Elemental Head

If you are walking up the stretch of Piccadilly from Green Park tube station to the Anteros statue, you are likely to go past One Eagle Place without noticing it. After all, you are in one of the world’s great city streets. Such is the brand name oversupply competing for your eyeline that you have …

Domine dirige nos Part II

The Macmillan dictionary’s website has a blog entry describing the origins of the word unprecedented. Since its first use in the mid-17th century, it featured rarely in common speech because the noun from which it was formed, precedent, was a legal term. But like Tolkien’s ring, unprecedented waited patiently. Until two years ago, when it …

De Blob

After months of London outings, Building an Appetite was ripe for its first international edition. Holiday and hobby converged over a few days in Eindhoven, where the Philips legacy runs deep even though the company has moved most manufacturing out of the city. Strijp-S is the site of former factories now re-purposed as a residential …

Deutsche Schule London

My insider knowledge as a borough resident took a beating this week. I knew there was more to Ham than just Georgian stately homes, thanks to an injection of modern housing in the 50s and 60s. But a listed estate off Ham Parade hiding in plain sight all these years? How could I have missed …

Cabbage, Gan-Gan, Gary

I don’t know what to make of the Elizabeth Line line. I could start with the redundant name, already called out by my irritated spell checker seconds after I have just typed it. I could get excited about the newfound access to Shenfield, a town previously not in my travel plans. I could point out …

Penguin Donkey

Now halfway through Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre, I’ve had no reason to disagree with the book’s subtitle – the true story of WW2’s most extraordinary spy. Born into an affluent, intellectual German-Jewish family in Berlin, Ursula Kuczynski had her first taste of activism at the receiving end of a policeman’s truncheon while marching with …

Marc Bolan Tree

We heard the tintinnabulating church bells of St. Mary’s in Barnes from two roads away. Once we were inside, we understood why they were ringing at a time not generally used to indicate passage of the hour – a group of bellringers were having a practice session. We watched, trying to work out how they …

Domine dirige nos

The Sunday Times named 70 places as the best to live in the UK. Englefield Green, a Surrey village twenty miles away, made the regional shortlist. The paper called it “a forest-fringed sward where dogs run free, families play football or frisbee and cricketers scurry for singles". So woodlands and a bit of grass, then. …

Dancing with myself

The first impression of Dublin for a visiting Londoner is the spatial déjà vu of a city bisected by a river. Then, one by one, the differences start to show. A greater proportion of retailers called Kavanagh, Murphy, O’Brien and Clarke. Tonal trams cutting paths through the city centre. A billboard advert for Kerrygold butter. …

Hamotzi

The Building an Appetite series already in its fifth episode, a pattern has set. A Guide to Modernism in Metroland by Joshua Abbott is consulted and destinations selected – this weekend, we made four stops within a mile’s arc of Willesden Green station. The trip was bookended by repurposed shuls – the Dollis Hill Synagogue …