Reasons to love London: from saving pubs to constant surprises

Evening Standard

From megastars on Lime bikes to fashion powerhouses and even Gen Z-friendly bumps of caviar — this is the city that keeps on giving

Transcript

00:00It's the best city in the world to live in.

00:01There's a certain characteristic to London.

00:03You've got a bit of everything everywhere.

00:05I love London because we know how to rally around a pub that is dying.

00:09So the artist Peter Doig is saving McGlin's, a pub in Kings Cross,

00:14which is a proper old-school boozer,

00:16and he said that he's going to keep it much the same,

00:20so there'll be the fuzzy carpet and scampi fries.

00:23I really love London for the restaurants.

00:25I mean, there's lots of reasons why I really love London,

00:27but because there's so much to do,

00:30and I think there's so many amazing restaurants you can go to,

00:34and there's so much diversity of experience across the place,

00:39and it's the best city in the world to live in.

00:41I think there's a couple of different reasons I love London,

00:43but the main one is the fact that there is a lot of opportunities

00:46to do a lot of different things, whether it's a career or just meeting people.

00:51I think there's always something spontaneous happening in London all the time.

00:54I love London because no one area is exactly the same the whole way through,

00:57so you might have the Red Lion, which is one of the roughest and readiest pubs that we have in London,

01:02which I just think is fabulous, and is next door to one of the poshest restaurants we have,

01:06Wilton's. So you've got this complete contrast all the way through,

01:09and you'll find that everywhere across London.

01:12And I also like that if you're in that part of town, which is St James',

01:14you can head up to the Burlington Arcade, which is the sort of place you'd go if you won the lottery.

01:19You might find a champagne bar next to a Cartier Jewelry worth hundreds of millions from hundreds of years ago.

01:26So you've got a bit of everything everywhere.

01:29People ask me about restaurants all the time,

01:31and you know, I love restaurants that have been open for a while.

01:35I'm not one for going to the ones that just opened last week.

01:38I like things to be timeless, embedded in,

01:41and I quite often recommend restaurants to people like, say, Bentley's here in Mayfair,

01:48or we've got Andrew Edmonds, or, you know, the Quality Chop House in Farringdon.

01:54There's great places like Shea Bruce, Otto's, places like that that you recommend.

02:00And when people do go there, almost every time you get a text the next day saying,

02:05that was amazing, that was brilliant, you know, they're all great.

02:08I think the fashion is probably second to none.

02:11Some of the best looks, best shops, best designers, and the nightlife is really, really good too.

02:17I love that London, for me, is just that thing of it being kind of several different towns.

02:23You've never really experienced all of London.

02:25You probably, like, never will.

02:26There's so much, it's constantly changing.

02:29Everything's just got its own very distinct style,

02:32and, like, the people who live there, they bring something as well.

02:34So, yeah, just constantly being able to be surprised by London.

02:38Well, I'm a Londoner, I spend most of my time here, you know,

02:41I spend some time in New York, in Paris, in Madrid, and Rome.

02:47Love them all, but none of them have the layers, and the complexity, and the timelessness,

02:53and the museums, and the wonder, and the different experiences that you can get in London.

02:59We're very lucky to live here.

03:00We're very lucky to live here.

03:01We're lucky to live here.

03:05You

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