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Fu Manchu Clapham + Rosewood Hotel Holborn London

Opium for Mass

SW London © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone 

When King Lud plays chess… Until lately Clapham High Street was lookin’ a tad down at heel, a touch downmarket, a trifle unpalatable. The chattering classes first discovered it in the Nineties. Gnocchi was knocked back and dotcom bubbly guzzled in minimalist restaurants. Consuming consumé against an appreciation of a consummate command of line. That was, until they sniffed out Northcote Road and jumped one mile west and several notches north up the junction | property ladder. Clapham High Street went down the two sewers tubes (both of them). The clattering bells of St Mary’s cloud splicing spire, the only constant. Yummy mummies and faddy daddies retreated to the ‘burbs, tossed with lilacs and red may, blind t’ the unflattering stare of charity façades. Meanwhile multimillionaires’ rows, they became chocca. Now the High Street is doin’ a Blur, having a comeback, a stationary tour. Waitrose? Yep. Byron. Yes. Protest free Foxtons? Yeah. The Dairy and its monosyllabically subtitled menu (Bespoke | Snacks | Garden | Sea | Land | Sweet | Cheese)? Yah.

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come

Fu Manchu Clapham High Street © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Awake, north wind, and come, south wind! Aspire to a cornucopian diet of multi layered Michelin starred musings. Rediscovered Clapham’s gone all Louboutin heel and Saturday farmers’ organic food market and sherry trifle on a plate. Yup. Even the gents have been gentrified. The WC conveniently next to Clapham Common Station’s been sanitised to become Wine & Charcuterie. North London’s got The Ampersand. South London’s got an ampersand. Thankfully there’s still a bit a’ danger lurking ‘neath the railway arches. We’re off to the hard launch of Fu Manchu for some moustachioed mischief and fiendish plotting with Lavender’s Blue new intern, blonde babelicious Bristolian Annabel P. “Life’s a beach. No make that a stage.” Quadruple doctorates aren’t a prerequisite. A lust for life is. We give good party. Fu Manchu attracts shady characters. Yep that’s us, we’re on our way. Time to play bridge and tunnel with our arch enemies in a deadly game of Cluedo. You don’t have to be in Who’s Who to know what’s what. But it helps.

The voice of the turtle is heard in our land

Fu Manchu Clapham North © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Fu Manchu Clapham Launch Night © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Fu Manchu Cocktail Clapham © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Rosewood London Courtyard © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Calum Ducat’s Fu Manchu’s Events Manager. “It’s not a generic venue. When you enter Fu Manchu it’s like your own little world. Clapham’s secret. Las Vegas’ Tao Asian bistro and night club. In SW4.” A rim of light installations by Louisa Smurthwaite, beloved by Alison Goldfrapp and Grace Jones, periodically illuminates the exposed brickwork. In between it’s dark like the tents of Kedar. The tall, lean and feline waiter seductively suggests lovely steamed Tai Chi Bo Coy Gow (£5.80) and baked Wai Fa Chi Mar Har (£4.50) dim sum. What a devious mastermind. “That’s going to happen.” Duty bound we help ourselves to a portion or four. Pure evil. Immortally hypnotic cocktails infused with Chinese essence and Asian flavours as fragrant as Jeffrey Archer’s wife. The Kiss of Death’s (£9.50) liquid rejuvenation, elixir vitae. Pure genius. Mancho’s Mind Control’s (£10.00) peril incarnate. Pure fear. Spikenard and saffron; calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices. DJ Andrew Galea takes to the decks. Time to play the Sax Rohmer. Yo. Let’s indulge in some insidious dancing; monopolise the floor, a game of risk, human Jenga, conscious coupling, connect two, crimes of passion and, eh, rumbustious rumblings (trains overhead anyone?), by the watchmen of the walls, under the unhaggard midnight sun. Pure lust.

O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved 

Rosewood Holborn © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

From a Victorian opium den to an Edwardian five star. Money can’t buy happiness but it can buy dinner at the Rosewood Hotel. If it’s not on your radar you need to quickly recalibrate. The hotel’s Holborn Dining Room is where it’s all going on, a macédoine of next seasonness, fashion fastforwardness. A recipe for excess. Forget trays or envelopes or woe betide by hand; bills in books are just so now. Rosewood might be a chain, but more Tiffany than Travelodge. If you could perfume glamour, it’d come up smelling of Rosewood. Money can’t buy dinner with the Right Honourable David Lammy in the Regency Carlton House Terrace (truffle arrancini, kale Caesar salad, asparagus wrapped in grilled courgettes and summer pudding washed down with Laurent Perrier Champers, Châteauneuf du Pape 2005, Mâcon-Lugny Louis Latour 2011 and Château Raymond Lafon Sauternes 2010). Pure gold. 

Arise, our love, our fair one, and come away

Rosewood London © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

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Architecture Luxury Restaurants

Victoria House + The Bloomsbury Ballroom London

Ballistics

Bloomsbury Ballroom Victoria House © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Like Selfridges, that other great Beaux Arts behemoth cathedral to commerce, Victoria House confidently swallows up a whole urban block. An architectural display of imperialism with balls of stone commanding attention along one full sweep of Bloomsbury Square, the (breathe in) di style in antis Ionic Erechtheion portico (breathe out) soars heavenward on giant columns through the upper floors to a pediment boxed in by the mother of all parapets below a monster green slate triple mansard. All this is so emphatic. Incidentally it was used as a setting for the television series Mr Selfridge. Again incidentally it is faced with Portland stone from the same quarry as St Paul’s Cathedral. Back in the day, or year, 1926 to be exact, the architect Charles William Long’s brief was to “add to the dignity and beauty of the metropolis”. Something we’re not averse to doing either.

Amazingly the interiors remain virtually intact. Entrance lobbies on all four sides are faced in Subiaco marble, decorated Greek style, dressed up to the nines with brass detailing and capped by coffered ceilings. Three halls with sprung floors for dancing are slotted between the panelled offices. The south hall is now called The Bloomsbury Ballroom. It’s a picture of a fabulous age, a place for roarers and flappers. Is that Alabama Beggs shimmying across the shadows? Seamus Heaney believed, “If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.” Conversely we reckon if architecture and the arts do anything, they can fortify your social life, your waywardness. Smash the carapace. Have a ball. And so, an invitation to a glittering world of Divine Comedy Decadence, an exploration of the darker side of paradise, utopia displacing dystopia, delving into a phantasmagoria, transcending into a transmogrification, proves irresistible.

We’re a little late arriving. Thank goodness for 3am licences. It’s been a long day starting with breakfast at The Travellers. Jennifer’s Diary eat your heart out. We’ve schlepped across London from an exclusive top secret party. It was a very private view for The Beautiful People of a three bedroom apartment at 155 Sloane Street curated by Wallpaper* editors for the next issue. Co-hosts were Wallpaper* Editor-in-Chief Tony Chambers and Cadogan Chief Exec Hugh Seaborn. Chatham House? What’s that? Is it National Trust? Anyway, it’s terribly important don’t you think to use colour for branding. Asprey Purple. Crown Cream. Linley Green. Tiffany Blue. Veuve Clicquot Yellow. Barry White. Hotel Chocolat Black. Acqua di Parma Gold. Bloomsbury Ballroom Black and Gold. Classy. The psychedelic Long Bar off the ballroom employs the full spectrum with lampshades of every shade in the colour wheel. Lights, cameras, lots of action: this starring Space Works world’s a candelabra-filled stage. Fuelled by Lotus Events canapés, ballroom dancers from City Academy take to the floor, tripping the polychromatic light fantastic. The room is on fire.

Turner Prize nominee Tris Vonna-Michell “creates circuitous, multi-layered narratives, characterised by fragments of information, detours and repetitions, designed to confuse and enlighten in equal measure.” The same could be said for the bars off the ballroom. The 32 metre Long Bar lives up to its name. So does the Crush Bar: we’re shoulder to shoulder with the air kissing crowd. “Things are always unnoticed until they’re noticed,” declared Tesco Chairman Sir Richard Broadbent, hell bent on stating something or other of consequence. “A monument to our creativity and a brilliant day out,” assertively commented Tony Blair on the Millennium Dome in the days before irony. Returning to paraphraseology we enthusiastically say The Bloomsbury Ballroom is a noticeable monument to our creativity and a brilliant night out. A dignified and beautiful ballroom of one’s own.

The Bloomsbury Ballroom candles © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley