“it opens doors of meaning and understanding”
Read More“London place-names are an x-ray – they show you the past”
Read More“trying to capture how they’re feeling”
Read More“you’re looking at where those kids lived”
Read More“99 percent of London is the dark side of the moon to most visitors”
Read More“It was a strip club so ‘We never closed’ became ‘we never clothed'”
Read More“his out-of-control penis”
Read More“I love the fact that I have a personal connection with the saving of Hampstead Heath”
Read More“double-faced traitor whose name was a synonym for infamy”
Read More“we’re going to go to Paris very briefly and we’re going to go to The Cotswolds – very briefly”
Read More“I’m looking at a secret waterfall”
Read More“a row of seven astonishing mansions’
Read More“the best toasted sandwich this side of Tuscany”
Read More“I got two years probation for running the toughest gang in the neighbourhood and causing chaos”
Read More“Like Shackleton, you have to find your way back”
Read More“he purchased 15 women…he was the last person to see Shelley alive”
Read More“the second-largest house in London”
Read More“that’s like panning for gold and finding a gold speck in the pan”
Read More“if you’ve got a taste for London quirky and quixotic…”
Read More“London houses are like baseball cards”
Read More“I’ve been face to face with God’s assassin”
Read More“the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire”
Read More“she had over 500 love affairs”
Read MoreDavid Cameron wearing a condom over his head
Read MoreA tiny chalice of light in green – an English oasis.
Read More“I was selling coffee and waffles…I make my own chocolates…it may be the healthiest drink on the planet”
Read More“the ancient world didn’t like its corpses. It feared them, was repelled by them. We’re different.”
Read More“Night strangles the traveling lamp….we die three times”
Read More“What kind of accent do you call that?” “It’s the accent of the capital of the British Empire.”
Read MoreYou can’t walk those streets without thinking ‘this is what it must be like for a beetle to go for a walk up on the counter of an ice cream parlour.”
Read More“it’s like mountain flowers in the spring”
Read More“we work all day every day and at the end of the day – at the end of every day – we’re £450 poorer than we were when we woke up”
Read More“I’d like you to know Mr. Guide that my husband is a cavalry officer and he’s at the back of the group there”
Read More“how do you ensure you’re not getting something nearly worthless for a £400 opportunity costs bill?”
Read More“all the elements that made it a goer for English sensibilities: snobbery, money, eccentricity, bitchiness, the foreign factor…”
Read More“it was a frisson moment – a shiver up the spine moment – for Sir Christopher Wren and that small gathering standing on those smouldering ruins”
Read More“Noma has been crowned ‘the best restaurant in the world’ four times. Macdonalds will never be crowned ‘the best restaurant in the world'”
Read More“possessor of the least inhibited tongue in Europe”
Read More“he wore six overcoats and two pairs of trousers”
Read More“The word that crystallises that phrase ‘bring some order to that chaos of sensory impressions’ is meaning”
Read More“I could just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books.”
Read More“The sky shook London like a rug”
Read More“London can take it”
Read More“the epitome of remaining elegant and refined while causing chaos”
Read More“those two moments were like hearing the worst possible news in the doctor’s consulting room”
Read More“the monster was out of its cage”
Read More“‘pish, a woman could piss it out’…it was, of course, the greatest understatement in London’s history, the biggest London misjudgement ever”
Read More“It was a street plan that might have been designed to aid and abet a catastrophic conflagration.”
Read More“she was gap-toothed, she was bawdy, she was a tremendous character. She was cremated on a beach in Bali.”
Read More“in Hampstead’s rush-dark pond where a lone swan sings without a sound”
Read More“when Mark Antony drank horse piss”
Read More“the name Kensington, it may well be the best, the most appropriate London placename of them all”
Read More“Hampstead is London’s skybox… from there they could see forever”
Read More“dogs, cocks, pianofortes and insipid men”
Read More“the London Walks guide who sounds like – when he wants to – legendary American sports announcer Howard Cosell”
Read More“I’ve been to 1200 tapas restaurants so you don’t have to”
Read More“London Walks is haemorrhaging red ink”
Read More“five centuries in the palm of your hand”
Read More“the mentality, the genus loci of Westminster is insular”
Read More“Always drink upstream from the herd…we had to slip the surly bonds of the coach…fastly superior”
Read More“Simon took an American megastar on a tour and she liked it so much she asked for a second helping – booked Simon for the next day”
Read MoreYou go on a virtual tour of Kensington – the wealthiest borough in London (indeed the wealthiest district in the country) – you best strap yourself in because “Sights & Secrets of Virtual Kensington” takes you through the looking glass: to the Cotswolds and the Egypt of the pharaohs and San Francisco and Docklands and […]
Read More“you’ll see a Victorian mortuary and Brigitte Bardot and a bear being skinned and 1930s workmen on a girder 80 storeys up and a Civet Cat and the prettiest girl in London and World War II bomb damage and Hugh Hefner’s shoes and the four great biblical rivers and Ascot hats…and that’s just for starters”
Read More“Keith was fed up with the banality of typical London tourist fare”
Read More“Hampstead’s great advantage as a spa town… in the end proved to be its great disadvantage”
Read More“darkness visible”
Read More“it’s the deepest station in the system – world-class marathon runners train by running up those 320 stairs ten to twelve times a session”
Read More“The Mississippi drains a continent. Small beer really. The Thames drains time itself.”
Read More“a woman in central London being executed by a firing squad”
Read MoreDavid gets in on the act– comes crashing in – on Kensington. This is his first podcast – shocking in places – but you’ll learn some good stuff.
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