25 THE MAGAZINE
Pop star Estelle tells us what she would eat for her death row meal, from fried chicken to fine wine
What it’s like checking into a £10,000 a night drying out clinic
The artist on shocking King Charles with his radical painting
No. 87
Gen Z has embraced Catholicism – but does religion clash with bucket hats and baggy jeans?
HOLLYWOOD’S UNLIKELY ACTION HERO ON MASCULINITY, MIDDLE AGE AND MORNING SKINNY DIPS
Iwas among the 20,000 people squeezed into the O2 Arena this month to see Pulp play a giddy, joyful, triumphant set. The irony of watching Jarvis Cocker sing about class tension from a corporate box, glass of champagne in hand, did not go unnoticed.
Twelve-year-old me would have thrown a fit at the mere suggestion, of course, but 42-year-old me had a blast. It got me thinking that this magazine is all about people growing up and leaning into the finer things in life, while maintaining a little bit of youthful joie de vivre.
On P42 we fly to LA to meet the men and women who have adopted a more adult-friendly version of the digital nomad lifestyle. Forget backpacks and sandals: this is luxury apartments with live-in networking opportunities. Hardly the stuff of teenage rebellion but the wi-fi is good and the cocktails are strong.
Our cover star Luke Evans is living his best life as he approactes his sixth decade, blending health and hedonism in Ibiza. Read about it on P26. Elsewhere, we sent our chief executive to Zakynthos to stay at Porto Zante, which claims to be the ultimate CEO bolthole. Could checking in to a luxury villa help our long-suffering boss blow off steam? Find out on P76.
On P18 Michelin starred chef Tom Sellers and former England player Joe Cole talk about taking their prodigious talents and directing them into sustainable, long-term careers.
So treat yourself to a leisurely few minutes reading our magazine – you are a grown-up, after all.
– STEVE DINNEEN
14: THE DEVIL’S DRINK
Absinthe is making a comeback. We sent Kyle Macneill to get pissed and write about it, memory permitting.
34: THE POETRY OF PONG
Smell is the forgotten sense. We follow our noses to discover how odour discreetly defines our lives.
42: ADULT CO-LIVING
Would you check back into student digs? We meet the men and women shacking up in co-working nirvana.
84: REST IN PRINT
The obituary pages are the unsung heroes of the newspaper world. We talk to the people who write them.
18: CHEF’S TABLE
Top chef Tom Sellers interviews his friend and business partner Joe Cole at his Covent Garden venue.
52: WATCHES
The world timer is the most romantic of complications. We celebrate this wrist-based paean to global travel.
62: FASHION
How Wimbledon went from a bastion of elitism to a fashionforward inspiration to Gen Z.
88: BOOKS
Were the children of Gabriel García Márquez wrong to posthumously publish his final, unloved novel?
ANNA MOLONEY is a features writer at City AM and the books editor of this magazine. On P36 she checks into rehab to find out where the super-rich go to dry out
ADAM BLOODWORTH is City AM The Magazine’s deputy editor. On P68 he reminisces about his days as a semiprofessional autograph hunter as he walks the streets of LA
KYLE MACNEILL is a pop culture and music writer. On P12 we send him on a bar crawl of absinthe hotspots to discover why this infamous spirit is making a comeback in hipsterville
LIBBY BRODIE is a wine writer and one of the Top 20 Most Influential People in Drink. On P30 she sits down with artist Jonathan Yeo for a nice glass of Pinot Noir
ANDY BLACKMORE is City AM’s picture editor. On P21 he remembers the time a butcher handed him a bag of testicles, kickstarting a love of offal that remains to this day
CHRIS DORRELL is a freelance writer and member of psy funk band Totally Amorphous. On P84 he flicks through the obituaries and asks what the death pages say about life
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
COMMERCIAL TEAM: Harry Owen Chief Executive Officer Graeme Pretty Agency Sales Director Nzima Ndangana Luxury & Direct Sales Director For sales enquiries contact commercial@cityam.com. City AM The Magazine is published by City AM, 107 Cheapside, EC2V 6DN.
Gen Z are embracing Catholicism. As someone raised Roman Catholic, ANNA MOLONEY wonders why her nominal religion is suddenly so chic. Could the answer be ‘accessories’?
Crucify him! Crucify him!” I’m eight years old, shouting with my peers, fists raised, as we rehearse for our class performance of the Stations of the Cross. I’ve joined the chorus for rehearsals, but for the big show itself I’ll be stepping up to play Mary Magdalene, who may or may not have been a whore (undecided by scholars). But in the classroom it’s a very respected role (underachievers have been relegated to percussion) and just one of the many strangenesses of growing up Roman Catholic.
I didn’t know Catholicism was strange until I entered secondary school. There, having played a key member of Jesus’s entourage no longer begot classroom clout. And the discovery of the deeper meaning of many of the rituals I had placidly participated in (that I had worn a mini wedding dress for my Holy Communion aged seven, so as to consent to my “marriage with Christ”, for instance) was slightly unsettling.
What then to make of the latest Gen Z fad: God.
That’s right, it’s not just Labubus (see the gremlin-like idol hanging from Mary’s shoulder strap) deemed worthy of Gen Z adulation, but Christ our Lord and Saviour. Harry Styles was even spotted among the crowds waiting for white smoke during the recent Conclave.
A report has shown a significant uptick in church attendance among the young. Indeed, according to the survey commissioned by Bible Society and conducted by YouGov, while just four per cent of 18-24-year-olds in the UK said they attended church at least monthly in 2018, today that has quadrupled. Now, this group is in fact the second most likely to attend church, outstripped in holiness only by the 65-and-overs. Within this trend is a denominational shift: it’s Catholicism specifically that’s in. Just 20 per cent of 18-24-year-old churchgoers identify as Anglican (down from 30 per cent in 2018), while 41 per cent do as Catholic.
Of course, given just a smidgen of thought, it makes perfect sense. What do the Catholics have that the Protestants don’t: accessories. Rosary beads, crucifixes, jewel-toned chasubles with golden embroidery: the Catholic wardrobe is what Gen Z might describe as yassified. Sabrina Carpenter’s music video for her hit song Feather sees her, clad in black tulle veil and golden crucifix, prancing along the altar of a Catholic Church in New York. The priest who approved the filming was later stripped of his duties, although the pop star defended the video, using the line of reasoning that “Jesus was a Carpenter”.
The report didn’t just note an increase in church attendance, but also a heightened vigour for faith and a commitment to spiritual practices. Young churchgoers were the most likely to pray regularly, while reporting high levels of belief in God. That may
sound basic, but that’s far beyond the call of duty in the Bouncy Castle Catholicism I was raised within (a parish priest once drunkenly confessed to a relative that he didn’t believe in God).
In a world of chaos and alienation, young people are craving order but they are also craving the indulgence of faith Catholicism offers. As millennial minimalism gives way to unapologetic maximalism, religion is back on the menu. Not pragmatism, but mysticism. This is the body and blood of Christ, not a representation.
Pentecostalism, where churchgoers are regularly ‘possessed’ by the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues, has risen in popularity, too, while an interest in tarot, along with a wider reverence for ritual and discipline (see 5am morning routines), speak to the same impulse.
Arguably, it is the seriousness of Catholicism that appeals most to the young. Happy clappy evangelicalism had its moment in the 2010s, especially with megachurch Hillsong, a hangout for the likes of Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and the Kardashians, but such transparent attempts to be ‘hip’ now seem obviously lame. By contrast, the Catholic Church, which may have become more progressive but has not visibly attempted to brand itself as ‘cool’ over the last decade, has managed to become chic for its insouciance. And, of course, its eye for interiors hasn’t hurt.
l Anna is books editor at City AM – The Magazine
Britpop was a moment in time rather than a musical movement.
MARK BURROWS asks what our obsession with 1990s Cool Britannia says about our 2020s psyche
Tonight, we’re gonna party like it’s 1995. Oasis have smashed box office records. Pulp have a new album out. Suede just announced one, too. Supergrass, Sleeper, Cast, Ocean Colour Scene – even Kula Shaker –are all on the road again. Britpop is back – the question is: why? Britpop’s blend of swagger, cynicism and communal euphoria suddenly feels relevant again. To understand the reasons behind this unlikely resurgence, we need to understand what Britpop was and – more importantly – what it wasn’t. Britpop was never a genre. Listen to Blur’s Beetlebum, Elastica’s Vaseline, Pulp’s Babies and Oasis’ Roll With It and tell me they belong in the same scene. It wasn’t a sound, it was a moment. And like all cultural moments, it was shaped by its time.
That time was roughly 1993 (the first Suede album) to 1998 (Pulp’s This Is Hardcore), after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before 9/11. The Cold War was over. The War on Terror hadn’t begun. The British economy was climbing out of recession. For the first time in decades, the future didn’t seem terrifying or stale. And into that strange, optimistic time came a wave of bands who were loud, local, funny, stylish, all with ideas way above their station and utterly convinced they belonged on Top of the Pops. “Brothers, sisters can’t you see”, sang Jarvis Cocker in 1995, “the future’s owned by you and me.”
For those of us coming of age in the mid 90s (I turned 15 in 1996), it felt like we were the chosen generation, the ones with a culture worth taking pride in. For a brief, ridiculous moment, it felt like Britain mattered. Music magazines were full of us. The headlines were about Blur vs Oasis. Tony Blair was at the Brit Awards. Noel was at Downing Street. Damon Albarn was on the cover of Smash Hits and The Face and The Guardian. Jarvis mooned Michael Jackson and was a national hero by breakfast.
It was a cultural high nailed very specifically to a time and place. Britpop couldn’t have happened in the bedsit gloom of the 80s, when unemployment, mass strikes and the threat of nuclear war hung over everything. And it couldn’t have survived past the millennium, when Blairism curdled, pop splintered, and the future darkened again. The party ended, the hangover began, and we all had to get proper jobs. But now, 30 years on, it’s back, back, back. And it’s not because things are the same. It’s because they’re completely different. Today’s Britain is fractured, politically adrift, economically battered. The Union Jack is more likely to signal division than shared identity. Optimism is rationed. And yet here come the
parka jackets and bootcut jeans, the 30th anniversary box sets, the club nights and the Oasis tickets. Because what Britpop offered was a feeling of belonging. You knew the lyrics. You sang them at closing time. It was a shared, unselfconscious joy. That’s rare now. We don’t really do “communal” in 2025. Our culture is sliced into hyper-personalised algorithmic niches. Even our outrage is individualised. And now we’re reissuing Britpop, literally and metaphorically, on coloured vinyl, looking to the past to remember when the present was defined by hope and optimism and confidence, all of which are in short supply amid the culture wars, climate crisis and belt tightening of the 2020s. It wasn’t perfect – God knows, it was overwhelmingly white, male, laddish, derivative and often deeply silly – but it believed in itself, and so did we. It had a kind of national swagger that never felt nationalistic. The producer Jackknife Lee, another 90s indie survivor, recently said Britpop was the ‘Make America Great Again’ of its day. That’s unfair, and not just because no-one in 90s Camden would be seen dead in a red baseball cap. It was a time where we managed to find a version of national pride that was scrappy and playful. British identity in 2025 seems to be either Brexit-era bombast or collective cringe. No wonder we look back (in anger).
Britpop was a moment. That’s why it mattered. That’s why it didn’t last. And that’s why it’s back.
l The Britpop Hour with Marc Burrows will be performed throughout August 2025 at the Edinburgh Fringe and then on tour in 2026; go to marcburrows.co.uk/the-britpop-hour
The owners of Boujis and Mahiki both have new clubs. ADAM BLOODWORTH asks if the glory days of posh partying are back
Picture the scene: it’s two o’clock in the morning and a throng of paparazzi are muscling for space outside Boujis nightclub in South Kensington. Tara Palmer-Tompkinson and her gaggle of It Girls are greeted by a blitz of white light. A kilometre away on the King’s Road, Prince Harry has exited Mahiki, but not through the door, by fleeing down the fire exit like Spider-Man. It was the age when celebrities actually went out clubbing, and photographers were making a packet.
In the era before social media, this was work. Before the grid there was only Backgrid, the photo agency that could zoom pictures into a newspaper when print deadlines were still in the early hours. It was helpful for both the celebs and the paparazzi that going clubbing was something people still did on a Friday night. Nowadays folk don’t tend to party in the same way, but back then they went out for the sake of it to drink from plastic treasure chests full of fruity booze. They chugged to the sound of Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Tinie Tempah. Booze was cool, and being a wreckhead was God-tier.
For a whole host of reasons – a shift in values, the cost of living crisis, moaning neighbours and the fact it was an extremely unhealthy way to live – that era has ended. The two flagships of the London scene, Boujis and Mahiki, both shuttered, the former in 2014 and the latter in 2021.
As Gen Z stopped drinking, the ‘naughty noughties’ were becoming a distant memory. But then both clubs reopened in one form or another. Boujis came back in March 2023 under the name B London (a second branch, Gallery, followed this year). And Mahiki founder Marc JacquesBurton recently launched The Rex Rooms on the King’s Road site of former legendary club 151, a venue loved by both princes, Diana’s former lover James Hewitt, Prince Andrew, PalmerTompkinson and, well, the whole gang. So is – whisper it – west London cool again?
“This is one of the most private rooms in the world,” says Jacques-Burton, dressed like a noughties indie kid and sitting in the back booth of The King’s Room, the VIP area of his new Rex Rooms. At Mahiki Jacques-Burton hosted DiCaprio and Jagger, as well as the meet-cute between Elon Musk and the British actor Tallulah Riley (the couple were married twice and together for eight years). “My friend was at MySpace at the time so he came down with Elon Musk, and Tallulah was there with another group,” says Jacques-Burton. “When you create a private room like you have here, where people have been vetted, people’s guards are down. They feel more comfortable mixing. That’s where they first met and I suppose the rest is history now.”
He hopes to recreate the formula and so far it seems to be working. With backing from film producers and the movie star Jason Mamoa, Machine Gun Kelly is one of the early names happy to have been papped here. But the whole point, these days, is discretion. “Fifteen years ago when we had Mahiki and Whisky Mist, if you had a superstar in the room people would notice them but that was it. Now everyone feels like they’ve got to get a selfie with them. The reason we’ve kept this room small and private and shut off from the main room is because we do realise the times we’re living in.” Has former regular Prince Harry been invited back to throw shapes to the punk, rock and nostalgia playlist? “If people want to come, they end up coming. That’s probably not the answer you’re looking for…” In the main room next door, the
basics are lured by lion’s mane cocktails served in mushroom sculptures.
A half an hour walk away and with a private exit into the grounds of Will and Kate’s gaff Kensington Palace, Gallery is a shocking sight for Knightsbridge. It has a Brutalist concrete grey door and inside, the club is industrial, inspired by stripped-back east London warehousestyle venues like Fold, which has a 36-hour licence.
“When we had Boujis and Mahiki it was the heyday of clubbing,” says Carlo Carello, formerly of both. “People had big expense accounts,” he says but now the Bribery Act and the general political climate mean those days are “long gone”. His new gambit plays into the trend for Gen Z mainly wanting to see famous DJs; in other words, event clubbing.
The message is clear: this is a serious club for West London. “Our main clubroom showcases some of the world’s best DJs. We’ve focused on sound quality, lighting, every single detail. What makes this place special is the core room is for music lovers,” says Carello. Pete Tong, Seth Troxler and Prospa have been early names.
But we’re still in Knightsbridge, really. He points out a “seductive French boudoir-themed room” hidden from the main space. Perhaps that’s where you might find the treasure chest filled with pineapple flavoured vodka. The question is: can West London blend the kitsch nostalgia of the naughty noughties and attract the cool kids from Gen Z? l Adam is deputy editor of City AM The Magazine
Absinthe is back on the menu. We sent KYLE MACNEILL on a pub crawl of the best places to drink the green fairy to see if it lives up to its fearsome reputation
It’s five o’clock somewhere! By that, I mean that’s the literal time where I am, although for a second I’m not sure where that is. My head feels like it’s been used as a cocktail shaker. I squint and attempt to focus: Hotel Cafe Royal… I’m still in Hotel Cafe Royal. A nice man is pouring me a glass of poison. He suspends a silver slotted spoon onto the rim of the goblet before carefully balancing a brown sugar cube on top. Then, with a flourish, he turns on the tap of an ornate miniature fountain. Ice water drips onto the sugar, which dissolves gradually, turning the glass cloudy. A quick stir, then a long sip.
It tastes like sin itself, a Dantian thimble of hell.
The toxin in question is, of course, absinthe. That 70-or-so per cent light green spirit made from grand wormwood that smacks of aniseed. As history has it, it’s revered by both hedonists and bohemian artists – is there a difference, after all?
brand known for its artificial colouring and 3D Van Gogh bottle. One time, I accidentally drank engine coolant at a house party and I’d say both memories taste pretty similar.
I’ve only had it once before, when I was 15, at a sleepover. While one friend furiously flicked through some rather choice TV channels, another whipped out a bottle of Fairy Liquid-green Absente. It’s a naff
Anyway, absinthe is now enjoying a new chapter in London thanks to some slightly more mature drinkers and bartenders looking for a new buzz. Sales are up by 40 to 50 per cent in the UK. All this calls for a proper absinthe adventure – one without Babestation on in the background.
I start the Absinthe crawl at 2pm, at The Last Tuesday Society, a gothic bar on Hackney’s Mare Street that’s at the vanguard of absinthe experimentation. I’m sitting next to Ali Crawbuck, an American art historian who founded the establishment in 2016 with her partner Rhys Everett to complement The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, a collection of macabre oddities downstairs. “Make sure you have some stodge,” she warns when I tell her about my planned escapade.
She sets up my first fountain of the day, pours me a glass and recounts its history.
Although disputed, it’s likely that wormwoodflavoured wine was first used medicinally in ancient
Egypt. But it wasn’t until 1792 that apothecarist Dr. Pierre Ordinaire first created a tonic using fifteen botanicals (including the now-signature flavours of star anise, liquorice and fennel) and prescribed it as a panacea for almost any ailment.
By the late 1800s, it was the drink of choice for washed-up artists in Paris, with 220 million litres a year produced in France at its peak. After a string of murders in Switzerland attributed to ‘absinthe madness’, it was banned in most European countries (but not the UK) for the best part of a century.
Fast-forward to the 1990s, and it began to enjoy a revival of sorts in Eastern Europe, where it was freshly legalised. But producers were reverse engineering the recipes, adding green food colouring to make it look like, as Crawbuck quips, “very vibrant mouthwash”. Worse still for purists, they did away with the spoon-and-sugar ritual and began to set it on fire instead to add a sense of theatre.
Brexit and Covid screwed everything up, which is why they began producing their own, based on antiquated recipes, in the Devil’s Botany distillery a few miles away in Leyton.
Back at The Last Tuesday Society, I quickly realise that my eyes are bigger than my liver. Offered a taster of the bar’s various, experimental absinthes — including a chocolate-and-brandy number and a pina colada slushy with a glace cherry — it’s all too easy to force the medicine to go down with a lot of sugar.
Travelling to France and Switzerland to sample the real deal in the mountains, Crawbuck and Everett started to import quality absinthe in the 2000s and amassed the largest collection in the UK. Of course,
I finish my slushy in the museum downstairs and start to spin-out at the stuffed two-headed lambs, pickled brains in jars and sadistic sex toys. A burning question before I go: will it actually make me trip?
Sadly, science has long debunked this myth. “Absinthe was never hallucinogenic,” Crawbuck says. Still, myth abounds. Sup enough of this sap and perhaps I really will see the Green Fairy, absinthe’s mystical totem.
Bidding farewell to Crawbuck, I head to the beating heart of the absinthe revival: Soho. Time for another glass of hard liquorice. I make my way to Oxford Street, gripping the handrail on the tube like I’m at the front of a rollercoaster.
My next port of call is the Thin White Duke, a recording studio and cocktail bar riffing off David Bowie’s 1970s alter ego. It’s run by Giovanni Almonte, a charismatic musician and bartender from New York. I try a cocktail called “...Away”, made from pensador mezcal, yellow chartreuse, luxardo maraschino, absinthe and lime, attempting not to slur my words.
Almonte first encountered absinthe in 2006 in Zurich. “It was the day that Gnarls Barkley released Crazy. I bought the CD, a bottle of absinthe and was just by myself in this hotel room. I drank half the bottle, just tripping on Gnarls Barkley, bro. Imagine. I was flying,” he says, eyes glazing over. I find it hard to imagine tripping on Gnarls Barkley, but my head does a nod. Almonte believes absinthe induces a special high. “It’s different: floaty and airy. More of an upper than a downer.” I get that. I feel more like I’m on an edible rather than a lot of ethanol: light-headed and giddy. Dabbling in the absinthe world back in New York at a bar called Elsa, Almonte got hooked on the ritual — something other drinks don’t really offer. “You don’t see leprechauns when you have beer,” he
says. After moving to the UK with a desire to open his own bar, Almonte ended up stumbling across an online absinthe seminar Crawbuck was hosting and they became friends.
Now, with The Thin White Duke, Almonte is trying to bring back the “Green Hour” – a Parisian tradition that saw punters put away fountains of absinthe after work.
Almonte needs to prepare a private
party for a member of international royalty so I leave sometime in the early evening and slalom past some sober, slightly bemused commuters to Hotel Cafe Royale for a drink in its opulent Green Bar, the Rolls Royce of the absinthe world. The storied guesthouse, opened in 1865, has seen the likes of Oscar Wilde and Charles Dickens sway through its doors to dance with the devil.
By the time I step into the Soho evening, I’m hammered. By a conservative estimate I’ve drunk half a bottle of the green stuff
Here I meet Matteo Carreta, director of beverages, for a glass of Jade 1901, a top-of-the-range French absinthe. I thought it would be hard to discern what makes one absinthe good and another bad – they are, of course, all evil – but this stuff is creamy and dangerously moreish.
Carreta emphasises the social aspect of absinthe, painting a picture of artists congregating around a slowly-dripping fountain. “If you’re discussing something romantic and esoteric, it gives you time to chat,” he says. He’s an expert in the distillation process and knows how to achieve the perfect syrup. I try my best to absorb it all, flitting in and out of socially acceptable lucidity. “Absinthe is a muse,” he says, explaining that people still come
to the Green Bar to tick it off their list, like going to the Ritz for their Crepe Suzette or, more recently, the Devonshire for a Guinness. “It’s special. There is meaning behind it.”
But why is this most illustrious distillate haunting the zeitgeist again now? For Crawbuck, it’s a successor to the ginnaisance of yesteryear. “It’s a natural progression. People are interested in botanical spirits,” she says. Plus, with squeezed budgets, people want an experience when they go out boozing. “They want to find drinks with a story.” The bubble, though, may burst at some point. Carreta tells me that The Green Bar is set to pare back on its absinthe menu to make way for a more varied offering. Perhaps featuring bottles that couldn’t double up as hand sanitizer.
Time to bounce. I’m at the wafer-thinmint stage of absinthe indulgence. But I signed up for a Wilde time so I float down the road to nearby jazz age speakeasy Nightjar for another. The security guard radios down to ask whether it’s OK to let me in but there’s only one other person there when I’m
finally let downstairs. It crosses my mind that I might look as drunk as I feel. But any inhibitions melt away with the wave of the Green Fairy’s magic wand.
Perusing the absinthe menu, I opt for a fittingly named potion: Death In the Afternoon. A slender glass of absinthe and champagne with a twist of orange soon arrives. I knock it back in an unchic fashion.
By the time I step back out into a balmy
Soho evening, I’m properly sledgehammered. I’ve drunk a classic absinthe, a chocolate one, a rose one, a slushied one, a mezcal one, a fancy French one and a champagne one, in that order. By a conservative estimate that’s half a bottle of the green stuff. I run a quick cognition test on myself: my name’s Kyle, it’s May and the President of the United States is Donald Trump.
Definitely room for another drink, then.
Crawbuck mentioned the French House as a past den of absinthe inequity (alas, no longer) so I traipse there for a half pint of Meteor, chasing down a day’s worth of absinthe with 284ml of frothy lager. I leave in a trance.
Who knows if the revival will endure, I think, as I glide back to Victoria Station, suffering from what doctors might term ‘anise reflux’. The licorice taste won’t shift from the back of my throat. But while I might feel all sorts of dizzy, I get the attraction. There’s something alluring about a drink with this much lore, an enchanting liquid steeped in history, an enigma, the elixir of the Green Fairy herself. Now if I could just find my way home…
Grammy award-winning British singer, rapper, and actor ESTELLE tells us what she would eat for her last meal, from West African puff puff to Granadian saltfish and a glass of whisky
My mother and my grandma were both chefs. Mum went to school for it, and learned how to cook all these amazing things. She would come back from cooking school and make French pastries for us all – we were the guinea pigs! It blossomed into a career and she went on to be the head chef for a bunch of nurseries. So I grew up knowing about food in a very specific way that felt quite ahead of its time.
My mum was from West Africa so we grew up eating a lot of food from that region, lots of jollof rice and plantain and okra stews. We all learned to cook that stuff. We had a big family – there were nine of us – and my mum ran a tight kitchen. There was no version of any of us that left the house without doing our rounds in the kitchen. There were always kids to feed so life kind of revolved around the kitchen – I still have vivid memories of being there with my mum, chopping onions or peeling potatoes or stirring a pot of stew.
When I got my first apartment in New York, that was the thing I carried with me. I would do Sunday dinners at the house with all my friends from the US and any of my London friends who had come to visit. They knew that Sunday dinner was good at my house so they made sure they came hungry. I still do that to this day. I’m in LA now and there’s a place called Datmoi that sells food from all over the world – West Indian, African, Chinese, Korean – it feels like Shepherd’s Bush Market but all in one store. I’ll often make jerk snapper, which is so easy but it’s something people just don’t expect.
If I’m eating out there’s this amazing restaurant in LA called Ardor, which is quite upmarket but I go there for the steak and onion rings – I have no idea what they do to the beef to make it taste this good but it’s really amazing.
For my last meal I’m going to start with some West African puff puff, which is essentially fried dough that you make rise like bread. You can have it either savoury
or sweet and it’s the perfect thing to get a meal started as it’s not as heavy as bread. Next up is my auntie’s fried chicken. My mum is the chef of the family but all of her sisters are great cooks too and my auntie is always in charge of this particular dish. You have to make it with chicken drumsticks and this very particular orange breadcrumb. It looks so pretty. I’ll have this with jollof rice and some fried plantain – but not mushy, it has to be just right. These are all foods from my childhood which would trigger nice memories for my last meal.
Next up is a diversion from all the West African food – my dad’s from Grenada and they have the most amazing saltfish fritters. It’s almost like a mini fish burger but the bread is fried dough and the patty is made with saltfish. You can make it with red and green peppers, some onions then
mash it all together with loads of seasoning. Once you’ve had that you don’t need to eat for the rest of the day. It’s dense, you know what I mean?
But we’re not worrying about that as it’s my last meal. So I also want you to fly in some cacio e pepe from my favourite Italian restaurant, which happens to be in Cologne in Germany. I’m not telling you the name because I want to keep this place on the down-low just for me. But trust me it’s really amazing.
And to finish things off, I’m going to get a selection of desserts because I have a real sweet tooth. I’m going to have a small cup of banana pudding, which is the most amazing American dessert I’ve ever come across. God bless whoever thought to put a load of bananas and cream and biscuits in a pot. I’m going to have some sweet potato pie, another amazing American dessert. I grew up eating sweet potato as a savoury food – as fries or mash. But sweet potato pie is the holy grail in America around holidays. And I’d also have some apple and blackberry crumble.
My mum was from West Africa so we grew up eating a lot of food from that region, lots of jollof rice and plantain and stews
To wash it all down, I’d want some good wine. A lady called Ingrid Best has a brand called IBest wines. There’s a South African white blend that I can drink without getting any kind of hangover. Some wines affect my voice so I have to be careful but this I could drink all night. It’s light and crispy and just a great dinner wine. And before I go, give me a small glass of Oban whiskey on the rocks. Then I’ll be ready.
l Estelle’s new album, Stay Alta, is out now
STEVE DINNEEN
I thought tins of tuna were sad cupboard fillers. What a fool I have been! Here’s how I fell in love with canned fish
Until I was in my twenties, I thought tuna was a sort of grey, flaky mulch that tasted of brine and disappointment. I had no concept of what an actual tuna might look like: I’d only ever seen them in the form of a hockey-puck sized cylinder. They might have fished them from the inky depths pre tinned for all I knew.
This was back in 1980s suburban England, a time that taste didn’t forget – it had simply never been introduced. Decades before the gastronomic revolution that saw London, and now much of the rest of the UK, draw level and even overtake our continental neighbours when it comes to culinary prowess, dinnertime was a feast of microwavable things in various shades of beige. Vegetables were boiled to within moments of disintegration, often complimented by food stuffs that slipped inelegantly from tin cans.
My mother had – and still has – cupboards filled with such tinned things: fruits, vegetables, meats (banished when she became pescatarian, a word that literally didn’t exist until the late 1980s), soups and, of course, tuna. So when I left home and learned to cook, I swore off tinned food. Nary a can of pineapple chunks or a tin of chopped tomatoes lurked in my kitchen. Until recently, when I was reintroduced to the joys of tinned fish.
It started, as so many things in the food world do, in Copenhagen. Not at the gastronomic palaces of Geranium or Alchemist or the dozen other Michelin starred restaurants in the city but in the contemporary art gallery where, after an afternoon poking around the collections, I ended up in the cafe. Here they were offering visitors
snacks of tinned sardines on toasted sourdough. You pointed to your tin of choice – sardines in brine, sardines in oil, sardines in tomato – and they flopped it out onto your toast. And it was delicious! Why did nobody tell me about this? How long has this been going on?
Then, on a recent trip to Portugal, I wandered past an entire shop dedicated to tinned fish – shelves stacked to the rafters with salty anchovies and flaked salmon and sardine roe and mackerel, each one packaged in bright, artisanal-looking cans.
So when I returned home I did a little research and signed up for a tinned fish subscription – because I am a Millennial and everything I buy must come in the form of a subscription – with a company called The Tinned Fish Market. It is what you might term ‘reassuringly expensive’, with the ‘classic’ tier coming in at £20 a month for three tins.
But it really is a treat when those tins arrive on the doorstep. I’ve had fat little Spanish mussels in tangy escabeche; Faroe Island salmon in sea buckthorn and verbena; Cantabrian anchovies so rich and salty it’s impossible not to finish the whole tin in one go; Papa Anzóis sardines that are dehydrated rather than steamed before canning, making them impossibly soft and juicy. And the tuna! Today I opened a tin of white tuna belly preserved in sheep’s butter: slivers of gorgeous, fatty, pale pink meat that’s a million miles from the Tinned fish is now my go-to snack, the king of the cupboard. It honestly feels a bit like cheating.
In fact, forget you read this at all, I don’t want everybody finding out. Steve is the editor of City AM The Magazine. For info on The Tinned Fish Market go to thetinnedfishmarket.com
Michelin starred chef TOM SELLERS has lunch at his restaurant Story Cellar with former England player
JOE COLE . They talk fatherhood, friendship and the future Told to STEVE DINNEEN; Pictures by GRETEL ENSIGNIA
THE MEAL:
ASPARAGUS, BUTTER AND EGG YOLK SNAIL BOLOGNAISE ON TOAST BEEF FILLET WITH PEPPERCORN SAUCE ROTISSERIE CHICKEN
TOM SELLERS: We’ve known each other for years now, do you remember when we first met?
JOE COLE: Yeah – I came into Restaurant Story and we got chatting. It was a meal out to celebrate Gareth Southgate getting the England job. I was a year before retirement, which tells you how long ago it was!
TS: Yeah, we just really struck it off. It sounds a bit cringe but I was a big fan of you as a football player. I wasn’t a Chelsea fan but I was a huge fan of the way you played. So when one of my investors wanted to cash out, you invested in the business. But it was a friendship first. I still play in the Sunday League team you started.
JC: I started playing Sunday League when I retired. I got all my mates involved, my agent, a couple of the school dads and some former players like Jamie Redknapp and Wayne Bridge. Someone once said to me, never stop playing the game – and I also hate the gym!
TS: It’s the one thing I always make time for, playing football on Sunday mornings. It’s good for my mental health. Over the years, the club made me captain and we’ve got some younger players now and you feel like a mentor to them, not so much on the pitch, but just in life. It doesn’t matter what’s going on personally and professionally, we just get together on a Sunday to play football and enjoy it. It’s important to have people to talk to – everyone’s got their own shit going on, right? That’s the reality of life. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, you know?
JC: I think it’s crucial for modern men – you get so much out of joining a sports
team, you learn so many life skills. As you get older and have children – I’ve got three, you’ve just had your first – you naturally detach from your friendship groups. And I think it is really important for your mental health to make sure you keep those in your life in some way, shape or form.
Because I’ve played football all my life, I can see people’s personalities by the way they play: whether they’re insecure or nervous or overconfident. And straight away I could see you were someone who wanted to learn and had a capacity to learn really quickly. Some people you could tell them something 10 times and they won’t get it but with you, you only ever have to say something once, so your growth and rate of improvement has been massive.
TS: I love to learn generally, across the board. So for me there’s nothing better than being taught by somebody that’s played the game at the level you have. I also don’t like to lose, right? Generally,
I’m a winner. So it was nice to win the league this year.
JC: Did I ever tell you that yours wasn’t the first restaurant I invested in…
TS: No you did not!
JC: Me and a bunch of the lads at West Ham put in £25,000 each into this restaurant in Chelmsford, just for a bit of fun really. Total disaster. It lasted about five minutes, everyone there was on the take. Stupid really. So when it came to investing in your business, everyone who advises me told me not to do it.
So many people invest into restaurants because they like the idea of it but have no idea about the reality of how precarious it is and how difficult and how much of an expert you have to be to run it. But when I saw you operate, watching the way you speak to your people and your attention to detail, I thought ‘I think this guy’s got something’. You know how to win and
I can see people’s personalities by the way they play football: whether they’re insecure or nervous or overconfident
how to get things done. You have your eye on that third Michelin star, which is an amazing thing to aspire to.
TS: That was always the goal, from the moment I stepped foot in the kitchen, in the same way your dream was probably to win the Premier League. I want to finish that journey. But it takes investment and it takes 100 per cent commitment, every single day. But I’ve worked hard my whole life and I’ve done it the hard way. I opened a restaurant very young, I took on a lot of debt personally, I’ve sweated all that debt away. I knew I wanted to grow the group and open more restaurants like the one we’re in today.
But for me, it was about making sure that the people I was doing it with had the same level of integrity and understood the longevity of what we’re doing. And you understood all of that. We had some hairy moments over Covid – it was the first time in my life when the thing I’ve done every day since I left school was taken away from me, which I found very challenging. We
basically had to hit pause for not only the 18 months we were locked down but the 12 months after that when the country was really slow to recover. But you were always super supportive, not only from a business perspective but as a friend, and that’s really important to me. They say ‘Don’t go into business with friends and family’ but I think we’re the anomaly – it’s very rare that we’re not on the same page.
JC: One of the ideas we’ve spoken about is opening a pub, which is a bit ironic because once upon a time as a retired footballer it was either coaching or owning a pub.
TS: We’ll become a hospitality group with a portfolio that will stretch across different areas, whether it’s a fine dining restaurant, a pub, casual restaurants within hotels… I always knew I wanted to have a diverse business. Have you always been into food yourself?
JC: My wife’s a foodie – she knows far more than I do. We love eating out in restaurants. The problem with working with you is that now I notice all the little mistakes in other places that I never saw before. You’ve ruined it for me!
There’s a bit of an unfair stereotype that footballers have bad taste and don’t appreciate good food but it’s not really true. Some of my football colleagues are the most intelligent people I’ve met – they really know their stuff.
TS: Even the small group I’ve met through you, they all carry themselves very well. They’re educated, and a lot of them eat in our restaurants, so they must have good taste.
JC: Players at the top clubs are committed, disciplined people. Every one of them had a long journey. They’ve put themselves through pain, gone through a lot of adversity, they’ve had to constantly scrap for their place. They deserve a lot of respect in my opinion.
TS: We live in a world where everyone has an opinion now and to some extent that’s fair enough – you pay for your ticket at the football or you pay for your bill in a restaurant so you’re entitled to your opinion. But I think how hard people have worked to get to this point gets forgotten. The hours people have put in, the sacrifices people have made. Both you and I sacrificed our teens and twenties. We didn’t go when all the lads were going out, you were playing football and I was in a kitchen somewhere around the world, working 18 hour days. That builds you differently.
JC: How are you adapting to fatherhood?
TS: I’m just trying to enjoy it – everyone you speak to says it goes by so fast. I’m very fortunate – my partner is already an amazing mum. I don’t mind the lack of sleep, I deal with that fairly well. But we’re just at the beginning of the journey, so speak to me in two years and I might sound very different.
JC: My one piece of advice would be to cherish these moments because they’ll be gone before you know it.
TS: One hundred per cent. This feels like an exciting phase of my life, there’s a lot of stuff going on and it’s good to know I’ve got you in my corner.
l To book Story Cellar go to storycellar.co.uk
When a butcher offers me a bag of testicles, you better believe I’m taking him up on it – and so should you
Like a character straight out of a Carry On film, the Turkish butcher leaned forward, looked my partner in the eye, and, with a heavy accent and an evil glint, said simply: “Testicles. Testicles.” Then, by way of explanation: “Sheep’s balls.” Though things had taken a surreal and vaguely vulgar turn, his strange sales pitch has opened my eyes to a whole new world of carnivorous possibilities. Suddenly, I noticed the multitude of trays laden with offal, the whole hog of gleaming, gloopy treats and mysterious, meaty morsels. Somehow, moments later, we left clutching a packet of prairie oysters – balls! – and several other bags filled with assorted animal parts that sound like a witch’s shopping list. Our haul: chicken hearts, calf’s kidneys, sheep’s testicles (also known as lamb fries) and calf’s liver. That’s an awful lot of offal. And you know what? It was delicious. Turning organs into delicacies is where the real alchemy of cooking happens. It takes real heart (and lungs) to turn the unloved and unwanted into the unbelievable and sublime. To name but a few dishes derived from this forbidden fruit: haggis, black pudding, roast bone marrow, bone marrow butter and hog’s pudding (to the best of my knowledge, you can’t get proper hog’s pudding in London, so, like contraband, my mum recently smuggled some of this delicious regional delicacy up from Devon). I adore them all.
Getting squeamish about offal is, of course, a particularly British – or perhaps
Anglo Saxon – attitude. The French have no compunctions about serving up barely contained sacks of intestine in their andouille sausage and further afield cultures have been dining on everything from chicken’s feet to lamb’s brains for time immemorial. In our age of rising costs of living and worries about intensive farming, it’s time we caught up, frankly.
I challenge any meat-eater with a pulse to turn their nose up at the smoky delight of char-grilled chicken hearts, best enjoyed over hot coals with a cold beer in one hand and a pitta in the other. Or the mind-bendingly delicious crispy sweetbreads, made from the thymus glands of calves or lambs, God’s own chicken nuggets. And my slow-cooked lamb’s heart goulash is a winner, too.
In a world that seems to recoil at the notion of eating red meat, let alone offal, there is something noble in the idea of nose-to-tail eating. There is even an old German saying about pigs that sums up this attitude to waste: “The only part of that hog wasted
In the old days, a lot of these not-so-choice cuts made their way into pet food or animal feed alongside the likes of feather meal, a byproduct of intensive chicken farming made from baked feathers, used to pad out livestock fodder or as fertilizer. But the world has moved on, and so have the markets. There is, after all, money to be made from apparently uninviting things. Your pet’s loss is our gain. That butcher, in his spicy delivery, was a visionary of nose-to-tail eating. He reminded me that culinary awakening doesn’t just belong to distant travels. It’s here, on your high street, waiting behind the glass counter, whispering at you to build up the courage to point and say, “Let’s try that.”
Andy is City AM’s picture editor
This autumn City AM will be celebrating all the places that make the City the vibrant, exciting place it is – and we need YOUR help. Over the 20 years City AM has served the Square Mile, we have seen it transform from somewhere people worked hard to a place they want to stay long after they have clocked off. It’s now a thriving hub for some of London’s most innovative restaurants, bars, coffee shops, fitness experiences and cultural projects.
The Toast the City Awards will recognise the institutions old and new – and the men and women behind them – that make our lives that little bit better. We want you to nominate the coffee shop you can’t walk past, the sandwich seller who completes your lunch break, the gym class you never skip and the cultural spots that enrich your time off
We’ve recruited some of the biggest
names in hospitality to sift through your recommendations and help pick the winners, with the final vote split 50-50 between the judging panel and you, the esteemed readers of City AM. Among our crack team of judges is two Michelin starred chef Tom Sellers, hotelier Tony Matharu and head of the Evolv Collection Martin William. We are also delighted to partner with the Square Mile’s five Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), who know the City of London inside out.
Here are the categories and what the judges will be looking for.
A restaurant that defines dining in the Square Mile, with exceptional food and great hospitality in a setting that speaks to both business and leisure.
A timeless pub full of charm and history where the ales are perfect and the regulars feel like family.
BEST LATE NIGHT VENUE
A go-to destination after dark that goes beyond drinks. The winner will have live music or entertainment that keeps the City buzzing into the early hours.
BEST BAR
Stylish, inventive and expertly mixed, this award will go to the bar that delivers fab drinks and slick service with an atmosphere that makes you never want to leave.
BEST ROOF TERRACE
Skyline views with immaculate vibes – an open-air gem where great food, delicious drinks and clever design come together, whatever the weather.
BEST MEMBERS EXPERIENCE
Exclusivity meets personality in this members-only experience, with top-tier service, curated events, and a City identity that shines through.
BEST OVERNIGHT STAY
A place that captures the essence of the City – judges will be looking for somewhere luxurious, service-led and packed with thoughtful touches.
BEST BREAKFAST
From power breakfasts to a leisurely start to the day, the winner of this award will serve high-quality dishes and top-tier coffee in a setting that kicks off the day in style.
BEST SANDWICH
The City’s ultimate snack, packed with flavour and made with care. The definition of ‘sandwich’ will be broad – if you have amazing tacos or killer pita bread, please apply!
BEST CULTURAL EXPERIENCE
A creative spark in the heart of the City – this experience could be thoughtprovoking, connected to the City’s rich heritage, or simply great fun.
BEST HIDDEN GEM
Everyone has their favourite tucked-away place. The winner of this award will be somewhere that’s full of unexpected charm and with a magic all of its own.
BEST TEAM EXPERIENCE
Perfect for bonding, celebrating or just letting off steam, this group-friendly experience will be fun, easy to book, and unforgettable for teams of all types.
BEST FAMILY EXPERIENCE
A brilliant reason to head into the Square Mile at the weekend, especially with the kids in tow. The winner will be welcoming, engaging and full of fun.
BEST FITNESS EXPERIENCE
The City is home to some of the best gyms in the land, from group classes to push your fitness levels to one-on-one boutiques and more meditative experiences. Tell us about your favourite.
BEST USE OF GREEN SPACE
A clever, stylish use of open-air space where people gather, relax or party in beautifully designed surrounding.
BEER GARDEN
An outdoor haven that perfectly balances a relaxed vibe with top-notch drinks and delicious food. It should also reflect the unique atmosphere of the City of London.
BEST MEAL
A standout dish or dining experience that elevates eating in the City to an art form: unforgettable flavours and a je ne sais quoi that stays long after the last bite.
BEST COFFEE
We’re serious about our coffee and we want to reward the institution making the perfect cup, be it a flat white served from a van or an espresso in a fine dining restaurant.
Luke Evans is a different type of Hollywood action hero. ADAM BLOODWORTH talks to him about redefining the macho man, and feeling sexier than ever in his forties
Luke Evans starts his day with a skinny dip every morning. His home in Ibiza is a short walk from the beach, where he dumps whatever he’s thrown on and surrenders himself to the ocean. Clothed, at least for now, he’s Zooming from The White Isle to plug his racy summer fashion range. Featuring skimpy short-shorts, it would certainly turn heads in his Welsh hometown of Pontypool.
If his character Owen Shaw in The Fast and the Furious wore the type of hyper-masculinised garms that helped him blend in, Evans’ new collection is all about standing out.
Hollywood’s only openly gay macho man laments that he has to vacate this paradise tomorrow as part of the launch: “I’m always very reluctant to leave the island,” he says glumly. It wasn’t always like this. Born into a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, he came out aged 19, leading to him being ostracised from the religion that had shaped his life. Last year, he wrote about his internalised shame in his memoir, Boy From the Valleys: My Unexpected Journey.
But we’re not here to talk about that. Evans wants to tell me about his shortshorts. In promotional pictures for his nascent fashion brand, a soaking wet tee-shirt rests precisely upon his junk. The image, branded a ‘thirst trap’ by the tabloids, perfectly evokes Evans’ Ibiza lifestyle. Rather than part of a fashion shoot, it was taken as an afterthought one blissful Ibiza afternoon.
“What makes me laugh is there was a gay magazine talking about the pics the other day, saying ‘Luke Evans wearing skimpy swimwear,’” he says. “I was like, who’s
written this, some old lady from Cheltenham? The pictures are just beautiful. My mum thought they were fantastic. My dad said ‘I don’t think I’ll ever wear a Speedo.’ I said ‘That’s okay dad, we’re going to make a longer short for the older man and the men that are not so brave.’” Evans runs BDXY with his partner Fran Tomas and the stylist Christopher Brown. They sell bucket hats, tote bags, scented candles, tees, and plenty of briefs. His face brightens whenever he mentions it. “It’s such a departure from learning lines and going to the far flung reaches of the world to film a movie or a TV show.”
Interestingly, early sales show women wear the tees as much as men, “which is wonderful,” beams Evans. He says the brand’s message is that everyone deserves to feel sexy: “The letters B, D, X and Y come from the words bold and sexy. These are very strong, powerful, confident,
identifying words. You can feel bold and sexy in shorts and tee-shirt or swimwear or a tuxedo or absolutely nothing at all.”
lll
Before his life balancing skinny dips with international film shoots, Evans spent his twenties house sharing in London and working intermittently in theatre. Things were going well, but not blisteringly so. At 30 his agent warned him against auditioning for a lead role in the Donmar Warehouse production of Small Change because they thought it was too ambitious. But Evans wrote directly to the casting director and landed the role.
A better agent followed and in 2010 he was cast in leading roles in five Hollywood movies including Clash of the Titans, Robin Hood and Tamara Drewe. It was the era that began to shape Luke Evans as we know him today.
Egos are as fragile as a rose: you’ve got to look after it, but a couple of petals are gonna fall off every now and again
“I possibly wouldn’t be an actor right now if I hadn’t got that job. So many things domino effected after that. Sometimes to push the needle you have to take the bull by the horns.” Giving life advice doesn’t come naturally – his inclination is to laugh at how corny this all sounds. “My internal dialogue is ‘What have you got to lose?’ A bit of ego maybe. Egos are as fragile as a rose, you’ve got to look after it, but a couple of petals are gonna fall off every now and again.”
Evans is the sort of actor whose roles are bigger than his name. He says he picks them based on whether they “bring something new, different and challenging to the screen.” There was Disney’s 2017 Beauty and the Beast, in which his Gaston was so warmly received that a spin-off prequel is rumoured; his critically-acclaimed turn as Bard the Bowman in The Hobbit trilogy; he was the titular hero in a rather shonky Dracula Untold. Then, of course, there is The Fast and Furious, the heist franchise exhaustingly dragged out over 14 (14!) feature films. They’re unlikely to titillate beyond their core audiences but their success is beyond doubt.
Given his leading man looks, there is surprisingly little that falls in rom-com territory apart from Tamara Drewe, in which he plays second fiddle to Dominic Cooper in attracting the attention of Gemma Arterton as the titular lead. Having developed a reputation for charismatic, brawny leads, over the past two years he has diversified into queer storytelling through indie film Our Son, a story about two male parents going through a divorce, and Netflix’s Good Grief, examining the death of a partner in a same-sex relationship.
Surprisingly, he has also released two pop and showtunes albums, one of which entered the UK top 10. Home recordings of Bridge over Troubled Water and You’ll Never Walk Alone have racked up millions of views online. They’re soft and schmaltzy and a million miles away from his acting identity.
Luke Evans stands totally alone. There are no other openly LGBTQ men in Hollywood playing the types of action roles he inhabits so well. Not that he thinks about it much. “I’m only reminded when someone brings it up,” he says. “It is just something that happened to me.”
He seems bored of analysing his place in the industry but he is more verbose on being a role model to young queer actors, especially those who relate to his macho style. He’s “very aware” of how powerful it is seeing a gay man play a straight hard-man role. “It’s hopefully positive and inspiring to other gay actors who possibly are masc-presenting and want to have a macho career in this business,” he says. “The world is their oyster as far as I’m concerned.”
But, even in 2025, Hollywood is still fearful of casting openly gay actors for fear of alienating Republican Middle America. Why is Evans the anomaly? Perhaps, due to the roles he takes, he simply passes as straight and people don’t think to google him when they get home. Evans says “of course” there’s some truth in that. “We’re talking about religious Bible belt people who believe in the man and the woman and there’s no other way.” But he doesn’t care what they think.
“It doesn’t even come into my mind,” he says. “I have zero interest or control.” Anyway, he says, “the best portrayals of anything by an actor is when they disappear and the character becomes real. Sometimes there’s no glimmer of me.”
Miraculously, Evans maintains a strong relationship with his parents despite the church viewing his sexuality as a sin. He says he respects that “they love their religion” and takes a remarkably pragmatic approach to the relationship, saying he “simply could not live” the life he was born into. “There’s always a way through,” he tells me in his lilting Welsh accent. “Especially when you love someone. It’s taken me a lot of time to get to this place and still have a smile on my face and be happy with who I am. I think they see that.
“They love the life that they have. Why should I be angry with that? I’m very grateful that they were able to accept that it wasn’t going to be my journey in life, and we somehow managed, in a very difficult set of circumstances, to find a compromise and respect for each other.”
But Luke Evans is still a work in progress. Confidence “comes and goes” and there are days when simply changing into short-shorts won’t cut through the
noise. “There’s some days I feel great about myself, and there’s other days I just don’t, and that could be just, you know, my mental health or my physical image,” he says. “I don’t know, some days you feel good, some days you feel absolutely shit, and you’ve just got to swim with the punches.”
Evans has homes in London, Lisbon and Ibiza, and has been with Tomas since 2021. As well as running BDXY together, they share a mini dachshund called Lala Black Boop. Her Instagram account says she’s the “proud owner of two very obedient humans.” One day he fantasises about buying a place back home in Wales even though he hasn’t lived there since he was 16. “It took me until my forties to have the most happy relationship I’ve ever had,” he says. “We enjoy the same things. Our dog has been a wonderful thing. Literally the most joy ever. I can’t believe it took me till 46 to have a dog, but finally, we did it.”
He and Tomas “talk a lot, laugh a lot,” but they’re very different. Tomas is a gamer and Evans “can’t stand” his nerdy pastime, “but I’m good with that – you don’t go into that relationship thinking, ‘I’m going to change this person’. You go into a relationship going, ‘I like this person for all the things I like about them and the things I don’t like about them.’”
Middle age seems to suit him. “By your forties, if you’ve done it semi right you should be able to take a breather, take stock of where you’re at,” he says. “Forties are grea and I’m excited about my fifties.”
Recent videos of Evans at Pacha in Ibiza on his Instagram suggests he’s still got stamina, which he laughs off. “I’m too old for that shit, honestly. The recovery after staying up takes me days. Usually my life is not like that. It’s very chilled and I’m in bed or watching TV by 10pm.”
Later this year he’ll return to Wales to film a project he can’t talk about but first his family are visiting him in Ibiza. He smiles at the thought of an end to these back-to-back Zoom calls. I imagine him slamming his laptop shut and cavorting to the seafront the moment this nonsense is over, shedding his clothes on the way. Somehow we land back on the topic of the short-shorts. “If you feel bold and if you feel sexy, then you usually feel good about yourself, right?” He says it with calming reassurance. Repeat it into the mirror and maybe some of that sweet Luke Evans energy will rub off.
Jonathan Yeo is one of the most recognisable artists of his generation, a portraitist of the great and good.
LIBBY BRODIE cracks open a bottle of wine to talk Charles, childhood illness and collages made from porn
Jonathan Yeo has painted them all, from super models to Presidents and our very own King. When he unveiled his vast portrait of Charles III last year, the monarch appeared, for a second, to recoil at the sight of the bright red canvas. The moment became a meme and the portrait was fervently discussed and dissected across the world. Some – me included – loved its vibrancy and ethereal beauty, while others described it as “cursed”. In reality, of course, the King had already seen the portrait. “He liked it, I think,” says Yeo. “He said ‘I don’t know how you do it’… though I suppose that could be taken either way…”
Dressed in double denim, Yeo radiates a youthful energy despite being in his mid-fifties. I’ve been an admirer of his work for decades and over the years we’ve met at galleries, parties and once at Soho Farmhouse where – fangirl that I am – I recognised the back of his head as he cycled by and shouted “Jonny!” so loudly he almost fell off his bike.
We meet in his Shepherd’s Bush studio, which unfolds Tardis-like from behind a heavy black curtain to reveal high ceilings, towering jungle plants and a black spiral staircase. Sunbeams fall from windows onto an assortment of sculptures and paint splattered canvases. It’s an enchanting place, full of comfortable corners stacked with books, leather armchairs and various curiosities. It is from one such corner that Yeo is holding court about the King.
“He turned up in his guards’ jacket, which is very red and that’s one thing I’m wary about. Normally if you paint something red, that’s what the eye goes to. It’s often used as a device to draw the eye and make a painting primarily about *that*. So I thought, either I change the colour, which would probably upset the traditionalists, or I take the colour and put it everywhere”. Yeo went with the latter idea. “It’s obviously a very striking and unusual colour. I was trying to make it ‘fairytale’ rather than ‘blood’, which is what some of the media have said”.
Yeo is one of the most recognisable artists of his generation, a name to rival the Damian Hirsts and
Anish Kapoors of the British art world. He’s best known for portraits that combine the figurative and the abstract, often featuring photo-realistic faces swimming in an ocean of colour. Given his body of work, which encompasses portraits of Prime Ministers, aristocrats and national treasures including Sir David Attenborough, you could argue he is the leading establishment painter in the land. But ‘establishment’ feels like a loaded term, especially given his subtly subversive work – not least his portrait of Charles. I wonder what he makes of the royal family…
“They’re in a funny job,” he says. “We don’t buy into their mystical power as in previous centuries, and we know from the tabloids their quirks and failings and that they’re normal people like you and I. But we do buy into the fairytale a little and I wanted to show that. We put them in this world that we keep alive as a kind of contract between us and them, so the idea was to make the piece feel slightly otherworldly”.
It occurs to me that sitting for a painting is not for the faint-hearted. There is the physical discomfort of maintaining a pose, the boredom of not doing much of anything for hours on end, the self-consciousness of being scrutinised. How was the King?
“He’s great. He’s funny and happy to chat about all kinds of things. But he wasn’t the King yet when they first came to me to paint him, so that relieved the pressure a bit. And I’d met him a few times before”.
It turns out his painting did pose some logistical challenges, however. “I’ve never done [a portrait] that big before. It was nearly eight feet tall so there were certain practical difficulties. I had to stand on something when painting and he had to stand on something to be at the right height. It was quite the production.”
Yeo says the key to a good painting is often working out how to get his sitters to relax. “The studio is full of objects and pictures that can distract people and get them interested in something other than themselves”. If after a couple of sessions someone is still stiff, he will take them for lunch and open a bottle of wine. “That’s when I can see them relax and that’s the point when I get to see what I need”.
Yeo is a notable wine lover and during our interview
he produces fine stemmed glasses from a vast selection kept at his studio and we crack open a lovely bottle of Central Otago Pinot Noir. He lapses into silence for the first time as he swirls the wine in the glass before sipping. He drinks slowly, appreciatively, commenting on the its colour and lightness. Wine, he says, is an almost daily pleasure, and after a glass or two, this interview is all but forgotten as Yeo and I chat about grapes and old times.
Though sought after by the powerful and prosperous, Yeo is now in the position where he can choose whom he paints. “It’s a lovely way to get to know interesting people but I don’t just do the famous ones, I mix it up. I keep in touch with most people I paint and some wind up being really good friends. I pick people who I think are going to be good company”.
Mixing with Hollywood’s finest and bonafide royalty wasn’t what Yeo expected from his life. “I enjoyed art as a kid, and it was one of the few things I was good at but there weren’t many people making a living as an artist around me. In recent decades it’s become more of an industry, but it wasn’t at the time. It was an affliction. It’s something you have to do if you really can’t stop yourself doing it”.
At 22, Yeo had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which he says steeled him. “That kind of being ill makes you more determined. Also being so ill at that age… no one wants to give you bad news if you’re having cancer treatment, no one wants to say ‘Go get a proper job’, so it bought me a bit of time in my early twenties, which is when most people give up or have to go and do something else”. Yeo never intended to paint portraits but says it was a way of making a living while learning how to paint.
His first big break was his portrait of archbishop Trevor Huddleston, founder and president of the anti-apartheid movement. “My dad knew him, and I think it was out of sympathy more than anything because I was going through my cancer treatment. I started one and made a mess of it, so I decided to bin it and try something looser, have fun with it basically, and it was so much better. I think it startled everyone I knew at the time because they were like, ‘Where did that come from?’”. It was a pivotal moment for Yeo and the piece made it into the newspapers. “It gave me a bit of kudos and made me think, ‘Maybe I can do this’”.
Then there was his infamous collage of George W Bush made up out of porn clippings. Yeo says he always felt his style would suit collage because of his abstract way of working. “If you’re going to do a portrait as a collage then the logical thing to use is pornography,” he says matter of factly. “Because it’s all skin tones. And, of course, I thought it would be kind of funny”. It sat in the back of Yeo’s mind
when, separately, he was contacted to do a portrait of Bush by an American collector, who had seen Yeo’s 2008 portrait of Tony Blair. It was in the middle of the so-called War on Terror and Yeo describes Bush’s team as being extremely suspicious of him. “It was a paranoid time, and they kept asking me to jump through hoops and provide information and proof of where I was born, where my parents were born and send sketches of what the portrait would look like, which I wouldn’t normally do”. Yeo went along with it but suddenly things went quiet. “They’d asked me to do it just before the end of his first term. I think they didn’t expect him to get re-elected and when he did, they stopped returning my calls, so I got a bit fed up”. Never one to miss an opportunity, Yeo decided to use his sketches to create his first pornographic collage portrait. “I thought it would be a bit of fun but actually it took a long time. You have to flick through hundreds of porn magazines to find exactly the right bit of the right colour, and where you can see that it’s a naked body”. A tough day at the office... Yeo’s plan was to send it over to Bush’s team and see if anyone noticed but Steve Lazaridis of Lazarides Gallery in Soho wanted to do an unveiling. This was during the heyday of street art and Lazaridis was at the centre of it. “He was opening shows with Banksy and people like that, so I said
yes, of course. It was my first experience of going viral. If you get your work on the right websites, in the right underground places, it goes all over the world, which was amazing but also spoiled the fun slightly because then the White House knew about it and that little game was over.”
I wonder if Bush reacted badly, but apparently not: “For all his failings Bush clearly has a sense of humour, I don’t think he would have minded, really, but for a while in the US I was known as ‘the porn guy’ and not for my painting at all”. The mind boggles imagining if the portrait had been of Trump…
From this mischievous seed, other collages sprang, such as Falling Leaves, a whimsical series which, at first glance, looks like beautiful autumn leaves until you notice they’re made of cut outs of
pornography. When I first moved to London, a friend showed me one and I have coveted one ever since. It is a major regret of my life that I failed to buy a piece when I could have because now, as one of the youngest living artists to have a solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, his work is far beyond my reach.
I try to do things without thinking too much about the consequences and how others will see it
Currently Yeo has been sidetracked doing technology-related projects. “I find that whole area really interesting. My usual work is seen as something quite traditional, so people are surprised I’m interested in this as well – but to paint is actually quite a technical process anyway.” Yeo has created a sculpture with Google (a self-portrait created in virtual reality using Google’s Tilt Brush software, 3D printed and cast in bronze, which ended up in the World Academy) and made an award winning app with Apple, which allows users to virtually visit and move around his studio. Now he is working on an immersive project he hopes will come to fruition by the end of the year. For Yeo art is about experimenting, trying something new and having fun while doing it.
“It’s important to do stuff you like, something you yourself would want to own. Hard as it is when it’s your job, I try to do things without thinking too much about the consequences and how others will see it. Ultimately the best work is stuff that you do for you”.
It helps define the world around us but the natural smellscape is being eradicated. Thankfully there are people trying to preserve it. LUCY KENNINGHAM meets them
The smell of the Clockwork Orange –AKA the Glasgow Subway – has mystified Glaswegians for over a hundred years.
Newspapers have pored over the pong since the metro first opened in 1896. Over the years the curious, slightly fusty scent has been described as an “odour-laden spice caravan” and prompted one Redditor to ask “how do they get the smell of farts into Buchanan Street underground?”. In 1968, the Glasgow Herald described it as: “An elusive melange of airlessness, and the bottom of the Clyde, with a distinctive note of diesel oil.”
Although the exact cause is uncertain, it is unlikely to be farts and more likely a mix of tar, the river Clyde, sewage, tobacco and a plethora of mysterious, unknown substances that have converged to form an odour of which locals are often surprisingly fond. Glaswegians are not alone in finding their local aromas scintillating. In January this year, locals mourned the closure of one of the UK’s oldest breweries, the Westgate in Bury St Edmunds. Retired resident Michael Ely said: “I was born with the smell of Greene King – the hops, the barley. I’ve smelt it all of my life. I suspect I will miss it.”
Smell has long been linked to recall and memory. The olfactory system matures earlier than other senses, and is usually fully developed by age 10, meaning smells can be particularly evocative of early memories (Proust’s narrator famously experiences a wave of nostalgia
after tasting a madeleine dipped in tea in his novel In Search of Lost Time).
Let’s start with the basics: what is smell? “Well, smell is not actually a thing,” says Kate McLean, a ‘smell walk leader’ and a researcher at the School of Arts & Architecture at the University of Kent. “A smell is just a series of chemicals that react together at a given point at a given time. It doesn’t exist until we give it a name.”
When she started her PhD at the Royal College of Art in 2013, she struggled to find research into smell from before the 1970s. Since then the academic field has expanded enormously: “It’s like being an explorer in Elizabethan times, suddenly there’s a whole lot of things to be discovered,” she says.
But while research may be on the rise, smells are being forced out, even eradicated. We live in an increasingly deodorised and sanitised world, where quotidian foul smells are all but neutralised: we wash, clean and spray with increasing, sometimes suffocating, fervour. Last year, a phenomenon where pre-adolescent and adolescent males use fragrances in huge doses to enhance their “musk” caught hold on Tiktok. It was dubbed smellmaxxing.
It was only at the end of the 20th century, however, that water, soap and detergents became commonplace in the West. Effluvium once flowed down our streets in brown rivers. Advanced sewers could not hide us from our bodily waste. Our rubbish wasn’t collected and buried or burnt or shipped overseas for someone else to deal with.
The lack of raw sewage in the streets is obviously a good thing, but have we gone too far in the destruction of the natural smellscape? Covid caused anosmia in many people, and air pollution has dampened people’s sense of smell. We live in an obsessively visual world in which screens have become ubiquitous. We can record sound. We discuss taste compulsively.
But smell is masked, or artificially enhanced. Half of young people claim they would give up their sense of smell before they handed over their tech, according to a 2011 global survey. You can assume a far higher proportion would choose smartphones over smells today.
Negging our sense of smell isn’t anything new, either: Immanuel Kant called it “the most dispensable” of the senses, claiming “it does not pay to cultivate it or refine it”.
“There has been a hierarchy of the senses in science and in historical study,” says Cecilia Bembibre, a lecturer in sustainable heritage at UCL. “There has been an idea that smell was a less than noble human sense, and that it was somehow less objective, less educated and even less trustworthy.”
With shaggy hair and a dangling pearl earring, Dr Will Tullett is a keen campaigner for the olfactory history movement. A smell historian from York University, he has published two books on the topic, Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense and Smell and the Past: Noses, Archives, Narratives, the latter of which argues that historians should
use their noses more. He helped lead the major EU Horizon 2020 funded Odeuropa project, creating an historical catalogue of scents, and is currently writing his third book. His favourite smell is his cat.
“Smell is still relatively unstudied,” he tells me over Zoom from York, said feline peering in from the edge of his screen. “We’re not given space to articulate our relationship with smell in a meaningful way.”
‘Smell history’, he says, has slowly become a part of academia since the 1980s, when historians first started to explore the history of smell and its impact on society. One of the first was Alain Corbin, who wrote the oft-cited work The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, a work that was instrumental in putting smell on the map.
The rise of the study of smells aligns with the “sensory turn” in the humanities during the 80s and 90s, which emphasised both a cultural
approach to the study of the senses and a sensory approach to the study of culture.
One difficulty for researchers is that human reactions to smells have changed fairly radically. “We don’t have historical noses. We just don’t smell in the same way now, and some smells mean different things.” Tullett argues that ‘smellscapes’ are as important as landscapes and a
Smellscapes are as important as landscapes and a nosewitness is as important as an eyewitness
nosewitness is just as important as an eyewitness. And his ideas are catching on.
Commercial businesses, historians and sociologists, and the heritage sector are all beginning to realise the power of scent. Medical researchers have discovered that Alzheimer’s can be predicted up to 20 years early through detecting loss of smell.
Olfactory branding is now an industry worth $3.6bn, projected to nearly double to $6.8bn in 2033, with particular scents being deployed to make customers linger, employees toil harder, and trainers seem trendier. Subway, Singapore Airlines and the Four Seasons hotel are all partakers in smell branding.
For over 50 years Rochdale’s AromaPrime, founded by “scent pioneer” Fred Dale, has built up a library of more than 400 scents, from chainsaw fumes to blocked urinals, musty attics to penguin droppings. The company works with everyone from theme parks to museums,
synthesising smells that create atmosphere and manipulate emotion.
Clients include the haunted hotel at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Alton Towers and a New York whaling museum.
I spoke to Liam Findlay, an extremely smiley “themed attraction and historical scenting” consultant at AromaPrime.
“For haunted houses we have scents like musty, mahogany, library and even vomit. The Curse at Alton Manor uses ‘musty’ to suggest the age of the building, and ‘coal fire’ to reflect the Victorian story.”
When it comes to heritage projects, it is usually museum curators or exhibition designers who order smells. In 2001, AromaPrime created a T-rex scent for the Natural History Museum’s animatronic T-rex. “We spoke with palaeontologists and were presented with fossil evidence that suggested the creature would have had meat stuck between its teeth. Based on this evidence, we could infer that it would have had breath that smelt of rotting meat.”
Findlay says he recently worked on a woolly mammoth scent for a tour guide: “The guide originally asked for a sweaty scent, but I read that mammoths didn’t have body odour.” So he visited a farm with sheep and llamas: “Because mammoths lived in similar grassy environments, their poo would have been similarly grassy”, and their fur would have been similarly matted with dirt from the surrounding environment. A smell was born.
“When we make bespoke blends, we combine different ratios of oils that have different olfactory qualities. For example, we could combine ‘fish market’ with ‘out at sea’ and ‘boiler room’ to make a scent evocative of a fishing ship,” he says. “When we make scents from scratch, we work with our partnering perfumers who will combine ingredients that have specific olfactory qualities.”
Entirely bespoke scents can also be prepared but it’s a long and laborious process. Say you wanted to recreate the smell of a strawberry: there are 350 different molecules that make up that scent, which represents a lot of lab work. Once prepared, scent oils that can be put into diffusers are a popular method of dispersion.
Such oils will be familiar to both Bembibre and Tullett, who worked on the EU funded scheme Odeuropais to create an archive of endangered scents. This amounted to a £2.5m research project launched in 2020 bringing together historians, artificial intelligence
Opposite page, clockwise from top: Liam Findlay, a themed attraction and historical scenting consultant at AromaPrime; Fred Dale, founder of Rochdale business AromaPrime, which has amassed a collection of some 400 scents; The smell of petrol ranks among the UK’s favourite smells; A ‘smell map’ of the Glasgow Underground, created by Kate McLean; The mouth of the Glasgow Underground, which has a distinctive odour that people have struggled to define since its opening (picture by Chris Ward); The Foul and the Fragrant by Alain Corbin is a seminal text in the world of smell academia
experts, chemists and perfumers to create an archive of the smells of Europe from the 16th to early 20th century. They used state-of-the-art AI techniques to analyse historic literature and paintings and recreate the smells therein, things like disease-fighting perfumes, tobacco or the stench of industrialisation.
In the Netherlands, the Mauritshuis gallery recreated the scent of Amsterdam’s dirtiest canals for an exhibition titled Fleeting – Scents in Colour, which opened in 2021. It paired 17th-century artworks with smells, hoping to pull the visitor into the worlds depicted. Do you experience a painting differently if you can literally smell it?
“I had never imagined such rankness when looking at cargoes unloaded from barges in scenes of old Amsterdam,” journalist Laura Cunning wrote in 2021. “What the Mauritshuis achieves with its specially manufactured scents is not just the olfactory equivalent of a soundtrack to the paintings, but a kind of doorway in itself to the pungent realities of the past.”
“Can we experience a building with our nose? What’s the olfactory equivalent of a painting?” These are the questions posed by researchers Bembimbre and Matija Strlič in a paper entitled From Smelly Buildings to the Scented Past: An Overview of Olfactory Heritage. Traditionally, these questions would not have made much sense, since our engagement with cultural heritage has relied heavily on visual experiences.
When we think of heritage, it’s easy to picture grand cathedrals, cobbled streets, or iconic landmarks etched into a city’s skyline. But heritage isn’t always something you can touch. In fact, some of the most powerful cultural legacies are the ones you can’t see at all – rituals, languages, crafts passed down through generations. This is the realm of intangible heritage, a living, breathing
I was originally asked to make a sweaty scent, but I read that mammoths didn’t have body odour
part of our identity.
Until last year, the UK was one of 12 countries (out of 196) not to have ratified an ‘intangible heritage’ pact with Unesco, despite it coming into effect in 2006. Last year we finally signed. Why did it take so long? Tullett thinks the UK has followed the lead of the US, home to the most hygiene-obsessed people in the world. He says that for many Brits, talking about smell surpasses the “boundaries of politeness”.
“If I detect an interesting scent on someone and ask them about it, they will look at me like I’m mad, or a pervert because it implies a kind of uncomfortable intimacy.”
Elsewhere it’s different. In Japan, the environment ministry published a list of 100 aromatic spots in 2001, with the judges testily whittling down a shortlist of 600. The purpose was to counteract complaints about bad smells and has become something of a tourist guide. In 2021, France passed a law protecting the “sensory heritage” of the countryside, including the sounds and smells of rural life. And Down Under, the smell of a Vegemite factory was given special heritage recognition by Melbourne council in the same year. “The distinctive smell of Vegemite should be acknowledged in any future development of the site,” said deputy lord mayor Nicholas Reece. “One of the counsellors said if the factory was closed down, we’d have a plaque there to commemorate the smell,” Tullett says. “Is that really the most appropriate thing? You’re enshrining what was a smell in a purely visual form.” Which smells should we in the UK try to preserve? To try to answer this question, Tullett partnered with the University of Sussex’s Mass Observation social-research project, which documents everyday life. They asked people to keep a smell diary for a day, describe the scent of an object in their home and note down which scents they would preserve for posterity. The most common answers were petrol and tobacco. These answers don’t surprise McLean: “It’s nostalgic,” she says. When the smoking ban came in, she tells me, people suddenly didn’t like going into pubs because they smelled of chlorine and bleach. Tobacco had masked it. We might live in a relatively deodorised world, but smells are still there under the surface. In a future without cigarette smoke or petrol fumes, who knows what other hidden smells may be out there, ready to drift to the forefront of our everyday smellscapes?
This four-guest Swiss rehab centre caters only to the top one per cent of the top one per cent. ANNA MOLONEY checks in where the world’s elite go to dry out
Upon checking in at £10,000-a-night rehab centre Paracelsus Recovery, I find myself transported into a world that revolves entirely around me.
Bequeathed with a 15-member entourage of therapists, clinicians, masseuses and personal chefs, I am part of a collective powered by a single goal: my betterment. If you can think of a celebrity who’s been to rehab, they’re not nearly rich enough for Paracelsus, the most expensive rehab clinic in the world where discretion is everything. CEOs, politicians and even royalty reside among its top-secret alumni.
Unlike other rehabilitation centres where group therapy can be a key component of treatment, patients at Paracelsus are treated alone; after all, what common ground could a young Saudi princess, an 80-year-old Hong Kong billionaire and the American grandkid of a famous actor possibly have? The clinic can take up to four patients at a time (provided one stays at the neighbouring hotel), but schedules are carefully managed to ensure paths never cross. Staying there, you can allow yourself to believe the clinic is devoted only to you.
“Obviously we’ve signed an NDA with every single person who has face time with a client,” says Jan Gerber, the founder and chief exec of Paracelsus. “And Switzerland has some of the strictest medical secrecy laws in the world. Prison terms are quite heavy. There have been no leaks.”
Prices vary depending on package, but ‘patients’ or ‘clients’ (the website flits between these terms) can expect to stump up between £86,000 and £108,000 a week to stay, with people typically encouraged to stay for a minimum of four to six weeks. Shorter programmes are available but Gerber says it’s hard to make progress in less time. Some clients fake cancer diagnoses in order to explain their absence from work, while others attempt to live a dual life. “We’ve had people running companies, and in one case a country, from here. We can be flexible, they just don’t get the full money’s worth,” Gerber says.
And at over £10,000 a day, clients want their investment to pay off. Almost all come at crisis point. Some are fighting eating disorders, others serious drug addictions, and many have been forced to go to Paracelsus after acting out, some amid public scandal. The team have occasionally coached clients before and
after TV interviews during their residence, and referrals from burnt out business executives are up 700 per cent in the last year.
The Paracelsus regime is intense: full medical analysis and treatment; genetic testing and extensive laboratory tests; a team of 15-plus experts at your disposal; full psychological analysis; sleep, lifestyle and nutritional assessment; a personal psychiatrist and a live-in therapist. Treatment programmes are bespoke, with a “whatever works mentality”, including traditional medical treatments in conjunction with local hospitals, as well as the more “holistic” regimes (acupuncture, breathwork, psychedelics and puppies are all available “when appropriate”). There are shinier perks too: a personal trainer, a private chef, your own driver, access to a five-star spa and, not least, your private penthouse residence, located in one of the most expensive districts in the city with a coveted view over Lake Zurich. But this is no holiday: Gerber assures me “you don’t go into this kind of treatment unless you’re in a bad place.”
There were many bizarre things about my stay at Paracelsus, but perhaps the bizarrest is that I am perfectly well. I was checking into the clinic for the noble pursuit of journalism and also, perhaps, the less noble one of voyeurism: what exactly does it look like to be so rich and so miserable?
Filling in the extensive surveys ahead of my visit – in which tick-box answers ranged from “I often feel misunderstood” to “I have ‘stared death in the face’” – it began to sink in that I was not on my way to a five-star resort. Indeed, I soon realised that the luxury is partly a disguise for some of Paracelsus’s clinical functions. The attentiveness of service may be part of the premium experience, but it’s also a form of surveillance.
When I was told by the clinic I would be met upon arrival, for example, I didn’t expect it to be on the airport tarmac itself. Stepping off the plane, I hadn’t even crossed the airbridge before being intercepted by an attendant, who promptly ushered me through a secret exit and into a car on the ground. From there I was driven to a private immigration desk, then shown to a buffet, all while someone else went to fetch my luggage. By the time I’ve made it out of the airport, the attendant’s told me I’ve made her day with how giddy I am; it turns out she’s more used to A-list insouciance. She drops me off at a Bentley, which I’m by this
point unsurprised to find out is for me. The door is opened to reveal Gerber inside, who has come to accompany me for the 30 minute drive to the apartment. This is part of the Paracelsus method: patients may be treated individually, but they are never left alone.
The Schedule is an important part of Paracelsus, Gerber tells me. My Schedule, printed and bound, is left for me on my dining room table: by breakfast the next day I’ll already have had a blood test and a 90 minute psychiatry session.
Said psychiatry session is a little tame compared to what Dr Thilo Beck is used to. A driving force behind the Swiss approach to the heroin epidemic in the 1990s, Beck was part of what has been cited as one of the most successful case studies in drug harm reduction. He is a favourite among the other staff members, who frequently reference his “zen” aura. He is certainly calm, but he’s also a little intimidating. The session takes place in the apartment’s therapy room, where we sit on plump cream armchairs overlooked by a crystal chandelier. Beck moves and speaks slowly, giving his every move a sense of deliberation. He’s not afraid to sit in silence and tells me I can lead the session. This is part of the method, with Beck favouring a collaborative approach.
“Oftentimes therapists or doctors feel that they know best and tell the clients what is good for them. I don’t believe in that at all… I think when they come here, somehow they know what they need. They
wouldn’t come otherwise.”
That’s bad news for me: not only am I not actually in need of rehab, this is my first therapy session and I’m not sure what to do. To fill the silence, I regale Beck with tales of day-to-day gripes with friends and family, more of a gossip session than high-level psychiatry. Despite this, Beck’s insights are astute and occasionally blunt. “They might not care much about you,” he remarks at one point.
No time to dwell. From here it’s time for breakfast, prepared by my private chef (the most beautiful bowl of Greek yogurt I’ve ever encountered followed by poached eggs and avocado on toast, garnished with petals) before another member of my ever-expanding entourage arrives to take me to the clinic (a one-minute walk away, but you bet I won’t be doing it alone).
On arrival, a cast of medics await. I feel rather like Julie Andrews greeting the Von Trapp children, all lined up as they await my whistle. From here I’m whisked through a body composition scan, medical
history consultation, physical examination and 3D ECG. The medical equipment is as stylish as medical equipment can be without making you lose faith in them: white, sleek and easily folded away so as not to obstruct the lakeside view. Having complained of being a little tired, I’m taken to the zero gravity chair, tucked up under a weighted blanket and left for a low-frequency vibration-induced power nap (which, incredibly, does work, though I am a good sleeper anyway), before being escorted back to the apartment for lunch, followed by physiotherapy.
I’ve got a 20 minute gap at this point and I’ve been dying to go outside to see the lake, but I make it just a few yards down the road when my phone buzzes. Sigh. My masseuse is early. I am beginning to develop empathy for the superrich. When I return from my short bid for freedom, Joanne is already in the apartment (everyone has keys) and is ready to address the tension in my shoulders and lower back, as identified by my physio. This is when I find out about the ‘Anna’ Whatsapp group chat, the forum where my attendants exchange notes on my progress.
I’ve been dying to go outside to see the lake, but I make it just a few yards down the road when my phone buzzes
I’m relieved to have been spared one aspect of the usual Paracelsus stay: a live-in therapist. On hand full-time, seven days a week, the therapist resides in the apartment’s second bedroom, with patients at liberty to call upon them whenever they need, even if that means waking them during the night. “They do a lot of ad hoc work, so if a client gets a
phone call from a spouse or business partner and they feel strong emotions or get triggered, then the live-in therapist is there for immediate holding and processing,” Gerber says.
He explains it’s a bit “like a flatshare in terms of the feel”, with the therapist joining the patient for meals and generally hanging out around the apartment. If the client wants to go out on an excursion, perhaps to a restaurant or a gallery, the therapist goes too. I ask if this might get a bit annoying, but Gerber says it’s essential, and there have only been a handful of cases where they’ve had to replace the live-in because a client didn’t get along with them.
Getting along is fairly crucial as, once your residence is finished, you will be encouraged to take your live-in therapist back home with you. Gerber tells me that about half the clients take advantage of this, and stresses its importance to the aftercare process. Going back to normal life after Paracelsus can be jarring, and the first few days and weeks after treatment can be the most dangerous time for relapse. How long can the transition last? From two weeks to… Gerber stops to think. One live-in therapist left 10 years ago, he recalls, and has yet to return.
When I first met Gerber, a couple of months before my stay, over a coffee at The Langham, he told me of his strong belief that, as a society, we need to be far more sympathetic towards the rich.
“They’re not well, emotionally. They’re
very, very, very lonely, more lonely than somebody from the average population,” he says, adding that some clients have returned multiple times, requesting the same apartment and almost considering the staff as friends.
He tells me there is a strong link between success and poor mental health. People with ADHD, for example, have traits that propel them to excel in top management, but also make them predisposed to alcoholism. Add to that the stressors of leading a company – or a country – and it’s not a pretty picture. For him, it’s also personal. After suffering from acute depression and burnout, he himself checked into a clinic. When finding themselves at rock bottom, many HNWIs don’t want to admit it for fear of reputational damage, while others are so lonely they have no one to call. “When things get tough, who do you call if you’re the CEO of a big oil company or big bank?” asks Gerber. “What if you feel like crying on a Wednesday afternoon?”
We need to be more sympathetic towards the rich. They’re not well, emotionally. They’re lonely lll
I ask whether being spoiled could contribute to such issues, whether the level of pampering provided at Paracelsus could even be unhelpful. Many other rehabs seek to intentionally humble their patients, with communal living arrangements where mucking in with household chores is part of the programme. Gerber insists this wouldn’t work for his clientele. “Telling them to do their own laundry is not a solution – it will be an additional stress factor,” he says.
“At this kind of wealth level, people are not used to carrying their own luggage. They’re not even used to thinking about bringing stuff to the laundry… what is important is that we don’t judge or project our own reality onto their realities.”
To make his point he gestures to the apartment I’ve been excitingly showing off to friends and family. “For our clients, this is tiny. But, you know, the lake view is nice, right? This is our best attempt to recreate the minimum expectation of normality for our clients, to take out as many stressors as possible from the everyday experience.”
So does it actually work? Do Paracelsus’ super-rich clients leave the gilded clinic happy and healthy? Gerber says it’s hard to measure what counts as a “successful case” and is suspicious when other clinics claim to have “90 per cent success rates” or similar. After all, what does ‘success’ really mean? “As long as they’re like, ‘Okay, my life is actually worth living, and I enjoy it more again, and my wife doesn’t hate me, my kids talk to me again’, that I will consider a success.” For £100,000 a week, it’s not a lot to ask.
A new generation of digital nomads are rejecting the backpack and sandals life for something more structured. ADAM BLOODWORTH checks in
Rows upon rows of cookie-cutter houses fill the boujee neighbourhood of Abbot Kinney in Los Angeles. In front of one, a basketball hoop stands by a double garage. It looks like all the rest, but this particular property is different. It is setting a new standard for digital nomad living.
It functions somewhere between an Airbnb and a posh hostel, with the bulk of the house made up of six private bedrooms built around a central coworking and socialising space. It is one of 50 properties around the world operated by Outsite, a company you’ve almost certainly never heard of that’s celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. This fact alone means it has succeeded where its competitors have not. Once upon a time there was CoBoat, the digital nomad community based from a boat; Remote Year, and Selina co-working hotels. Then there was WeWork...
Selling somewhere to sleep and work with random strangers is a formula I hadn’t seen anywhere else. Despite 48 per cent of members earning more than $100,000 a year, Outsite has a vibe that feels almost studenty. House sharing seems to buck the conventional life-goal narrative, which dictates that the more successful you get, the quicker you inhabit your own home.
So I decide to fly to Los Angeles, where there is the highest concentration of digital nomads in the world, to meet the remote workers using Outsite.
“I haven’t seen this kind of remote working, co-living situation before,” says Hannah, who is in her thirties and from London. She is one of a handful of people I meet within hours of arriving, after being added to a WhatsApp group by Outsite’s property manager. She’s a freelance marketing consultant, currently based out of LA. She’d signed up for the year-long Outsite membership (£110), allowing her to
book in at any of the properties around the world (for a fee, of course).
I soon meet up with another Brit, 36-year-old Mark, who has worked for himself for two decades as a business-tobusiness seller on Amazon. He tells me he has lived full time at Outsite for the past few months. “The other night we were talking about how we all own flats in the UK and here we are, living in this shithole,” he laughs. “It’s funny when you think about it.” To be fair, Outsite is far from a ‘shithole’ (Mark notes that the LA property is worth more than $3m) – the joke is that these are wealthy people choosing to live like students.
Our house includes a fabulous entertaining area and a kitchen island big enough to accommodate the whole cast of The Hills. Everything is intimidatingly white and a piece of aspirational art features the words “no bad days.” Pictures of coloured in animals hang on the wall like children’s artwork on a fridge door, only drawn by adults. Polaroids of guests are pinned to corkboards. “You’re sharing but most people are out all day, so you’ve kinda got the house to yourself,” says Mark. “Obviously if you’ve got a relationship and stuff you want your own space, but if you’re single…”
A room without a bathroom in my Los Angeles pad costs around £2,000 per month. That’s the same as renting a one-bedroom apartment in the same part of town with a kitchen and living space to yourself. My bedroom – ‘Walgrove’, named after a street in the local area – is a decent sized double with plenty of storage, a pleasant view over palm trees, and a bedside table. It’s what you might call minimalist. Next door is a (clean) bathroom with a bath, shower and toilet. I’m a fairly light sleeper so sometimes in the night I’d wake up hearing people opening and closing their bedroom doors. As this is LA, guests use ‘outside voices’ in the morning, clanking plates and cutlery. In California, 7am is
The Los Angeles Outsite house is worth more than $3m and includes a communal
These digi nomads are grown-up. They’re eschewing booze and partying for gym classes and early nights
practically midday.
But while I’m irked by their pre-dawn energy, in a lonely and isolated world, the new social capital is in bringing people together. “Everyone is open to meeting new people,” Mark says. “If they were a real introvert they’d just stay at an Airbnb.” There are weekly socials and while I’m there our community manager throws a pizza party. One guy shares wine while others bring beers and people jostle to control the music. It feels like pregaming before a night out, only with less drinking. I doubt anyone is under thirty.
At the drinks I meet Jessica. Also in her thirties and from Australia, she works for the search engine Duck Duck Go, whose staff are fully remote. She’s keen to tell me one of her favourite stories about Outsite. She had touched down in Nicaragua and was heading to the property there, but before she made it, people in the Outsite group chat “convinced me to go with them to a beach town nearby instead of heading straight to the property.”
Does anyone actually get any work done? Well, during my week-long stay I manage to do a week’s worth of work, but I also hike Runyan Canyan, cruise Mulholland Drive, dine out and go on a naff celebrity home-spotting tour, all with fellow Outsite guests. I find out about cliques, and spot the people who would exhaust me if I were moving in. After drinks we go out on the town and, on the dancefloor, speak about how we are 15 years older than everyone else in the club. At this point, I feel cautiously optimistic that Outsite has given me a community. I can see how this could become a lifestyle.
For the past few months, Mark has been working mornings then spending afternoons with friends he met through Outsite. “When I first came, I found it liberating to see people living differently,” he said. “To see 40-year-old guys going to yoga every day.” Hannah has enjoyed trips to Joshua Tree National Park with Outsite members. “I like the idea that it’s not a twenty-something house share, I can hang out with people who are more established and older,” she says. She doesn’t “feel weird” about house-sharing in her thirties and is tired of the narrative that adults can only cohabit with someone they are sleeping with. “It makes co-living feel very normal.”
The digital nomad stereotype conjures images of someone working their web design job from the beach, beer in one hand, mouse in the other, laptop precariously balanced on a knackered
bamboo stool. But what surprises me about Outsite is how members appear to be balancing shades of that life with a far more mundane existence. These digi nomads are grown-up. Rather than living with a bag on their backs, they spend months in one location, and that location is often somewhere functional and ordinary. For people like Hannah, Mark and Jessica, living like an ordinary person in a different city is kind of the point.
Day-to-day life for this type of digital nomad involves going to the gym, eating well and going to bed early. “There’s a rise in people being able to remote work, so there are people who want to do that but in a less knackering and hectic way than being constantly on the move,” says Hannah. “This feels more like I’m actually living here.”
The Outsite experience changes depending on where you go. In Los Angeles, people stay for months, whereas in Europe’s capital of digi nomad working, Lisbon, it’s common for guests to check in for just a few days. Members say flexibility is key. They can book Outsite for exactly the period they want rather than having to commit to a rental in a city they don’t know. But the flip side of that coin is that shorter term guests disturb the feng shui. “It’s a bit exhausting getting to know people when they’re not going to stay,” says Mark. “I’ve been trying to get to know people staying longer term.”
Some members tell me they’d landed at the company because they were fatigued with the obvious alternatives. “Airbnb isn’t a reliable choice these days,” says Hannah. “At Outsite I get a cleaner, my bills paid and a comfy bed. It’s a premium way to travel that isn’t going into a hotel where you don’t talk to anyone.”
On my last night, Hannah, Mark and some others are in the living room in their sweatpants. We talk about relationships, and what it means to be single in our thirties and living on the road. I’ve always romanticised this life, but I realise that, in many ways, it isn’t easy. These people face the same anxieties and loneliness as the rest of us. It’s stressful being this far from home.
But bundled together on the sofa, I feel – for the first time in fifteen years – the sense of community I used to enjoy at university. Just hanging out doing nothing with new people is an experience I’ve craved but have rarely been able to find. Like how the best travel experiences happen when you make the fewest plans, in an age where we’re all seeking community, simply existing together feels incredibly worthwhile.
We live in an age of internet conspiracists, where everything from Covid vaccinations to the shape of the earth are questioned. GARY NUNN meets the people fighting back
Michael Marshall is Britain’s only full-time, paid sceptic. He attends flat earth conferences, distributes flyers outside psychic shows and lurks in anti-vax Telegram groups, all to promote critical thinking over pseudoscience.
“Any of us could, at our worst, find ourselves in an emotional hole where our reason is compromised,” he says. “If we’re watching each other’s backs, we can stop each other from falling into such traps.”
When Marshall first started working in the field 15 years ago, scepticism was about debunking UFOs and sasquatches. While psychics remain a steady bête noire,
interest in flying saucers has faded, replaced by a rise in dangerous pseudo-medical claims. These range from Gerson Therapy (a wholly unproven alternative cancer treatment consisting of specific juices and coffee enemas), to the followers of Joseph Mercola, the ‘alternative medicine proponent,’ branded the “most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation online” by the New York Times.
“Since I became a full-time sceptical investigator, I get emails from families whose loved ones have died and they’ve since learnt they’d declined traditional treatment for ‘alternative medicine’,” Marshall says. “Inevitably, they discover their deceased loved one had signed up to Joseph Mercola’s mailing list – and want me to expose it.” Why the shift from UFOs to quackmedical claims? “Youtube algorithms confirmed people’s biases,” he says.
In 2014, Marshall joined The Good Thinking Society, a small charity founded by science author Simon Singh, which promotes rational inquiry by battling against pseudoscience. “We are pro-science and pro-evidence, which means we are anti-woo and anti-quack,” the charity’s website says. “We like scepticism, but not cynicism. We like nerds and geeks, but we hate bogus things without a jot of evidence.” From challenging
alternative medicine, Marshall says, it was an “easy leap” to “take on the anti-vaxxers” whose influence surged during Covid.
The British sceptical movement is now at a critical moment. In an AI-driven world, fact and fiction can blur; misinformation can be easily amplified because algorithms can’t be relied upon to spot truth from lies, or to unpack nuance. Activists like Marshall aim to reorient those caught in conspiratorial thinking back to rationality.
Their impact is real. One campaign persuaded Gofundme to remove ‘miracle cure’ fundraisers; another led to the NHS blacklisting homeopathic treatments such as diluted arsenic, snake venom and ground-up bees (after the Good Thinking Society threatened the Department of Health with a judicial review). The charity’s campaign prompted the NHS to officially acknowledge that such treatments were ineffective, with the institution finally blacklisting homeopathy in 2017.
Marshall says conspiracy theorists have “much louder megaphones” now, pointing to Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the US US secretary of health Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (RFK). The latter has a particularly powerful platform from which to promote damaging
and disproven conspiracy theories, such as that wireless 5G technology can cause cancer, that AIDS is not caused by HIV, that fluoride causes diseases and that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates exaggerated the pandemic to promote vaccines.
Dr. Susan Blackmore doesn’t fit the sceptic stereotype. She ‘trained’ as a witch, has rainbow-dyed hair and first became interested in the supernatural after a near-death experience.
“I was a sleep-deprived undergraduate at Oxford, had smoked a little cannabis and went down a tunnel towards a light, looking down at my body” she says. “It felt more real than anything in my life.”
Determined to prove her Oxford lecturers wrong, she pursued paranormal research – only to find nothing. She eventually joined sceptic groups.
Part of her pre-sceptic journey involved attending séances and hanging out with other witches. “I was invited to a coven –we’d chant spells for world peace,” she says, something she concedes hasn’t worked out so well. She quit when they asked her to sew her own cloak: “I hate sewing!”
In the 1980s, she found herself on the board of both the London Society for Psychical Research and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal – one filled with believers, the other with sceptics. Their stated goals, she notes, were strikingly similar: to investigate, without prejudice and in a scientific spirit, strange phenomena.
The now honorary associate at the National Secular Society, who has fully revoked her former psychic beliefs, says that paranormal claims “will be with us forever – what’s frightening is how easily people get captured by social media and disinformation now.”
A PR problem exists for those in organised sceptical societies: they risk coming across as the bah-humbug killjoy crowd, or, as Marshall describes it, the ‘well, actually’ person. It’s something Marshall has encountered his whole life. It has always bothered him when he suspects charlatanism, whether it’s a psychic or a quack cancer-cure salesperson. Both, he says, amount to defrauding vulnerable people.
“I was always the person in my friendship group who was upset there were people out there pretending to be psychic, capitalising on grief,” he says. “There’s something incredibly grubby and exploitative about finding someone in their worst moment and deciding that’s when you can start selling to them.”
His solution is to first understand, then debunk. “I want to immerse myself in as
much unreason as possible to try and understand what draws people into it.”
Modern scepticism is far from joyless. Founded by eccentric magicians including Harry Houdini and The Amazing Randi, it remains a movement of curiosity. Perhaps surprisingly, sceptics are often keen to engage with woo-woo ideas. They attend seances, train as witches and present the annual ‘Rusty Razor’ award to the most outlandish pseudoscientific claim.
This is because a modern sceptic is curious, open and claims to always be led by science. As The Good Thinking Society says, this differentiates them from cynics, who are immediately dismissive towards things such as seances, witchcraft and anything considered ‘spiritual’. A good sceptic will attend the seance or join the anti-vax group chat so they can follow the lines of rational enquiry. They are there to deeply listen,
to rigorously test, to fastidiously analyse, to assess all evidence and be open to all possibilities – but, crucially, to always bring it back to things that can be substantiated by the facts.
Spending so much time wallowing in the ridiculous means sceptics often have a good sense of humour. Marshall recalls attending London’s Mind, Body, Spirit festival (dubbed Mind, Body, Wallet by sceptics). A ‘psychic’ at a group reading claimed to hear from “Michelle.” Silence. “Michelle – or ‘‘Chelle,” (pronounced ‘Shell’), she said – “something to do with ‘Shell’”. “Yes!” an audience member said. “I can take a Shell! My late husband used to go to a Shell garage!” It shows, Marshall says laughing, how far people are willing to go to make the ‘life after death’ narrative work for them.
I was always upset that there were people out there pretending to be psychic, capitalising on grief
It highlights just how eager some people are to believe – and how dangerous that can be. “If this so-called message from the dead fits, then that loved one isn’t really gone forever, and I don’t have to sit in my grief,” Marshall says. He’s never been to a psychic show where there weren’t tears. “It’s about love, loss and the hardest emotions. It’s not about gullibility. Despite there being entertaining, borderline ludicrous moments like the Shell garage story, we shouldn’t laugh or pity them.
Sceptics aren’t superior.”
It took him time to reach this understanding. “You go through a sceptical adolescence before realising it’s about meeting people where they are.”
The same values, he says, should be applied to anti-vaxxers and conspiracists.
During the pandemic, he spent months in a local Telegram group promoting Covid denial. As an observer, he could “see what the other side were saying” and get a better understanding of what leads people to desert science and reason. He saw firsthand why people fall for misinformation. “It’s never about [lack of] intelligence,” he says. “They’re very smart, they find justifications for the unjustifiable because they have an emotional reason to do so.”
That reason is often a loss of control. “Most were scared and confused. They lost one community and found another.”
He even convinced one man to leave the Telegram group for the Skeptics’ group (Marshall prefers the spelling with a ‘k’).
“He was in a bad place, and the pandemic led him down a black hole.” What helped? “I wasn’t judging, lecturing or laughing.”
But such conversions are rare. “You can’t completely change most people’s minds,” he says. Instead, you “lower the cost” of small shifts in perspective. “Don’t point score. Sometimes you’ll get them to take a left in the maze and hit a brick wall they didn’t know was there. They’re the conversations I get really excited about.”
The phrase, popular amongst
rationalists, that most irks Marshall is: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”
“The thing is, feelings don’t care about your facts,” he says. “People won’t listen to facts if their feelings aren’t in the right place.”
The temptation is to patronise and talk down to conspiracists, which leads them to feel dismissed or insulted. If, instead, they feel heard, even if you don’t agree with them, they’re in a better place to listen – and perhaps make a turn away from misinformation.
l Gary Nunn is author of The Psychic Tests: An Adventure in the World of Believers and Sceptics
Patek Philippe remains cream of the crop with a surprise drop fit for hopping date lines and time zones, says ALEX DOAK
PATEK, BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT
A gorgeous ivory-lacquered dial, seamlessly blending a ‘GMT’ travel feature, driven by a sumptuously hand-finished movement you can admire through the back. So far so Patek Philippe. But that’s where the similarities between the Calatrava Pilot Travel Time and your standard gold, circular Patek Philippe watch end. Where are the slim yellow-gold case, the alligator-leather strap, the Roman numerals?
Instead, Patek has reinterpreted the modern globetrotter’s trusty timepiece with a boldness that feels borderline contrary. Its blocky, raised numerals are inspired by vintage cockpit instruments, as are the retro ‘mushroom’ pushbuttons on the left. The ‘dagger’ hands glow fiercely at night in fluoro-green, complementing a contemporary acryliccomposite strap finished with a new khaki-green fabric motif.
The pushers operate – in more typically
‘Patek’ fashion – a clever cocktail of micro-mechanical engineering. They nudge, forward or back, a second stencilled-out hours hand, which keeps track of the time back home.
Most cleverly, whether you’re hopping the international date line eastwards or westwards, the hand of the local date display jumps forward or back to meet you there.
l Patek Philippe Ref. 5524G-010, £52,180, patek.com
Over 175 years since Edwin Fear started his watch business, his great-great-great grandson has unveiled a new collection: the ‘Arnos’
Watches of Switzerland, already the biggest outlet for Rolex, has compounded the partnership by cutting the ribbon on a spectacular four-storey flagship boutique on Bond Street. It’s the latest episode in a relationship that began back in 1919 with Group’s Northern Goldsmiths showroom in Newcastle.
Visitors to the store – up there with next-door neighbours Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Dior for sheer showmanship – can immerse themselves in the entire Rolex oeuvre, met by an imposing mosaic-floored lobby and accented with signature green marble.
From the lower-ground floor dedicated to Rolex’s pioneering ‘Certified PreOwned’ programme –guaranteeing authentic, fully serviced vintage watches – your ascendant tour takes in as many lounge and bar areas as retail opportunities, culminating on the second storey where daylight floods a fully equipped service centre. Here, glass walls offer a glimpse of five watchmakers qualified to go tweezers
and tongs on models as complex as Rolex’s flagship Daytona chronograph. “The boutique is not only a place to purchase a timepiece,” says Richard de Leyser, managing director of Rolex UK. “It’s also a celebration of the brand’s legacy: the Rolex Watch Company was, after all, founded here in London by Hans Wilsdorf in the early 1900s.”
OBLONG TIME COMING
With a boldly geometric design, it’s quite the departure from the Bristolian company’s recent ‘Redcliff’ and ‘Brunswick’ conceits. But it remains in the spirit of the brand’s redux, with nomenclature inspired by historic and newfound premises in the WestCountry capital.
The Fears Arnos Pewter Blue is inspired by the tall, slim rectangular watches that Bowman-Scargill has unearthed from the family archives, dating back to the 1920s. Not limited, it’s named after Arnos Vale, the area of Bristol where the company’s headquarters are located today, and also
home to the cemetery where both Edwin and his son Amos Daniel Fear are buried. Inside a beautifully art-deco steel case, ticking beneath a hobnailtextured, rhodium-plated dial is a top-grade Swiss-made Sellita SW1000 self-winding movement with a Fears Blue decorated rotor featuring the ‘flower of Bristol’ motif.
Arnos Pewter Blue, £4,350, fearswatches.com
Christopher Ward’s dazzling new exercise in techno horology the C12 Loco blends contemporary, post-modern design language with affordable inhouse-conceived mechanics.
It’s driven by the CW-003, Christopher Ward’s second in-house movement, delivering a six-day (144-hour) power reserve. What sets CW-003 apart is the meticulous polish of its architectural bridges, in combination with the ticking balance wheel seemingly floating in space. It’s a joyous antidote to those cold, rectangular black mirrors adorning most wrists today.
CEO Mike France wan’t backwards in coming forwards, saying “This is a truly audacious piece. Loco’s mesmerising mechanics take us as high-up the watch ladder as we’ve ever dared to climb.”
World time watches are having a moment but what is the appeal of this unnecessary complication?
LAURA MCCREDDIE DOAK
finds out
On the website greenwichmeantime. com there is a page dedicated to time apps. Here you can create a list of different cities at the touch of a button, see the time in Chizhou, Sidoarjo or Scaggsville, USA concurrently and compared to your home time. You can check whether meetings in different time zones have been properly coordinated. You can check sunrise and sunset anywhere in the world, and the same for the lunar rising and setting. With all this at the flick of a finger, why would you want a GMT watch?
But the fact is, we do. At Watches and Wonders, the annual luxury jamboree held in Geneva, there were GMT and travel watches for every taste and budget. There was minimalism at Parmigiani Fleurier, with its elegant take on a dual time, featuring a subtle gold hand that remains hidden until it is required. Montblanc used a red dot for its second zone indication in its 1858. Patek Philippe gave its version of a retro aviation vibe. TAG Heuer’s take is a racy little automotive-inspired number in a Carrera case. Even Nomos, more known for its Bauhaus austerity, added this particular complication to its Club Sport Neomatik line.
“Wristwatches give us a sense of time, but GMTs and world-timers connect us to places,” says Lydia Winters, brand consultant, watch collector and co-host of the This Watch Life podcast. “For me, this is the most useful complication for everyday life. Whether traveling and wanting to know the time at home or – often in my case – living across the world from my family as an American in Sweden, wearing a GMT or world-timer brings them closer because I always can see their time. It’s an important point of connection. It’s the bridge between the poetic – a feeling of connection to home – and the practical.”
This mix of the practical and the poetic was how the complication came to be in a wristwatch in the first place. The first world-timer was created by Louis Cottier at a time when travel was the preserve of the elite. Even if one did travel, there was little need to know what the time was back home because letters were the main form of communication. As the son of a watchmaker, Cottier had more knowledge than most, so, just two years after completing training, he was able to put his mind to solving the problem of how to
display multiple time zones on a dial. By 1931 – 38 years after the International Meridian Conference in Washington where the world was divided into 24 time zones with Greenwich as point zero – he had a solution in what he termed his “Heures Universelles” or HU. The local time was displayed as usual with the three central hands, but he linked the 12-hour hand to a 24-hour ring on which the cities’ names were written. It rotated counterclockwise, a half rotation for every full turn of the hour hand. As the hours progressed, the inner ring would move with it so the wearer could easily read the time in any part of the world. For years this complication was confined to pocket watches, albeit ones commissioned by the likes of Vacheron Constantin. Then Patek Philippe came knocking and Cottier was called upon to downsize his invention. In 1937, he put a world time in a rectangular ref. 515 HU and in a Calatrava case for the ref.96 HU. The latter became one of the most collectible watches in the world and Cottier had paved the way for the classic world time still used by Patek Philippe and later adopted by Patek alum Svend Andersen.
“Back in the 1980s, when Svend Andersen launched
his first collection – the Communication – a world time was an essential complication for businesspeople and frequent travellers, offering a practical way to track multiple time zones,” explains CEO Pierre-Alexandre Aeschlimann. “More importantly, it was a complication Svend mastered during his years at Patek Philippe in the 1970s, where he worked closely with the legendary Louis Cottier world time mechanism.”
While these world times of Andersen and Cottier were romantic and artistic, the next big leap was more functional than aesthetic, using the bezel as an indicator. The first person to pioneer that was Glycine with the Airman, which debuted in 1953 and featured a 24-hour display paired with a rotating bidirectional bezel marked with a 24-hour scale. This was a professional pilot’s watch, the idea being that, with a bezel indication, they could quickly set and read a second time zone. Unfortunately for Glycine, two years later Rolex unveiled its GMT-Master, and the design code of a new GMT was set.
But what exactly is a GMT watch? Technically there are two types – the true GMT and the office or caller GMT. On a true GMT the 12-hour hand can be adjusted independently, making it ideal for frequent travellers who need to reset their watches when changing time zones. An office GMT has an independently adjustable 24-hour hand for those who just need a secondary time zone, so they know when to call the office.
However, given that we now have all that information at the tap of a screen, why are people still spending their money on outmoded complications? It all goes back to that personal connection. “In 2025, the practical necessity of a world time complication on a mechanical watch has diminished, much like the perpetual calendar, moon phase, or chronograph,” says Aeschlimann. “Yet, the world time remains a beautiful complication, one that resonates with collectors globally and connects them through a shared appreciation of horological artistry.”
That connection is something that resonates with Winters. “What I love
about Nomos’s new Club Sport neomatik Worldtimer, which aims to be a go anywhere, do anything world timer, is being able to have the second time zone on the subdial,” she says. “It’s a new configuration of the traditional world time dial layout, and I’ll always have it set to Florida. It’s nice to be able to look down at my wrist and know what time it is for my sister and nephews. Is it breakfast time there? Are they just getting out of school? Is it time for us to FaceTime yet? It adds an extra connection with the people that matter most in my life.” The practical combined with the poetic. You can’t get that from an app.
LAURA MCCREDDIE-DOAK
Is there a watch that ticks all the vacation boxes: casual, stylish, waterproof and versatile? There sure is! Here are my top picks
There are plenty of articles floating around the internet in praise of the “one and done”; the perfect watch that will see you right for the rest of your life, give or take a service or two. This isn’t that column. I’m definitely in the “watch wardrobe” camp and take great delight in switching timepieces depending on mood, outfit or current situation. This is however about the one watch you should take on holiday with you.
Holidays are different from everyday life, which means your horological needs change too. Before we get to what those needs are, we should define our holiday parameters. For the purposes of narrowing the field, we’re talking the classic summer holiday.
Somewhere warm, with a pool, maybe a beach, where the order of business is lying by water during the day and exploring the town at night.
Clothes-wise, you’ll have packed your ideal summer self – one that is slightly more relaxed than your usual sartorial personality. Looser with more linen and a touch of sprezzatura about you, maybe even with a hat. You need a watch that can take you from beach to bar without compromising on either function or form and maybe with a little more panache than you would normally display. This is your holiday, after all – a time to cut loose and experiment. You want something robust, water resistant, obviously, and, I would suggest, with a
change of strap – that way you can bring multiple looks with you without the fearing of carrying around extra watches.
The usual answer to this question would be a Longines Legend Diver or Oris’s Cotton Candy. They fit the fashion brief perfectly, especially if you opt for a coloured dial Legend Diver, however both require tools to change their straps, and no one wants to be wielding one of those after a couple of sundowners. Next up is the Omega Seamaster Diver 300m, which comes with a nifty spring bar retraction system. However, the design is very much “functional diver” – it looks great with swim shorts and a tee-shirt but not so much with unstructured trousers and a loose shirt (presuming you’re taking your dressing cues from Jude Law in Talented Mr Ripley, as all men should when going on holiday).
To my mind, the watch that ticks all the boxes, both horologically and sartorially, is the Hermès Cut. The size is a universally wearable 36mm, the white dial screams summer, and the overall vibe is sporty but with an elegance that feels very French. It is water resistant to 100m, so perfect for swimming, and alongside a lovely bracelet, there are eight rubber strap options in eight colours drawn from the Hermès palette from the subtle – gris perle, gris étain, glycine, vert croquet – to the standout, orange.
So, that’s your ideal holiday watch sorted: now you just need to find the ideal vacation.
l Laura is a leading watch and jewellery writer
Cheese and watch making. Two things the Swiss hold as sacred. We pay homage to them both with our new watch, launching in April. But not everyone will be amused. Some may even accuse us of sacrilege. What next? All will be revealed in April. Sign up now for more clues.
Do your research
Whether sailing it, swimming it or plunging it, the watchmakers of landlocked Switzerland are still exploring the limits of the big blue, says ALEX DOAK
Almost a century ago, one of Switzerland’s historic maisons created the enduring formula for the water-resistant wristwatch. With its screwed-down caseback, screwdown winding crown and rubber gaskets, the sub-aquatic world has been Rolex’s ‘Oyster’ ever since.
As our timeline below shows, diving-watch casemaking has been a crucible for engineering innovation since 1926. Admittedly some of this innovation is showboating for the sake of it, with dive watches now able to operate far beyond the human body’s own limits beneath the waves.
This year’s horological novelties nicely demonstrate this point. The venerable marine chronometer pioneer Ulysse Nardin has gone beyond what was even believed to be possible with its new Diver [AIR], the lightest mechanical dive watch ever made. “If it’s possible, it’s done. If it’s impossible, it will be done,” said Paul-David Nardin in 1876 – and sure enough his successors have lived up to this ambitious slogan.
To achieve the exceptionally light weight of just 52g (including the strap; under 46g without it) material had to be removed from the Diver X Skeleton’s ‘skeletal’ mechanics, without compromising the reliability and precision performance expected of a diving watch. For perspective, Ulysse Nardin’s Diver 44mm released in 2019 weighed 120.5g, as would be expected for a sturdy, robust dive watch. The Diver [AIR] manages to lose an incredible 68.6g and comes in at less than half of the Diver X Skeleton.
Generally, watch movements are crafted from brass, which has a density of 8.7g/cm³, making it relatively heavy. Aluminium, at 2.7g/cm³, is lighter, but its softness makes it unsuitable for the rigorous demands of a watch movement. Titanium, at 4.5g/cm³, offers a
A timeline from the watch that defined diving for a century to the race to the bottom and the savvy innovations it brought about
promising balance – being 45 per cent stronger than steel – but it is notoriously tricky to work with, tending to catch fire during machining.
Despite this, Ulysse Nardin has wrangled titanium into the nigh-on diaphanous bridges suspending the mechanics seemingly in mid-air. On the outside, the materials alchemy continues, using a blend of upcycled nylon from old fishing nets, in 60:40 combination with carbon fibre recovered from the world’s fastest ‘IMOCA’ sailing boats. Combined it guarantees 200 metres’ water resistance and £33,420 less in your bank account.
If you think that’s going to extremes, Tudor would like you to hold its beer. The Rolex stablemate has proven that the sheer depth a watch can plunge to remains the ultimate bragging right.
Waterproof to a full kilometre, and priced at just £5,070 (with chronometer levels of precision thrown in), Tudor’s new ‘Pelagos Ultra’ really is the ultraversion of the modern Swiss diving watch.
Engineered specifically to overcome the challenges associated with hardcore ‘saturation’ diving, this is the most technically capable Pelagos ever made, fitted with a proprietary bracelet adjustment system for quick switches between wetsuit or skin, and has a 43mm titanium case complete with a a helium escape valve, a Rolex invention of 1963 that changed everything for commercial divers.
For the purposes of coastal holidaying with a bit of recreational SCUBA diving involved, Bremont’s latest ‘Supermarine’ is perhaps more realistic. Rated to ‘just’ 500 metres’ water resistance, it still more than ensures peace of mind. With a suavely sculpted 3D ‘wave’ dial and classic case construct, it strikes that perfect balance: a design that neatly straddles beach and beach bar. Trust a British brand to think so stylishly yet so practically.
1937: CHRONOGRAPH DIVER
The world’s first ‘chronograph’ dive watch is released by St Imier village’s biggest employer, Longines, whose stopwatch function was operated by patented ‘mushroom’ shaped waterproof pushbuttons, affording an ‘instant reset to zero’ flyback mechanism. Because that’s exactly what you need 100 metres below the waves.
Rolex’s ‘Oyster’ system sets the bar high with a watch featuring a screwed-down case ring, back and bezel, plus crown and multiple rubber gaskets. It had submarine levels of watertightness that garnered a Daily Mail cover story when Mercedes Glitz swam the English Channel wearing one the following year.
1939: A DIVING POCKET WATCH?
Rolex may have coined the watertight watch as we know it, but this didn’t preclude a commercial boo-boo in the form of an Oyster pocket watch. Thankfully, it was rescued from ridicule when the Italian Navy came knocking via Panerai, looking for a large luminous dive watch. A simple 90º rotation, strap added, and presto! – an icon was born.
Clockwise from main:
Tudor’s new ‘Pelagos Ultra, which is waterproof to a full kilometre; The Ulysse Nardin Diver [AIR] is the lightest diving watch in the world; The Longines Chronograph Diver, whose stopwatch function was operated by patented ‘mushroom’ shaped, waterproof pushbuttons
Rolex gets back in the game, souping up its 1954 (James Bondendorsed) Submariner for the extreme demands of French commercial diving firm COMEX. The ‘Sea-Dweller’ debuted a small valve on the side, which gradually releases helium. It means when you depressurise from long periods ‘saturated’ in a bathyscaphe or divingbell’s breathing gas mix, your watch dial’s crystal dome doesn’t ‘pop’ off from the internal pressure of seeped-in helium atoms.
War accelerates innovation, yet again: at the behest of France’s Royal Navy, whose frogmen benefitted from Blancpain’s ‘Fifty Fathoms’. This watch coined the principal trope of the modern dive watch: a rotating ‘bezel’ to keep track of your oxygen reserves. And what’s more, it pipped Rolex’s Submariner to the post by a year.
Proving its sea-legs, Omega teamed up with the catchily-named International Underwater Contractors and attached a Seamaster 1000 watch to the arm of a Beaver Mark IV deep-sea submersible. Diving to a kilometer below the waves, the watch was rigorously tested in the unforgiving darkness of the sea-bed –and passed with flying colours.
Tenniscore as a fashion trend blossomed in the summer of 2024 – but it’s here to stay. ADAM BLOODWORTH asks why preppy sports-luxe remains a key look this year
Zendaya and the ‘Tenniscore’ trend took hold last year following the release of the film Challengers, but fashion types assumed the look would be game, set and match by autumn. Little did they know: Brat summer is back, and so is Tenniscore, only this time it’s gone beyond the court. It has become a fully-fledged style aesthetic that is reshaping what we wear on the tennis court as well as what we wear off it.
There are more accessible and renovated tennis courts in the UK than ever, and padel and pickleball, formerly popular only on mainland Europe, are booming in popularity. But the Tenniscore trend goes further than yellow balls. The popularisation of preppy clothes in everyday life says something about Gen Z’s penchant for the traditional. They aren’t just wearing formal clothes, either: more twenty-somethings are going to church, stopping drinking, and romanticising domesticity (see: TikTok’s Tradwife trend).
“The rise of ‘Tenniscore’ in 2025 is part fashion revival, part identity shift,” says Louise Millar, strategy director at Gen Z marketing agency, Seed. “It taps into a broader resurgence of conservative style, where we’re seeing clean grooming, polos, pleated skirts, preppy collars, all paired with a quieter, more considered attitude,”
Be it a pleated skirt or a popped collar, these looks have cache on and off court – in fact, arriving to lunch sweaty in Tenniscore fashion might be the ultimate 2025 sartorial serve. “Our collaboration with A.P.C. showcases tennis not just as a sport but a lifestyle, bridging the gap between sportswear and everyday style,” says Camille Eberhard, director of apparel at Asics, whose new range includes tie-dye tracksuits and sleeveless activewear tees.
Sporty & Rich and Recreational Habits are the types of activewear brands capitalising on the trend, but the look has transcended the sports world. Gucci and Louis Vuitton have launched Tenniscore-inspired ranges, too.
“You’ll see it in the likes of Vogue,” says Jonathan Dowdell of Original Penguin Tennis & Padel. “The added benefit for the consumer is that they’re getting the benefits of sportswear, matched with stylish designs.”
Zendaya, Dua Lipa, Nicole Scherzinger and Bella Hadid have been photographed in Tenniscore looks, and last year The All England Lawn Tennis Club – AKA Wimbledon – saw a huge spike in sales of merchandise, with sales up 54 per cent year-on-year. Their activewear
range was historically made by sportswear-maker Babolat, but Wimbledon’s online store this year is teaming with pieces that can be worn while hitting balls or sinking buzzballs (that’s the latest trend of takeaway cocktail).
“We are tennis!” says Wimbledon’s creative operations lead Emily Adams when I ask what she thinks of all the brands now competing in their space. “If anything it’s just bolstering the trend, I don’t think it’s competition, particularly.”
Wimbledon’s new range for 2025 includes a tennis skirt purposefully designed not to be worn during tennis and an active wear t-shirt with colour-contrasted sleeves. Adams hopes the fancier jumpers will be thrown over the pleated activewear skirts. “I feel like this is the most relevant season I’ve designed,” she says. “Now I don’t know what I’m going to do next year!”
Look at images of Fred Perry on Centre Court taken in the 1930s like the one on the page opposite and it’s hard to argue there is a more classic or timeless sports fashion look. But why are Gen Z, people born between 1997 and 2012, suddenly looking to the past? One theory is that in an increasingly lonely and splintered society, where we’re all stuck to our phones, young people find historic visions of community appealing.
But it’s not just about Gen Z. While countless thinkpieces have been written about football fashion both on and off the field, by contrast, people are only just coming to terms with tennis fashion, reckons Millar, who says Tenniscore’s growth is also down to where brands see room for commercial opportunity. “Tennis is the last ‘ownable’ sport with space to grow,” she says. “Right now, tennis is cool because it hasn’t been fully claimed – but that’s changing fast.”
Look at images of Fred Perry on Centre Court in the 1930s and it’s hard to argue there is a more timeless sports fashion look
If you’re looking for something classically ‘Wimbledon’ that’s as fashionable off the court as it is functional on it, head straight to the official shop. The new collection blends performance-wear with chic styling to give a range like nothing the All England Club has released before. We love this pleated skort, which features under-shorts with upside-down pockets for your tennis balls.
US brand Recreational Habits was founded by Marlon and Jackie Skye Muller with the aim to bring the exclusive, preppy look to a more diverse audience. At north of $100 for a jumper, it does not come cheap but there’s wonderful tenniswear to be found here.
Sporty&Rich began life as an online mood board, then evolved into a print magazine, and now it sells original capsule collections to discerning buyers. Its tennis collection is retro and playful, with splashes of colour giving a 1980s vibe to the classic cream designs.
Take a long weekend like no other at this lovingly-restored Spanish manor in Menorca, which surprises at every turn, says JULIA KHAMISSA
Vestige Son Vell, a newly established boutique hotel in southwestern Menorca, captures the stately grandeur of an English country house but throws in a liberal helping of Spanish idiosyncracy, resulting in a property that has more than a dash of the
Alice in Wonderland to it.
The story of Son Vell began in the late 1700s, when a farmer transformed the abandoned farmhouse into a Palladianstyle villa. It was designed as a weekend retreat, where his daughters performed music and dance recitals. The grand residence fell into disrepair until it was purchased in 2019 and lovingly restored.
The manor has a soft, mischievous spirit, with design choices that feel both
Castile-inspired and contemporary. It’s the Mad Hatter’s tea party if you were to swap the tea for Rioja, the teacups for terracotta pots, and the cucumber sandwiches for slivers of jamón ibérico. It’s a vision concocted by the Cheshire Cat, if he ran a design studio in Madrid, full of muted velvet, monastic limewash walls and chandeliers strung like sugar-frosted garlands. l vestigecollection.com
Whether sailing it, swimming it or plunging it, the watchmakers of landlocked Switzerland are still exploring the limits of the big blue, says ALEX DOAK
Dubai’s Atlantis The Royal claims to be ‘the most ultraluxury experiential resort in the world’. JULIA KHAMISSA finds out what happens when opulence knows no limits
The phrase “Disneyland for adults” is thrown around to describe everything from Monaco to Miami, to certain Soho House outposts. At Atlantis The Royal, the 795-key mega-resort on Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah, the comparison actually holds up, except this time Mickey is wearing Balenciaga, and demanding tableside caviar bumps. This isn’t so much a hotel as a glitter-dusted pleasure dome engineered for maximum spectacle. It’s a place where you sip cocktails beside the world’s largest jellyfish aquarium, sample Heston Blumenthal’s “Meat Fruit”, stock up on Graff diamonds, and, if you’re a literal billionaire, sleep in the Royal Mansion, which at $100,000 a night is touted as the world’s most expensive hotel suite. It’s so over-the-top, it makes the Vegas Strip look like a National Trust tearoom in the Cotswolds.
There is no pretence of boutique cosiness here: Atlantis The Royal is all about scale is. This is maximalism turned up to 11. And nowhere is that more in evidence than in the food: it’s why I came, and why you should, too. With 17 restaurants, eight helmed by celebrity chefs, Atlantis The Royal is essentially a global tasting menu with hotel rooms attached.
Behind the landmark water and fire fountains where Beyoncé headlined the hotel’s launch, is the Middle East’s outpost of Milos, the acclaimed seafood-led Hellenic restaurant founded by Costas Spiliadis, the Greek visionary who opened the first Milos in Montréal in 1979. Now a $10m, family-owned global empire, Milos is the largest restaurant at Atlantis, with 220 covers, three private dining rooms and a dramatic chef’s table set inside the kitchen. It offers the kind of simple, ingredient-led cooking that’s quietly confident in a sea of pageantry.
The Milos Special arrives like a savoury haystack: paper-thin courgette and aubergine slices, lightly fried with saganaki cheese. They resemble Walker’s Ready
Salted and are dangerously addictive. Our waitress nudges us to try Fava Santorini: a velvety, lemon-kissed split pea stew, its creaminess enhanced by the crisp floral notes of Ktima Gerovassiliou’s Xinomavro Rosé.
At La Mar by Gastón Acurio, the pisco sours are sharp like frothy lime sherbet. Menu highlights include bluefin tuna ceviche with smoked yellow chili leche de tigre, a Peruvian classic with smoke and citrus dancing over cool buttery flesh. The Piqueo king crab sharing platter arrives in a gaudy plastic lobster, a fun, tasty build-your-own affair: crisp crab, lettuce cups and Nikkei glaze. And then there’s my favourite spot, Ling Ling, a pink, glossy, Pan-Asian restaurant that transforms into a nightclub when you’ve finished your robata and dim sum. The menu features one of the resort’s most audacious creations: The “24K Gold” specialty roll, a decadent seaweed duvet filled with lobster, bottarga, Hokkaido Wagyu, caviar, and – of course – edible gold.
Nobu by the Beach is a rare display of restraint. The brand’s debut pool and beach club is chic but a little unremarkable. You might momentarily forget where you are until you glance up at the hotel itself: a brutalist cascade of concrete Jenga blocks, rising 45 storeys and stretching the length of two Eiffel Towers laid end to end. You don’t fully grasp the scale and geometry until you’re lying poolside at Nobu or at the equally sleek (and equally sedate) Royal Pool. On the menu? Nobu classics like black cod miso and yellowtail sashimi, plus a surreal take on fish and chips, with both components sealed within the batter like some delicious Russian doll. It arrives alongside a Nobubranded coconut, naturally.
Atlantis The Royal boasts a total of 90 swimming pools, most of which belong to suites or private residences. The most talked about is Cloud 22. Perched on the 22nd floor, the Insta-famous infinity pool and lounge offers views of the Arabian Gulf, Palm Island and the Dubai skyline. A Dolce & Gabbana x Ounass collaboration blankets the space in blue-and-white majolica print: parasols, cushions, sunbeds, even floaties, alongside 110 giant hand-blown glass flowers.
It’s where Kendall Jenner launched her tequila brand. If it’s good enough for Kendall, then it’s good enough for me, and for Holly, a Liverpudlian day guest I befriended on a floating double sunbed, who seems impressed we are staying here. Holly gives us a wink of approval as we tuck into a girl dinner of Caesar salad and Diet Coke. Should you wish to reserve the twostorey Dulux cabana here, it will set you back £2,000 per day. I gave it a miss.
The hotel rooms themselves are modern, bright, but ultimately forgettable. But you don’t come to Atlantis The Royal to stay in your room. You come to be seen, to indulge, and to get £800 diamond facials. What you’re really paying for is access. And maybe a gold-plated toothbrush. Atlantis The Royal isn’t just a hotel. It’s a place where every detail is curated to overstimulate and hypnotise you until you forget what normal life looks like. It’s a high-octane fever dream for trust fund babies, glowing symmetrical people, and those with cast-iron pre-nups. Your neighbours might be royals, rappers, or a robot dog with a Tik Tok account.
Would I go back? Maybe. But would I sell my left arm for one more bite of caviar brioche? Absolutely.
l Rates at Atlantis The Royal start from £654 per room per night including breakfast at Gastronomy and based on two sharing. For more information visit atlantis.com/atlantis-the-royal
Los Angeles is the heartland of celebrity culture. While the idea of celeb spotting may seem passé to us Brits, ADAM BLOODWORTH finds it surprisingly profound basking in their collective glow
I’d pilgrimaged to Los Angeles as a celebrity nerd. As a queer kid growing up in suburban Britain, the idea of celebrity felt impossibly glamorous
Asea of aggressive power lunches are taking place on the terrace next to a swimming pool. I’m in the Tower Bar on Sunset Boulevard, which runs along the top of arc of mountains, making it feel like we’re high up on a rooftop when actually we’re on the ground floor.
It’s a perfect vision of Los Angeles, the city often accused of being one big optical illusion. Is anyone actually happy in those big houses? Is it really glamorous to work in the movies? Is it really paradise?
Certainly not for everyone: LA has one of the largest homeless populations in America and for the nearly four million Angelinos (that’s what they call the city’s people) life is often tough. The cost of living is high, with the average apartment rented out for north of two grand a month.
But no one is talking about that at the Tower Bar. I’m having lunch with a very excitable publicist who speaks so fast that his words are like a scarf pulled from a magician’s hat: you never know when it will end.
In his late-thirties, he has the perfect, beaming, day-glo smile you’d expect. Before I’d arrived, he’d noticed a comedian sitting at the table behind us, and had told her he loved her. Soon after she came to our table to tell us that she’d spent her lunch discussing famous people, too. “We’ve just been gossiping about all the celebrities we’ve seen!”
Over a Chinese chicken salad, he explained his rule about meeting celebrities. He will go over and say hello, tell them he admires their work, but never ask for autographs or selfies. A-List sightings and the commotion they cause are so common around here that it’s appropriate for these rules to be established.
Stan culture, where you openly admit you’re a huge fan of someone, isn’t embarrassing or shameful in Los Angeles. Even those who have ‘made it’ in one way or another still ogle celebrities in restaurants, an activity that in Britain would seem desperately uncool.
This cultural difference makes sense: public declarations of love are very American. One of the biggest differences between Brits and Americans is how Brits suppress themselves in public, whereas
Americans express themselves. I’ve always found the US attractive in that way: women shouting about how their booty looks on the sidewalk in broad daylight, people bowling over to you in bars to have a conversation. For an anxious Brit who –shock horror – finds it difficult to express how he feels, their openness and expression is addictive.
I’d assumed LA would be more snobbish, that those working within the world of entertainment like my lunch companion would be forced to play it cool. I was pleased to be proven wrong.
The overtness of stan culture in Los Angeles has birthed a whole world of experiences. The Ritz-Carlton and The Conrad are very posh LA hotels that both offer ‘A-List facials’ to help their wellheeled but anonymous guests feel famous. “You’ve had a red carpet facial, you’re just like a celebrity,” my beautician at The Ritz-Carlton tells me. These places are not tourist traps. Stars attending the Grammys had been in my chair at The Conrad earlier that same week, although my beautician refused to tell me whose face she’d been pummeling.
At Highly Likely on West Jefferson Blvd, I was lunching with Melissa, tourism representative for Discover Los Angeles. Like my lunch partner at Tower Bar, she moved here and took this job because she is an out-and-out stan who has followed celebrity culture all her life. Over ice tea and colourful brunch plates, we discussed how even celebrities themselves identify as stans: Billie Eilish, an LA local, has spoken about how being in Justin Bieber’s fandom in her teens helped her understand fan culture when it began changing her life.
I’d pilgrimaged to Los Angeles as a celebrity nerd. As a queer kid growing up in suburban Britain, the idea of celebrity felt impossibly glamorous and far removed from my own relatively mundane life. As a teenager I’d leave school and get the train to London to wait for actors at theatre stage doors and at film premieres. I took a photo with Tom Cruise on the Southbank, had a nice chat with Brad Pitt on a Soho backstreet, and got Clint Eastwood to wind down his car window to sign a photo. Getting close to them made me feel like I’d stepped through the bubble of my life into the fabulous world beyond.
I’m not alone. There’s a burgeoning
cohort of people who feel great when they get close to celebrities in new and weird ways. Ever since the internet was born, the line between celebrity and ordinary people has blurred. Outlets like TMZ have upped the ante when it comes to getting the story first in a world where anyone can publish from their phones.
The Instagram user joy.of.everything is an example of how online stan culture is intensifying in strange ways. Emmynominated producer Joe Andaloro simply bowls over to A-Listers, often at LAX airport, thrusts his phone in their face and starts asking questions. It’s interesting because his videos sit somewhere between journalism and paparazzi work, but most importantly they are pure distilled fandom. Look through his reels and you’ll find Aimee Lou Woods chatting about White Lotus, Ernie Hudson talking Toy Story 5 and William Shatner grudgingly opening up about his music career. A professional journalist, Andaloro is clearly delighted and emotional at the prospect of confronting his favourite stars. Is this unprofessional? Who knows?
Stan culture has certainly developed a habit for occasionally turning toxic. Chappell Roan has spoken out against “abusive” fans and Taylor Swift’s fans have sent bullying emails to writers who gave her music bad reviews. Ultimately, standing around outside LAX with a camera phone and sticking it in the face of 94-year-old William Shatner is just plain weird.
Talking of blurring the lines, Discover Los Angeles (essentially the LA tourist board) has whole sections of its website dedicated to where to go in the city to
spot celebrities, and which Hollywood Hills walks to do to be in with the highest chance of hiking with the high net worth. Would this fan approach fly in the UK? I doubt it: from my experience meeting celebrities in London, it’s rare to meet true fans, or at least people who will admit to being a true fan. Even film premieres in the UK are attended mostly by autograph collectors, some of whom sell the signatures and others who keep them as collectables.
One thing’s for sure: this new online content is making ‘traditional’ celebrity tourism look rather anachronistic. On a Starline celebrity bus tour, a company that has been running celebrity house tours for 90 years, our driver pointed out the spots where 1980s films were shot, but failed to acknowledge Sushi Park, the understated but much-hyped restaurant where Beyonce, Kendall Jenner and Justin Bieber have been dining of late.
You might presume all this pursuit of
stardom would make one miserable, that trying to ‘make it’ when you’re surrounded by success is bad for your mental health. But this wasn’t the experience I had. One of my Uber drivers told me about his own music career, yet seemed giddy with excitement over the people he picks up in his car. The maitre’d at the Tower Bar makes introductions between burgeoning actors and major film producers; he enjoys being able to do that as a side hustle within his job. I couldn’t help but think how unlikely such scenarios would be in Britain.
I’m not trying to bowdlerise the truth –I’m sure for plenty of triers, LA hasn’t spawned the opportunities they hoped. At an Oscars party I attended with Melissa, we had been given the promise of celebrity guest attendees. Hundreds lined up in their furs to get in, expensive tickets in hand, only to be told the party was at capacity and they’d have to wait outside. Rumours from within the building were that producers of one of the nominated short films were inside, but nobody you’d recognise. Perhaps the reality for many is spending a lot of money to get close to stardom, but ending up at the wrong party and queuing out in the street.
The reality for many is spending a lot of money to get close to stardom, but ending up at the wrong party and queuing out in the street
For me though, Los Angeles felt like a place where fandom thrives IRL, not just on the internet. Where the white picket fence ideal had been side-lined in favour of a different sort of self-fulfillment. One day, over lunch at the famous Beverly Hills Hotel, Lindsay Lohan walked past me with her dog, and half the restaurant excitedly turned to watch. Are the people in those big houses really happy? Who knows? But in Los Angeles, at least you might get the chance to ask them.
ADAM BLOODWORTH
But staying in the best hotels in the world has taught me what needs to change. City AM’s travel editor airs his grievances
Iknow, it’s not en vogue to brag, but I stay in the world’s nicest hotels for a living. Here’s the shocking thing: despite the £1k-a-night price tags, they often fail to do the very simplest of things to make your stay better. So, here is some constructive criticism from City AM’s travel editor.
1. MAKE CHECK-IN SUCK LESS
Why does check-in still involve standing in front of someone typing for ten minutes at a computer that looks like it’s from 2002? Why do they ask so many questions? No, I don’t need the hotel tour. Yes, I know where the lift is. Why are you asking for my email address when I booked with it? You already have my phone number. Aaahhhh!
2. ROOMS SHOULD HAVE A BATH
There is a heinous new trend for hotel rooms not having baths. It’s cheaper (and more water efficient) to put in one of those trendy ‘rainforest’ showers but the whole point of being in a posh hotel room is to feel the opposite of being in a rainforest. I want to be held, womb-like, in a porcelain chamber, like a cherubic infant with a penchant for Ruinart. Without a bath I’m forced to sit in bed like a teenager, which I quite like tbh, but anyway, give me a bath.
3. LIGHT SWITCHES SHOULD BE EASY!
I’m ashamed to admit the number of nights I’ve had to call reception to ask how to turn off the lights. The design is so unintuitive I sometimes question whether they’re doing it on purpose. If I’ve paid a grand for a hotel room, the last thing I want to do is stalk around the place like some weirdo trying to turn off the lights. I just want to sleep and now I’m covering mood lighting with socks.
4. THE SMALL ROOM IS BEST
Have you ever had a terrible night’s sleep in a hotel suite? Science says the bigger the room, the worse the kip we have. Our brains perceive a higher risk of threat if we sleep in bigger, less familiar spaces. When did you ever throw a lavish dinner party around the in-room dining table anyway? Never, that’s when. The lounge is just a sad, ghostly, perfectly upkept corner of your room that amounts to little more than a status symbol. Its addition means there are literal corridors to get to the bathroom. Scrap the suite.
5. NEVER GO TO THE SPIRIT TASTING
Never let anything eat into a beach day, especially not a spirit tasting run by the hotel bar. A superlative beach holiday should involve absolutely no activities at all. Anyone who says doing nothing is boring has no idea: doing nothing is the hardest thing in the world. So don’t go to the spirit tasting billed as a ‘fun’ 3pm freebie. No one needs hard liquid at that time in the afternoon. Plus, when a barman talks about spirits, you listen for ten or fifteen seconds, then stop, because brains can only absorb so much information about grains and distillation processes. Everyone just smacks their lips and says something about it tasting like ‘coffee’ or ‘chocolate’. There is nothing intellectually highbrow about this, go back to the beach.
6. BREAKFAST FINISHES AT 10.10
If breakfast ends at 10am, I get a thrill from getting out of bed at 9.42am, showering, dressing and being downstairs in seventeen-and-a-half minutes. This maximises my sleep and potentially helps me shake off my jetlag. I still deserve to have the full breakfast experience. Because I am on time (just).
l Adam is the deputy editor of City AM – The Magazine
Going racing in Hong Kong is an experience of a lifetime – but there is plenty more to do when visiting this buzzy city, as Ben Cleminson discovered
There aren’t many more vibrant cities in the world than Hong Kong – and if you’re a horse racing fan, a visit to the iconic Happy Valley Racecourse has to be pretty high up on your bucket list.
Opened in 1845 after horse racing was brought to Hong Kong by the British, it is the equivalent of plonking a racecourse in the middle of Canary Wharf, with a stunning backdrop of skyscrapers and an incredible party atmosphere.
Racing normally takes place on a Wednesday night, and you get a real mix
of locals and expats who head there in their droves after work. From the topclass hospitality in the grandstand to the bustling beer garden with live music in between races, and even an on-course McDonald’s and nightclub, it’s a racing experience like no other.
While the racing isn’t as high quality as the fare normally at Sha Tin on a Sunday, it is highly competitive stuff where the draw can have a big impact.
Plenty of former British and Irish horses now ply their trade in Hong Kong and the same is true of well-known jockeys like Harry Bentley and Andrea Atzeni, so there is always a sense of familiarity for British visitors.
The biggest meeting of the year in
Hong Kong is the Longines Hong Kong International Races, which takes place this year on Sunday 14th December at Sha Tin.
The Wednesday of that week sees the International Jockeys’ Championship where 12 of the world’s best jockeys take each other on in a four-race competition at Happy Valley. But it’s the action on Sunday that brings in the really huge crowds, with four Group One races, culminating in the £3.8million Hong Kong Cup, and normally a strong group of horses from Europe making the trip over.
More and more tourists are travelling to Hong Kong for big sporting events like the racing, golf and the historic Hong Kong Sevens, but while in town there are plenty of things to keep you occupied.
Get a tram or, if you’re feeling ambitious, hike your way up to the best view on the island, The Peak, also known as Victoria Peak.
While catching the tram, which became Asia’s first ever cable funicular when launched in 1888, is a classic way of getting to the top, reaching The Peak on foot is more rewarding.
Paths wind their way up right from the city centre, offering stop-offs on the way at various parks and gardens to help you catch your breath and wipe some sweat from the brow. Having burnt off a few calories on way up, The Peak is populated with top restaurants and its own shopping complex, Peak Galleria.
The view is outstanding in most conditions but try to pick a clear day to get the full picture of Hong Kong’s stunning and unique landscape, where skyscrapers populate a peninsula of tropical jungle.
Located 30 minutes north-west of the city and dubbed the ‘back garden of Hong Kong’ or the ‘Hawaii of Hong Kong’, Sai Kung is a hidden gem of countryside.
Along the sea front of Sai Kung Town, local fishermen sell their catch of the day and seafood restaurants offer freshly caught dishes and views of the harbour.
From the pier, you can go island hopping on a Kaito boat, which is like a small ferry service. The boat will take short stops to explore the likes of Sharps Island and Yim Tin Tsai – a must see for fans of arts and sculpture. If you’re feeling peckish on return, the Sai Kung Café Bakery offers just about the best pineapple buns in town!
Another place to get away from the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong is Stanley, a coastal town on a peninsula which has a couple of lovely sandy beaches, plenty of bars and restaurants, and the famous Stanley Market. It will only take you around 20-30 minutes in a taxi from central Hong Kong and it has a really nice, relaxing vibe. Stanley Main Beach is popular with windsurfers and has a variety of other water sports, while it also stages the annual Stanley Dragon Boat Championships every June.
One thing you won’t struggle for in Hong Kong is finding good bars and restaurants –particularly in the lively Central area. If you want to dance the night away, Lan Kwai Fong is the famous street where the party carries on until the early hours, but for food you can’t go wrong with a couple of restaurants in the Black Sheep Restaurants family.
The intriguingly named Ho Lee Fook (holeefook.com.hk) is a city institution with
If you want to dance the night away, Lan Kwai Fong is the famous street where the party carries on until the early hours
its modern take on traditional Cantonese classics. Prawn toast to die for and an extensive list of local Chinese wines!
And just a few hundred yards up Elgin Street and over the road is Chôm Chôm (chomchom.com.hk), a cosy and buzzy
restaurant serving delicious Vietnamese small plates and moreish cocktails.
GET A SUIT AT THE TAILOR TO THE STARS
Hong Kong is famous for its tailors but none more so than the legendary Sam’s Tailor (samstailor.com) in Kowloon. Set up in 1957, it has made top quality suits for A-list film stars, sporting icons and world leaders, with photos of these celebrities adorning the walls of their shop on Nathan Road in Kowloon.
You can even have a Sam’s Tailorbranded craft beer while being sized up for your suit. Father and son owners Manu and Roshan Melwani also have a strong racing connection, through their horse Karma who won the HKJC 140th Anniversary Cup last October. When heading over to Kowloon make sure you take the famous Star Ferry from Wan Chai which offers the most incredible views of Hong Kong Harbour.
Opposite: The Longines Hong Kong International Races, which takes place this year on Sunday 14th December at Sha Tin (picture by A Evers); Above: Stanley is a coastal town on a peninsula that has lovely sandy beaches and plenty of bars and restaurants; Right: The interior of Central restaurant Ho Lee Fook, one of the most exciting dining options in the city
Porto Zante in Zakynthos, Greece is billed as the ultimate CEO escape. So we sent our CEO HARRY OWEN to put the hotel-villa concept through its paces
We have plenty of talented journalists at City AM to tackle foreign travel stories. But we only have one person qualified to discover if Porto Zante is, as claimed, the ultimate CEO retreat. As the only CEO available at the time of writing, the assignment fell to me.
So I dusted off my notebook, roped in my wife and seven-year-old daughter (two other daughters were left behind studying for exams) and set off for Zakynthos, wondering what exactly makes somewhere a C-Suite escape.
This was new territory for us. Our family holidays tend to be classic ‘we-livein-west-London’ destinations: a week in Cornwall or a self-catering villa in France or Italy. We’ve never experienced a part-villa, part-hotel hybrid concept and I had no time to do any homework for this trip. Thankfully I received a personal itinerary: a nice touch, especially for someone entirely reliant on my executive assistant Linda.
The first sense of what Porto Zante has to offer comes as you drive through two monumental wooden gates, then pass a security chamber, before ferrying through a second set of 15ft doors. These open onto a courtyard filled with lush bougainvillea, swaying palms and a lineup of staff
offering flutes of chilled champagne. It feels like walking into an episode of The Night Manager – I was half expecting Corky and Sandy to come round the corner yelling expletives at us.
‘This place is insane’, I messaged our editor Steve Dinneen, a man who knows his way around a luxury resort. Even he agreed this looked next level.
The Night Manager was set on a private Mallorcan island, La Fortaleza, a sprawling complex of villas and pools in which the characters could lounge and plot. By contrast, Porto Zante’s villas are arranged amphitheatrically, each with its own pool, garden and uninterrupted Ionian sea views. It’s a masterpiece of privacy and precision, ensuring each villa is a sanctuary, albeit one with a world-class hotel quietly operating around you.
Strolling through communal areas broken up by stunning Turkish carpets, and mature gardens full of wildlife, we arrived at our villa. Perched just above the main restaurants, it has nearly 1,300 square feet of interior space flowing seamlessly into an outdoor living area. There’s a saltwater pool, sunken daybeds, a shaded dining terrace and drop-down privacy blinds. The details are extraordinary: MASA Italian linens, Christofle cutlery, Bulgari toiletries, Bernardaud porcelain, branded sunhats. Even the sun towels were satisfyingly weighty Ralph Lauren (so good I bought
some to take home).
There was a Bose sound system, an iMac – a welcome respite from burying my head in a laptop during those unavoidable moments of work – and 34 different mini-bar options (I counted). My daughter received two plush teddy bears on arrival. The TV was tuned to the BBC on mute – a subtle nod to the British guests.
Porto Zante’s staff-to-guests ratio at high season is two-to-one but this was week two of the season so it was closer to three-to-one, a ratio that felt almost presidential. I’d met Porto Zante’s founder, John Sotirakos, a few weeks earlier in London. He told me how the resort was founded as a family project and evolved into Greece’s first true luxury-villa-with-hotel-services concept. It’s been part of the prestigious Small Luxury Hotels of the World portfolio since 2012 and last year it posted an occupancy of 95 per cent. Nearly 60 per cent of guests return within three years. Any CEO would be envious of numbers like those. When I asked Sotirakos how he managed that, his answer was simple: “Warm hospitality, and a team crazy with the detail.” He wasn’t exaggerating. Within three hours, Porto Zante’s 70-strong team seemed like old friends. They spoke to us with an easy charm that never felt scripted or performative. They knew what we liked to drink, what time we’d take a family stroll, that my daughter loves chips with ketchup. When I met Sotirakos again in Zakynthos, I asked what it took to get a job at Porto Zante: “We are looking for great hearts – it’s easy to find staff, but hard to find the right ones”.
Upon arrival we were briefed about The Hotline: “Dial 300 for anything you need”, from anywhere in the resort. The first time you call this line, it’s slightly embarrassing. But as a CEO who often relies on calling the aforementioned Linda, ‘dialling 300’ soon became remarkably easy. Latebreakfast, non-alcoholic beer, ham-andcheese toasties, cocktails, dinner reservations, spa bookings, cash transfers – we soon overcame any anxiety. After dialling 300, staff would often emerge through a hidden door that mysteriously opened in the garden. This felt less like The Night Manager and more the Ocean Club in the Bahamas from James Bond adventure Casino Royale. Waiters appeared carrying drinks and plates of Greek meze. Cleaning staff would flit in and out without us catching sight of them. Fresh water, chocolates and an itinerary for the next day’s children’s activities would discreetly appear next to our beds. And talking of beds, as we walked to dinner on the first night, I remarked to my wife that it looked like we’d be sharing the double with our daughter. But lo and behold, when we returned from dinner, a bed had magically appeared, perfect for a little girl, her jim-jams neatly folded, teddy and book carefully placed on her pillow.
The Square Mile is full of quality restaurants and in my humble C-suite role, I am forced to dine out in many of them (I also spent time working for both M Restaurant and Boisdale). So I can confidently say that Porto Zante is providing a seriously high-end food and drink experience.
Breakfast was served in-villa each morning by a four-strong team: pastries, crepes, omelettes, fresh juices, croissants and plenty of Greek yoghurt – everything you’d expect, but elevated. Lunch and dinner options range from fresh sea bass to wagyu steak, bouillabaisse and perfectly
For those who strive for excellence in their chosen field, it’s easy to recognise the same qualities in another team
crisp fries. The in-dining menu is available 24-hours a day and features lots of traditional Greek appetizers –kalamarakia, garides saganaki, ntakos, Greek salads, plus more substantial dishes including lobster and souvlaki skewers.
There are two restaurants: The Club House, offering refined Greek and Mediterranean dining; and Maya, a Japanese fusion experience offering an eight-course omakase menu. We were welcomed onto The Clubhouse terrace by Vasilis, the charming, knowledgeable and very funny restaurant manager (when asked how I should refer to him in this article, he quickly replied “the handsome one”).
We enjoyed gazpacho followed by beetroot salad, saffron risotto with scallops, and finally a magnificent profiterole dessert. The head chef even popped out seeking feedback on the gazpacho – excellent! – as it was the dish’s first outing, while bar manager Giorgos guided us through an impressive nonalcoholic cocktail list and an even more formidable top-shelf spirits selection. Maya is a different beast altogether, an intimate restaurant whose dining room was overseen by Filipino designer Kenneth Cobonpue, known for his work with the Nobu franchise using natural materials. The Ionian sea fills the vista from the Maya terrace and the menu is
appropriately focused on the high quality fish available at Porto Zante’s front door. The omakase experience consists of eight dishes, the stand-out being the maya roll (tempura prawn, salmon, avocado, teriyaki and garlic mayo), which is the best sushi I’ve ever tasted. Vasilis even persuaded me to try an oyster: “Are you allergic or scared? Because if you are allergic, we take this away now – but if you are scared, there is no better place to try the freshest, most beautiful oyster you will ever have in your life.” He was right.
On our last night we remained in the confines of our villa for dinner for the taste of Greek meze menu, happily settling into our silver-service meal brought to us in our pyjamas. Seven courses followed, including Greek dips with fava, tyrokauteri, tzatziki and pitta, kolokythokeftedes (grated courgettes with cheese and eggs, shaped
into balls with a lemon yogurt dip), feta saganaki, melitzanes papoutsakia (aubergine filled with feta and Béchamel) and finally loukoumades (deliciously fluffy pastry and honey balls). Greek balls won the night, both savoury and sweet.
One day we arranged a three hour boat charter. The Dione – goddess of love and fertility – arrived at the private jetty to propel us across waters as still as a millpond, with plenty of time to stop for lunch (prepared by the Porto Zante team, naturally) and a swim. The island is famous for its caretta-caretta, the sea turtles of Zakynthos. After some searching, one suddenly appeared, popping its head out of the water meters from the bow of the boat. Given everything I’d experienced thus far, it would have been a surprise if there
wasn’t an award winning spa. There is, of course, introduced in 2015 and offering a range of massages, treatments, pedicures, manicures and even catering for ‘Little Guests’, who could join in with a ‘cucumber eye hydration and scalp massage’.
Hailing from South Africa, spa manager Artemis is a reminder that Porto Zante hires the very best people for these specialist roles. My wife described her treatment as “heaven”, spending an hour in the glass-fronted spa overlooking the sea. Her treatment included the Porto Zante Signature Massage Experience, with some modifications (Artemis wanted to “check her energy” and presumably work around that). I was content to read a book and let them get on with it.
The kids’ club was run by Valentina and Marianna, two lovely ladies who scooped up our daughter every day – not all day! – to play games, make pottery and design T-Shirts. Each ‘Little Guests’ daily itinerary had its own theme and a series of activities. Super-Hero Wednesday included cape-making, code-names, superpowers and culminated in a ‘laser battle’. My wife, a primary school teacher, was impressed by the ‘sequencing’ (a teacher term) and how interactive the sessions were. If you’re travelling with children, Porto Zante doesn’t just accommodate – it celebrates. When we left the villa, our daughter, entirely unprompted, ran straight across and gave the Kids Club team huge hugs. I almost lost it thinking about all the core memories this trip was giving her.
It would be remiss not to mention the private beach, where we spent a glorious morning trying out canoes, paddle boards and a mini jet-ski, which our daughter piloted around the beach-cove. But it’s the quieter moments that really define Porto Zante and make it a true CEO retreat.
Like many people tasked with running a company, I often find it hard to relax. But in just one day I found myself poolside, engrossed in a great book (The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis – highly recommended), sipping a grapefruit soda, without a care in the world. My wife – radiant after her spa treatment – said she’d never seen me so relaxed on a short break.
As Sotirakos puts it: “When you build a guest’s routine, that’s when they start relaxing.” Porto Zante seamlessly builds this rhythm. It pre-empts your needs, pampers without being pretentious, and leaves you feeling like you’re part of a very exclusive club.
For those who strive for excellence in their chosen field, it’s easy to recognise the same qualities in another team at the top of its game. And for high-performing execs in need of a genuine reset, Porto Zante isn’t just another 5-star resort: it’s the benchmark.
l Porto Zante offers 5-star luxury villas in Zakynthos with rates starting from £2,000 per night for a one-bedroom. All Villas come with private pools and prices are dependent upon season. For more info go to portozante.com
The locals may hate those of us who turn up in the summer with our yoga mats and Big Green Egg barbecues. ADAM HAY-NICHOLLS gives them something to really complain about as he revs his £400k Ferrari through sleepy St Mawes
Ah, Cornwall, the second home capital of England. Of course, the locals loathe the incoming hoards from West London and the home counties, breezing in for a few sunny weeks of the year with their 4x4s, yoga mats and Big Green Egg barbecues. Following the G7 summit held in Carbis Bay in 2021, an especially bright spotlight was shone on Kernow’s natural delights: its pirate coves and rugged cliffs and bucolic fishing villages. Everybody wanted to escape to the South West.
But the natives weren’t having it. Holiday home owner Gordon Ramsey was grassed up for flouting Covid rules. He, in turn, said he “can’t stand” the Cornish. In order to battle rising property prices, which has inflamed the rich-poor divide, Cornwall has doubled council taxes on second homes and holiday lets. As a result, many blow-ins are selling up and heading to Spain (a locale in which they are only marginally more welcome).
Which brings me to the Ferrari Purosangue. If the Cornish thought they’d seen the back of obnoxious SUVs DFL (Down From London), I ensured they got an earful of the loudest and most outré high-riding supercar in the business. But rather than further infuriate them by pitching up at a Ramsay-style Airbnb palace, I checked into the county’s most buzzworthy hotel, The Idle Rocks in St Mawes.
The Idle Rocks is owned by one of Britain’s foremost motor racing entrepreneurs, David Richards CBE, the founder of Prodrive, a racing organisation and engineering group most famous for taking Subaru to multiple World Rally Championship victories. He has been a Formula One team principal, he’s been the
boss of Aston Martin, and he currently chairs the governing body of UK motorsport.
As for Ferrari, Prodrive engineered the 550 Maranello that won the GTS category at the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2003. Richards actually lobbied for Prodrive to build some limited-edition GTS customer cars, but Ferrari refused. To be a Ferrari, it has to be built in Maranello, not Banbury. The car I’m driving west down the 303 and A30 is the right shade of red and hails from that hallowed production line. Purosangue – pronounced puro-sang-way – is Italian for ‘pure blood’, or thoroughbred. It’s a clever name, not least because it’s designed to wind up the Ferraristi who think it’s sacrilegious for the prancing horse shield to appear on a high-sided vehicle.
My destination, St Mawes, sits on southern Cornwall’s lush Roseland Peninsula at the mouth of the Percuil River. Unlike Padstow and St Ives, it has managed to escape overtourism. Boats bob in its tiny harbour, while hardy souls pad across the cobbles wrapped in towels, shivering from a wild swim. Today is grey and very wet, causing the sea and the sky to merge with barely a line on the horizon. The Ferrari would stand out anywhere, but it’s especially vibrant and otherworldly against this backdrop of rock pools, whitewashed fishermen’s cottages and thatched houses.
The Edwardian Idle Rocks sits prominently on the waterfront and has long been favoured by both artists and the yachting crowd. From the outside you don’t even have to squint to be transported back a century, when Man Ray and Max Ernst would visit. During the war, St Mawes was marketed as Britain’s answer to St Tropez. David and his wife Karen bought The Idle Rocks in 2010 and relaunched it to coincide with its centenary after a head-to-toe renovation. Karen was
responsible for the interior design, which is in the New England beach-style: fresh, youthful and benefiting from the building’s natural light. Neutrals, blues and greys dominate, with pops of coral red and starfish orange. Driftwood sculptures abound, adding to the feeling of barefoot luxury.
It’s shoulder season, and the cosy log fire is burning. The kitchen’s focus is seafood, with local oysters, crab, cod and octopus starring on the menu. The view from the terrace and the bedrooms above is spectacular, even under tungsten clouds when the windows are being battered by sideways rain. These are the murky conditions under which one can imagine smugglers coming ashore. For those who wish to start their own rum-running operation, the hotel offers sailing lessons. At night, multicoloured bulbs strewn along the harbourfront illuminate, offering a safe embrace to sailors through the mist.
Ideally you’d come to St Mawes and not return to your car for the length of your stay. But when your car is a naturally-aspirated V12 Ferrari, and you’ve only got it for the weekend, you’d be a fool to spend too much time in the village queueing for a pasty and staring out to sea. Let’s deal with the question at hand: yes, this is a true Ferrari. It has a lot more in common with a hypercar than it does a Range Rover. Unlike the Lamborghini Urus, which is essentially an Audi Q7 with a bull badge, the Purosangue lives up to its name with its undiluted DNA. It’s also a lot more exclusive. Ferrari won’t reveal how many of these they’re building, but each Purosangue has a base price of over £360,000, and you can add an extra 20 per cent on top for what the average customer spends on customisation. It works out at about double the price of the Lambo.
For that, you get four seats and rear-hinged suicide doors at the rear, all-wheel-drive, and more boot space than has ever been conscionable in a Ferrari before. And, most importantly, the engine is a masterpiece, evolved from that of the storied Ferrari Enzo in the
early noughties. Mounted mid-front for perfect weight distribution, it absolutely roars with 715bhp – 74 more than the Enzo). Other road users are swatted away like flies with even the smallest gap in which to overtake. Zero to 60mph takes under 3.3s and the top speed lies beyond 193mph. The smoothness and precision of its handling – aided by active suspension and rear-wheel-steer – blows anything else of this shape into the weeds.
A more sensible choice might be the Aston Martin DBX, which is almost as powerful and no slouch in the corners. And at £190,000, it would represent a considerable saving. It would also earn you brownie points at The Idle Rocks, given the Richards’ preference for the marque (David is particularly proud of his dark blue DB6 Volante, just like the King’s). But despite its enormous talent, the DBX doesn’t provoke double-takes in the same way. The Purosangue is just the right parts aggressive and elegant; well proportioned; innovative in its aero without being nerdy; and, crucially, masking its girth so that it looks lissom and genuinely athletic. There are familial nods to other cars in the Maranello line-up: the SF90 at the front, the 296 at the rear, references to the iconic Daytona of the late 1960s and early 70s, and a vaguely Berlinetta shape. This was one of the most high-wire automotive briefs of the last half-century, and Ferrari have nailed it.
This is a supercar with added practicality, not a steroid-injected luxe load-lugger. Even if you took the prancing horse badges off, I’ll say this: it looks like a Ferrari, sounds like a Ferrari and goes like a Ferrari. Anyone with hot blood in their veins dreams of driving a Ferrari and, given that everyone wants an SUV these days, the Purosangue is, quite simply, the most desirable car in the world. Down here, tourists are tarred with the word ‘emmets’, the Cornish word for ants. If that’s the case, the Purosangue is the undisputed queen.
l To book The Idle Rocks go to idlerocks.com
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Far more than ‘the morbid pages at the back’, obituaries are a reflection of the modern world that are forever evolving.
CHRIS DORRELL examines these celebrations of life – and death
To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity,” the philosopher Alain de Botton once said. Clearly Mr de Botton didn’t make it to the obituary pages very often.
Every day newspapers devote a few pages to covering the lives of interesting and eccentric characters. They are a testament not to the roar of humanity, but the satisfied purr of a life well-lived.
Last month, Amanda Fielding, the “crackpot countess” who studied the benefits of LSD, appeared in The Times alongside Robert Shapiro, a Monsanto chief executive who invented the sweetener for Diet Coke. The only connection between them was a love of synthetic substances. The Telegraph made space for Luigi Alva, a Peruvian oil executive-turned-opera singer, as well as Clive Birch, the man credited with reinvigorating British local history.
In those four lives there’s an immense sweep of human experience, condensed into a handful of pithy
anecdotes and biting one-liners. Ironically, it is often the obituaries section which is the most life-affirming part of a newspaper. This was not always the case: for much of the 20th century, obituaries were a dead zone in British newspapers, so to speak.
The scene was dominated by The Times, whose obituary pages featured a succession of aristocrats, generals, bishops and politicians. The stories were often perfunctory, simply listing the deceased’s honours and achievements. “For much of the century they were basically extended society notices,” says Dennis Duncan, an associate professor of English at UCL.
It all started to change in the 1980s, when Hugh Massingberd at The Telegraph and James Fergusson at The Independent began experimenting with new kinds of obituaries. They broadened the cast of characters who might appear in a typical obituaries page, seeking to make the stories more interesting. From this starting point, however, they then took different approaches. The Independent sought to “open up and demystify the obituary”, according to Fergusson, while The Telegraph set out to “subvert
the traditional obituary from within”.
Under Fergusson’s editorship, obituaries in The Independent would appear with bylines. He also got subject matter experts – or “people who knew what they were talking about” – to write pieces, a move that can be unnerving for journalists. The Telegraph’s obituaries remained unsigned, but Massingberd turned them into brief character sketches, full of revealing anecdotes and thinly-veiled euphemisms.
As Fergusson wrote: “Once upon a time the activities of a deplorable peer would have been so downplayed by The Times that only a professional code-breaker with the wind behind him could have spotted
In 1999 an obit for Dave Swarbrick, a member of the folk band Fairpoint Convention, appeared in the Telegraph. He lived another 17 years
them; now The Telegraph treated them so rumbustiously that the obituary could seem like an elaborate practical joke”.
The Earl of Carnarvon, for example, was described as a “relentless raconteur and most uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man”. And while the painter Adrian Daintrey may often have looked “faintly bemused and bewildered”, we are told “his interest in the fairer sex, wine and cigars remained undiminished to the end”.
Euphemism is still very much in vogue among obituary writers. “If I say ‘generous with his affections’, it could mean he was a top shagger,” says freelance obituary writer Tim Bullamore. “‘Never knowingly left his own county’ could mean they were enormously dull. Someone who was ‘not burdened with self-doubt’ might be extremely arrogant…” The list goes on. However, the phrase ‘he never married’ – once used as code for gay – has largely been dropped.
Being in some way ‘interesting’ is now the only necessary qualification for someone to deserve an obituary. In fact, while being dead is strongly encouraged, it is not always required. In 1999, Dave Swarbrick, a member of the folk band Fairpoint Convention, appeared in The Telegraph’s obituary pages. It soon transpired that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated.
Swarbrick saw the piece as he recovered from emphysema in a hospital bed in Coventry. “He read the obituary and didn’t quarrel with any of the spellings or the facts, apart from the obvious one,” his wife said. Swarbrick
lived for another 17 years, and would sometimes sell signed copies of his obituary at his gigs.
Andrew Brown, The Telegraph’s current obituaries editor, said the team was doubly cautious to prevent another premature obituary. “We always try to get more than one person confirming the death. It is always a bit spooky to just have one person,” he said.
But sometimes it is not possible to find an extra source. Brown said he was writing an obituary for a famous author one quiet Sunday, with the only confirmation of death coming from the author’s executor.
“Are you sure he’s dead?” Brown asked sheepishly. “Well, I’m standing in his house looking at his coffin, so I’m fairly sure,” came the reply.
Although it is rare for an obituary to be published before someone’s death, major newspapers have thousands of obits stored away, should the moment arise. These storehouses are known as ‘the morgue’. Important politicians, 27-year old musicians and ageing celebrities are all likely to have obits ready for action. Inevitably, sometimes they have to be changed to reflect new information. ”I’ve had to rewrite Zelensky’s about three times,” says Bullamore.
But the storehouses are a vital hedge against the need for speed in a digital age. Like all forms of journalism, getting a story up fast is crucial. A big obituary can attract a lot of attention.
If an obituary is prewritten, there is
also scope for the subject to contribute to it. Bullamore said he occasionally travels around the country for interviews specifically with an obituary in mind. These face-to-face meetings can add crucial details to a piece,
bringing the character to life. Bullamore describes how he went to interview Sir Colin Davis, a famous composer, for his obituary. “He sat there doing his knitting and smoking his pipe… All through the recording you could just hear the clink of his needles. And when I stood up, I saw he had a full-length skeleton behind him. ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘Just a reminder’, he replied.”
While prewritten obituaries are stored in the morgue, post-mortem obits are known as ‘live copy’. Obviously it is difficult for the subject themselves to contribute to these pieces, so writers often seek out their families.
Although this sounds like it might be awkward, Brown said that in his experience, the family often enjoyed telling stories about their loved ones in the prime of life. They can also be indiscreet: “Grieving widows tell you the unvarnished truth,” Bullamore says.
One thing that does not get much space in British obituaries is the cause of death. Usually, if it appears at all, it gets at most a line. The Telegraph briefly experimented with including more details, but this was abandoned after a jazz musician died from an exploding penile implant. Not a good breakfast read.
Most obituary writers insist that it is, for the most part, not a morbid profession. Obituaries, Fergusson says, are “celebrations for the most part, of small lives, lives well lived, the lives not of the great… but of people in most ways, except maybe one, much like us”.
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez has a posthumous novel out. ANNA MOLONEY asks what that means for literature
It’s “an act of betrayal”, acknowledge Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s own sons Rodrigo and Gonzalo in the book’s preface. “We decided to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations. If they are delighted, it’s possible Gabo might forgive us. In that we trust.”
Rodrigo and Gonzalo need seek forgiveness because their father was unequivocal on his intentions for Until August: “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” Yet 10 years after Gabriel’s death, packed up in pink and red technicolour, Until August is now available in all good bookstores.
Posthumous publication is a fraught
matter. It is by no means new – Samuel Pepys’s diaries and two of Jane Austen’s novels would be lost to us without it – but in today’s age of hyper commercialisation, people as brands, and parasocial relationships between consumer and creator, it appears to be happening more often and more quickly than ever.
Just this year, a largely unedited collection of 46 of Joan Didion’s diary entries, written in reflection of her psychiatry sessions and addressed explicitly to her husband, were published despite Didion’s known disapproval for publishing houses determined to release “every last scrap of a famous author’s work”. Meanwhile, in November, John Le Carre’s son Nick Harkaway published Karla’s Choice: A John
Le Carre Novel featuring George Smiley, the most famous character from his father’s novels, with the justification that his father had requested his sons help keep his legacy alive. In the coming autumn, The Land of Sweet Forever, a collection of stories by the late Harper Lee, will be published. Her last book, Go Set a Watchman, published seven months before her death, caused controversy concerning whether Lee, who had previously stated she would never release another novel after To Kill a Mockingbird, had had proper control over the decision.
Gabriel’s sons’ preface to Until August is provocative in its frankness of its betrayal in a way I imagine is supposed to prompt approval, as if confession were absolution. Unfortunately, even were we to judge righteousness by their own metric – the pleasure of readers – the novel falls short, having received only middling reviews. It’s marketed as a “lost novel”, but this is in bad faith: after writing five versions and being satisfied with none of them, Gabo concluded that “sometimes books need to be left to rest”.
Its publication comes after the death of Gabriel’s widow Mercedes Barcha in 2020, while also following the release of the Netflix adaption of One Hundred Years of Solitude, on which Gabriel’s sons serve as executive producers despite Gabriel’s belief the screen could never do his novel justice. Indeed, it is the power of literature at the very word level that makes the publishing of unfinished works so tiresome; it doesn’t matter if the raw material was there, editing is an important and – crucially –collaborative process.
A good editor has the power to turn a book from good to great. There is force in the editorial process, the back and forth between two people who fully believe a single word can matter.
“What editors do for writers is mysterious, and does not, contrary to general belief, have much to do with titles and sentences and ‘changes.’ The relationship between an editor and a writer is much subtler and deeper than that,” Didion wrote in an essay on her own editor. The editor gives the author “the image of self that enable[s] the writer to sit down alone and do it.” In other words, is it the relationship between writer and editor that allows for good writing, and that process is alive
In the editor’s note to Until August, Cristóbal Pera reflects that “the relationship between an author and editor is a pact of trust based on respect”. In the same text he writes how Gabriel was “very protective of his writing in progress”.
It is perhaps ironic then that Until August is largely a book about how we honour the dead. After following the middle years of Ana, who takes a trip every year to the island on which her mother is buried, the novel ends with Ana carrying out a startling defiance of her mother’s wishes. She is resolute that her mother would understand. It’s unclear whether we’re meant to agree.
In the year 2025, using ChatGPT to write about ChatGPT has already become a cliche. But Vauhini Vara may have been the first. In 2020, having previously shadowed Open AI CEO Sam Altman for a tech profile, Vara asked him if she could try out the new text generator they were then testing: GPT-3. Using this Vara wrote Ghosts, an essay that alternates between text written herself and by the LLM. The subject? The only one she could never find words for: her sister’s death from cancer. When the essay went viral, Vara was somewhat conflicted, unsure if she really wanted to be a collaborator with such technology.
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, is a book that includes Vara’s viral essay within a collection of other experimental texts, which either use or are inspired by tech. Some are her conversations with ChatGPT about the book itself. One is just her Google search history, which, like the cetology chapters in Moby Dick, is more interesting in point than it is to actually read. Neither a tech evangelist nor pure adversary, Vara is interesting for her contradictions. She criticises the mechanisms behind much of Big Tech while also giving concessions. She writes how Google CEO Sundar Pichai, for example, is not given enough credit for his point that people actually retain control over many aspects of how their information is collected and used by the company.
By far Vara’s bravest admission in Searches, however, in method and statement, is that AI can actually produce good prose. “After Ghosts came out, some readers told me it had persuaded them that computers wouldn’t replace us anytime soon, arguing that the lines I’d written were much better than AI-generated ones… The complicating factor, for me, was that I disagreed. In my opinion, GPT-3 had produced the best lines in Ghosts.”
Vara pinpoints a particular line written by the AI in which her sister holds her hand, something she admits was a complete invention. “My sister and I were never so sentimental… It was a kind of wish fulfilment.” In this admission, Vara reminds us that any significance produced by AI is ultimately human.
The average cost of a wedding is around £23,000, so it’s no surprise that we all act a little differently at them. Depending on our temperament, and perhaps how much money we ourselves have been forced to fork out to attend them, weddings can bring out the very best or the very worst in us.
Either way, our Wedding Guest version of ourselves is usually at least a little different from our normal persona. Perhaps they are kinder, perhaps they are drunker, perhaps they wear florals and say sentimental things their non-wedding counterpart would never. I for one love a wedding, but have certainly been caught grumbling at what can feel like the selfishness of their extravagance and imposition on others.
The premise of The Wedding People is unusual: 40-something-year-old divorcee Phoebe has checked into aspirational Rhode Island hotel in order to kill herself, but finds her attempt immediately thwarted amidst a wedding party. She has been stopped not by a concerned relative, nor dutiful staff member, nor even the discovery of a will to live. No. Phoebe is stopped by Lila, the uppity bride due to be married at the hotel, who is resolute she will not have a dead woman ruin it. It’s this premise, in its jarring combination of grit and airiness, that makes The Wedding People so compelling.
Through Lila, Espach unpacks the bridezilla trope with care and humour, making an unlikely defence for the much villainised archetype. To do so Espach invokes Mrs Dalloway, a novel which, on a basic level, is about planning a party. “It is so easy to hate Mrs Dalloway for worrying so much about her stupid party, the way it’s so easy to hate the bride,” Phoebe muses. “But in the end, everybody goes to the party and that’s the point... If the problem is loneliness, then in this way, and maybe only in this way, Mrs Dalloway is the hero for giving everybody a place to be.”
If you’re feeling grouchy as wedding season approaches, may I recommend you read this on your ever-so-inconvenient journey there.
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Each issue we ask a photographer to talk about their favourite frame. This edition KRISTOFFER AXÉN
This incredible shot is from Kristoffer Axén, one of the artists nominated for the Photo London Nikon emerging photographer award. The Stockholm-born photographer was initially drawn to film but soon found he perferred the solitary nature of photography – something that is perfectly
encapsulated in this striking image, part of a wider series exploring the elegiac beauty found in life’s quieter moments.
Axén’s photography has a painterly quality, blurring the lines between the real and the imagined, allowing the viewer to project their own narrative onto the scene. In The Visitor an old Volvo idles in a
darkened green space, its headlights barely penetrating the gloom. There’s something homely and nostalgic about the picture, underpinned by a feeling of unease – or, as Axén puts it, “a cold and ominous tone collaborates with the restful and contemplative”. The result is both beautiful and haunting.
