2024’s saunter sans purpose also marks 25 years of The Chap Magazine. This year sees two very special milestones for The Chap Magazine. We mark our Silver Jubilee, having first published in 1999, and we shall sally forth on the fourth Grand Flaneur Walk on Sunday 5th May 2024. Assembling as usual at midday beside…
Another successful saunter sans purpose through the sunny streets of Old London Town. On Sunday 14th May, just one week after the coronation of Charles III, a very different kind of event, yet one steeped in as much ritual, tradition and protocol, took place. The Grand Flaneur Walk was not placing a crown of gold…
A central hotel that provided a haven for guests during WWII proves a more than suitable billet for a visit to coronavirus London Upon our return from a three-day visit to London during the coronavirus pandemic, I asked my teenage children what their favourite part of the trip was. “The hotel!” they both said in…
When m’learned colleague invited me to join him for a Chinese meal, my first thought was – isn’t at least one of us a little old to be gorging on cut-price fodder ordered in a dank Soho basement by pointing at lurid pictures on a laminated menu, to an oriental chap who makes a virtue…
Borough Market came to everyone’s attention in the 1990s, when Jamie Oliver pointed out that British food is actually rather good, as long as you spend vast amounts of cash on each ingredient. The market continues to thrive, anachronistically at odds with the vast developments that have taken place around it in Southwark. The change…
London’s Cinnamon Club is something of an institution, set in the former Westminster Library and teeming with politicians, journalists and ladies who lunch. Its sister establishment in Oxford, Cinnamon Kitchen, is situated in the rather less grand-sounding Westgate Shopping Centre. But this is Oxford, where everything is nice and shopping centres are nothing like other…
Where does one go for lunch to mark that fateful descent from one’s early fifties to one’s mid-fifties? Wouldn’t it be tragic to choose some achingly hip joint in Shoreditch, Portland or Berlin, where the menu, mostly consisting of kimchi, is printed in braille on a rusty vintage advertising sign? The venue for such an…
You cannot miss Boisdale of Belgravia. The strawberry-red frontage stands out like a Highland hunting lodge amid the upmarket estate agents (a set at Albany for £4.3 million, anyone?) and the fly-by-night delicatessens that look like reckless gifts from hedge-fund managers to their trophy wives. En route to our lunch appointment we paused to pay…
By now, Hawksmoor Borough has delighted and beguiled a vast number of carnivorous types. Excitement can be seen writ large on the faces of each meat-eater at the magnificent treats that lie in store. ‘The finest meats, exceptional wines and cocktails and a wonderful setting – what could possibly be better?’ The answer, you will…
“Wondered if you’d ‘ave the time to assess the sartorial credentials of this dandy in the underworld,” writes London Boy Lou. “What could be more indicative of one’s immense chapability than writing about oneself in the third person, eh?” A decent command of the English language? However, we are actually impressed both by Mr. Boy…
