Living in London we’re used to being able to eat out at the drop of a hat. All change this week; but our brilliant restaurants have already begun to adapt, with many offering new take-away or delivery options. Plus, there are plenty of food delivery companies that make it possible to stock up the fridge and support a small business instead of the supermarket. Here are our favourites:
We make no secret of our love for Potage. The formula is simple – homemade meals delivered to the door – and the food is completely delicious. Founder, Georgia is always evolving the offering too – in these current times they have expanded their pantry section so you can now add eggs, seasonal fresh veg, granola, oats and spaghetti to your order. Then there are proper meals like beef goulash, chicken curry or lasagna that you can either eat straight away or freeze, plus brightening fresh salads and sharing platters. For someone sick or in need we love the sound of their Revive Hamper – for £55 it contains enough to get someone through a few days – with soup, a hot meal, salad, breakfast pots, fruit, chocolate brownies and comes with a handwritten card. Plus Potage are adding a free bunch fo daffs to all gift deliveries this week.
Adapting to circumstance, Honey & Co now offer a delivery service across London. Find the menu here – the only question is how to choose when it all sounds so good. If there are a few of you under one roof, go for the tray of mains (serves 3-4 but knowing Honey & Co that will be plenty for 4-5+!) and share things like Lamb Siniyah – spiced lamb baked in tahini with yoghurt topping and a sesame bagel, and Savoury Cheesecake – Greek feta, goat’s cheese, courgette, nigella seeds and herbs. Don’t scrimp on puds too. Hampers are also available that come with cookbooks and all the ingredients you need to get started. To order call 02073886175.
It used to be that only those lucky enough to live within a 2.5 mile radius from Borough Market could make use of their zero-emission food delivery service – just this morning they have extended this to include every address within the M25. Pretty much all the market’s regular traders are signed up to the service so take your pick from fresh fish (Richard Haward), meat (Ginger Pig), fruit and vegetables (Ted’s veg), cheese (Neal’s Yard, Alsop & Walker) and fresh pasta (La Tua) all delivered to your door. Delivery costs £4.50.
Amelia Freer put us on to a good thing with Brindesa, which she recommended at her nutrition workshop at Lime Wood last autumn – particularly the Navarrico artichoke hearts and butter beans. There are so many tempting goodies to stock up on including Extra Virgin olive oil, Bomba paella rice and tins of La Chinata smoked paprika. Orders over £60 are delivered free.
Delicious Italian wine arrives by Vespa. Give owner, Luca Dusi a call to order (literally just on his mobile! 07899844820), and he’ll be able to advise on the best bottles for you. Delivery is available across the whole of London.
Home made with love from the Chiswick kitchen of trained nutritionist, Sam Murgatroyd. Snacks vary every week and include energy balls and seedy flapjack (£10 for 6 snacks) and are delivered free to W4, W12, W3 and W6. Wider West London postcodes including W14, W11, W8, SW13, W5 and SW6 are £3.50 delivery per order. Sam also offers a cooking service and will prepare healthy meals for your family if you get in touch here.
There are some great names on Supper.London where you put in your postcode and it pulls up all your options. These might include meals from Daylesford farm shop, pizza from Homeslice, salads from Planet Organic and curries from Cinnamon Kitchen. Restaurants are being updated all the time.
As we write this we’re hearing news from so many brilliant restaurants across London that are launching delivery options next week, so check next Thursday’s newsletter for more!
If you’d like to read more in self-isolation/lockdown but don’t know where to start, then we highly recommend the site Five Books. They ask experts – everyone from Harvard Professors to Mia Farrow and Will Self – to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. There are over a thousand interviews to choose from with subjects ranging from kids books (including by age) to books on specific countries and even audiobooks. Sign up to their newsletter and they’ll keep you updated on their latest interviews too. Happy reading!
As anyone who experiences anxiety or who has gone through a period of change knows, routine is one of the key ingredients that can keep you on the straight and narrow. If you’re new to working from home (or let’s face it even people who usually work from home are all at sea at the moment), routine conquers all. Without a daily structure, the temptation to procrastinate, open and shut the fridge a hundred times and generally be ineffective can leave you exhausted and deflated by 11am.
Morning Routine
Get up at your usual time, have a dose of endorphins and treat yourself with kindness. This might look like:
As soon as you get up, allow yourself five minutes’ stretching.
8am: Walk real or imaginary dogs and notice spring unfolding before your eyes (double dose of endorphins – three if you count the dogs).
9am: Shedloads of coffee accompanied by a chat with someone who uplifts you – have a bit of a laugh/moan.
9.30am: Shower and get dressed in your favourite clothes. Don’t save for ‘best’; we don’t know when that will be; and don’t skimp on the lipstick and perfume.
Create an office space of your dreams. Experiment with how best you work: with/without music, candle, flowers/plant, favourite beverage, ideally some natural light and settle down to a specific work task or work deadline. If it’s an option, make contact with as many fellow office workers and other people as possible.
Break mid morning: Whilst you are still feeling invincible, call a parent or someone you know needs to hear your voice.
Lunch: Take an hour off work (it’s harder than you think not to have a desk lunch). If you don’t, it’s definitely tough to get to the end of the day.
Afternoon Routine
Unless you are on a tight deadline, it can be difficult to motivate yourself after lunch, especially if you have attacked the carbs at lunch. This might be the time to do an online exercise class. The beauty of many of them is that you can put in a super quick ten-minute work out or – seeing as you are effectively your own boss now – longer. However long a break you decide, it’s important to stick to your timetable. Back at your desk, remember to keep drinking enough water – it helps keep fatigue at bay. I have a jug of filtered water with sliced fruit on my desk.
Fixing a time in the day to keep a connection with your immediate community might become more important as the days go by. More information about how you can get involved will be issued shortly but you could consider dropping notes around to your neighbours to stay in touch.
Before you leave your work space, make a plan for the next day of what you plan to achieve at your desk. And schedule in a few phone chats where before you might just have sent an email.
Final tip: if you are working at home with your partner for the first time, it might become necessary to find a ‘co-worker’ you can blame things on. Thanks to @mollytolsky for the following: ‘In our apartment, “Cheryl” keeps leaving her dirty water cups all over the place and we really don’t know what to do about her.’ And my favourite for keeping it real is this picture from Instagram (@djfattony) about keeping to rituals:
Evening Routine
This is when it’s important not to have a routine! Mix it all up: movie night, cards night, my suggestion of bingo night went down like a lead balloon but you get the idea. I have stock-piled Peroni Blue so that I resist the temptation to get stuck into the rose before the season’s even begun.
Amongst the challenging news filling our feed there are some wonderful things happening. Oliver Jeffers is reading one of his books every day until it’s safe to go out again. Tune in at 6pm when the stories go live: this week there’s The Way Back Home on Thursday 19th March and The Great Paper Caper on Friday 20th March. He’ll also be answering questions after the stories so leave one beneath his instagram post before 6pm. Chris Martin began a new hashtag #TogetherAtHome and performed a live gig from home taking song requests from fans – before passing the baton to John Legend who has since nominated Charlie Puth to go next. Molly Mahon is showing everyone how to do block printing from the kitchen table – with more videos coming soon. Bread Ahead’s founder, Matthew Jones will be offering free online baking tutorials live on Instagram every day at 2pm, starting with their legendary donuts. Brick House Bread are also posting about self-isolation sourdough so you can learn to make and bake bread at home. Soho Farmhouse Pilates teacher Chloe Hodgson and her son Jacoby will be doing weekly 10 minute workout sessions to do at home for parents and kids. E-mail her at chloe@chloespilates.com for more details (apparently Arnold Schwarzenegger will be publishing daily videos for older people to do at home!) Gareth Malone is starting an online choir called The Great Britsh Home Chorus and you can register now. We have loved seeing the images of dolphins and swans swimming up the canals in Venice for the first time in years – see them by searching Venice in the Places tab (or @lizzieloveshealthy has posted some on her stories). And it was via Twitter that we heard the National Trust will be opening their gardens and parks for free during this time, so that everyone can enjoy their open spaces to relax.
There’s much anticipation for the new film, Rocks, a story of female friendship set in East London. The plot might be fictional but draws on the intense real-life friendships between teenage girls – with a cast plucked from years 8 and 9 of girls’ schools in Hackney and Newham. Book tickets now to a preview screening at the BFI Southbank that includes a Q&A with the actors plus talks, workshops, panels, music and spoken-word performances, make-up and nail-art pop-ups, and giveaways inspired by the film.
We’re great fans of Julia Samuel, leading psychotherapist and specialist on grief. We were lucky enough to hear her talk at the Freud Museum earlier this week about the newly published, This Too Shall Pass. In this, her second book she addresses how we might cope with all kinds of change in our lives, covering not only grief but ‘living loss’, as well as the changes we might have chosen for ourselves. Eloquent and funny in person, if you want to catch her live events there are lots of upcoming dates here including one on 18th March at Lutyens & Rubinstein in Notting Hill. We also have three copies of her book to give away via the prize draw below:
From March 26th to April 23rd, one of the current darlings of Interior Design, Beata Heuman, will be in residence at 8 Holland Street showcasing a collection of furniture, lighting and homewares. Although Heuman has her own online store, Shoppa, this is one of the first times that everyone can view and experience her products in a gallery environment. Expect marbleized velvets, the popular Dodo pendant light and the Luck Dragon stool alongside 8 Holland Street’s collection of 1950’s Italian furniture, lighting and ceramics.
And on March 26th, journalist Claudia Baillie will be in conversation with top designers Beata Heuman, Martin Brudnizki and Duncan Campbell in the 8 Holland Street gallery. The trio will discuss projects and the influence of 20th century Swedish design and iconic European interiors. There are limited spaces however, to do RSVP ASAP by e-mailing events@8hollandstreet.com.
The Beaton show opens today at the National Portrait Gallery with over 150 rarely-seen prints giving a snapshot into the eccentric parties of his bohemian-aristo set – it’s just the dose of escapism we need right now. Here we meet ceramicist and specialist Joanna Ling who ran the Cecil Beaton archive at Sotheby’s for over 20 years, and whose Beaton-inspired ceramics will be on sale at the NPG shop during the exhibition:
Could you tell us a little bit about life running the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s?
It was such a privilege to be the guardian of the largest archive of Beaton’s photographs in the world. As well as over 100,000 negatives and 10,000 vintage prints Sotheby’s also own 42 of his personal scrapbooks and photograph albums. My role was to ensure that his work continued to stay in the public eye which meant either curating or being involved in exhibitions worldwide as well as working on all the major Beaton publications during the over twenty years I was there. A dream job!
Did you have any stand-out career highlights from that time?
So many wonderful moments but the two that really stand out were the exhibition hosted by the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton House and curated by Jasper Conran. It was amazing to see a rather dilapidated room transformed into an imaginatively realised rococo drawing room. Beaton spent much of his time at Wilton and would have very much approved! The other was a lunch I hosted at Sotheby’s. Among the guests were Cecil’s nephew and several other famous sitters, including Leslie Caron, and many of the top Beaton experts. It was a very special moment to gather everyone together.
Do you have a favourite Cecil Beaton photograph and why?
So many! So hard to choose! From the BYTs era I would choose his gloriously glittery portrait of Paula Gellibrand. It is so emblematic of that time and she has the perfect face for it.
What’s the most eccentric prop or costume you’ve seen in a Beaton photograph?
Of his earlier work Beaton admitted that the backgrounds to his photographs were sometimes more important than the sitters themselves. His portrait of his sister Nancy dressed in a costume he and Oliver Messel designed for the Galaxy Ball in 1929 personifies this. Nancy floats in a sea of cellophane and flowers and it is hard to tell where dress and props begin and end.
How do you imagine life was for the Bright Young Things?
I like to think of the BYTs enjoying a summer’s day at Beaton’s country home Ashcombe – drinking champagne, lounging on cushions on the lawn, looking at scrapbooks and planning their next dressing up party or jaunt.
How have Cecil Beaton and the Bright Young Things influenced your ceramics?
My ceramics for the exhibition were very much influenced by the costumes and backdrops Beaton created for his photographs. One range is inspired by Cecil’s leopard print dressing gown that he made for his first trip to Stephen Tennant’s home, Wilsford. Another by the Meissen shepherdess costume – designed and hand painted by Beaton – that Tilly Losch wore for the Chesterfield Ball. The exhibition, at one time, was to be called The Age of Silver, so some silver lustre had to come into the mix!
Cecil Beaton was working nearly 100 years ago. Why do you think his pictures are so enduring?
Beaton had the knack of capturing the zeitgeist of each generation. His photographs span six decades so he didn’t just chronicle the antics of the BYTs. He was also a prolific war photographer and was still ahead of the game photographing Mick Jagger on the set of Performance in 1968. I also think the man behind the lens continues to fascinate.
Is there anyone working today that you feel compares?
Tim Walker immediately comes to mind for his sense of theatre, eccentricity and eye for detail.
What can we expect from the NPG’s exhibition?
The curator, Robin Muir, has done an enormous amount of research for the exhibition and he has winkled out some wonderful paintings and artefacts from private collections to complement the photographs. He has also unearthed fascinating stories about some of the lesser known sitters. Look out for Dorothy Wilde, niece of Oscar, a sparkling member of the BTYs.
What has the process of creating ceramics to go alongside the show been like?
Amazing! My two great passions combined. Having worked with Robin on the exhibition before I left full time work at Sotheby’s it seemed the perfect project when I set up my ceramics business. The show also happens to cover my favourite chapter of Beaton’s life.
Where is your studio?
My home is in South West London. I am lucky enough to live within ten minutes walking distance of Richmond Park and walk there most days. The park is a great influence on my work and I often incorporate things I find there in my ceramics. My studio is at the bottom of my garden. It is such a pleasure to be able to work from home but to have a separate space to retreat to – although my daughter complains that my ceramics are taking over the house!
And finally, what’s bringing you joy this spring?
I am working on a collaboration with the interior designer Birdie Fortescue for her spring/summer collection which I am very excited about. A lot of cosying up at home away from Storm Dennis and others. I have finally read A Gentleman in Moscow which I loved. Also trying to hone my Japanese cooking skills after an amazing trip there last year. Yesterday afternoon I sneaked out to Olympic Studios in Barnes for a bit of escapism with Emma (coincidentally, much of which was filmed at Wilton House) and I am really looking forward to seeing the Hayward’s new exhibition Among the Trees. And of course the opening of Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things!
Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things is on view at the National Portrait Gallery from 12 March to 7 June 2020. Joanna Ling’s range will be available to purchase from 12 March at the National Portrait Gallery shop, as well as at the NPG Online Shop. Prices start from £25.
Perhaps it’s the time of year, but our skin is feeling extra dry and unloved at the moment. Perk up for spring with the new City Cleanse Facial from Skinwork at Alex Eagle Studio. Especially designed for Londoners the new treatment fights pollution and congestion to brighten the skin, combining the best bits of their excellent Signature Facial, Perfecting Peel and Microdermabrasion in a new 55 minute treatment. An early bird tip: book this March to make the most of their £150 introductory offer here.
Timeless Pearly letter pearl pendants, £155 from Net-A-Porter
