Author: Paul Southgate
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Sky High and Slightly Smug in Shenzhen
Some hotels trade on geography like it’s a personality trait. White sand beaches so soft you feel guilty walking on them. Alpine perches where you’re served fondue while staring into the moral abyss of a glacier. And then there’s this place, which has decided correctly that the most dramatic natural wonder of the modern world…
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A Modern Grand Hotel That Knows Its Manners
If modern luxury hotels were people, most would be that over eager chap at a party who insists on telling you about his watch collection before you have even found the bar. The Shangri La Qiantan, however, is something rarer: a place with enough confidence to pour you a drink first, then quietly reveal it…
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Intercontinental Shenzhen: Calm, Coffee and Clever Toilets in Shenzhen
Big international chains, when done properly, are not soulless monoliths but something closer to a warm bath drawn at precisely the right temperature. You arrive frazzled, over-stimulated, slightly cross with the world after another immigration queue that seems to have been designed by a sadist, and there it is: beige, marbled, quietly humming with competence.…
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Pisco, Precision and a Touch of Lima: Alfonsina Is the Real Deal
London is an elite city. It simply is. Not in the peacocking, velvet-rope sense, though there’s a fair bit of that to, but in the far more important way: you can wander into almost any district and, if you know where to look (or sometimes even if you don’t), stumble across somewhere that feeds you…
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Yotel Manchester – caffeine fuelled
Question. What’s better? A: A decent cup of coffee you have to walk to get. B: An instant coffee in your room. The answer, obviously, always has to be A. No one should ever be forced—before breakfast, before consciousness, before hope—to drink instant coffee. It is a moral failing disguised as convenience. Glad we’ve cleared…
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Scott’s Richmond: Oysters, Opulence, and the Comfort of Getting It Right
Scott’s in Richmond is the sort of restaurant that makes you want to sit up a little straighter the moment you walk in, as if the building itself has opinions about posture. Oysters, opulence, and old-school service, really, what’s not to love? It is a modern throwback, which is a perfect contradiction and all the…
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The Pelican Notting Hill – Built by Gods
If the ancient gods ever convened on a cloud somewhere above W11 and announced, “Right, let’s design the world’s most implausibly perfect winter pub,” they would, naturally, bicker for a bit; Zeus insisting on thunderbolts behind the bar, Hera wanting better cushions, Dionysus demanding bottomless wine; before finally agreeing to conjure The Pelican, Notting Hill.…
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Mercure Oxford Eastgate Hotel: A Properly Oxford Place to Stay
Some hotels just get where they are. You know the sort: they don’t try to be something else, or to reinvent the wheel, or to pretend Oxford is in Dubai. The Mercure Oxford Eastgate is one of those rare spots that understands its brief perfectly: be Oxford, stay Oxford, breathe Oxford. And it does. You…
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The Talkhouse: Thank God This Pub Still Exists
Thank God places like this still exist. Honestly. Before I’d even parked the car, I could feel my blood pressure dropping. A thatched roof straight out of an Enid Blyton daydream, crooked old beams that probably remember the Civil War, an open fire crackling away as though it’s been waiting centuries just to toast your…
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King’s Arms Oxford: Everything a Pub Should Be
Yes yes yes. A great pub. Everything a pub should be. None of your distressed brick and faux industrial nonsense, no ironic lighting or Shoreditch wankery masquerading as “authenticity”. The King’s Arms is the real thing, the sort of pub that’s been around since God was a boy and still smells faintly of ale, wood…
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The Travel Critic 