Anna van Praagh

It’s time to think spring style. Plus, what’s really behind London’s barber shop boom?

Adolescence star Ashley Walters on prison, fame and finding peace

It’s a national institution that attracts two million outdoorsy Brits a year to its holiday villages. So can committed city-dweller Anna van Praagh learn to love Britain’s most wholesome holiday?

The pushers, the shovers, the scoffers… Come on London, remember your manners

Disastrous policies fraught with unintended consequences, a wrecking ball budget and a total alienation of voters have got Labour off to a woefully bad start

It’s hard to pinpoint the most egregious side effects of Rachel Reeves’s Budget so far, with its blizzard of bizarre policies fraught with unpleasant unintended consequences. Who do they most want to hurt? Business owners, farmers and parents who have the cheek to want the best education for their children are, naturally, first in line for a thrashing.

Reading the dripping with snobbery and class-prejudice articles and social media attacks on Charlie Mullins, the Pimlico Plumbers boss who has declared he is taking all of his money out of the UK because of Labour’s attitude to the wealthy, I suddenly realised that there has been a seismic shift in British culture.

As synonymous with London these days as black taxis or red buses, food delivery drivers are visible everywhere as they weave in and out of traffic on their bicycles and mopeds, lugging their branded backpacks through heatwaves and hailstorms. But even though they are visible everywhere, unless their takeaway Big Mac is running late, do people give them any thought at all?

Who, apart from the very wealthy, could bring themselves to go to university these days? Three years of mostly less-than adequate teaching, a lot of it on Zoom, an uncertain at best transition into the workplace and a whacking great loan that you’ll spend the next 40 years repaying isn’t exactly the most tantalising proposition.

If the general election goes the way everyone on the planet thinks it will, David Lammy could soon be heading off around the globe as our government’s new international deal-maker. But with his feet firmly rooted in home soil, Anna van Praagh discovers a Londoner through and through

Does anyone else find the thud of Taylor Swift’s inexorable march to sequinned leotard world domination slightly ghoulish, intimidating and, dare I say it, depressing?

Does anyone else find the thud of Taylor Swift’s inexorable march to sequinned leotard world domination slightly ghoulish, intimidating and, dare I say it, depressing?

Acton, where I live, can stake no claim to being the most beautiful part of London, though over the 12 years I’ve lived here I’ve grown incredibly fond of its quirks and idiosyncrasies. Architecturally, it’s pretty mixed between predominantly Victorian and Edwardian housing, the odd Georgian gem, a mix of social housing and more recently some of the tallest high-rises in London.

It’s hard not to admire Angela Rayner. Her backstory is almost cinematic – bullied kid growing up poor in Stockport, Manchester, told she would never amount to anything, illiterate mentally ill mother who she cared for from the age of ten. Pregnant at 16, deputy leader of the Labour Party by 40.

At a dinner party recently, I got chatting to the twentysomething children of some acquaintances. I asked them what they thought about a range of subjects and was intrigued, and slightly startled by their opinions, which ranged from a total disrespect for the police, to a rejection of marriage as a concept and a desire to legalise drugs entirely. Despite attending elite universities, they told me exam results didn’t matter. Without a hint of irony they told me they thought eco-activists should p…

As a 44 year-old woman I am constantly made aware by armies of presumably well-intentioned but frankly wearing women in later life with programmes to make and books to sell and brands that might otherwise be struggling for relevance, that my next challenge as a working woman will be an unedifying descent into a frantically sweating mood-swinging, forgetful hot mess. How long can it be I wonder, before I succumb to the death spiral, the worst thing of all that happens to women among many bad thin…

I love city life, love the bustle, the hustle, the Tube, love nothing more than going to the buzziest restaurant, the most talked-about exhibition. I have lived in London all of my adult life and have never run out of places to see, things to do. In London, I’m never lonely, I’m never bored and it always feels like excitement, opportunity and fun are forever sparkling on the near-horizon.

The music by Alex Weston is pitch perfect and Lulu Wang is a director of note: this is a triumph

Camila Batmanghelidjh, who founded the globally renowned, London-based and entirely besmirched — but ultimately exonerated — Kids Company died peacefully on New Year’s Day aged 61. It is my sincere belief that we Londoners will rue the day she suffered what she described to me as her “reputational assassination”, which brought down the charity she set up to help the capital’s most disadvantaged children escape lives of gangs and violence.

What upsets me most about life in London today? The endless proliferation of “luxury flats” marketed abroad while ordinary Londoners can’t afford to rent a basic home? Yes, that upsets me. The fact that so many young people in the capital are so utterly devoid of manners that they see nothing wrong with listening to their phones on public transport without headphones? Deeply upsetting on an existential, future-of-mankind level. How about grown men often nearly knocking me or my children over on…