In defence of renting in London

Flat hunting in London, not as fun as it sounds

Please don’t think this is a defence of landlords in London; it isn’t. They want to squeeze every last penny out of renters in the capital and that will never change.

The reasons landlords are the villains right now is that the cost of renting has gone up again (2.4% UK average, 4.5% in London) and the figures comparing London to the rest of the country make anyone paying to live here (like me) look plain stupid. For instance, London households apparently spend 71% of their salaries on rent, according to a FindaProperty.com Index published this week – the average net wage in London is £36k and £24k of that goes on rent.

When I first moved to London in 2006 I thought a wise ratio to stick to would be to spend 2/5ths of my income on putting a roof over my head. But that was back when I thought rents would stay about £100 a week per person and before I discovered council tax, paying full price at the cinema and Zone 1-6 travelcards.

So renting in London seems like a mad thing to do. But it isn’t. Firstly, think about why people come to London (or stay here) in the first place – a place at a prestigious university, a once-in-a-lifetime graduate scheme or – in my case – the whole damn industry. Yes, you could live in some random part of the UK for a fraction of the price, save up and buy a house there but for education, inspiration and careers London has a lot going for it.

Then there’s the culture, the history and the people. Even if rent saps all your money in the capital, that’s not going to stop you visiting some of the world’s greatest museums and galleries for free, nipping over to Buckingham Palace or finding cheap bars and markets. In a week where I was supposed to saving money, I still accidentally ended up in a Caribbean restaurant in Brixton, at a reading at the ICA and in a basement bar not far from Oxford Street.

So what if I’ve spent over £25,000 on renting in London since my first year at university here? I’m a city girl and as a journalist I need to be in the thick of it or else I’m not much use to anyone. I’d spend the same amount in New York or Tokyo and I honestly believe my interests and awareness would be much narrower had I not moved here. Renting also means you are independent from a) your parents and b) a man who’s richer/ older/ more successful than you and wants you to move into his house. That’s pretty valuable.

Frances Ives, illustrator extraordinaire

The Place des Vosges is my favourite place in Paris, perhaps even one of my favourite places in the world. When my boyfriend proposed to me there, we decided to commission a watercolour sketch of it by the lovely Frances Ives for the wedding invitations. I’m going to frame the original – my first piece of commissioned art, how grown up!

After researching various different invitation options I realised if you have a beautiful, unique image, you can print some simple postcards very cheaply. I have some friends who are freaks for paper thickness and weight, but I personally think it’s worth investing in the perfect, personal illustration and cutting costs on the actual printing.

Frances’ style is quite flexible and she’s a genius for putting your ideas onto paper. I love her loose, pretty watercolour sketches (she even adapted the colours to the tones in my bouquet!), but another friend of mine commissioned a more detailed painting of a Spanish building (above) which was also beautiful.

Frances did a degree in Illustration at Kingston University in London, and takes commissions starting at £50. Her website is currently under construction, but you can see some more examples of her work on her blog. Contact her on frances@francesives.com for more information.

Damien Hirst at Tate Modern | Prebook or prepare to queue part two

The new Damien Hirst exhibition opened at Tate Modern last week. In hindsight, maybe it was a mistake to try and go on a bank holiday weekend, because the queues turned out to be worse than that time I went to David Hockney at the Royal Academy.

In fact, it took two attempts to get in. My first try was on Good Friday, when I joined the back of the longest queue I’ve ever seen for the Turbine Hall ticket desk. I got to the front 30 minutes later only to find that the next entry time on sale was for 7pm. A five-hour wait in the middle of touristville didn’t appeal, so I bought a ticket for the next day instead and returned at midday on Saturday.

The queue for tickets stretched half way through the Turbine Hall

That was when I realised my second mistake of the weekend: Hirst and hangovers do not mix. I had gone to bed at 5am that morning and after cycling to the Tate my energy levels were already flagging. Things were about to get much worse. First, the installation that consisted of two large glass cubes buzzing with flies, the floor coated with hundreds of fly corpses had me feeling pretty nauseous. ‘It’s making my skin crawl,’ agreed someone nearby. Next, a giant ash tray filled with hundreds of cigarette butts, the stale fag smell permeating throughout the room, made my headache ten times as bad. I had to dash through the room of rotating motion sickness-inducing multicoloured Spin Paintings, and by the time I’d gone through the bright, humid, heated room filled with live butterflies I thought I was going to faint. Oh, and there was a queue for that too.

If I hadn’t felt so rough I think I would have enjoyed it all, and there was plenty that I did like in fact. I thought Hirst was basically just about paintings of spots and animals suspended in formaldehyde but there was way more on offer, spanning more than 25 years and starting with work he completed as a student at Goldsmiths. Hirst admits he’s preoccupied with death and the way that medicine is used to try and prolong life: ‘You can only cure people for so long and then they’re going to die anyway,’ he said. In Pharmacy (1992) Hirst recreated an entire pharmacy, the walls lined with cabinets full of drugs. Later, he created huge mirrored frames filled with row upon row of pharmaceutical pills. Lullaby (2002), in which the soft colours of the pills are reminiscent of the famous Spot Paintings, I found quite mesmerising.

As well as the main exhibition, Hirst’s famous blinged up skull is on show in the Turbine Hall and admission for that is free. For the Love of God (2007) is a platinum cast embedded with 8,601 diamonds, estimated in value at £50 million. It occurred to me that in the minute or so you spend looking at it, that’s probably more diamonds than you’re going to see up close in the rest of your life time. But you’ll have to queue to do that as well.

The Damien Hirst exhibition at Tate Modern runs from 4 April to 9 September 2012. Tickets are £14 with concessions available. Visit the Tate website for more information and to book tickets.

Click on the photos below to enlarge them.

© Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved. DACS 2011. Photo: Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates

© Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved. DACS 2011. Photo: Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates

© Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved. DACS 2011. Photo: Photographed by Prudence Cuming Associates

The queue for tickets stretched half way through the Turbine Hall

Sarah Howe – Private Lives at the Foundry Gallery // Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it

Style & Then Some is having a little outing on Thursday evening to a private view at the Foundry Gallery in Chelsea (if they let us in the borough looking like we do). And it’s not for just any young, talented photographer that we would make the trek – we can’t wait to see Sarah Howe’s shots of burlesque dancers posing in their own homes, after hours.

Sarah went to New York with her co-conspirator in photography Magnus Arrevad after they won a competition but couldn’t afford to go over to see their work. Instead, they made a pact to go and create something new. “It just so happened that on the night before we left we met a New Yorker in London named Joe who was heading home,” she says. “We met up the following evening at one of the burlesque shows he produced in Brooklyn.”

The exhibition which runs from 26th March to 10th May is titled Private Lives in part because Sarah wanted to capture the stage personas of the women brought back into their personal spaces. Sarah is interested in “the way people construct their identities. In burlesque this is obviously exaggerated and extended.”

And the dancers themselves? Hands up if you’re surprised that they made for interesting subjects. “I was really blown away by all the girls. They were driven, creative and strong women. Jenny (pictured) was one of the most thought provoking acts but they all held down nine to five jobs, made their own costumes and performed at night,” she says.

Private Lives is Sarah’s first solo show and after taking the exhibition to the US, she’s on the lookout for artists to collaborate with. The exhibition at the Foundry Gallery is free entry but you can buy one of the gorgeous exhibition guides, designed by graphic designer Tom Peet, with images and quotes for £3.

See more details on the Facebook page for the Private View this Thursday 22nd March.

This is MADD|Bringing the Thai dessert house concept to London

Have you ever been to a café that specialises in just one type of fruit? Well I hadn’t, until last week. Helen and I went to sample some of the sweet treats on offer at MADD in London’s Soho. It stands for ‘mango addiction’ – because the fruit in question is that juicy tropical delight, the mango.

MADD was opened in December 2011 by Ralph Monthienvichienchai, who originally moved toLondon from Thailand to study at UCL. In Thailand, Ralph told me, ‘dessert houses’ are really popular. They’re like the coffee shops of Europe, where friends meet to socialise and share traditional Thai sweets. He wanted to bring the concept to the UK and so MADD was born. He wants the café to ‘feel like a second home’ so it’s got a bright but cosy feel to it. With the main seating area set away from the entrance you could easily forget you’re in the middle of bustling Soho, and be distracted for hours playing Jenga or Scrabble or Uno or one of the other games that are laid out on the tables. I really like this idea – it’s better than in other places where there are a bunch of games on a shelf somewhere but you daren’t get them down. At MADD, a bit of friendly competitiveness is positively encouraged.

What about the food? Helen and I tried a sharing platter of three desserts – mango cream, which was shot through with a mango sauce; warm sticky rice topped with mango pieces (Ralph’s mum’s recipe no less); and MADD’s take on the classic English fool, you guessed it, mango fool. Clearly, if you’re not a fan of mango, you’re not really going to be a fan of MADD (although there are cupcakes and other non-mango-based desserts on the menu) but we loved everything we tried. You can also get cocktails (mango flavoured, obviously) and it’s open until 11pm weekdays and midnight on weekends so you can enjoy a bit of late night dessert and gaming action too.

MADD is located at 53 Rupert Street, Soho, London W1D 7PH. Visit the MADD website.

Pop-Up Design @ Le Garage

Roll up, roll up, get your trendy bums down to Le Garage for Pop-Up Design- A showcase of purchasable raw talent from some of London’s finest graduates.  Pick up original works across the disciplines of photography, textiles, jewellery, fashion, illustration and more at Le Garage until the 27th November. 

 

All details can be found on the poster above, and being open until 8:30 at night thurs-sat, it’s a perfect excuse for a bit of original late night shopping.  Showcasing hand printed scarves by the likes of recent Chelsea MA graduate Jessica Chan, it is your chance to snap up some original pieces before these talented artists hit the main arena!

Happy shopping!  Be sure to share with us what great pieces you pick up!

REVIEW: Degas at the Royal Academy

Degas is a pretty safe bet for modern audiences; everyone loves a bit of Degas. Along with his Impressionist contemporaries, Monet and Renoir, reproductions of his painting are the go-to decoration for hospital walls, old people’s homes and slightly out-dated cheap hotels. For an exhibition to present such a popular artist in a new light, then, and to remind us that he was a controversial artist in his time, is quite a feat, and one that the Royal Academy pulls off well.

The first room you walk into is dark, with three big dramatic screens playing black and white films of the silhouette of a dancer rotating in an arabesque. This sets the scene for a rather unconventional exhibition which focuses on Degas’ obsession with the movement of the body and the human form. It mixes his own work with old film reels of nineteenth century ballet performances and photographs and sculptures by his contemporary scientists and photographers, trying to document patterns in the movement of dance and the flight of birds. With so many of Degas’ charcoal and pencil sketches on display, it was very obvious that he was trying over and over again to capture the movement of a split second. He had to work quickly, and in a lot of the pictures you can see faint sketches of arms and legs in slightly different positions, leaving a trail of movement like a slow-lense captured photograph.

I went to see the exhibition with my ballet dancer friend, which made the experience even more interesting. She said the ballet dancers’ poses, the way they held their arms and legs, looked almost sloppy compared to modern standards. This was probably mostly because they were all wearing tight corsets that restricted their movements, as well as the fact that their point shoes didn’t have blocks in them, making it a lot more painful to balance on tiptoe. It also showed the impact that the development of good quality photography had on dance: knowing your every movement could be perfectly captured forever, you naturally work harder on looking picture perfect every second of the dance. Because Degas captured dancers in natural, off-guard positions, he presents the modern ballet expert with a fascinating record of how balletic technique has evolved over the years.

The queue was out of the door, and the exhibition was crowded, but somehow it didn’t feel claustrophobic. Some of the rooms had so much empty space in the middle that they reflected the empty floorboards of the rehearsal spaces in Degas’ paintings. I felt like I should have done some pirouettes or something across them.

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement is on at the Royal Academy until 11th December.

Check out Style & Then Some’s guest article on the Telegraph’s London website

Read the full article here: London’s best charity shops: stylish spoils and sweet charity

I’m really quite excited about this. Today an article I wrote for the Telegraph’s London website was published. It came about after Alice Revel from Running in Heels kindly recommended Style & Then Some to the site’s London Content Editor, John O’Ceallaigh. John got in touch and asked if we’d like to contribute an article about fashion in the capital. It was hugely flattering to be asked and jumped at the chance – I put five years of bargain hunting to good use and wrote a guide to finding the best charity shops in London. I trekked all over the city and came up with a top five areas to target, and I’m pretty pleased with the resulting article. More than that, I’m really proud that all of mine, Helen, Sophie and Sophie C’s hard work on the blog has lead to us being featured on the website of a national newspaper. So girls, next stop Vogue?

Mind and RSPCA in Highgate, one of the five areas I featured in my guide to London charity shops

INTERVIEW: Keeping up with Corby

Picture: Rose-Marie Caldecott

There’s an air of maturity about Matt Corby that belies the Australian singer-songwriter’s 20 years. Corby left school when he was 13 to tour Australia when a band picked him up after hearing him sing Amazing Grace at his local church. With an ethereal, remarkably pure voice reminiscent of Jeff Buckley (he laughs and rolls his eyes when I point this out – it is a comparison that has been made before), it is easy to see why he was singled out as something special at such an early age. At 16 he was catapulted to fame when he was voted runner up in the hit TV talent contest, Australian Idol. Despite the whiskey and lime he’s drinking this afternoon in the pub garden of the Prince Albert in Notting Hill, despite his chain smoking and stubble, every now and again he gives a flash of his Peter Pan smile and he suddenly looks his age.

“Going in for Australia’s Idol was the biggest mistake of my life,” Corby grimaces. “I wasn’t ready for fame on that scale. It absolutely ruined me, it really did.” Corby tried to bring his own style to the project, but recalls how his choices for song covers barely made it through. “It was quite cleverly controlled by production. I did Death Cab and Damien Rice, which were a bit alternative, but they wouldn’t let me do a song that I wanted to do from a New York band called As Tall As Lions.”

Coming to London and playing at open mic nights has helped Corby to escape the music snobs who only saw him for his Australian Idol reputation in his homeland. The indie label and production company, Communion Music, has provided Corby with links to like-minded musicians. “People really get what I’m trying to do here.” The perfect antidote to his experience of commercial music as a fresh faced 16 year old, it seems.

While he’s released three EPs, and is finally making some headway in the very circles that once turned their noses up at him, he’s not in a hurry to release his first album. “I’m still really young, I have a lot of time and I want to do it right. I don’t want to release something because I’m being pushed. I’ll have something next year, and I’ll be able to say that I worked really hard on it. It’s going to be an interesting year.”

Free ice cream anyone? Book a session at the Häagen-Dazs Boudoir

You know those new Häagen-Dazs ads on the Tube, the ones that make it very clear that the Häagen-Dazs target audience is FEMALE and YOUNG likes to have FUN? Well presumably as part of that same campaign, Häagen-Dazs have set up something called the Häagen-Dazs Boudoir in the middle of London. They call it a ‘luxury VIP experience’ but essentially this is a place where, in exchange for increasing your Häagen-Dazs ‘brand awareness’ a bit you get to eat a bunch of free ice cream and mess around with make-up, shoes and other things that people who are female, young and fun just love. To be fair, there are some less irritatingly girly-girl pursuits on offer, like DJing lessons and life drawing, plus some decent bloggers and stylists are involved. And did I mention the free ice-cream? You’re a girl, you must love ice-cream.

The Häagen-Dazs Boudoir is open from 14^th July 2011 for 3 weeks. Book your session via the Häagen-Dazs Facebook page.

Inside the Haagen-Dazs Boudoir. Note the fridge full of ice cream, far right.

That would be a 'shoe chandelier' folks.