Categories: London

Rochelle School Canteen

Rochelle School Canteen
Rochelle School
Arnold Circus E2
020 7729 5677; www.arnoldandhenderson.com

From the street, the only sign that there might be somewhere to eat in this former primary school is the typewritten word "Canteen" next to one of the buzzers (the bottom-right-hand buzzer-the last one you would look at) outside the Boys' gate.
     If you're lucky enough to hear the gate unlock (the Canteen is open only on weekday lunchtimes), when you step through, you'll see a beautiful lawn, wooden tables, chairs and benches in the sunshine, and a bike shed that has been converted into a restaurant. The school is now used for studio space, so there might be some well dressed artists on their lunch break. The owners, Melanie Arnold and Margot Henderson, are married to Jon Spiteri and chef Fergus Henderson, respectively, who started the renowned St. John restaurant, and Rochelle Canteen has many of the same impeccable qualities: nose-to-tail eating, with fresh ingredients and simple dishes. Everything on the menu is good, but I'm always drawn back to the purple sprouting broccoli with anchovy, their pies for two, and the chocolate pot.

Joe Dunthorne
Joe Dunthorne was born in Swansea in 1982. He is the author of a poetry pamphlet, Faber New Poets 5, and a novel, Submarine, which won the Curtis Brown Prize and is being made into a film by Warp Films. He currently lives in London and is a striker for the England Writers' Football Team.

Freud Museum

Freud Museum
20 Maresfield Gardens NW3
020 7435 2002; www.freud.org.uk

In a perilous last-ditch flight from the Nazis, Sigmund Freud arrived in London with his family in 1938, moving into the substantial red brick house in Hampstead which he predicted would be "his last address on this planet." The following year he died of cancer of the throat. This, the most atmospheric of all London museums, is strangely little known. At its heart is Freud's own study and consulting room, drawing its peculiar aura of enchantment from his famous collection of antiquities in bronze, stone, and terracotta, sent on from Vienna, and enriched by the colour and texture of the carpets and hangings. Most magnificent of these is the five-sided deep-red-and-blue rug, woven by one of the tribal groups of the Qashqai confederacy of Western Iran, draped over the couch employed by Freud for his analyses. Dream on.

Fiona MacCarthy
Fiona MacCarthy is a cultural historian and author of biographies of Eric Gill and William Morris.

Cruise from Little Venice to Camden Market

Cruise from Little Venice to Camden Market
Little Venice to Camden Town by barge, along the Grand Union Canal (seasonal)

To journey by the canal is to see a place from an entirely different perspective, and this short trip, about twenty minutes, is no exception. It starts in Little Venice, with its respectable, fashionable villas and houseboats; dives into a tunnel; comes up briefly for air in an estate of low-cost housing; then goes back under a bridge, and immediately you are among millionaires' mansions on the edge of Regent's Park. Beyond them is the tranquillity of the park in a deep cutting with overhanging trees. The canal bisects the London Zoo; we saw gazelles and heard the squawk of tropical birds. Just after the Zoo, the barge takes a sharp left turn by a floating Chinese restaurant before arriving in Camden.
      The barge drops you right at the centre of the Camden market. The day we went, there was a cloudless sky with bright sharp sunlight, so that the arrival at the crowded market, with is bright colours and exotic smells, owed more to a Conrad arrival at some riverside town on the Congo than to a North London market.

Charles Marsden-Smedley
Charles Marsden-Smedley's design practice specialises in museum and exhibition design.

Egg - one of London's most unique boutiques.

Egg
36 Kinnerton Street SW1
020 7235 9315; www.eggtrading.com

A cobblestone's throw from one of my favourite hotels, the Berkeley, is Egg, London's most unique boutique, though the shopkeeper, Maureen Doherty, probably wouldn't like it to be called that. It's just a little whitewashed place-a nineteenth-century building, originally a dairy-that sells a cherry-picked collection of items that Maureen (who, before Egg, worked mainly with Issey Miyake) has found on her travels and fallen in love with. I worked here years ago, when I fancied the idea of becoming a fashion stylist; somehow, miraculously, in a world of online everything, it has managed to stay just as under the radar now as then.
      The shop-which feels more like it should be in an unexplored corner of Scandinavia than in bankers' Belgravia-sells diaphanous cotton, linen, and silk separates made in Tibet; lightly quilted blanketcum--shawls made from unusual, almost Anglo, vintage sari fabric; poetic straw hats made by the German label SCHA; delicate, hand-blown Japanese glassware; and a very small stock of kitten-soft cashmere knitwear that the designer, Sine, can never make enough of.
      Egg's customers-perhaps "followers" is more like it-are a mix of dames, divas, gallerists, artists, and style-makers; the late Hardy Amies used to come and perch on a stool, stick in hand, for a gander and a natter, and Donna Karan and Ralph Lauren still make regular pilgrimages.
      Maureen has just started stocking some of her wares at the Comme des Garçons Trading Museum, in Tokyo, but, luckily for us, for the time being, she remains, with her of London that time and fashion have yet to erase.

Summer Litchfield
London-born Summer Litchfield, formerly arts editor of UK Esquire, is a freelance journalist writing for the Telegraph, the Sunday Times, and other publications. She writes extensively about restaurant culture and is working on her first novel.

Dennis Severs' House

Dennis Severs' House
1724; 1979-1999, interior, Dennis Severs
18 Folgate Street e1
020 7247 4013; www.dennissevershouse.co.uk
Tours only. Check website for schedule.

Dennis Severs' House is a museum of sorts, but also the very opposite of a museum. It's a Georgian terraced house tucked in a back street between Spitalfields Market and the City, restored in the styles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by Californian artist Dennis Severs, who died in 1999. The best time to visit is a dark winter evening (you have to book a slot beforehand). A man in a black shirt and black trousers will open the door (you have to knock, there's no bell) and take £12 off you, in return for which you are allowed to walk around the house for forty-five minutes. The man will tell you that you have to do this in complete silence. There is no electric light in Dennis Severs' House, only candles and open fireplaces.
     Stumbling from room to room, you feel not only like you are travelling back in time but like you have walked straight into a Dickens novel, or the Hogarth painting that hangs in one of the rooms. There are half-made mince pies on the kitchen table and spilt glasses of punch in the smoking room, and there's a real canary in the lounge. Occasionally, you can hear the haunting chime of clocks, the rattle of a horse-drawn carriage outside, and the creak of footsteps in the room next door; it's as if the people who used to live here are standing around the corner.
     As with any good story, you feel like you've uncovered a secret by the time you get to the end, the last room in the house. On the top floor, eighteenth-century opulence gives way to shocking nineteenth-century poverty. The wallpaper is peeling off the damp walls, the bed linen is filthy, there's a stench of oysters and vinegar, and it's freezing cold. It comes as a shock when you realise the banisters have been burned for firewood: such was the completeness of Severs's operatic vision that he has planted the seeds of its own destruction inside it. As youn walk into the cold winter night, you will try to touch the next automobile on the pavement just to see if it's real.

Philip Oltermann
Philip Oltermann was born in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Since 1997 he has lived in London, where he works as an editor at The Guardian. He is writing a book on Anglo-German meetings.

Chocolate Martini

Claridge's Bar
55 Brook Street W1
020 7629 8860; www.claridges.co.uk

Walk to Old Bond Street, familiar from smash and grab
movies, to buy stiletto boots from Gina Shoes (9 Old
Bond Street). Have a chocolate martini in Claridge's bar.
If I were meeting God for a cocktail, I'd take him to this
Art Deco paradise.

Carole Morin
Carole Morin has been writer-in-residence at Wormwood Scrubs prison and Literary Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Her books include Lampshades, Dead Glamorous, and Penniless in Park Lane.

Joseph Emberton Barber Shop

Austin Reed Barber Shop
1930s, Joseph Emberton
103 Regent Street w1
020 7734 6789;

The chrome and marble interior of this Art Deco barber shop has an austere glamour that is given a frivolous edge by an extraordinary twisting light fixture. It looks like the set of a Hollywood musical, and has survived remarkably intact, tucked away in the basement. The architect, Joseph Emberton, was also responsible for Simpsons Piccadilly (now Waterstone's, 203-206 Picadilly), and the HMV building on Oxford Street, as well as the exhibition buildings at Olympia and the Casino building on Blackpool Pleasure Beach-and the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club, which was featured in the first edition (but not the second) of The International Style (H. R. Hitchcock and P. Johnson).

Andrew Ballantyne
Andrew Ballantyne studied and practised architecture before moving into an academic career. He has written about a wide range of topics in architectural history and theory, and his books include Architecture: A Very Short Introduction; Deleuze and Guattarifor Architects; Paliochora on Kythera; and Tudoresque: Histories of a Popular Architecture. He is Professor of Architecture at Newcastle University.

The Grenadier

The Grenadier
18 Wilton Row sw1
020 7235 3074

Near the end of a cobbled mews cul-de-sac in London's most exclusive neighbourhood, Belgravia, is a delightful pub, the Grenadier. A huge Victorian gas lamp, a sentry box, and flower baskets adorn the outside of the pub, where steps lead up to a snug room with a four-hundredyear-old pockmarked chrome bar. Hidden away-even cab drivers have problems finding this one-the pub,  some believe, is haunted by the eponymous soldier who is said to have been flogged to death by fellow card players after being found cheating. The pub claims to make London's best Bloody Mary. There's even a cosy restaurant at the back of the pub, serving tasty but quite expensive fare.

Nick Wyke
Nick Wyke is a journalist at The Times and has recently devised a foodies' walking tour of Belgravia in London.

Berry Bros. & Rudd

Berry Bros. & Rudd
Established in 1698
3 St. James's Street sw1
020 7396 9600; www.bbr.com

The most gracious shopping experience in London without doubt is a visit to Berry Bros. & Rudd, wine and spirit merchants to the Queen and the Prince of Wales, who have carried on business at their sublime lopsided premises since the seventeenth century. There is no finer place to buy a bottle of claret than in this unchanging shop, with its creaking uncovered floorboards, collection of ancient bottles, large set of beam scales, and the courteous service of yesteryear.

Peter Horrocks

Peter Horrocks, a barrister, is a freeman of the City of London. He is a former Chairman of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, runs the Covent Garden Minuet Company, an 18th century dance group, is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.

Famed for selling and sourcing the best wines, particularly claret, Berry Brothers gives equal attention to a highly rare case of Château Latour as it does to a single bottle of their famed Cutty Sark whisky. Behind the green-shuttered façade, the Victorian clerks' desks stand on the ancient undulating floor whilst on the scattered Georgian chairs clients quietly discuss their next purchase with the highly knowledgeable staff.

A huge old coffee scale on which most of fashionable London has been weighed since the eighteenth century still hangs in the shop, beside framed telegrams that include one gravely reporting the loss of a consignment of wine aboard the Titanic. Once their clients may have included Napoleon, countless European monarchs, and famous figures, but now they could equally include pop stars and shrewd dot-com millionaires.

Below the shop lie the cavernous cellars, rumoured to link with St. James's Palace by a lost tunnel, which now also play host to dinners and tastings for both private and corporate clients.

Jeremy Garfield-Davies

Jeremy Garfield-Davies is an architectural and art historian. A former director of Mallett in London and New York, he advises privately on the research, restoration, and acquisition of works of art for some of the most important private and public collections worldwide. 

Robert Kahn recommends Norman Foster's Sackler Gallery