Colourful houses, a world-famous carnival and market and, of course, a film with a certain H. Grant and J. Roberts. These are just a few of the images London’s Notting Hill conjures up. But there’s a lot more to the neighbourhood than elegant architecture and *that* movie. My one-day itinerary will help you uncover Notting Hill’s rich cultural and social history, and make the most of its excellent dining and shopping.
If The Phoenician Scheme left you longing for more Wes Anderson, you might like to pay a visit to West London's Foreign Exchange News. The beautifully designed coffee shop would fit right in to Anderson's universe and — just as importantly — the coffee is great and there really is a working bureau de change inside!
I never could get the hang of Wandsworth. Like Southwark, it's a London borough and a district, which confused me. In any case, that part of south-west London is poorly connected to my part of south-east London. This is a long-winded way of saying that it's taken me longer than it should have to visit Story Coffee's Wandsworth location. But I'm very glad I did!
UPDATE: Unfortunately, this location of Kapihan has now closed permanently. But they have reopened at two locations on Battersea Park Road.
Two recurring themes in my London coffee shop write-ups during these 18 months of COVID have been: the power of coffee shops to connect people amid the loneliness of lockdown, and the ability of coffee shops to transport you and allow you to experience other places and cultures even when travelling is harder than it once was. Both of these ring true at Kapihan, a Filipino coffee shop and bakery close to Battersea Park, which I visited again at the weekend.
The past two years have been among the most challenging for hospitality businesses, including specialty coffee shops, in London, and around the world. Keeping a specialty coffee shop in business in London is difficult even in normal times, let alone during a global pandemic, which has felt like a game of snakes and ladders with constant changes of rules, snap lockdowns and general uncertainty.
Unfortunately, some coffee shops have had to close permanently (please come back, Black Swan Yard!), but it's been encouraging to see how many new — and often exciting — cafes have opened in London in the past couple of years.
With the glorious British summer in full force — oh, wait, that was two weeks ago — it was the perfect time for a staycation. I joined my parents in Pall Mall for a couple of nights last weekend, and although it wasn't as sunny as we had hoped, nor was it as rainy as forecast, and we made the best of it, dining at three different restaurants and spending a very enjoyable day exploring Notting Hill.
After visiting north-east London last week, this week's Caffeine Chronicles post is about a specialty coffee shop and roastery on the opposite side of London: Kiss the Hippo, in Richmond, to be more exact.
Midway through a long bike ride around west London, I found myself not in a dark forest, but in Hammersmith, where I was born. You can't go home again, according to Thomas Wolfe's novel of the same name, but in my case, I don't return often enough. Owning a bike makes the journey from Bermondsey easier, though, and knowing there was an excellent coffee stop, in the form of Carbon Kopi, helped me stay on track as I meandered along the Thames-side cycle route.
Update: This Over Under location is closed but you can still find them in Earl's Court and Wandsworth.
Outside Over Under Coffee's Ladbroke Grove cafe, there's an A-board that reads 'best in the west'. Indeed, the Antipodean specialty coffee company has other locations in Earl's Court, West Brompton and Wandsworth, all a little far west for me even now I have two wheels at my disposal. And it was on two wheels that I made it to Ladbroke Grove on Sunday morning, despite the intermittently inclement weather.
By all accounts, 2020 has been a terrible year, but one upshot was that I finally got a bike and started cycling around London while the locked-down streets were much quieter than usual. Another positive was that without having to rely on convoluted public transport routes, I was finally able to visit Amoret Coffee's Notting Hill roastery cafe, which had been on my to-visit list for an embarrassingly long time.
