London Cocktail Week 2015 hits Spitalfields Market October 4, 2015 Gin and tonic season may be well and truly finished, but have no fear; London Cocktail Week is back for its sixth year to keep Square Mile slickers inebriated this autumn. From 5-11 October, Old Spitalfields Market, usually home to antique dealers, speciality stalls and Liverpool Street’s lunching lawyers and bankers, will become a huge [...]
The City must work with the rest of the capital to keep London on top January 11, 2016 The City and the boroughs of London are intimately connected. Not only do around 400,000 Londoners travel to work in the City every day, but many also come to visit the Square Mile’s bars, shops, museums and galleries throughout the week. On Thursday, 100 of the top figures in London government, including the mayor of [...]
Mayoral hopeful Zac Goldsmith can’t afford to ignore the City for ever December 22, 2015 The two leading candidates to replace Boris Johnson as mayor of London squared off earlier this month at a dinner hosted by the Federation of Small Businesses. Both Labour candidate Sadiq Khan and Conservative contender Zac Goldsmith took to the podium to appeal to an audience of the capital’s leading business figures, with Khan stressing [...]
EU referendum: City of London Corporation is one step closer to making the case for remaining in the EU despite member opposition February 25, 2016 The City of London Corporation has moved one step closer to campaigning for Britain to remain in the European Union, despite vocal opposition from many of its members. In a move that sparked outrage among eurosceptic City figures but was welcomed by the pro-EU campaign yesterday afternoon, members of the Corporation's policy and resources committee voted 17-3 [...]
How do bankers escape the City to make it as an entrepreneur? December 17, 2015 Bankers have a long history of flexing their creative and marketing muscles once in a while to start their own firms, sometimes with mixed success. This year, former City banker Oli Brookes took a step back from Square Mile life. He joined up with fellow entrepreneur Dan Zell to set up a company that now [...]
The surprise London areas where disposable income’s rising fastest November 28, 2016 Did someone say gentrification? Any resident of south London knows the area's on the rise, but now new figures reveal just how much that's happening: disposable incomes in some of the hottest areas south of the Thames are rising more than 10 times faster than the rest of the UK. Lewisham and Southwark experienced a 5.3 per cent rise in cash in [...]
Lord Mayor tours London firms on City Giving Day October 1, 2015 Shoes were shined, ties were straightened, balloons were inflated and cakes were freshly baked for the arrival of Lord Mayor Alan Yarrow at dozens of the Square Mile’s banks and financial institutions to mark City Giving Day, where he saw first-hand what they do to give back to society. Joined by company leaders from [...]
Bad EU regulations hold the City back: We need more influence over policy February 9, 2016 At the heart of David Cameron’s hard-fought EU renegotiation, there appear to be some misconceptions about how the City views its relationship with Europe. Although many institutions in the Square Mile have voiced support for the UK’s membership of the EU, there is also widespread concern about the City’s strained relationship with Brussels, whose policy-making on [...]
Exploring the Sardinian paradise of Costa Smerelda, Europe’s top playground for the fantastically wealthy January 6, 2017 Some places are just so beautiful, so unbelievably picture-perfect, so utterly, gob-smackingly Instagrammable, that you think, ‘if this didn’t exist, someone would have had to invent it.’ So I’m taken aback on finding out, on my first afternoon on the Costa Smeralda – one of Europe’s top playgrounds for the super-wealthy – that actually someone [...]
Paradise Beach: Enjoy rum, monkeys and tropical luxury on the twin islands of St Kitts and Nevis January 16, 2017 French settlers brought their pet monkeys to the Caribbean islands of St. Kitts and Nevis in the 17th century. Soon after they promptly escaped and began multiplying (the monkeys, not the French), wreaking simian havoc wherever they went. The marauding apes now outnumber humans and routinely devastate crops in dawn raids, munching their way through [...]