almost £68m for the local economy in 2019. A new, faster train line opened and DFLs flooded in. Gentrification took hold. TS Eliot’s bus shelter, where he wrote part of The Wasteland – On Margate Sands / I can connect nothing with nothing – was recently refurbished.
From 2011 to 2021, Margate had the highest rise in house prices of all the UK’s coastal towns. Yates, worried that local people couldn’t afford to stay in their homes, proposed letting limits and planning restrictions on Airbnbs, which many DFLs blame for the housing problems (rather than blaming themselves). Fortuitous cards have not been dealt evenly: Cliftonville West and Margate Central remain the most economically deprived neighbourhoods in Kent, and are within the most deprived 10 per cent in the UK.
Margate is also a place of political
conflict. Thanet District Council was famously a UKIP heartland, although last year the town elected its first Labour MP in 20 years. A recent clash between left and right saw locals successfully block the removal of asylum seekers to the controversial Bibby Stockholm floating ‘processing centre’ in Portsmouth by lying in the road. The protest ultimately prompted the Home Office to rescind their decision to send 22 men, mostly from Afghanistan, to the barge.
At an old morgue in the heart of Margate, I meet David, a chef at The Perfect Place To Grow. A humble man with large, kind eyes, he greets me outside the arched annexe; a Tracey Emin neon sign flickers behind us. He introduces me to the three youths in the kitchen that afternoon: Bradley, Bradley and Lyra, all wearing aprons and making meringues.
They are part of a project that aims to help NEETs (young people not in education, employment or training) get a foothold in the jobs market. David used to work in London as a chef but fell into poor mental health and spent time sleeping rough. He got help and trained to become a councillor.
You can tell Lyra’s a good cook. She’s obsessed with a £15,000 monster pressure cooker that can make 25 litres of spaghetti bolognese in one go. “I want one in my house one day!” Lyra’s dream is to open a bakery in Italy, so David helped get her a placement at an Italian bakery in town, with funding from Thanet Council.
“When we do an initial assessment, we ask potential trainees, ‘Do you feel part of your community?’ And most of them don’t even know what that means. They really don’t,” says David. Last summer, Emin invited the team at The Perfect Place to Grow down to the White Cube in Bermondsey – one of the chicest art galleries in London – to cater for the opening night of her new exhibition.
Arlington House is a vast monument to 1970s excess, out of character with the rest of the town
The Perfect Place to Grow is located between a new block of flats called Emin Court and TKE Studios (the Tracey K Emin artist studios). I knew she was a big presence, but I didn’t know quite how big. Emin presides over Margate like a feudal lord of the manor. If you sit in a (gentrified) cafe, the person sitting next to you may well turn out to be one of
her proteges (this actually happened to me).
The creator of provocative and confessional artworks such as Everyone I’ve Ever Slept With, You Keep Fucking Me and the infamous My Bed (literally her bed, after having spent a few days shagging, eating, drinking and sleeping in it), she is worth an estimated $15 million. As such, she can afford to do things like buy up an old gentlemen’s club on a whim in a bid to stop it being turned into a nightclub (it later transpired the roof was caving in).
She is also the patron of The Perfect Place to Grow, whose website reads: “None of this would be possible without our amazing friend,” under a large portrait of Emin, as if she were the town saint. After making her name in London, the artist moved back to Margate (from Shoreditch) in 2017 after suffering from cancer. She has become a diligent local campaigner and patron of the arts. The sea air is filled with gossip about her: “She owns 80 per cent of the property here,” speculates a musician, who wishes to remain anonymous (no one wants to be caught bad-mouthing Tracey).
One problem I encounter, as a temporary DFL, is that if you’re a late night drinker, Margate’s pubs and bars close early (even earlier than London). Or, if it’s a Wednesday, they are likely not open at all. So it is not by choice that I end up at Lido Pool Bar at the edge of the town, by the sea. It sells Kit Kats and Neck Oil with suspiciously printed-out and laminated labels. A game of pool costs 50p. It is a real mix of DFLs and Margate lifers, groups that otherwise tend to operate in silos. It’s also extremely weird: indescribable scenes are plastered over the walls: howling demons, smug flat-capped men, and what looks like… uh, the Louvre? If you look up close, the images are heavily pixellated. “The Sistine Chapel!” my new friends cry. “We love it!” They argue over whether the wallpaper has changed recently. “It’s not wallpaper, it’s art,” says the owner Neville.
Around the corner in a spacious room near the Old Town, Danny Romeril, a man with mutton chops and a green cap, is holding an exhibition. Originally from Jersey, he and his partner moved from Camberwell to Margate to buy a property a couple of years ago. It was during Covid that they got the idea. More space, the sea. He doesn’t miss London. The exhibition – an odd combination of sketches, small sculptures and grand oil paintings – is called Jumble.
Romeril loves it here. “If you like bad weather, this is the perfect place,” he grins, describing the regular 40 mile an hour winds with genuine affection. He doesn’t think Margate’s problems – a rental crisis, gentrification, deprivation – are Margate’s alone; in fact they are Britain’s problems. But if you get the media calling Margate the eighth coolest neighbourhood in the world, he says, then of course you’ll create some false expectations.
To jumble is a process of mixing things up in a disordered way, according to Romeril’s display notes. Is Margate a jumble? In a way yes, but it’s also carefully ordered and socially coded to prevent jumbling. Certain cafes are for certain people. Curve, for example, sells kimchi cheese toasties for £10, as well as ground coffee and various merch, all reading ‘Curve’, as if the place you buy a latte describes your whole personality. Which, in a way, it does.
People who go to Curve do not go to Charlie’s, a
seafront restaurant that currently has a 50% OFF ALL FOOD offer advertised in the window. If you walk up from the Old Town, the slant of the windows has the unfortunate effect of squeezing the letters together so that it reads: 50% OFFAL. Nor do they go to The ODDS Club, which I’m told has a tendency to turn away the DFL crowd.
It’s at Curve I meet Ryan, a pub manager and novelist in his forties who hails from the Outer Hebrides. He tells me he’s a “walking cliche”: he and his partner moved here from Hackney after Covid. He, too, thinks The Media gets Margate wrong. “A lot of Old Town is owned by people who bought here in the 1980s for nothing, people who don’t even live here. It’s too easy to blame incomers [for rental increases]. It’s the landlords who are to blame. People often call it Hackney-Meets-Sea, or Shoreditch-by-Sea, which is so lazy, you know? All healthy communities should have art galleries, community spaces and places where people go to share ideas and enjoy culture.”
Ryan says that by spending his money in local restaurants, venues and shops, and working in Margate (in his case as the general manager of The George and Heart pub), he is participating in a circular economy. It reminds me of Aly’s observation that Margate attracts people who are looking for community while also running away from something.
Arlington House, a gigantic brutalist tower block in the centre of town, divides the people of Margate. You can’t miss it: it’s a vast monument to 1970s excess, entirely out of character with the rest of the town but not without its modernist charms. Whichever way you lean, it has the slightly sinister energy of a neolithic obelisk. From outside, it appears deserted. The only indicators of life are little details like an anti-Putin banner on a mid-floor window, and even that looks washed out and faded. Crisp packets blow in the blustery Margate wind across its wide, empty paths. It’s an unlikely totem for a small-town rebellion.
But one night last November, a Thanet District Council planning meeting erupted into cheers over Arlington House. Councillors had just voted unanimously against a recommendation to replace its windows. A campaign headed by – of course – Tracey Emin had won. “If Arlington House had been in London or any major city, it would have been protected and listed as an outstanding building,” she said last year.
The leaseholder had planned to replace the windows, which “rattle and shake”, with a new design. Artsy folk, architectural charities like the C20 Society and flat owners including Emin, protested. The windows had been specifically designed to give each flat both a sea and inland view, they argued. They are part of Margate’s heritage. Some residents fought back, citing the staggering energy bills they accrue due to the single glazing.
The aesthetic of the flats within Arlington House change drastically from floor to floor. On one it might be run-down and deprived, while another will be full of freshly decorated units complete with mid-century furniture and all the trappings of middle-class life. A local historian is said to have decorated their flat in period 1960s style. In a way, Arlington House is reflective of Margate as a whole: gentrified and falling down, a vision of both the past and the future, an extreme example of Britain’s deepening inequalities.
We’re living for longer than ever but the boom in the elderly population is a social and political timebomb. Could ‘later life’ communities like Auriens be the answer, asks STEVE DINNEEN
Ienter a grand lobby, all lofty ceilings, marquetry floors and art deco fittings. An effusive concierge in a natty blue suit takes my bags, hands me a keycard to my suite and directs me to a bank of sofas, where I’m furnished with a crisp glass of viognier. I catch the eye of Paulene, who tells me she’s been on the cover of Vogue. Soon we’re sashaying arm in arm down a flight of marble stairs, exchanging stories about how we ended up here. We settle into a row of seats in the library for the evening’s entertainment: a spirited lecture on the sinking of the Titanic, delivered by a relative of someone who sailed aboard the ill-fated vessel.
Were you to stumble upon this place – and were you to make it into the secure building – you would be forgiven for thinking it was a new five star bolthole for the international jetset. But this isn’t a hotel and, at a mere 42 years old, I’m the youngest person in the room by several decades. This is Auriens, a Chelseabased “later living” community where the minimum age is 65 and the average is north of 80. It’s a retirement community rather than a care home – you
must be relatively healthy and mobile to move in and there are no doctors on site, although nurses and carers can be organised for an additional fee.
Residents are offered everything from state of the art medical check-ups and custom meal plans to a 24 hour concierge and a calendar packed with social events, all in a bid to keep them happy and healthy long into old age. I’m the first journalist to check in for an overnight stay to find out how the super-rich are seeing out their dotage and ask what – if any –lessons we can take into wider society.
Auriens, which opened in 2020 (sadly just in time for the pandemic), is unabashedly aimed at the top one per cent of the top one per cent. It offers both purchase and rental options, with prices to buy ranging from £2.75m for a one-bedroom apartment to £9.5m for the sprawling 2,500 square foot penthouse with views across Chelsea. Rent starts from just over £20,000 a month. And that’s before you add tailored support plans, meals at the restaurant, exercise classes, service charges… The list goes on.
In what seems like a baffling statistic, I’m told 80 per cent of residents here have flown on Concorde. One
designed the Pimms bottle. Many were titans of industry or patrons of the arts (73 per cent are women, who live longer and are more likely to lose a partner). It is what you might call an elite crowd. As you would expect, no expense is spared: there’s a speakeasy-style bar; a blue velvet residents’ cinema; a garden –rather cold and wet during my visit – designed by a gold medal-winning Chelsea Flower Show landscape architect, where live music events are held. There is a spa and a pool and a salon and a cutting-edge medical facility. It is nicer than just about any hotel I’ve stayed in.
Like the Titanic heading inexorably towards the iceberg, the UK is on a collision course with an old age crisis. In 2022, there were 12.7m people aged over 65, or just under a fifth of the population. According to the ONS this is set to rise to 22.1m, or 27 per cent of the population, by 2072. Almost a quarter of over-65s are expected to be in poverty by 2040. Combine this with both a housing shortage and a welfare deficit and you have a major problem on your hands. How will we care for them all? How will we pay their pensions and their medical costs? Where will they live once they can no longer stay at home? And by “they” what I really mean is me
Another issue is loneliness. In 2023, The World Health Organization declared loneliness a global health threat. The US surgeon general says its effects are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, with the lonely seeing their chances of developing dementia increase by 50 per cent and the risk of heart attack or stroke increasing by almost a third.
“Everywhere you look, there are the wrong type of properties being occupied by the wrong people,” Auriens chief commercial officer Henry Lumby tells me. Clad in a pinstripe suit and pale pink tie, Lumby is a well-put together man in his mid-forties who looks every inch the luxury hotel manager; you can picture him scurrying along the corridors of the White Lotus putting out fires and dealing with stroppy guests. He’s worked in later living (“we hate the word ‘retirement’ here,” he hisses) for more than 20 years, describing it as both his profession and his passion.
“We need to see [residences like Auriens] across the country, across all price points and geographical regions,” he says. But while Australia and the US have around five per cent of the population living in such communities (Auriens is backed by a US private equity group), in the UK it’s just half a per cent. By Lumby’s estimations, we’re about 20 years behind.
The benefits of these communities, he says, wouldn’t just be felt by individuals but by the whole country. It adds to the stock of family housing and can help free up hospital beds. “Bed-blocking costs the NHS hundreds of millions a year,” he says with a sigh. “People go into hospital, perhaps after a fall, and their home is no longer fit for purpose but there’s nowhere to discharge them.” Several of the residents I talk to say that before moving to Auriens they hadn’t seen the upper floors of their homes in years (this happened to my own grandmother, who
struggled to climb her stairs in the last years of her life).
The reasons we lag so far behind on later living are partly cultural – people in the US and Australia tend to be more willing to move long distances for jobs or to retirement havens such as Florida, for instance – but it’s also down to legislation. “In New Zealand, they have a retirement villages act, which basically provides parameters for operators and protections to consumers,” says Lumby. “That led to a huge uptake in the development of communities and consumer confidence to buy them.”
Before dinner, Paulene and I catch up for a chat. She moved to Auriens from a five-storey townhouse in Belgravia, where there were – you guessed it – “too many stairs”. She says she only planned to stay here for a few months but fell in love with the place.
It feels incredibly patronising to say older people have stories to tell – but my god Paulene has stories to tell. A contemporary of Twiggy in the London modelling scene – “she was a few years younger than me” – she has been married four times, including to the Oscarnominated actor Laurence Harvey and the Hard Rock Cafe co-founder Peter Morton. Her daughter Domino worked as a bounty hunter in the US, tracking fugitive drug dealers and murderers; Keira Knightley played her in a biopic of
her life, called Domino. Her son Harry was a restaurateur and one-time owner of the infamous LA nightclub The Viper Room. In a life tinged with tragedy, Paulene has outlived two of her four husbands and two of her children. During our conversation she mentions someone called Tony (“a horrible little man”), who turns out to be Anthony Hopkins.
Once the face of the swinging sixties, she’s now the poster girl – poster lady? –for this later living community. One of her best friends here is Lorna, a former stock broker with links to the contemporary art world. “I love it here,” Lorna says. “The staff are just brilliant, so lovely. There’s always somebody to talk to. I looked at one of the villages in Sunningdale [in Berkshire] but then thought ‘Why would I want to live in Sunningdale when I have everything in London?’ My husband and I looked at Auriens 10 years ago, long before it was built. We saw the floor plan and thought it was a great idea. When he died during Covid, I just kept in touch.”
Both Paulene and Lorna are holding glasses of viognier, which they refer to as a “123” (“it has another name but that’s what we call it,” says Lorna). I ask if they sit here drinking every evening but they say it’s usually just on Wednesdays, although Lorna tells me in a conspiratorial tone that she has “a rather large wine cooler” in her apartment. I wonder if romance ever blossoms between residents but Paulene says not so far. “No old fart has come in and married some pretty widow. Nothing like that. Not yet. I’m certainly not looking to get married again – I don’t want anybody else in my nice bed. We do need more men here though…”
Later that evening, Lumby and I have a meal of smoked salmon and roast chicken in the bistro, which is headed up by a former Savoy chef. Everything here is
wood and gold, accented with royal blue furnishings and huge bouquets of flowers. It’s aggressively pleasant. “People here have routines and it’s our job to know them,” says Lumby between mouthfuls. “We know their favourite seats for breakfast, the way they like their croissants, the newspapers they like to read. A lot of our residents are members of the Hurlingham or The Arts Club or Boodles or Whites, those sorts of traditional clubs, and this almost becomes an extension of that, a place where they can host their friends.”
I ask whether it’s tricky asking residents to give up homes they may have occupied for decades. He says the key is understanding the reasons they are reluctant to move. “We had this one lady who loved Auriens but kept putting off moving. It turned out the reason was her two children were adopted and they didn’t know. She was terrified of them coming across the birth certificate. So we helped her find it and once her secret was safe, she had peace of mind.”
Lumby takes me on a whistlestop tour of the building, pointing out the details as we go: the vintage black and white photographs hung throughout, which hark back to the heyday of the residents; the huge gym, where even the dumbbells are branded with the Auriens insignia; the wine cellar where residents can host meetings and store their own bottles; the Steinway in the library, which is played once a week by a concert pianist who comes over to practice.
We take a detour into a light-filled art room packed with easels burdened with water colours and oil paintings. Here I meet Janine, who is admiring some of her handiwork. Like many residents she downsized from a four storey house to a “bijou one bedroom”. She shows me her still lifes, which I must say are very good.
The tour ends outside my suite, which Lumby introduces with a flourish. It really is stunning, a huge two bedroom
apartment with carpets so deep you practically wade through them. The lounge is filled with vast sofas piled high with soft furnishings, all in tasteful shades of yellow and magnolia. The far end of the room opens up into a view over Dovehouse Green. If you squint you can make out the Head of Oscar Wilde statue by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi.
“Everything here has been designed with older people in mind,” Lumby says excitedly. “Every surface is load bearing. The bathroom taps were replaced so people with arthritis could use them more easily. And if you press this…” He runs his hand under the kitchen work surface to a hidden button and a bank of units lowers itself downwards from the wall. It’s very impressive. Eventually I collapse into the impossibly comfortable bed and fall immediately to sleep.
Auriens isn’t just about luxury: it’s underpinned by science. Early the next morning I meet head of wellness Gideon Remfry, who oversees the medical facility and gym. Through his company Kyros Project he works with both elite athletes and the over eighties. His business partner is currently in the US with the Brooklyn Nets working on performance strategy and before that was with the Grenadier cycling team.
“We do standard stuff like lifestyle assessments and medical checks all the time,” he says. “But then we look at blood biomarkers of stress, be it environmental, dietary or medications. We measure antioxidant status and metabolic health. By the end we’ve got a complete look at their physiology, objectively and subjectively. We know these residents really well and we can build out a personalised programme. We’ve seen 85-year-olds putting on half a kilo of muscle, which is unheard of. We’ve seen big reductions in fat, which drives a lot of disease. Nobody else is doing this for the over eighties.”
This is all well and good for the millionaire residents at Auriens but I wonder if there are lessons that can be rolled out across our ageing population? “These are very affluent people, yeah, and
this testing is proprietary but the outcomes are pretty simple. We’re not doing rocket science. We’re building strength. We’re doing really clever but simple nutrition strategies.”
The facilities look identical to a high-end gym, only with the occasional hospitalstyle bed thrown in for members who need to remain lying down to exercise. There’s a pool for aqua aerobics. Remfry says part of the success comes from the residents living in such close proximity, which introduces an element of competition. And if someone doesn’t feel like going to an exercise class, one of their friends will come knocking to drag them along.
Paulene is one of the residents to benefit from the medical centre: she broke both knees in an accident: “I thought, ‘Well, that’s it for me…’” But through hard work and some encouragement from her friends, she’s back up and walking. “There’s something quite profound about 85 year olds wanting to live their best life for another 10 years, you know?” says Remfry.
My last meeting is back down in the restaurant for breakfast with head concierge Dan McCaskie. Dotted in ones or twos across the room are the cast of characters I’ve met during my stay: Paulene with a coffee and a newspaper. Lorna chatting to another resident. Janine tucking into a pastry.
Like Lumby, McCaskie has a long history with the elderly: his mother ran care homes in Rock in Cornwall and as a child he would spend his weekends peeling potatoes and delivering sandwiches. He then spent 24 years working as a concierge in luxury hotels, including 12 years at the Grosvenor House Suites on Park Lane, dealing with clients paying up to £80,000 a night for the penthouse suite.
“It was very high demand work, trying to open up London to them and facilitate everything, whether it’s theatre tickets, helicopter trips, days at Ascot…” He says he uses the same contacts for the residents at Auriens, organising everything from private jets to the South of France to an expedition to Dublin to fulfil one resident’s bucket-list trip to see Riverdance. Next up is a group holiday to the Isle of Wight. These days his job is complicated by practical concerns such as whether the hotels all have walk-in showers.
“The residents here have such active social lives, they make me look very boring,” he laughs. “A couple of the ladies were torn because the Titanic talk
clashed with the opera.” A lot of his job, though, is just talking to the residents. During our conversation he breaks off every minute or two to chat to people walking past; they speak to him like they’ve just bumped into a family member. He knows the movies they like – Doctor Zhivago is a favourite – and the football teams they support. A man called John – a Newcastle fan – stops to thank him for the magnetic watch strap McCaskie had given him from his own watch because John was struggling with his buckle. When another resident’s car broke down, they didn’t call the AA, they called McCaskie. “The most important thing is to have that empathy and understand what they’re after. They value the soft touch, the recognition, the eye contact when they arrive, the opening of doors, umbrellas when they get in and out of the taxi, all those things, the basic standards.”
For McCaskie, it’s the environment rather than the trappings of luxury that keep Auriens’ residents in good shape. “There’s a common perception that as you get older, you lose your competitiveness, your mojo. It’s absolutely not true. Get eight of these residents together playing poker and you’ll see what I mean. It’s like Casino Royale. It’s loneliness that makes you give up and here we simply won’t let
that happen. Everyone’s got their friends, they’ve got a community and people to talk to. People dress up, they make an effort. That’s what keeps them going.”
We’re trying to recreate the village we’ve destroyed, a place where everyone lives close by lll
It’s this aspect that most interests me about Auriens. It is not, of course, a solution to the looming elderly crisis – not at these prices – but there are principles in place here that could be rolled out in communities a little less fancy (okay, a lot less fancy). Our reluctance to adopt the kind of elderly residences you can find across the US and Australia and even mainland Europe seems absurd, given the demonstrable benefits.
“These types of residences can help counteract the loneliness a lot of people inevitably feel in old age, particularly when a partner goes,” agrees Dr Eliza Filby, a historian of generations and ageing. “We tend to think that older people want to downsize, maybe move out to the shires, but actually we’re seeing a real shift to older people wanting to stay in the city, stay more mobile, have more connections, be near to the grandkids because they’re providing so much childcare.
“Part of it is trying to recreate the village that we’ve destroyed, a place where everyone lives close by, people socialise. There was a level of interaction that, frankly, none of us, even young people, have anymore.”
That village is certainly in evidence as as I check out of Auriens into a blustery Chelsea morning. The lobby is filled with people sitting around chatting, shooting the breeze. McCaskie is ping-ponging from one conversation to another. Lumby strides purposefully through the room with his megawatt smile. For me it’s back to the grindstone but in 30 years – and with a lottery win or two – I hope I end up checking into somewhere like this.
Death is the only thing surer than taxes. But how we’re remembered is a strange and sometimes controversial business. RALPH JONES meets the people rewriting the rules, one stone at a time
Stonemason Neil Luxton once agreed to use comic sans on a grave. Once was enough – he has refused ever since. Luxton, however, is no stuffy traditionalist: indeed he is one of a growing number of designers who believe most modern graves are actually quite boring and don’t do justice to the dead. He is dedicated to quietly tearing up the gravestone rulebook, turning the often drab and predictable slabs into something personal and inspiring. “I try to encourage something unusual,” he says. His goal: to elevate the hunks of rock that will be our final legacy into “a statement of a person’s life”. If you’re the kind of person taken to skulking around graveyards, you’ll have noticed the odd stone that stands out among the sea of rectangles and crosses. In Highgate – the most famous of London’s Magnificent Seven cemeteries – you can find painter Patrick Caulfield’s ‘DEAD’ memorial, a grand piano tomb in honour of the concert pianist Harry Thornton, and writer Douglas Adams’ neat rectangle, complete with pen holder. Over in Paris’s Montparnasse there’s geographer Antoine Haumont’s symbolist sculpture of two people reading and the light, modern grave of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir, which is forever covered in red lipstick kisses.
A century ago, such frivolity would have seemed absurd. Slowly but surely, however, graves have evolved with the times. The memorialisation of the dead isn’t a
business in which anything happens quickly but the ground is always shifting, so to speak.
In the 1970s, there was far less variety, with most memorials containing some religious iconography. This dropped off alongside religiousness as a whole. When it comes to typefaces, Times New Roman is “extremely popular”, says Luxton. While this may seem a little anachronistic in our age of clean, sans serif fonts – those without the little flourishes at the top and bottom of letters – it actually represents progress: before the 1990s, people wanted Gothic-style lettering, which has now fallen out of fashion.
The style of lettering has also changed. “One of the things that has become fashionable is the extensive use of upper and lower case on a memorial,” says
The memorialisation of the dead isn’t a business in which anything happens quickly but the ground is always shifting, so to speak
Luxton. In the Victorian era, all of the letters used to be titlecase. “There are a lot more rounded letters today.” This change is the result of modern technology: it was traditionally harder to carve lower-case letters by hand but a computer makes no such distinction.
Occasionally people will request a beloved cultural figure like Mickey Mouse to look over them as they rest in perpetuity. “But Disney’s difficult,” grumbles Luxton. “They may say, ‘You can have a Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck but you can’t have the one you sent us.’” Regulations on a gravestone’s appearance differ from cemetery to cemetery but a three-foot height limitation is fairly common. At Highgate, a bare minimum of information a gravestone should give is the occupant’s full name and birth and death dates. Peter Humphries, head of planning and projects at Kensal Green Cemetery, says, “Unless it were to be carved in what might be construed in an offensive way, there’s very little restriction on what it might look like in the end.”
Luxton is not alone in his quest to take that as a challenge. “One of my goals is to shake the industry up,” says Mark Brooks, a stonemason who also works on memorials for Highgate. “It’s depressing walking around many cemeteries, because you just get this sea of black shiny granite with gold letters, Times New Roman; no thought whatsoever [has gone in] to the design or lettering.”
Black granite, it turns out, is a controversial trend. Banned as a material in Highgate since around 2000, it has become popular virtually everywhere else because of its affordability. Imported from China or India, it has become the default stone of the British graveyard. Because it is comparatively brittle, however, it is harder to hand-carve letters onto. Instead, inscriptions tend to be sandblasted – a relatively unskilled process that began to replace hand-carving in the 1990s, involving firing sand at high velocity. Fewer and fewer British stones are used and local stonemasons have “effectively disappeared”, says Brooks.
do it. So why don’t we talk about it more?
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This sits predictably badly with Mark Noad, chair of trustees of the Lettering Arts Trust, an organisation that champions and trains letter carvers. Because polished black granite isn’t a native British stone, Noad says it doesn’t fit with the British landscape. It doesn’t age much either, unlike the classic weathered gravestone that probably exists in your mind’s eye. The Trust commissions bespoke memorials using hand-drawn lettering instead of a typeface. There is a glimmer of hope that this kind of work might be on the up: the Heritage Craft Association used to list letter carving as an endangered craft but, as of a few years ago, no longer do. Over time, the possibilities within memorialisation have enabled more expression. “Headstones have become more elaborate,” says Joe Batt, head of retail at stonemasons R Munday and Son, who points to a popular design of theirs that includes three hearts with carved roses between them.
This complexity is almost entirely down to the new technology that has transformed the industry. Brooks used to make four or five memorials a year by hand; now he makes around 500, thanks in part to his ability to let a computer operate his tools. It is now possible to etch almost anything onto a gravestone using lasers. Computers also allow customers to see exactly what they’re getting, giving them more control. Today requests include football badges; photographs; and several times Luxton has carved a replica of a Fender guitar onto a gravestone. Another of Luxton’s unusual
commissions was for the late public intellectual Jonathan Miller, who found fame in the comedy show Beyond the Fringe, went on to direct operas, and died in 2019. Miller’s son William says, “My father was always rather disparaging of any kind of burial or monument to him, and sort of said, ‘Just shove me in a skip.’ We obviously chose not to do that.”
Miller had always been obsessed with a plaster-cast ‘life mask’ made of him when he was in his forties. Using this as a memorial seemed appropriate, thought William. The opera designer Isabella Bywater made a negative version of the face in bronze, and Luxton’s job was then to embed the mask – about four inches deep – into a gravestone. When I visited Highgate Cemetery recently, I saw the optical illusion effect of the mask up close. The four-foot grave, which went up in October 2024, is about 50 yards from Karl Marx. “I can’t say, ‘He’s up there somewhere looking down on us and he’d be dead pleased’,” says William,
Making a grave is permanent –there’s no backspace when you’re carving a stone
“but I do feel a duty to honour him in a way that he would find fitting – and that would amuse him.”
Part of the reason graves became so homogenous in the first place was the fact that people don’t tend to pick them themselves. Have you thought about how you want to be commemorated when you die?
The answer is almost certainly: “no”, according to Julie Dunk, chief executive of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management. “We do not speak enough about death and what’s going to happen to us,” she says. More often than not, relatives are left to guess at what their loved one might have wanted. This is changing. In our hyperindividualistic age, people want to stand out from the crowd and are more willing to think about their enduring physical legacy. “People want to be individual,” says Dunk. “There was a period when we didn’t; they wanted to conform and have a regulation headstone because that was the fashion at the time.” As evidence of this shifting attitude, she recalls one headstone made from pieces of laminated glass, and another in the shape of a dolphin.
Noad remembers being moved by one in the shape of a football shirt. Another gravestone enthusiast, Ian Dungavell, chief executive of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, is particularly fond of a memorial whose corner had been deliberately exposed, revealing what looked like Lego blocks inside. Such designs may be prohibitively expensive but Dungavell says that even if you are restricted by budget, you can always personalise the words on a gravestone. “If someone recommends a piece of text that you’ve never read before in your life, just don’t use it.”
Personally, I love the idea of brightening someone’s day as they’re walking through a graveyard. These public monuments are how we will be remembered by family and strangers alike.
It’s important to give the whole thing some thought – especially as it’ll be too late to complain once you’re buried beneath it. As Brooks puts it, “It’s permanent – there’s no backspace when you’re carving a stone.”
BREITLING’S SILVER-SCREEN SIGNING Hollywood idol Austin Butler is joining Breitling. As Switzerland’s pre-eminent timekeeper for the 20th century’s pioneering aviators – both civilian and military – it’s a shrewd move.
Butler’s sheer variety of roles sets him apart from Hollywood’s current crop of leading men, from gyrating his hips in Elvis’s blue-suede shoes, to daylight bombing raids over Bremen in 1943, to his terrifying turn in Dune Part Two.
Breitling’s own breakthrough came with its cockpit stopwatches of WWII, swiftly
followed by its rakish, wrist-born ‘Navitimer’ stopwatch.
The partnership marks Butler’s luxury-watch ambassadorial debut as the face of the Top Time B31, “A collection built for those who move fast, live free, and make their own rules,” says the watchmaker.
Like Butler it represents a modern spin on matinée-idol glamour. A threehanded, in-house movement, adjusted to chronometer levels of precision, topped by an orange seconds hand sweeping across a choice of three dial colours: fir
green, cobalt blue, or a two-tone combination of sky blue and white worthy of a 1950s Cadillac (pictured on-wrist, £4,550).
The boldly graphic style of Breitling’s original ‘Top Time’ was enough to earn a place on 007’s wrist in Thunderball (1965), though Sean Connery’s Commander Bond had his Breitling souped up with a geiger counter. Perhaps this could be a harbinger of things to come: now Bond is in the custody of Amazon, Austin Butler starring in an origin-story isn’t such a leap…
All the latest news from the world of haute horologie, from an incredible creation by Max Büsser to Lewis Hamilton’s new favourite watch, by ALEX DOAK
Bulgari’s design guru Fabrizio Buonamassa-Stigliani has collaborated with Swiss futurist MB&F to create something truly special. After hundreds of sketches and dozens of 3D-printed prototypes, they created a sinuous blend of the high-carat ‘serpentine’ famously worn by Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra in 1962 and the titular Max Büsser’s own brand of horological adventurism.
It’s certainly a pleasure to behold, a curvaceous, watertight jigsaw of five sapphire crystals, lending one almighty headache to MB&F’s machinists. That pain also extends to assembling the equally complex 3D machinery inside this miniature glasshouse. The time is displayed on little aluninium domes – the snake’s ‘eyes’ –revolving beneath the reptile’s ‘brain’: a pendulous ‘flying’ balance spring, oscillating with a calculated tick, tick, tick... Bvlgari x MB&F Serpenti in rose gold, approx. £133,600
Rather than follow in the footsteps of his father Lord Bamford and his JCB digger empire, his son George has furrowed his own path into the world of luxury watchmaking. And given the top-flight spec’ of his new ceramic/titanium ‘D-300’ diving watch, the boy done good.
Using Switzerland’s historic movement maker Sellita for Bamford London’s precision mechanics, it features an oversized titanium adjustment crown, and dazzling ‘SuperLuminova’ so the dial can be read at even the murkiest depths. “We stayed true to our ethos,” Bamford says, “creating a high spec with bold, cool designs that both guys and girls can wear without breaking the bank.”
£1,800, bamfordlondon.com
MILLES PER HOUR
He’s certainly come a long way from Stevenage. Seven-time F1 champion Lewis Hamilton finally finds himself realising his “dream of racing in red”. Besuited and booted, the ex-McLaren, ex-MercedesAMG Petronas pilot posed at Ferrari’s historic Modenese stronghold – stood beside his favourite supercar of all time,
the F40. For watch nerds, equally notable was his switch in wristwear. As slick as a pitstop tyre-change, his IWC has been changed for fellow Swiss brand Richard Mille – a materials-science and micromechanical alchemist historically inspired by the uncompromising world of F1 engineering.
It wasn’t long before official race-suit portraits emerged, alongside teammate Charles Leclerc, and sure enough a Richard Mille RM 74-02 is strapped-in: a tiny chassis in carbon fibre, layered and fused with rose gold, suspending an open-framed enginework of baffling intricacy.
£456,500, richardmille.com
A welcome volley of fresh faces in the world of fine watchmaking has ALEX DOAK hoping for the industry’s ‘v3.0’ moment
Retro, revivalist, old-skool, shabby-chic, heritage… However you want to pigeonhole #vintage there’s no denying that beyond the bare brickwork and filament lightbulbs of hip vinyl cafés, the trend’s nostalgic tendrils have stretched all the way to Switzerland. This is not without precedent, admittedly: the country’s famed mechanical timepiece is, after all, inherently anachronistic in an age when your cellphone is ever-present about your person.
In part a response to the financial crash, 2009 ushered in a cosy, affordable throwback to mid-century design, all WWII sepia tint, Gill Sans typography and battered brown leather. It felt like a welcome respite from the garish maximalism of the noughties. But 15 years later, raiding the archives is beginning to feel like a bit of a cop out.
Brands have made huge technical strides behind the dial: antimagnetic mechanics (Omega), carbon (Richard Mille), ceramic and silicon (Rado, Hublot, Patek Philippe, Ulysse Nardin), so it was only a matter of time before the package strapped to your wrist started to reflect what was ticking inside.
That time is now.
Leading the charge is Tudor, which despite a name harking back to Henry VIII, might be the most progressive outfit in the valleys of the Jura Mountains. Its core ‘Black Bay’ was a phoenix from the ashes, a supercut of design details drawn from the diving watches Rolex supplied to the French Navy’s elite frogmen in the 1960s. Today it is a cradle for the 21st century’s reassessment of traditional springs, cogs and levers. Five-year warranties, super-precision, 70-hour-powered movements, all made in a purpose-built robot-enabled production facility boasting net-zero carbon emissions.
Now the aesthetics are following suit, with rainbows of colour, high-tech materials and sci-fi sculpture
adding flair to the already solid range. The new ‘Flamingo Blue’ dial of the 41mm Black Bay Chrono (£5,020) is a joyous affirmation of mechanical timekeeping’s future. Anchor weighed, retro military tropes discarded, titular wading bird taking flight, unshackled by the past…
Now let’s turn to Bell & Ross, the 1990s upstart whose majority owner Chanel went in with Tudor on a bleeding-edge micro-manufacturing plant they jointly dubbed ‘Kenissi’. The UFO-in-miniature that is Bell & Ross’s new ‘BR-03 Skeleton’ (£4,990, limited to 250 pieces), with all its steely, openworked brutalism, couldn’t look less high-fashion ‘Chanel’ or jetset ‘Tudor’. But it’s keenly informed by all three brands’ modern MO: a defiantly far-sighted belief in mechanical watchmaking, and how it can be an inspiration for design as well as reliability.
Bell & Ross’ watchmakers’ desire to fully reveal the watch’s mechanics naturally led to the creation of a dedicated movement. Its newly forged ‘BR-CAL.328’ forms the dial as well as the moving parts, making a spectacle of its upper ‘bridges’, forming an ‘X’ with each arm suspended from the case’s four corner screws. The screws themselves are a hangover from B&R’s square-jawed design language, drawn from the analogue cockpit instrumentation of fighter jets.
Architectural and wilfully technical, the BR-03 Skeleton Grey Steel, “is a high-tech jewel,” says Bruno ‘Bell’ Belamich, creative director and co-founder alongside Carlos ‘Ross’ Rosillo. “It’s both a ‘horological’ and ‘brutalist’ machine… a tiny sculpture in steel. The polished and satin-finished case, the faceted indexes, the ruthenium coating on the dial... everything is designed to capture and reflect light.”
The same could be said of Rado’s latest artist collaboration with British product designer Tej Chuahan. Before establishing his own company in 2005, Chuahan worked at Nokia, where he was responsible for the design of some of the tech giant’s most memorable models. Chauhan’s own ‘3210’ in watch form beams Rado’s signature futurism even further into the cosmos: the ‘DiaStar Original’ (£2,100), clad with gleaming, ceramic-fused yellow-gold, looks like it’s modelled around the proportions of Darth Vader’s helmet.
The dial of Christopher Ward’s Twelve 38 has a similarly dazzling effect. In response to a stream of requests from its increasingly cultish followers, Christopher Ward has re-introduced four open-series versions of its dodecagonal, integrated-bracelet sports watch, now in ‘mid-size’ Nordic Blue, Glacier Blue, Arctic White and Midnight Sun (all £1,050). The three contrasting finishes applied to Twelve 38’s jigsaw of steel facets – namely, ‘high-polished’, ‘fine-linear-brush’ and ‘sand-blasted’ – frame the main event: a tessellating, pyramidally textured dial that mimics the brand’s logo.
From one lighting condition to the next, every glance at your wrist is designed to shimmer uniquely. Time marches on, but it seems watchmakers are keeping pace.
LAURA MCCREDDIE-DOAK
A new report says women are underrepresented in the watch industry. This is no great surprise – but it is a great opportunity
It can come as no surprise that women are massively under-represented in the watch world. But now we have a report to prove it. Late last year, Watch Femme, the first global non-profit dedicated to promoting and strengthening women’s voices across the watch world, joined forces with Deloitte to unveil Swiss Watch Industry Insights 2024: Spotlight on the female market.
Surveying 6,000 female consumers from Switzerland and across its top export market, alongside 107 specially selected watch industry professionals and connoisseurs in 13 different countries, the results made for interesting reading. Half of the women exclusively wear a smartwatch, while 21 per cent don’t own any watches. In Japan and the USA, 53 per cent and 36 per cent, respectively, don’t wear a watch. Switzerland isn’t immune either. In the country that has watchmaking baked into its DNA, 35 per cent of women don’t wear a watch. The statistics also correlated with those around the buying of watches. There are also interesting insights into the way women shop for their timepieces. The overall preference for online or bricks-and-mortar is evenly split with 48 per cent on both sides. Along generational lines things change somewhat. Some 17 per cent of Millennials and 19 per cent of Gen Z-ers prefer online because, according to the report, it allows them to “bypass potential barriers that might deter them from entering luxury stores”.
And you know what barrier they are referring to? Sales staff: as a comment from one of the industry women attested, in boutiques women receive different treatment to men, ranging from patronising to misogynistic. If we’re all honest here, the watch world is a bit of a boys’ club, isn’t it? At every level, from boardroom to newsroom, women are sparse or absent. This may not seem like much of a problem, until you think about the domino implications. If articles about watches aren’t seen in women’s magazines or timepieces aren’t featured in shoots, then interest isn’t piqued.
Much of the information out there is written by (or fronted by) men, which can be intimidating and – again –impacts sales. Of course, there are women out there interested in watches, but they are the exception rather than the rule. That means the majority of brands focus on the core market, which is predominantly male.
If statistics say 50 per cent of women wear a smartwatch rather than a pictured) then something isn’t working. Perhaps we need more adverts that show women wearing watches in the same way we see handbags and jewellery. Maybe we need more editorial that furnishes women with information, so that when they encounter sales staff they aren’t flummoxed by what a chronograph does and what “chronometer” means. There’s no quick fix, but one thing is certain, with the watch industry currently in need of new buyers, there’s 50 per cent of the population out there waiting to be seduced. So, what is it waiting for?
l Laura is a leading watch and jewellery writer
Just over 20 years ago, three friends created a watch brand. In doing so they may have spearheaded the renaissance of the British watch scene.
By LAURA MCCREDDIE-DOAK
There I was on stage after having won the GPHG [Grand Prix d’Horolger de Geneve] for Bel Canto last year and Max Busser comes up to me,” recounts Mike France, chief exec and co-founder of Christopher Ward. “I love Max, love what he does, and not only does he congratulate me on the Bel Canto, but he also tells me he’s just bought one.” The delight in France’s face is evident. To have this Swiss iconoclast’s approval is something probably even France wouldn’t have expected when he and his two friends, Peter Ellis and the eponymous Chris Ward, took a boat trip down the River Thames and talked business.
This was 2004. Ellis and France had just sold the Early Learning Centre and Ward was fed up with his t-shirt importing business. The three set out to create, in their words, “the cheapest most expensive watches in the world”. Fast forward 20 years: France and his cohorts at the Alliance of British Watch and Clockmakers, Alistair Audley and Roger Smith, hosted the biggest celebration of British horology ever seen. There were queues. The scrum at the Studio Underd0g stand, where limited-edition pizza-dial watches were up for grabs for one day only, just about held off from descending into fisticuffs. An exclusive Roger Smith was sold at auction for over £600,000. It’s hard to imagine that any of this would have happened without the rise of Christopher Ward, from tiny disruptor to major player.
“I think you could refer to this as one of those ‘twenty-year-overnight-success’ stories,” says Audley. “Christopher Ward set out to disrupt the luxury
watch category and has been building a global following since then, predicated on their watches being wrapped within a great ethos. Speaking as a fan, Christopher Ward has always been a brand to believe in, so the foundations were already firmly in place. For me what’s happened more recently is that Christopher Ward has gained an elevated level of confidence to try new ideas and new innovations, which have also remained firmly on-brand. And the watch world has embraced them.”
To realise what a volte face this is, you have to remember the world into which Christopher Ward was launched. Bremont was just two years old, the likes of Stephen Forsey and Peter Speake-Marin had decamped to Switzerland and the soon-to-be revived Fears wasn’t even a smudge on Nicholas Bowman-Scargill’s spectacles. Similarly, the likes of Roger Smith, Robert Loomes, and Garrick hadn’t even started production. Whippersnappers such as Studio Underd0g weren’t even in the picture. “British” as a word associated with
watchmaking carried zero currency. Two decades later, the landscape is very different.
“While the British watch industry has a long and storied history, the success of modern independent brands has helped reinvigorate interest in what we’re doing here,” says Bowman-Scargill, managing director and owner of Fears.
“Christopher Ward, Fears, and other British brands have shown that there is both demand and appreciation for watches designed and built with a distinctly British approach – one that values heritage, craftsmanship, and a touch of British eccentricity. As more brands have found success, it has created a ripple effect, giving confidence to others to start or grow their own watchmaking ventures. This collective momentum has been instrumental in shaping today’s thriving independent scene.”
As a relative newcomer to the scene, Richard Benc, founder of Studio Underd0g, has benefitted from this collective momentum both in terms of getting his
watches out there and the public’s interest in them.
“When I started Studio Underd0g four years ago, I was reaching out to British brand owners, founders and CEOs I admired,” says Benc. “I was surprised that not only were these people replying to me, but they were helping to open doors wherever they could.
Bowman-Scargill, was among the first few hundred people to back Studio Underd0g’s initial crowdfunding campaign back in 2021. There is a well-understood sentiment that a rising tide lifts all boats. If the market for British brands as a whole continues to increase and multiply, then everyone can be a winner.”
Benc is certainly one of this market’s winners. His starting point was to create a brand that countered the stuffiness and seriousness that he perceived to be prevalent in the watch world. Pandemic lockdowns gave him time to finalise a plan and in 2021 a new British brand was born. The only thing serious about Studio Underd0g is its success. The designs riff on watermelons, salmon skin, and pizzas. It has collaborated with H.Moser on two watches, one at Studio Underd0g prices and the other at H. Moser’s more elevated price tag, with a dial colour combination based on a halved passion fruit (because it was a passion project for the two names involved). It has also concocted one based on a cocktail – the
gimlet – in collaboration with Fears; its launch was the star of this year’s British Watchmaker’s Day, with fans queuing from 6am to score one of the 200 pieces only available on the day.
If the crowd at this year’s sold-out event shows anything it’s that there’s an appetite for brands claiming a national identity. “British” doesn’t have quite the same cache as “Swiss made” but it’s a vibe nonetheless and one with momentum behind it.
“The British watch industry is heading towards a new golden era. We are seeing a broader acceptance and enthusiasm for British-designed and British-built watches, not just from collectors but from the industry as a whole,” says Bowman-Scargill.
“The key now is for brands to build on this momentum by continuing to refine their craft, tell authentic stories, and maintain the high standards that have brought them to this point. Collaboration, whether through shared resources or joint ventures, will be crucial in strengthening the industry as a whole. Ultimately, the goal should be to make British watchmaking not just a niche, but considered as equals alongside the globally recognised watchmaking nations. We’re seeing that with the professionalisation of key brands in Britain as they grow and continue to hire more people.” And to think, this all started with three men on a boat.
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Château de la Commaraine in Burgundy promises to be a wine-lover’s hotel like no other. Here’s a sneak peek of what’s to come later this year.
it seems hard to believe but there were no five-star hotels in the town of Epernay, one of the main tourist towns in the Champagne region, until 2018. It’s a similar situation in France’s Burgundy region, where super-deluxe resorts tend to take a back seat to higgledy-piggledy converted farmhouses and ramshackle vineyard cottages.
That is until the people who opened the Royal Champagne Hotel & Spa in Epernay decided to repeat the successful formula in the small village of Pommard. Château de la Commaraine has 37 rooms, each with a view out onto the region’s award-winning, world famous vineyards. It’s an exercise in understated luxury, with sleek modern details seamlessly blended with original wooden beams and rugged stonework. One room even
overlooks the vat room, so you can spy on the winemaking process from the comfort of your bed. As you might expect, it has all the trappings of a five star hotel, with two expansive terraces and an 18-meter heated outdoor pool. But the real draw is the access to the endless rolling vineyards, which unfurl in every direction. This wine lover’s paradise opens later this year. l chateaulacommaraine.com
The Four Seasons Koh Samui is where the third season of travel satire The White Lotus was filmed.
ADAM BLOODWORTH checked in
It had been an ordinary day of filming on The White Lotus season three at the Four Seasons Koh Samui, Thailand, until staff noticed two intruders with bleeding feet approaching the set, climbing over the dangerous rocks dividing the resort from the swathes of jungle. “I saw them coming by chance, with bleeding toes,” remembers resort manager Jasjit ‘JJ’ Assi. “I called security and said ‘who are you?’ They said they’d do anything to be part of the show.”
Weirdos with bleeding feet and paparazzi flying drones over the hotel from boats docked metres from the beach: life changed drastically for JJ and his Four Seasons Koh Samui colleagues when the White Lotus film crew came to town. It was no surprise: the first two seasons became huge stories when they filmed at Four Seasons resorts in Hawaii and Sicily. In Thailand, the popularity of the show has already driven a 386 per cent rise in enquiries.
To scout the location for the third season, White Lotus creator Mike White spent a year trawling around posh hotels in India and northern Thailand. He wasn’t looking for any old swanky five-star resort: he was scouring for somewhere truly substantial from which to base his show, which satirises its cast of brattish, hot-headed hotel guests. It had to be right: nearly 10 million viewers obsessed over season two. At the end of his research year, White rocked up at the Four Seasons Koh Samui. “I was ready with my marketing spiel,” says JJ. “He came in and stood there quietly for 10 seconds. Then he said: ‘This is it. This is it.’ Koh Samui was the last destination. He must have seen 30 resorts in Thailand by that time.”
White entered at the highest point of the resort with views over the Gulf of Thailand. Having visited recently in the name of very important journalism, I
can attest to the fact that the hotel’s arrival spot is almost impossibly beautiful. Guests high on dopamine and the scent of orchids remain in a dreamlike state for an average stay of four days; most never leave the resort despite the bounty of Koh Samui sitting on their doorstep. Even for people predisposed to beautiful places, the view raises the hairs on your arms.
Sixty villas spill down the mountain towards the sea. Each protrudes from the jungle on stilts; little swathes of private-pool-blue stand out against 150 varieties of exotic plant. This is not manicured resort jungle, but jungle proper. “If you go five, six metres deeper it starts to become wild,” says operations manager Hannes Schneider. Designer Bill Bensley carved the resort out of a former coconut plantation and refused to disturb a single tree. Forget the humans, the 856 swaying palms are the real divas; some protrude through bedrooms. My villa had a hole in the roof to make room for our arboreal totem of the East.
You feel so literally in the middle of a jungle that it can be a little unnerving, but nature contrasts with meticulous craftsmanship: plants nearest the pathways have been layered to perfection: “Lady palms have this beautiful ability to not overgrow but have a certain visual beautification effect,” says Schneider. “The most important thing is that you layer the jungle. Different plants at different heights with different colours. That brings everything to life.” The secret to pampering the world’s most pampered is what interested Mike White. Given the storylines about ridiculous diva requests and portrayals of staff, The White Lotus surely introduced a PR problem for the Four Seasons? JJ shakes his head. “Look, it’s not a PR problem,” he says, squinting in the sun over an iced coffee at hotel lunch spot Pla Pla. “They are
doing a great job in saying this is a satire, this is all exaggerated.”
“In the end it’s a work of fiction, but in every piece of fiction there’s a grain of truth,” laughs Schneider. Other guests are as curious as me, says JJ when I ask him whether dramatic things really happen at the hotel like they do on the show. “They want to know the stories. ‘Is there anything you can tell me, has there been a murder?’ I say no, just in the series.”
When he isn’t spending his downtime schmoozing guests, JJ scours Reddit for fan theories. “I read comments after every show to see what’s going on,” he says. “It’s very important to understand the sentiment.” JJ was actually offered an acting role by White – he had even learned his lines – but Thai labour laws prevented his star turn.
It’s a few hours after my check-in, and we’re stirring G&Ts by the pool used for filming. It’s sundowner hour and we’re having the loudest conversation I’ve heard all day. Many of the crowd are exec types doom scrolling on their phones from sunloungers. A quintet of couples are wearing snapbacks in the pool and talking loudly. This is where the thirsttrap scenes from the third season are shot, such as when Patrick Schwarzenegger grabs his crotch as he chirpses Aimee Lou Wood on a sunlounger. It’s here where the original White Lotus sign remains.
Dare to leave your private pool and there is Michelin-rated Thai food, a dedicated Italian restaurant, a Middle Eastern pop-up and private beach. One morning at the resort’s most beautiful restaurant, Koh, I tucked into a prawn soup topped with so many interesting ingredients it felt more fit for a fancy dinner. If spice sounds stomach turning at sunrise, try in-house-made financiers, madeleines and Orio cakes – a few fragments of the overwhelming breakfast buffet.
The island of Koh Phangan, four kilometres away, looks almost swimmable. Staff disparagingly brush it off as “hippy”, but Thailand’s reputation for wellness began there. It was where the Full Moon Parties started in 1985 and where some of the earliest mindfulness resorts taught the Buddhist philosophies of breathwork and stillness to cluttered Western minds. The island still has some of the most authentic spiritual retreats in the world. By contrast, Koh Samui has a reputation for posh hotels and not much else, which is exactly what the Four Seasons guests want.
In a meta reflection of the show, the cast stayed at the Four Seasons for two months during the shoot, which took place in the winter of 2024. “The actors were rehearsing with the butlers so they could learn the script, that’s how
personal relationships started to form,” says JJ. When filming started, residence three turns into Parker Posey and Jason Isaacs’s family apartment in the show and residence nine is where the trio of toxic school friends live.
Absolutely no question is met with a “no,” except when I ask manager JJ whether the cast of The White Lotus enjoyed Thailand’s legalised weed culture. He thrusts his hand to block the question, exhibiting the soft power that escalated him to general manager. “No.” Were they big drinkers? He laughs this time before keeping predictably schtum. “No, no.”
JJ laughs when I ask whether Four Seasons guests are like the characters on the show, then avoids the question. “Our guests are ultra high net worth individuals who come here to relax and really cut off from what’s going on in their day to day lives.” I ask again. “Look, it’s exaggerated. There are guests, I wouldn’t call them divas, I’d call them… There are guests who require hand-holding because they require their itinerary to be on time and scheduled. They want everything planned out for them. You manage guests… that’s what we do.”
In the end The White Lotus is a work of fiction, but in every piece of fiction there’s a grain of truth
Having at first ignored that the show existed, the Four Seasons has finally realised leaning into the hype is a good idea. A White Lotus pop-up is happening in the Los Angeles hotel and the themed cocktails (very tasty) are available in their hotels worldwide. Trying my darndest to get into character, I must have sunk about thirty of them around the pool. As time went on, I became the classic Four Seasons guest. I didn’t leave the resort once. One afternoon, after an early lunch, we considered it, then laughed off the idea. Everything to see – waterfalls, food markets – is at least a 40 minute drive away, and given the beauty here, nothing justified spending an hour-and-twenty on gridlocked island roads. Instead, we cracked open the mini bar and whiled away free time by our private pool, pretending to be the characters from the TV show. We weren’t alone: a group of American guests admitted they’d been filming skits in their apartment; the wife did an uncanny “where’s the Lorazepam” Parker Posey impression. Not everything is perfect. The water is shallow and coral means it is hard to swim, and we weren’t told about daily activities. But honestly, I’m glad I didn’t know about them, because I might have been tempted to do them, and using my brain would have been horrifying. After four days doing sweet FA, it was time to leave. I had lived for a time like a White Lotus guest but I was glad to escape the bubble. Still, as I checked onto my business class flight I did wonder if perhaps I’m a little more of a Jennifer Coolidge than I realise.
l Villas at the Four Seasons Koh Samui start from £1,184 per night for two people; fourseasons.com/kohsamui
STEVE DINNEEN
A mezcal-related disaster ruined my holiday. This analogue madness cannot continue.
Tulum, Mexico, 2016. It was early in the morning on new year’s day when I awoke on a beach with a furious throbbing behind my eyes. The last thing I remember was dancing in the sea to outdated house music.
I tried to piece together the night before the way a fortune teller might read a deck of tarot cards, using a single image as a prompt and extrapolating from there. I constructed a loose but convincing timeline: new friends, now long gone; mezcal; dancing in the sea; more mezcal; police shutting down the party; one last mezcal… then, nothing.
Careful not to make any sudden movements, I began to scoop myself and my possessions from the sand. Sunglasses: miraculously still on my head. Bag: currently being employed as a pillow. Passport… Oh god. No passport. A decision had been made to bring it with me rather than risk leaving it at the Airbnb. Bad call.
And just like that, the first days of 2016 went from deciding how long to nap between cocktails to a bureaucratic and logistical nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions. Google told me I’d have to visit the closest British consulate, where I could apply for a temporary passport. But first I’d have to report the passport stolen. That meant taking an hour-long stroll along the side of a busy road in the blistering heat to the nearest police station, which was closed. I repeated the journey the following day, only to be greeted by a stony-faced policeman who claimed to speak no English. “Pesos, pesos,” he said, and after I’d handed over a wad of notes – quite a lot of notes – he gave me a form confirming my passport had been nicked. Is there a fee for reporting a crime? Did I just bribe a cop? Who knows?
Next came a coach ride from Tulum (lovely) to Cancún (one of the lower circles of hell) to get the documents, which, it turns out, is a whole thing In 2016, for instance,
there was one shop in Cancún capable of taking passport photographs and it opened only at certain times on certain days, like some occult bookshop that vanishes when you’re not looking.
I will stop describing the process now because I’m getting bored just thinking about it. Suffice to say the holiday was essentially over the moment my passport found a new owner.
Catania, Sicily, 2024. This cannot be happening again. I’d checked into a hotel and was about to put my passport into the safe, as has become my habit following The Tulum Incident. But my passport wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere. Every item I owned had been emptied onto the ground, every pocket of every pair of shorts rifled through a dozen times. That sinking feeling returned, the realisation that this holiday is now over and the coming days will be deeply unpleasant.
Then I spotted it, tucked into a pocket of my suitcase I didn’t even know existed. The relief was palpable, a feeling of ecstasy that bordered on the sublime, like I had been touched by the finger of god himself. But the mood soon turned to anger. How do we still live like this? We put a man on the moon 55 years ago, we’ve carried iPhones around for nearly two decades, yet we still use tiny folders of paper to underpin the entire global travel industry. It’s absurd.
This year the government offered a sliver of hope to people like me, raising the possibility that we might, some day, all carry digital passports. Some forms of ID, including driving licences, will be available in new digital wallets stored in your phone as soon as this summer, with the holy grail – digital travel documents – following later. Acceptance of these 1s and 0s as proof of identity at foreign borders will, of course, depend on local regulations. But it feels like we will eventually get there. The children of the future will laugh at how I once got stuck in Mexico because I drank too much mezcal. Let’s just hope they never lose their phones.
l Steve is the editor of City AM – The Magazine
TA
lucky coincidence has turned the Caribbean island of Anguilla into the ‘home of AI’. ADAM BLOODWORTH visits the
world’s most unlikely new global tech hub
he Sunset Bar on St Maarten’s Maho Beach is one of the weirdest tourist attractions in the world. Go at any time and hundreds of cruise ship passengers will be posing with their arms in the air as jumbo jets fly metres above their heads. The beach is right at the end of the runway, and while sunbathing is permitted, it hardly induces zen to look up at the belly of an A380 that’s close enough to see the nuts and bolts. Tour guides shout to round up their passengers back to the ships, but they cannot be heard over the jet fuel and general hysteria. In the bar, cocktails are
called Liquid Viagra and women drink for free if they’re topless. Everyone’s burnt. Taylor Swift is on. Loud. There are more American retirees than there are grains of sand.
A 20 minute boat ride away from this tourist hellscape and I’m somewhere I’m sternly told to keep secret by people on the boat ride over. No one’s joking. “Leave one star reviews,” one New Yorker jokes. That secret? The island of Anguilla. No cruise ships can get to Anguilla and there’s a ban on fast food and casinos. It is St Maartin’s snobby neighbour and that’s exactly how the expats who move here like it. There are around 15,000 Anguillans on the 16 kilometre-long island, and a small cohort of incredibly
high-net-worth Americans who take the one international flight down from Miami. While loads of Caribbean islands extol the benefit of privacy, Anguilla is on another level. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston escaped the paparazzi to come here for crucial break up talks, and Paul McCartney is a regular. “You hear him walking about whistling,” one local tells me. Beaches are immaculate, deserted, and chunky, for those who think bigger is better, and the sand is so fine it’ll give you an endorphin rush just thinking about running your toes through it. Lawyers on sabbatical from New York are the sorts who are drawn here – but the island’s radical change in fortunes means its demographic is set to change.
Anguilla’s domain name is dot ‘AI’, a coincidence from years ago that has come up trumps for the island in light of the rise of AI. Put simply, businesses wanting a ‘.ai’ website address need to pay Anguilla for the privilege, registering their website on the island. A spike in companies purchasing new websites netted £32m in 2024 for domain name sales. “We want people to understand that AI belongs to Anguilla,” says Lanston Connor, registrar of companies on the island.
Until recently, Anguilla’s only town, The Valley, only had bumpy stone roads. Driving on them hurt the backs of drivers. Flat concrete ones have now been laid using the AI money distributed by the government, and darkened streets are now walkable at night due to new solar lighting. “The Valley feels more like a town” for the first time, one taxi driver tells me. There are still kilometres of shrubland at the centre of the island reminding that Anguilla’s development is still in its infancy: away from the handful of posh hotels, there’s not much here, and that is how the locals and esteemed guests like it.
Land at the airport and you’ll be met by walls of builders constructing a huge new terminal; drive out of the carpark and you can see a Kardashian-style villa with blackened glass windows, a new
private jet airport set to open this spring, anticipating a huge rise in digital nomad and leisure visitors. In front of the new airport, a billboard displaying a picture of a perfect palm fronded beach reads: “Anguilla: The Home of AI.” Three new hotels and a marina are also in construction. It’s an arresting if perplexing new vision of a tech utopia. Could this really be the new home of AI? And what does that even mean?
During my visit, I meet tourist board reps who say the government wants to “grow, grow, grow” its visitor footprint. Others attend conferences in Asia and the Americas to promote Anguilla’s AI
The high rollers will leave if there’s an influx of new tourism, changing the island’s identiy
identity, although no one seems to know the specifics. When I ask what they are promoting, they say strategy meetings are ongoing.
There is a paradox in growing paradise: you risk ruining the DNA of the place. Isn’t Anguilla’s whole thing that it is totally empty? “The high rollers will leave,” says one Manhattan solicitor when I ask about the influx. Enjoying the remoteness as a contrast to the city, he joins court proceedings digitally from the beach during the weeks he spends working from his condo. He says on a typical day he speaks to no one, and that’s how he likes it.
On a mission to meet Anguillans, I end up on a hike with Boston, who leads walks through the arid heart of the island, showing visitors some of the 100 indigenous plants, including one that foams into a natural soap, and Candlewood that burns when wet. An essential when he was growing up in the 1960s and 70s when electricity was scarce, his hunter-gatherer approach was the only way. As a child, he’d collect Candlewood for his parents, “especially in the morning when they were baking, they needed to have that fire going if it was raining.” He says the younger generation are reengaging with the island’s biodiversity, which seems partly down to suspicion of
modern medicine and partly because of food cost hikes. Despite the little fishing boats pointed out by tourist board representatives, the island imports most of its food and with Trump, tariffs are going up. “A lot of young people are into the natural way, how we used to be a long time ago,” says Boston. How come? “They see the results of it,” he says. “We pass it on, we learn from our parents, those who were here before us.”
Later I meet Sam, the barman at the Tranquility Beach Anguilla hotel on the island’s West End, who makes a killer rum punch. He uses fresh ginger and mint from his own herb garden, fresh lime juice and a little bit of cane sugar. Tranquility Beach lives up to its name, featuring a series of privately owned condos that are rented out to guests, each with a private hot tub, most with sea views. The beach never has more than three or four groups on it, so they don’t have to wait long on their sunloungers for their rum punch. Like Boston, Sam is of an advancing age, and defaults to nostalgic reflections of Anguilla pretourism in the 70s and 80s, when much of the island was off-grid. No locals care about the beach: he tells me the only times he swam as a child was when it rained, when he’d play in the sea.
What do they think of AI? Boston says he doesn’t know too much about it. “I heard about it but I’m not too much into it. The year before last I listened to a programme with this guy who developed it. I listened a bit, but I still ain’t into it.”
Other locals share a similar sentiment, but Lanston Connor is trying to change that. He’s registrar of commercial activities at the Anguilla Commercial Registry, which provides financial services to national and international businesses, so he’s tasked with enticing entrepreneurs to Anguilla to buy AI domain names and – ideally – to register their companies here to exploit the tax free business privileges. “Locals are not as aware of the prevalence of the domain name as they should be,” says Connor. “And the fact that they themselves can become speculators, buy the domain and have it
for reselling.” We’re speaking from a fintech conference being held in an air-conditioned tent on the grounds of the Aurora Hotel, which has a family waterpark in its backyard, featuring loads of multi-coloured slides. At the event, local government officials are miced up so they can be heard over the hum of the AC unit. On the agenda, the usual threat of money laundering, but also AI.
“Anguilla is an international financial centre,” says Connor. “We have no corporate taxes, we are a well regulated British overseas territory with that same credible regulation. We’re established in the financial services industry. People can [register] their company anywhere in the world, so we’re just one of many choices, but with the package we’re hoping to put together, including inviting you to visit the island, we’re hoping we can attract high net worth individuals and really high quality companies, including AI start ups. We’re trying to become the home of AI.”
Buy the domain from Anguilla – as Connor says, “it’s ours, it’s unique” – and once you’re registered, the country is preparing a whole lifestyle for you. “We’re hoping they’re already satisfied with their domain and may look to see what other AI services you can have. We have a lovely location with beautiful beaches, beautiful hotels, very nice people, and a very low crime rate. Anguilla is a paradise so we’re just trying to make it a complete paradise, one that includes all the financial services necessary for high net worth individuals
to come and live and flourish and feel good. The hope is AI continues to grow, becomes a sustainable revenue generator for the government and we can piggy back on other services, other attractions.” There is a worry that the money being made – $30 million in 2023, with $100 million projected for 2024 – isn’t reaching people like Boston and Sam. I meet one teacher who asks to remain anonymous. They tell me they’ve seen social issues getting worse due to a lack of funding in education. “There’s a lot of social decline, a decline in values, morals,” they say. “We need more counsellors at the school, we have a lot of social issues – we need programmes for that.” The government says they have been funding local schools, including new campuses, but “what they say and what they do are not necessarily the same. We don’t hear much about where it goes. I’ve seen a lot of children struggling with mental health issues.”
Sleep is a big thing in Anguilla –stressed lawyers down from NYC presumably hope a little of that low-stress way of life will rub off on them. Many locals work until 5pm, go to bed, then wake up at 9pm to shower before going back to sleep. That’s not just for oldies; Gen Z schoolkids admit this is the way things go here. Pride is also big. One hope is that the AI money means Anguilla can stop taking handouts from the British government. The island is still an
Anguilla is a paradise, with lovely beaches. Now we’re making it a paradise for workers too
Opposite page: Bankie Banx, a local
known as the
on Meads Bay; Inset: The Anguilla Arch on the north-west coast of the island
overseas British territory, despite how increasingly uncomfortable that feels (one of the island’s former plantations is currently being renovated into a museum; locals say it is a “good question” when I ask whether it will educate about how Britons enslaved Anguillans). “We have to pay our way,” Boston tells me, “not just wait on handouts.” We’d finished our walk, passing an inland lagoon and ending on a gorgeous, empty beach. There are so many, you’ll easily find a whole one for yourself, but even at the hotels in peak season, sunloungers are only a third full. Metres in front of me there’s a decapitated shark’s head; Boston tells me it’s been mauled by a bird.
Bankie Banx, a local reggae singer known as the ‘Anguillan Bob Dylan’, and has laid down tracks with the folk icon, echoes Boston’s sentiment. “We’re very disconnected to most of the Caribbean, we had to survive via our wits and our minds,” he says. “Most of the people are drifters and people of the sea, fishermen, hard working people. They plant crops to keep themselves alive. People built 100 foot boats and pulled them down manually, just like the Egyptians. We’ve been that way for years.”
Our walk finished on an empty beach. There are so many you’ll easily find one for yourself
National pride has led to disappointment at the way the government has handled things. The Anguillan government leased the management of the AI domain to US company Identity Digital, who are operating on a revenue share. The firm is reportedly taking 10 per cent of profits from every domain name sale, with the rest going to the Anguillan government. Patrique, the head chef at the Serenity Beach hotel on the north-east coast (most of the hotels are in the more touristic West End) hoped Anguilla would keep autonomy over the management of their AI domain. “It’s disappointing,” he says from an open kitchen looking out to snorkellers and people lazing over long, late lunches of conch salad and lobster.
“We have all that money but I don’t really see where it’s going. I would like it to go into the community, the schools, the future generation.”
An election in February heralded a new era. The Anguilla United Front, promising to reduce tax hikes instated in 2020, were voted in, pushing out the Anguilla Progressive Movement. Their mission, they say, is to put people first. How much of the AI money will be seen by the average Anguillan remains to be seen, but what is a near certainty is that an impending increase in flights will raise the international profile of these beguiling little stretches of sand. Visit right now – don’t leave it too long – and you’re fairly certain to be the only Brit for miles.
l Go to ivisitanguilla.com. Flights from Heathrow to St Maarten via Paris or Amsterdam are bookable through airfrance. com or klm.com. Take a Calypso Charters boat from St Maarten to Anguilla with calypsochartersanguilla.com; Tranquility Beach Anguilla rooms are from $490 per night and Zemi Beach House has rooms from $625 per night; tranquilitybeachanguilla.com and zemibeach.com
People have been flying to Asia for a cheap suit for decades – but does the industry still hold up in the age of Tiktok? JANE KNIGHT jets off to Hong Kong, son in tow, to find out
It started with Tiktok, as things tend to these days. Keen to swap casual clothing for sartorial elegance, my teenage son, Christian, discovered a Tiktok celebrity tailor based in Hong Kong. Countless videos later, my tracksuit-loving boy started talking about notched or peak lapels and shirts with Italian spread collars. Then came his suggestion: “We could fly to Hong Kong and buy a suit for less than it costs to have one made at home.”
Not quite, I thought. Many of the tailors who had given the former British colony a name for its cheap, 24-hour suits have now moved elsewhere in China, where costs aren’t as high. Meanwhile, places such as Hoi An in Vietnam are gaining a reputation for their inexpensive but well-crafted formal wear.
But however lovely Hoi An is, it’s not Hong Kong. It can’t offer a tantalisingly easy taste of China. Nor does it have a Peninsula Hotel, where you can spend what you save on the suit (and more) by staying amid its East-meets-West splendour, gazing down from your room at what look like toy sampans and junks plying the waters of Victoria Harbour. A city break there together with a souvenir of a suit would make the perfect 18th birthday present, my son suggested. So off we went. Our plan was nearly scuppered when we realised that most tailors, including the one from Tiktok, couldn’t finish a suit during our four-night visit, which fell shortly after Chinese New Year. When they offered to send it to us afterwards, I worried about final adjustments. However, using the excellent Tailor M website (tailor-m.com), I found L&K tailors, with set prices, good reviews, and just a three-day turnaround. Their shop was also a convenient six-minute walk from The Peninsula, making it easy to visit after we rolled off the plane into a different time zone.
“I sold a suit three months ago for £7,000,” said Kenny Mirpuri (the K in L&K), enthusing about their luxury Loro Piano and Ermenegildo Zegna Italian fabrics. We
ordered the entry-level model instead (£350) but Kenny assured us it would still be made from Italian cloth that was 80 per cent wool and 20 per cent cashmere. In a matter of minutes, material and style were picked, measurements taken, a lining decided upon and an accompanying shirt ordered for £40.
Then it was a matter of hitting the tourist sites while we waited. We took the tram up Victoria Peak, watching Hong Kong’s skyscrapers seemingly tilt on their sides as we glided up the 26-degree slope. We rode the longest escalator system in the world from Central to the Mid-Levels, passing enticing alleyways with cheap places to eat. And we paid 50p to cross the harbour at night on the iconic Star Ferry, gazing at the illuminated buildings lighting up the skyline of Hong Kong Island.
There was shopping too, with plenty of high-end outlets along the golden mile of Nathan Road in Kowloon, and cheap clothes, bags and souvenirs at both the Ladies Market and Temple Street Night Market just off it.
Amid the to-ing and fro-ing, we squeezed in Christian’s first fitting. Little more than 24 hours after our arrival in Hong Kong, the suit was already well advanced, but needed more length in the legs; the shirt was complete, though Christian asked for it to be taken in slightly for a snugger fit. “It’s cheaper to get them here than in Charles Tyrwhitt,” said my son astutely. “And they fit my long arms.” We ordered another three.
While L&K tailors have worked in Kowloon for 42 years, the rise of Hong Kong’s textile industry dates back to the 1950s, when preferential tariffs for Commonwealth countries combined with an influx of immigrants with essential know-how from China. We learnt what happened next on a food and fashion tour of Sham Shui Po, with Agnes Tam, who formerly hosted fashion buyers from companies
including Victoria’s Secret.
“The peak of the fashion industry in Hong Kong was in the 70s and 80s,” she said. “Many international brands came here to make their first sample. There were more than a million people in the garment industry here in the 80s but today the majority of factories have moved to China, because it’s less expensive there.”
There are still remnants of Sham Shui Po’s textile heyday on Yu Chau Street, aka Bead Street, where shops overflow with designer accessories. Some specialise in rolls of ribbon, another has drawer after drawer of buttons and yet more specialise in unusual shoe-laces, Swarovski crystal beads or sew-on patches.
Cheap street food that sprung up in the neighbourhood to feed the workers is still on offer – and it’s great. At Yuen Fong Dumplings we crammed onto communal tables, tucking into big bowls of broth and dumplings that cost just over £3. It was
There are still remnants of Sham Shui Po’s textile heyday on Yu Chau Street, where shops overflow with designer accessories
even cheaper at Hop Yik Tai, where enough glutinous rice rolls (cheong fun) to fill you up cost just £1.
Suitably refuelled, we took the MTR to Tsuen Wan and The Mills. Established in the 50s but closed in 2008, these former cotton mills were re-opened as part of a revitalisation project in 2018. Now you can see how cotton is made into yarn in the exhibition centre as well as visiting a new generation of fashion shops within the old factory. They range from Eoniq, where you can design your own watch, to a store run by the Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel, which recycles your old clothes into something new.
Back at The Peninsula, we shook off the city in the pool, where it felt like we were swimming into the skyscrapers, and watched Hong Kong’s evening Symphony of Light show from the Philippe-Starck designed restaurant and bar. The elegance in this grande dame of a hotel with its legendary afternoon teas in the lobby, and where everything ran as smoothly as its fleet of Rolls Royces, made the perfect contrast to Hong Kong’s cacophonous streets and buzzy night markets. Its many restaurants, including French Gaddi’s and Chinese Spring Moon, both with a Michelin star, were a delicious change from the street food.
Before we knew it, our last day rolled round and it was time to pick up the suit. I was nervous as Christian tried it on, wondering if they could fix any issues in our last few hours. But it fit perfectly. “It’s like it’s been moulded to me,” he said proudly.
“We’ve got his measurements,” Michael told me, making sure I had his card. “Whenever he wants another one, you know where we are.”
l Cathay Pacific has return flights to Hong Kong from £632 (cathaypacific.com); For more information from the Hong Kong Tourist Board go to discoverhongkong.com; Rooms at The Peninsula costs from £665 a night (peninsula. com). Holidayextras.com has meet-and-greet parking at Heathrow from £89 for five nights
The remote Laferm Coco in Mauritius is an agro-tourism experience like no other.
STEVE DINNEEN visits the chickens and cows
wandering through Laferm Coco, you pass through neat little fields packed with guava and papaya and bananas and coconuts and turmeric, all hemmed in by jagged volcanic mountains, the splashes of colour from the produce impossibly saturated beneath a clear blue sky.
Elsewhere farmyard animals flap and graze and squabble. There’s a duck pond that looks like it’s been lifted from a children’s picture book, a pair of cows that lazily regard you from patches of wild grass, and dozens of bright orange chickens that follow you around in the hope you might spare them some grain.
Nestled in a remote corner of Mauritius, itself a remote island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, this idyllic 7.5 acres has a Marie Antoinette-ish quality, like nowhere this perfectly bucolic could possibly exist in real life. But Laferm Coco is a working farm, the only 100 per cent organic operation of its kind on the island.
Should you be planning a trip to Mauritius, best known for its coral beaches and high-end hotel chains (I also stayed at the five star Maradiva, which is every inch the pristinely-manicured resort that lives in your mind’s eye), Laferm Coco offers a taste of something else entirely.
I spent an afternoon there with Stefan and Christine Rouillard, a Mauritian couple who started the farm nearly a decade ago on a patch of unloved land, having previously run a construction business. By the time I arrived, snaking along dirt roads running beside the sugar cane fields ubiquitous across the island, they had already finished a day’s work, having risen at 5.30am to tend the land.
Over a spread of organic produce plucked from the farm, they told me how they had taken a dream of living among nature and turned it into this unlikely oasis (this really is their house – you can nosy through a window into their bedroom and flick through their impressive record collection).
“We had a dream of living in this type of environment,” says Stefan in a thick French-Mauritian accent. “I’ve never been able to live in towns, so I wanted to live in a natural environment. We started reading books on how to do organic farming. It started with a coconut plantation after I spoke to a friend who’s in the coconut water business. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll start by planting coconut trees instead of sugar cane’. Then we said, ‘Why not grow a few vegetables?’ Next it was ‘Why not add some chickens and ducks’. It went on and on from there and we ended up with what you can see today.”
Neither Christine nor Stefan knew the first thing about farming – so they set about reading every book on the subject they could find, experimenting with various techniques until they found ways to work the difficult Mauritian terroir.
“It took three or four years to really understand what we had to do and start getting a glimpse of a direction for the farm,” says Stefan. “We had no one to show us and all the books were European, where there is a different climate and different plants. There were times when I became discouraged and questioned if I was doing the right thing. But I was hooked on the lifestyle and determined to make it work.”
The original plan was to make a living selling their produce across the island, but they found it difficult to compete with supermarkets. Instead they turned to agro-tourism – literally “farm tourism”, a growing trend among ecologically-conscious travellers –constructing two lodges where guests can stay and get a feel for life on the farm. “Now our efforts and all the resources we’re putting in can be sustained financially by tourism.”
There are two log-cabin-style lodges, one essentially a small bedroom with an en-suite bathroom, with a second bedroom and kitchen soon to be installed. The other lodging is much bigger, sleeping up to seven, with two bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room and a veranda overlooking the fields. Those who value the finer things in life will be pleased to hear that there are regular toilets and mains electricity.
Since opening the guesthouses in 2023, the Rouillards have invited guests to dine in their home each evening, although they are now building a kitchen in one of the lodges and serving food to the lodgings. “It can get a little intense eating with guests every evening – for us and the guests,” laughs Stefan.
Those staying on the farm are free to spend their time on-site or use it as a base from which to explore the island. Laferm Coco also sells organic picnic boxes so guests can take the taste of the farm on their travels.
“The appeal of Laferm Coco is that it’s the only place in Mauritius where you can stay on a real farm, not just another tourist farm with a few ducks and a cow.”
When I visited, getting there was an adventure in itself, involving the navigation of a series of maze-like dirt tracks, although Stefan says they have since improved the roads – they are now accessible by “almost any vehicle” – and added signs. Let’s hope it’s not too easy to find, however – the feeling of being lost in paradise is part of the appeal.
l The small house is available from 7,500 Mauritian rupees a night, including breakfast and dinner. The bigger house is available from 9,500 rupees per night on a bed and breakfast basis; go to lafermcoco.mu for more information
Humans have taken solace in the stars for tens of thousands of years. After his mother was diagnosed with cancer LUKE ABRAHAMS took a trip to South Africa and found himself comforted by the universe
Last April, I found myself alone in the African bush. It was just after 11am and I was watching a family of elephants guzzle down water from the Sand River. The autumn sun was merciful, as were the seasonal winds sweeping over the tundras of the Sabi Sands private game reserve. The moment would have seemed perfect to an unsuspecting onlooker.
But inside, I was screaming. “Luke, I’ve got cancer,” my mother had recently told me in a broken voice. If ever you’ve been unlucky enough to hear those words, especially from someone so close to you, you’ll know they cut you like a knife. Over the years, I have become all too familiar with the word ‘grief’. Close friends have died, as did a long-term relationship. Faced with the news of my mother’s recent diagnosis, I dealt with it in the most classically ‘me’ way possible: I ran far, far away.
My connection to Southern Africa is familial. My mother is half South African by way of her father, and so it seemed fitting that, despite me being thousands of miles away from her, Mother Abrahams was eerily there in spirit. Travelling has always been my tonic, and after years of grafting and hustling through Britain’s media institutions, I am privileged enough to do it as a job. I often look back at my travels when I’m down, remembering the moments when I was exposed to entirely new ways of living.
When most people think of an African safari, they have visions of lions, rhinos and exotic birds, but I was here for a very different reason: to get lost in the cosmos. Noctourism is a growing trend. With news of planetary alignments, once in a decade northern lights displays, and rare interstellar cosmic events, the stars are once again having their moment. The question is, why? For me, it’s simple. We live in an age of technological narcissism. Our lives are governed not by the cyclical rhythms of Mother Nature but emails and alarms and notifications. What most people crave, including myself, is connection to something larger.
Time is also very much the topic du jour. We are always chasing it, and the paradoxical beauty is that when you look up, it is chasing you as you stare
into the past. Here especially, out in the wild, you learn the art of pure escapism. The adrenaline rush of being so exposed, so defenceless, and so helpless out in the savannah is a dangerously addictive drug.
Stargazing is no different. One night I found myself in the middle of Singita Ebony lodge’s stretch of Kruger bushland while out on a drive and I asked my ranger to stop somewhere so I could look at the stars. Ten minutes or so passed and we arrived at an airstrip, the darkest and safest place to see them, I was told. Fuji Film XT5 camera ready, I marched to the middle of the tarmac and set up my tripod to capture a smidge of the universe in all its glory. Looking up for what seemed like an eternity, my eyes finally adjusted. Like a thin veil of mist, the distant cloud of our galaxy began to reveal itself. As Jupiter began to rise, I felt humble beneath the Milky Way. A sense of awe shot through me. Its immensity feels beguilingly tranquil. I was in a daze, transfixed by the sights of shooting stars, constellations, hurtling satellites and nebula dust. Staring into the centre of our galaxy, my mind felt detached from my body. Cosmic perspective is a rare thing, especially for city types like myself.
Over the last decade, a number of researchers have found a connection between star-gazing and mental wellbeing. It forces us to contemplate. A 2016 study by Coventry University found stargazing helps promote wellbeing through what researchers describe as an ‘increased sense of flow through fascination and loss of time’, or as South African researcher Dominic Gregory Vertue put it, “turn negative fixations into larger perspectives.” While cancer, work stress and the odd spell of depression were looming large over my life, they seemed insignificant under the grand scale of the night sky.
A month passed and I encountered the same feeling again in Tanzania. At Singita Explore, the conservation brand’s mobile safari in the Grumeti Reserve, I indulged in a night of planet spotting. I had never stared first hand at Saturn’s giant rings until peering through the camp’s telescope. Seeing this distant
We are on a rock hurtling around a star. This cosmic voyage is the greatest journey any of us will ever embark upon, and we are seldom aware of it
and lonely gas giant only made me appreciate the fragility of our own planet even more. That night I realised for the first time – in my mid-thirties – the sheer unimaginable vastness of the universe. I became obsessed with everything from black holes to pulsars and nebulas, all a welcome distraction from my problems. Though billions of miles away, this space matter both guides and grounds us in ways I never thought imaginable.
Fast forward to January this year, and I found myself in Patagonia National Park in Chile for a few nights at Explora’s namesake lodge on another kind of safari; in search of the elusive puma. Surrounded by giant snowcapped peaks and rolling hills, its desolate and remote landscapes are among the loneliest on earth. While the puma remained scarce, at night, the magic of this isolated wilderness came alive. At 10pm on a briskly chilly Wednesday evening, I ventured outside and, like clockwork, the sky turned a deep red. Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn aligned with the Earth in near perfect unison. This was a rare and privileged night sky, and after three hours of staring blankly at it, universal contemplation turned to worldly realisation.
I am on a rock hurtling 67,000 miles per hour around a star orbiting a black hole on a 225 million earth year journey around the Milky Way. Along the way, we are dodging asteroids, gamma rays and radiation, things that could wipe us out in less than a millisecond. This cosmic voyage is the greatest journey any of us will ever embark upon, and we are seldom aware of it. While it might sound nihilistic, we will all be dead soon and traces of our existence will soon be lost to the sands of time.
One day, that great big star we see every day will swallow our planet whole and we will once again be nothing but stardust, used once again as building blocks in the pillars of nucleic creation. To some, that might seem terrifying, but the one thing the universe has taught me over the last year, is that there is beauty in death.
All the atoms and electrons that make up the lowly journalist Luke Abrahams and his sick mother will once again swirl through the cosmos. I take great comfort in that.
This Chinese SUV is a newcomer to the luxury market, and it has its sights set on Land Rover fans.
ADAM HAY-NICHOLLS buckles in for a test drive
You’ve probably never heard of the car brand Jaecoo before, but you’re about to start seeing a lot of them. The Jaecoo 7 boasts the three things most motorists in the UK are looking for in a new set of wheels: It’s a mid-size SUV; it’s hybrid with fantastic fuel economy and all the latest digital technologies; and it’s extraordinary value. The downside is that it could lead to the extinction of our own homegrown automotive industry. So, on the one hand, comfort and flexibility at a bargain price, on the other the collapse of the western economies.
Jaecoo is Chinese, you see. And China has rather cunningly set about dominating the car industry’s shift to electrification thanks to its unfettered access to half the world’s lithium, cobalt and graphite (which are essential materials for making EV batteries), and its talent for copying what other countries make and doing it much
cheaper. In fact, having enticed some of the west’s most experienced executives, designers and engineers with their renminbi, and invested heavily in its workforces and manufacturing plants, China has gone from bootlegger to global leader. It sells 60 per cent of the world’s EVs and 80 per cent of the batteries that power them, and is set to overtake the United States in autonomous driving technologies. There are some 150 Chinese auto manufacturers. Additionally, Tesla, Volkswagen and BMW have factories there.
But there has been a steer towards hybrids, which are less expensive to buy than fully-electric vehicles and are booming in sales. Hybrids offer the best-of-both-worlds; motorists benefit from emission-free journeys in urban areas and long range on motorways and in the countryside. Range anxiety, sluggish charging infrastructure and expensive energy means that fully-electric vehicles are impractical for many customers. That’s true of those living in Zhoushan just as it is for people in
Sudbury. And China’s ambitions are nothing if not international and expansive.
Which brings us back to the Jaecoo 7; a car that’s sure to appeal to a lot of Brits. It’s a handsome machine, with styling cues reminiscent of contemporary Land Rovers and Jeeps. Inside it’s minimalist with a huge central touchscreen, like a Tesla or Volvo, and it’s well-equipped. In terms of size, it sits between the Range Rover Evoque and the larger Velar. Incidentally, Jaecoo’s parent company, Chery, builds cars for JLR (Jaguar Land Rover) in China, and some of what you might find under the skin of the British off-roader is to be found here.
Yet were you to spec the Evoque to the same equipment level as a standard Jaecoo, you’d be presented with a £63,000 bill. The Jaecoo’s sticker price: just £35,000, with a seven-year / 100,000 mile warranty thrown in. That undercuts all of its B and C segment hybrid competition, including the Volkswagen Tiguan, Nissan Qashqai and Ford Kuga.
To test drive the car, I headed to Africa, where European motors are not the only endangered species. Africa, it should be noted, is another area where China is making remarkable inroads. Since 2009, the superpower has been Africa’s largest trading partner. It has invested across the continent, funding infrastructure projects, extracting oil and minerals, improving healthcare, importing Chinese workers, establishing military bases, and making multibillion-dollar loans to African governments. Some might call this neo-colonialism, others development and mutually beneficial cooperation. Presently, Eswatini is the only African nation that officially recognises Taiwan.
To this end, Jaecoo and its owner Chery (China’s fourth-biggest car builder with worldwide sales of 2.6 million in 2024, which is more than BMW) are already deeply embedded here, especially in South Africa. I flew to Cape Town, picked up the new 7, and then drove in convoy with other international media along South Africa’s ‘Garden Route’, a 1,000km (620 mile) drive between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. Picture the Pacific Coast Highway, but with penguins.
Framed by the towering majesty of Table Mountain and kissed by the Atlantic Ocean, Cape Town is affectionately known as the ‘mother city’, and to its west the Cape of Good Hope has been a meeting place of explorers and legends since it was first sighted by the Portuguese in the 15th century. From its lighthouse, one can see humpback whales in the ocean below and great white sharks circling beyond the deserted Diaz Beach. In the car park, there’s another predator. Jaecoo takes its first syllable from ‘jaeger’, the German word for hunter, and its second syllable from ‘cool’, but no one could be bothered to add the ‘l’ (if you think that’s bad, BYD, another Chinese manufacturer making strides in Europe and the UK, stands for ‘Build Your Dreams’).
Heading back towards Cape Town, Chapman’s Peak comprises 114 curves along a five-mile stretch, which the 7 takes in its stride. This is a smooth machine, with well-weighted steering, seamless switching between electric and petrol propulsion, and sufficient power to spring like a gazelle from turn to turn. Cutting through the city, one passes the oldest working harbour in the southern hemisphere. Enormous cargo ships disgorge and collect containers, many of which have Chinese
characters on the sides. And from there it’s on to the Garden Route, which takes us through the picturesque locales of Hermanus, Pearly Beach and Mossel Bay, where hundreds of penguins assemble like the casting of a diminutive Moss Bros campaign. Overnighting at the Misty Mountain Reserve in Tsitsikamma, I stayed in a wooden hut which, I learned the following morning, was located about ten metres from a crocodile enclosure.
We also ventured on safari, visiting Addo Elephant National Park and seeing the other ‘big four’ at Brandwacht Game Reserve, where our guide Mark, a Top Gun-era Tom Cruise lookalike, offered some interesting insights: apparently leopard makes the tastiest meat of all; giraffes look like Chuck Norris gave a horse an uppercut; hippos are the world’s angriest vegans (he’s obviously never been to Dalston); and wildebeest are made up of the spare parts of other animals. Perhaps that makes the Jaecoo 7 the wildebeest of SUVs, for I see a face reminiscent of the Jeep Cherokee, a rear light bar like the latest Range Rover Sport, and vertical rear air outlets that give it a Jaguar F-Pace SVR stance. That said, the only part I can see that’s been directly lifted is the JLR-derived infotainment system.
Mark tells me there are 14,000 white rhino in South Africa. Twelve years ago, that figure was 26,000 and the reduction is the result of illegal poaching. Hunters kill these beasts for their horns. And who insists on buying rhino horn for its supposed medicinal and sexual powers? That’d be the Chinese.
Meanwhile, the Jaecoo is adequately thrusting. A combined 201 bhp from its 1.5-litre petrol engine and hybrid system isn’t about to embarrass the Porsche Macan at the lights, but its 310Nm of torque means it never feels like it’s dragging an anchor. Zero to 62mph is a respectable 8.5 seconds. Capable of a real world 55mpg and a range of over 745 miles, we were easily able to complete the Garden Route without having to refill its 60-litre tank or plug in. Unlike a typical plug-in hybrid, Jaecoo’s third-generation ‘Super Hybrid’ powertrain self-charges when you back off the gas and never drops to zero. Electric-only mode from its 18.3 kW battery pack tops out at 56 miles –more than enough for most people’s day-to-day. Had we needed to re-up, I’m told a 40kW charger will boost the batteries from 30-80 per cent full in 40 minutes or will fully charge in around six and a half hours. The figures for thermal efficiency and carbon emissions (23g/km) are genuinely mighty – the result of innovative ignition timing that lowers combustion temperatures – and its battery safety technology is class-leading.
Should one opt for a combustion-only version, it’s even cheaper. Front-wheel-drive is available from £29,435 and all-wheel-drive from £32k. The hybrid I drove, due to packaging, is only available as a front-wheel-drive. That mightn’t make it a true competitor for Land Rover, but it’s refined enough to pose a serious challenge to the likes of VW, Nissan, Kia and Ford, and may even tempt some customers out of their BMW X1s and Audi Q3s. In these times of economic uncertainty, who wants to spaff an extra £10k on a badge?
This is all very good news indeed, of course, for the Chinese economy. The ‘jaeger’ Jaecoo is on the hunt, ready to eat mainstream European car makers for lunch.
Immersed in the loud and vibrant world of Lamborghini, TIM PITT drives its newest supercars and watches the Super Trofeo racers do battle
Ferruccio Lamborghini wasn’t a fan of motorsport.
While Enzo Ferrari sold road cars primarily to bankroll racing teams, his rival on the opposite side of Modena saw things differently. Launching the Lamborghini Miura in 1966 – widely regarded as the world’s first supercar – Ferruccio said: “Every one I build [will be] like winning a grand prix, and people will talk about it for long after they have forgotten who won the race.”
Despite its founder’s misgivings, though, Lamborghini did dabble in racing over the years. It supplied 3.5-litre V12 engines to the Larousse, Modena and Ligier F1 teams between 1989 and 1993, then competed at Le Mans in the early 2000s with the Murcielago R-GT.
The turning point came in 2013, with the
establishment of Squadra Corse. Literally translated as ‘Racing Team’, Lamborghini’s in-house motorsport division developed a GT3 version of the Huracan that won titles in the British GT Championship and Blancpain GT Series, among others. The company also threw its weight behind a one-make Super Trofeo race series for wealthy ‘gentlemen drivers’, using the Lamborghini Gallardo at first, then the Huracan from 2014.
The Lamborghini World Finals is the season finale for the three Super Trofeo championships now staged each year, in Europe, Asia and North America. The latest event brought together 73 cars, 121 drivers and more than 10,000 spectators at the Circuito de Jerez near Seville – originally built to host the Spanish Grand Prix. After three days immersed in all things Lamborghini, I came away with ears ringing and adrenaline coursing, ready to
sell the house, remortgage the children and begin a glamorous new life as a Super Trofeo driver. None of those things happened, of course, but here is what did…
DAY ONE (FRIDAY)
I arrive in Jerez and immediately bump into Stephan Winkelmann, Lamborghini’s effortlessly stylish chief exec, in the hotel lobby. He has little time for small-talk, however, and I’m due at the track to drive some cars. All I need to do first is sign numerous forms promising not to crash and die. If Italians do one thing even better than hedonistic supercars, it’s headscratching bureaucracy.
At the circuit, qualifying is already underway and the air quakes with a combined chorus of unsilenced V10 engines. I’m given a coveted access-all-areas lanyard, then ushered through to a busy pit garage, where one of Squadra Corse’s
tame racing drivers joins me for a closer look at Lamborghini’s current Super Trofeo racer: the Huracan EVO2.
It might look like a Huracan STO in sponsorship warpaint, but the EVO2 is a very different beast to the road car. Its enormous diffuser and swan-neck spoiler boost downforce, while a rear dorsal fin enhances stability at speed. The car’s body is made entirely from carbon fibre – easier to repair than aluminum, as it can be patched and retain its strength – and its 18-inch centre-lock wheels are shod with Hankook slick tyres.
Inside, the Huracan EVO2 looks brutally basic: no carpets or trim, just an FIA-spec roll cage, custom switch panel and single hard-shell seat. The steering wheel is a detachable, F1-style yoke with colourful buttons that allow the driver to adjust traction control and ABS settings, activate a pit lane speed limiter, communicate with
the race engineer and a bewildering amount besides. The Huracan’s heart is the same 5.2-litre naturally aspirated V10 found in showroom-spec cars, although here it runs on refined racing fuel and drives the rear wheels via a six-speed X-Trac sequential manual transmission (as opposed to a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic). Peak power of 620hp at 8,250rpm means the Super Trofeo EVO2 can actually outpace a Huracan GT3 on the straights – and makes it one of the quickest one-make race cars (a lot of) money can buy.
As the qualifying session roars and rumbles to its conclusion, I’m ushered outside to a waiting Huracan Sterrato. Ironically, recent rain has made the on-site rally stage “too muddy” for skidding about in Lamborghini’s off-road supercar, so an empty car park dotted with traffic cones has to suffice. Still, with a damp surface, knobbly Bridgestone Dueler tyres and that
maniac V10 yammering inches behind my ears, I have no difficulty going sideways. Hilariously sideways, in fact. Note: some cones were harmed during the making of this paragraph.
It’s then time to ‘test the agility’ of the new Urus SE on Jerez’s go-kart circuit. And no, a tightly coiled track designed for vehicles with lawn mower engines isn’t the natural playground for a 2.5-tonne SUV. But that doesn’t mean hurling the ‘Rambo Lambo’ around isn’t riotous, tyre-torturing fun. Go kart handling? That’s a stretch, but rear-wheel steering and active anti-roll bars do make the brutish Urus respond like a smaller, lighter car. A proper road test is lined up for tomorrow.
Lamborghini’s press cars are parked outside the hotel like a colourful assortment of pick-n-mix. Elbowing my way into the
gaggle of journalists as keys are dished out, I’m allocated a Urus SE for the outward journey, then a Revuelto – Sant’Agata’s latest V12 supercar – for the drive back. Well, it’s probably best to start slowly…
‘Slowly’ is a relative term in an 800hp, 194mph Lamborghini, though. The plug-in hybrid Urus SE replaces the old S and Performante models, retaining their brawny 4.0-litre twin-turbocharged V8 but adding a 25.9kWh battery and rear axle e-motor. The result is the best of all worlds: thunderous performance combined with 37 miles of silent electric range and tax-dodging CO2 emissions of 51g/km.
On the road, the Urus can play the mild-mannered family holdall, but its wild side is never far beneath the surface. Switch into Sport mode and the new electronic rear differential lets it all hang out, dialling down the stability control for ‘on-demand oversteering’. Alternatively, another click of the huge ‘tamburo’ lever selects Corsa mode, tightening the reins for greater steering precision and iron-clad body control (ideal if you happen to be chasing lap times at a go-kart track).
For all its speed and bombast, however, the Urus can’t hold a (Roman) candle to the Revuelto. If Lamborghini’s SUV is like watching the reformed Oasis in 2025, its flamboyant flagship takes you back to Knebworth in 1996, when every note felt vital. The drama starts from the moment you glimpse the exposed V12 engine, lift the trad-Lambo scissor door and twist your hips into the low-slung seat. Everything about the Revuelto feels exotic.
With a faintly ludicrous 1,015hp from its 6.5-litre engine and three electric
The drama starts from the moment you glimpse the exposed engine and lift the scissor door
motors – good for 0-62mph in 2.5 seconds and 217mph – the Revuelto smashes through the glass ceiling between supercar and hypercar. Find a sufficiently long straight, bury your right foot and it sucks in the road like a strand of spaghetti. But where driving a 1990s Lamborghini Diablo was like being strapped to a low-flying missile, now you feel confidently in control, helped by nuanced steering, supple damping and tenacious four-wheel-drive traction.
Back at Jerez, a test session is underway for owners of the Lamborghini Essenza SCV12. A track-only evolution of the Aventador developed by Squadra Corse, only 40 Essenzas were made – and seven of them are here at the World Finals. With my brain still scrambled by the Revuelto (appropriately, its name means ‘scrambled’ in Spanish) I lean on the pit wall, sip a strong coffee and let the primal howl of each 830hp V12 wash over me. This extreme machine makes even a Huracan Super Trofeo sound subdued.
With the Lamborghini World Finals champions due to be decided, today is all about the racing. Each Super Trofeo race lasts for 50 minutes, with a compulsory pit stop around half-time that most teams will use to change drivers. Contested in professional (Pro), amateur (Am) and combined (Pro-Am) categories, the action is fast-paced and fiercely competitive.
I wander along the bustling grid, doing my best Martin Brundle impression, when one of Lamborghini’s PR team offers a ride in the Urus SE safety car. We lead out the field on its formation lap, my driver clearly pushing quite hard, but the Huracans that fill our mirrors weave back-and-forth impatiently to warm up their tyres. However fast an 800hp SUV might feel, these fully fledged race cars aren’t even breaking sweat.
After a day of daring overtakes, close calls and crunched carbon fibre, Egor Orudzhev of the Art-Line team claims the Pro title. Leipert Motorsport’s Brendon Leitch and Anthony McIntosh win in Pro-Am, while Renaud Kuppens of Boutsen VDS lifts the Am trophy. Lastly, GT3 Poland’s Holger Harmsen takes victory in the Lamborghini Cup.
The Huracan EVO2 has one year left to race before the V8-powered Temerario becomes the basis for Lamborghini’s new one-make racer in 2026. Squadra Corse might still be a minor player in motorsport, but the successful Super Trofeo series and World Finals have allowed Lamborghini to forge its own path – just as it always did. I think the late Ferruccio would have approved.
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The
penguin, the myth, the legend, ANNA MOLONEY on the company that revolutionised reading (sort of)
In 1934, on his way to London after visiting his good friend Agatha Christie, the young publisher Allen Lane stopped at the station bookstall at Exeter St Davids, saw all the books on sale were low quality and overpriced, and thought that simply won’t do. Within a year, he’d founded Penguin Books and singlehandedly set off the paperback revolution that would fundamentally change the publishing world forevermore. Or so he’d like you to think. Of course, Allen Lane was in the business of
storytelling and he’d be damned not to sew his own corporate myth.
As it happens, Penguin wasn’t the first publisher to produce cheap paperbacks. It wasn’t even the first bird-named one to. Rather, Lane had caught wind of Albatross Books, a German publisher with a distinctive look – simple typographical covers stamped with its own bird mascot – and the rest is history. Thank god imitation is the greatest form of flattery.
From there, Lane grew his literary avian empire (Penguins, King Penguins, Pelicans, Puffins) until running out of Ps,
and, as it celebrates its 90th anniversary this year, still parrots this charming myth.
“Allen really had a campaign to make himself seem like a publishing genius. But he was more of a business genius,” says Stuart Kells, author of Penguin and The Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution. Perhaps more concerning for Penguin fans though: he wasn’t a literary person at all. Allen’s favourite book? A weight loss guide. Even so, Lane did change the reading world. Set at the same price as a pack of cigarettes and the first books to be sold in Woolworths, Penguin Books made reading accessible. The penguin mascot itself, a choice inspired by a visit to the recently built Lubetkin Penguin Pool in London Zoo, spoke to this in form and function. Not only were penguins “in the zeitgeist” due to their modernist credentials (black and white and oh so chic), so were mascots, modern British historian Richard Hornsey tells me.
The Penguin penguin, pictured varyingly slipping around, donning its characters’ clothes and settling back with a good book, is a character both humble and refined, with a slight air of English self mockery. This, Hornsey says, appealed to the function of a mascot, which sought to foster brand loyalty as mass manufacturing made products themselves less important.
As testament to its success, unlike other publishers, Penguin commandeered whole shelves in the bookshops: ‘FAMOUS BOOKS, FAMOUS AUTHORS’, advertised the sign of one London Penguin kiosk pictured in 1936. The authors’ names themselves were hardly enough of a pull: it was the waddling penguins marching through the spines that were the real stars.
“When you go up to the bookshelf and you see 40 penguins all lined up… it’s offering you this almost utopian version of some future society in which we’re all well-read penguins. As if when you take your Penguin off [the shelf], you’re becoming a penguin yourself, and you’re joining this well-cultivated society,” Hornsey says. He’s only half joking. After all, even today to flash a Penguin Classic on the Tube is to signal casual cultivation.
And indeed, 90 years on from its more humble origins, those little penguins now waddle beaks tipped up, having since acquired a sense of prestige. “We wish to challenge the perceptions — held even by Allen Lane and the creators of Penguin — that their books were essentially ephemeral,” states the Penguin Collectors Society, which seeks “to encourage others to recognise the essential importance of Penguin books”. When I speak to Andrew Malin, who has collected over 7,500 first editions, he tells me he is driven by nostalgia and an appreciation for Penguin’s democratic spirit – as well as the obsessive characteristics that define any collector. How many has he read? “I have no idea, but not very many.” I think of Hornsey’s image of penguin utopia, and wonder if Malin feels himself there.
The day after Donald Trump was reelected as President of the United States, the sales of dystopian novels surged. I won’t waste words diagnosing why. Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest instalment in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series, may also owe the President some of its success. Selling 1.5m copies in its first week, the newly-released prequel marks the biggest debut of the entire Hunger Games series. It has outsold the opening week of Mockingjay, the trilogy’s original finale, more than three times over.
The prequel, set 24 years before the events of the original trilogy, explores the Games of Katniss’s lovable rogue mentor Haymitch Abernathy. Featuring a plucky young protagonist, an impassioned love story and conspicuous social commentary, it follows the classic formula that made the first so seductive. Perhaps more than anything though, it is strikingly gruesome.
The idea of ‘trauma porn’ has gained traction in recent years. In many ways, The Hunger Games series seeks to be a commentary on this: Collins cited her discomfort during a night of channel surfing, in which she was able to seamlessly flip between the distressing coverage of the Iraq War and the shiny visuals of TV gameshows, as inspiration for the original book, while last year’s Met Gala, broadcasted as bombs simultaneously rained down on Gaza, prompted many to cite the series online. But it also feeds into it: it seems reasonable to suggest that one reason these books prove so hard to put down is because the scenes they portray are so engrossingly disturbing.
Is it perhaps time our literature sought another way? Dystopia as a genre has blossomed over the last century; before that it was utopia that captured more writers’ imaginations. Aldous Huxley’s most famous book was Brave New World, but his final was Island, a novel where a shipwrecked, cynical, young journalist embraces a utopian island’s way of life. As President Snow himself warns in The Hunger Games itself, hope is the only thing stronger than fear. Perhaps we could benefit from
If the popularity of dystopian literature wasn’t enough to have you worried about Gen Z, consider where they’re now getting their romance from: Fyodor Dostoevsky. Or, to be more specific, his 1865 novella White Nights, which has become an unlikely Booktok hit and, according to booksellers, prompted an uptick in sales. That the short story, told from the view of a lonely young man living in St Petersburg who suffers from acute loneliness and alienation, resonates so much with Gen Z is something we should lament.
The tale is as thus: our young, lonely, nameless protagonist, who spends his nights wandering the city imagining the houses are talking to him, comes across a young woman crying on the street. He befriends her, tells her he’s never known a woman before and is afraid. That’s all okay, she reassures, women like timid men and, besides, she’s already in love with another young man, who promised a year ago he would come back to find her.
He hasn’t and she starts toying with the idea that maybe she could spend her life with this man she’s just found on the street instead. He, naturally, is delighted. She’s just about sold herself on the idea when her original sweetheart saunters past. She kisses our loner hero bye bye and runs off to be wed, sending a letter the next morning to apologise. I’m sorry for the spoilers, but you’ve had 160 years.
The novella ends with rousing words from our hero. Initially distraught at the turn of events, he finds it in himself to find comfort: “My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man’s life?” Yes, I would argue: I think our young lovers can aspire to more. Dostoevsky, no matter how great a writer, had a string of affairs, a tendency to get involved with other peoples’ wives and a troubling gambling addiction. He was not a great lover. White Nights is a dreary tale for dreary people, recommended chiefly, at only 80 pages, for its merciful brevity.
Each issue we ask a photographer to talk about their favourite frame. This edition ANDY BLACKMORE
GONE FINSHING IN SOUTH LONDON
If, like me, you see photography as fishing in the rivers of light, you won’t be surprised when you catch something unexpected. That’s why I love this shot – it captures the perfect synchronicity of subject, shutter, and scene, encapsulating everything I adore about South London. Or
should I say, ‘Sarf London’?
It contains a mix of urban culture, street art, and everyday life, frozen in a split second. The very essence of a place condensed into a single frame, if that were possible. Or, to put it another way, a perfect example of the ‘Decisive Moment’. The fact that I shot it in Penge makes it
even sweeter – just saying the name makes me giggle. I like to think that if Henri Cartier-Bresson had been from Croydon rather than Chanteloup-enBrie, he might have taken something similar. Either way, whenever I see this image, I smile and think about that day – gone fishing.
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