Eneko at One Aldwych

This month sees the opening of Eneko Atxa's newest restaurant at the basement of One Aldwych hotel in the Strand. Eneko at One Aldwych is a more casual version of his three-Michelin Azurmendi restaurant in Bilbao, Spain. Azurmendi has recently been rated as one of the world's top twenty restaurants, so we were excited to dine at Eneko's newest restaurant today.

The simplified menu consists of several seafood and land-based dishes, as well as vegetarian options. We had the anchovy tempura and a trio of pork consisting of  mushroom and Iberico ham, suckling pig brioche and crispy pork jowl. The anchovy tempura were served in a cute fish and chip style cone. Despite being a battered dish, I found the anchovy tempura to be light, but the trio of pork (trexxi boda pork festival) stood out for its generous portion and delicious variety of pork.

The case of a useless bus lane in London

Sometimes you wonder if the people at Transport for London ever use the buses they provide. Living in South East London, I understand the frustration of being someone who is very dependent on public transport and yet resigned to the fact that Transport for London will never improve the infrastructure here.

If you have ever taken a bus through Brockley Road between 7.30am and 8.30am, and between 5pm to 7pm, you will be aware of how much this road sucks your life. It takes about 20 minutes to cross a half mile stretch of Brockley Road before the buses reach the bottleneck that is Brockley Cross.

The Lorax at the Old Vic

It seems rather sad that on the very day our parliament would approve fracking in our national parks, we would be sitting in the magnificent Old Vic watching the Lorax presents his passionate case for the environment. And boy would you get fired up, especially when you read the next day the government is also cutting subsidies to renewable solar energy.

Adapted for the stage by David Greig and directed by Max Webster, The Lorax is based on Dr. Seuss's classic tale of the eponymous cranky mustachioed grouchy critter out to protect his woodlands from the businessman and Thneed-knitting industrial businessman, Once-ler, whose greed ultimately caused the destruction and deforestation of the Lorax's forest. A fable if you will, about the dangers of corporate greed versus the need to preserve nature.

The Rising Tide

The Rising Tide by Jason deCires Taylor is a temporary installation situated beside Vauxhall Bridge on the beach below Albert Embankment.

Located a mile away from the House of Parliament, the four horsemen of the apocalypse is a political statement on the impact of fossil fuel and the reluctance by our leaders to tackle climate change. The sculptures, which features horses with heads modeled after oil well pumps, are only visible during low tides. Two of the riders in business suits looks away in defiance.

Club Rouges at the Rivoli Ballroom

Club Rouges is a new club night format at the fantastic Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley, Crofton Park, South East London.

The first night was 25 July 2015 and featured music from the 1970s and 1980s via DJ Kobayashi Doron. Judging by the energy by those who attended (both young and old) it was a huge success. I am already looking forward to their next themed evening 'Hollywood' on 25 September, and this is coming from someone who hasn't 'danced' since his college years.

A Grade II listed 1930s art deco building, the Rivoli is the only intact 1950s ballroom to remain in London. It has hosted plenty of epic music nights, including gigs by Florence and the Machine, music videos by Lana del Ray and appearing in blockbusters such as Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Rivoli Ballroom
350 Brockley Road
Crofton Park SE4 2BY
Transport: Crofton Park, Brockley

Carsten Höller Decision

Carsten Höller: Decision

Hayward Gallery at Southbank Centre has always hosted some pretty amazing and immersive exhibitions such as Martin Creed's What's the point of it? and Lights. So it was pretty exciting news when they announced that they will be hosting Carsten Höller latest exhibition - Decision, featuring some of his best installations and more.

Bakerloo Line extension

After a consultation period that can be measured in decades, Transport for London has published a mind blowing report that dwellers in the neglected part of South East London wants better transport infrastructure. Shocking, I know! (You might also notice a distinct lack of bridges in this part of the capital).

Just how much money did Transport for London spend on this consultation just to get this very obvious answer?

The Crooked Well review

The Crooked Well is a local gastropub in Camberwell. Five minutes walk from Denmark Hill railway station, it isn't too difficult to find. Its location in a neighbourhood, rather than on busy high street of Camberwell Church Street, ensures that it has a quiet ambiance, quite unlike what you would find in most pubs.

Gastropubs are not special to write about, and The Crooked Well isn't particularly special. But what they do, they do it good. We first visited on a Sunday a couple of months ago to sample their roast. We are particularity fussy about our Sunday roast, so it was delightful to find that the roast did not disappoint. The beef roast was delicious and served with appropriately thick, but not too thick gravy. In terms of my own personal Sunday roast ranking, it sits just behind Hawksmoor and Princess of Shoreditch, but The Crooked Well's take on traditional roast takes the crown for south of the river.

Brockley Market

Brockley Market is a weekly food and farmer's market held on the outskirt edge of Brockley close to Deptford and Lewisham Central. We've been living in Brockley for 1 1/2 years now and visits them at least twice a month. South East London hasn't been getting plenty of love by the media, local and regional government, so it isn't like we have a high street that is worth shouting about. We do not even have a none-chain groceries shop selling fruits and veggies. So something like Brockley Market has become crucial to the community here.

Brockley Market is divided into two distinctive bits - one which sells locally sourced market produce - meat, veggies, flowers, wine, cheese, fish and all sorts, an another half where street food hawkers sells hot food and drinks.You know, the kind that are despised by some top chefs in Soho because it is totally wrong to pay £5 to stand and eat something you can see cooked before your eyes, but it is totally okay to pay £40 for something previously frozen and heated in an oven.

The Miles Stairs at Somerset House

Somerset House hosts a ton of amazing spiral staircases, most of which dates back to when the building was build. Not only are they an architecture success that has withstood the test of time, they are also an engineering marvel.

Joining them is the Miles Stairs. Designed by Eva Jiricna, this amazing new spiral staircase is located in the West Wing of the Grade I listed Somerset House, and features a lightweight steel mesh tower core and ultra performance concrete cantilevered stair threads made of a new material called ductal. Ductal is said to be a thousand times stronger than concrete. Unlike the older staircases in Somerset House, the threads on the Miles stairs are connected to the central tower and not on the walls.

Knyttan

Knyttan is a pop up concept store currently located on Somerset House. Since November 2014 they have been selling scarves, jumpers and throws. There is nothing exactly interesting in doing that by itself, but what sets Knyttan apart is you can design (or at least customise) your goods and watch them get knitted instore,

The store itself can be found on the New Wing section of Somerset House, accessible through Lancaster Place near Waterloo Bridge. We've only stumbled upon it by accident last week whilst checking out PJ Harvey residency at Somerset House. At first glance, it looks like yet another typical wool shop, that is until you see that big Stoll flat knitting machine.

Four Microsoft Surface tablets are fixed on one side allowing you to customise your own scarf, jumper or large scarf via a web browser app. Here you select from one of several of pre-defined patterns or designs, allowing you to carefully 'customise' them by creating effects or changing the colour. Once you are done, you can order it. It takes 4-5 days for an order to be fulfilled and send to your address, but you can also make an appointment to watch your order made in that Stoll machine instore.

The Wellcome Collection's stunning new spiral staircase

Anyone who has followed my Instagram account will know how much I love spiral staircases. From traditional 17th century cantilevered stone staircases like the beautiful Tulip staircase in Queen's House to the majestic Brewer staircase at Heals and modern classics like the one in City Hall. If there's an interesting staircase, particularly the spiral kind, you will bet I will be there photographing it.

Peckham Bazaar review

Hands up if you ever believed that there's no such thing as a good restaurant in the south east region of London? Yep, we've all thought about that at least once. But not only are there good restaurants down here, there are loads of hidden gems. One of them is Peckham Bazaar.

Peckham Bazaar started out as a pop-up restaurant in an old pub on the boundary of Peckham and Nunhead. Its location within modest rows of Victorian terraces, low rise council flats and a Grand Design house, might not be an obvious destination for culinary fans, but trust me, it is worth trotting up here (as we so occasionally do from Brockley).

They have since become a permanent fixture at the same location. Peckham Bazaar describes themselves as a pan-Balkan restaurant, and you can tell by the eastern European influences that goes into their innovative dishes, primarily cooked on the grill. The menu changes daily and seasonally, depending on what ingredients their chefs can lay their hands on. This ensure that at least each visit will be a unique experience.

King's Cross St Pancras tunnel

The new Pancras Square has been connected to King's Cross St Pancras underground station by a tunnel since July of last year. It is well hidden - so much so, that in fact, I've walked past the tunnel a couple of times without ever realising it was there. Not that I never needed to use the tunnel itself as it isn't exactly a short cut to anywhere particular interesting (unless you are a property developer/speculator).

Still, in a redevelopment that has thrown up its fair share of bland and uninteresting design, the tunnel is perhaps, along with the redesigned King's Cross Railway Station, worthy of a visit for anyone interested in architecture (or at least pretending they live in a Star Trek fantasyland). The 90m tunnel is equipped on one side with an integrated LED light wall which displays a radiating form of light show.

The entrance to the tunnel is at One Pancras Square building. It is located at Pancras Square, part of a massive redevelopment and gentrification of St Pancras & Somers Town district.

London Street Food

Street food is all the rage these days, as it has always been. The quality has improved beyond anything we've had before, and often if I need my daily dose of calorie boost I would seek out a food truck.

Here are my picks for some of the best street food operating in London right now, in no particular order.

Bleecker St Burger (Spitalfields Market, South Bank Queen's Walk, Street Feast Dalston Feast)

Bleecker St Burger won the annual London Burger Bash with their special New York style burger made out black pudding sandwiched between two patties of beef. And it tastes so darn good. Top it off with a cup of their delicious sweet potato fries.

Roti King review

Nasi Lemak

Roti King is a Malaysian cafe/restaurant located close to London Euston railway station. Formerly located in Charring Cross, they moved there earlier this year.

Good and cheap Malaysian food are hard to come by in London. There are a couple - for example Malaysian Hall in Bayswater area is run by the Malaysian government, and Malaysian Deli in our very own Brockley. But Roti King does something that neither of those does - proper roti canai.

Roti canai is a type of fluffy flat bread sold in Malaysia, an is normally eaten as a side with curry or dhal (lentil) sauce. It is a versatile dish, and can be combined with other ingredients like eggs and meat, but the best is still the plain ol kind. It is light and fluffier that the kind of flatbread that are normally served in Indian restaurants in this country. When I used to live in Malaysia, I would have it for breakfast, lunch an occasionally, dinner.

Street Feast Lewisham - Model Market

Today marks the launch of the Lewisham chapter of Street Feast. Hosted at the derelict abandoned 1950s Model Market just off Lewisham High Street, the organisers has used to opportunity to inject some much needed vibe into the local scene. Foodies who lives in Lewisham has one less reason to make the trek to East London. A good thing too as I personally find East London to be a victim of its own success.

Argument about the march of gentrification aside, the feeling that I've got from speaking with some longer term residents as well as newer residents like us, is that Lewisham has been waiting for something like this to happen to their beloved by often neglected town centre.  After all, Lewisham (and by extension, South East London) has long been a laughing stock of inner London (fun fact: Lewisham is the only inner London borough that isn't connected to the London Underground).

The day the Avengers came to Brockley, London

Last Friday, Marvel Studios came down to film a scene at the Rivoli Ballroom in Crofton Park, Brockley in South East London. My partner and I were walking down Brockley Road when we stumbled upon a film crew filming "After Party". The Rivoli Ballroom is no stranger to film - it has featured in Doctor Who and the Muppets Most Wanted, but this one was big. We could tell by the twenty of so trucks that were lining up on Brockley Road and Marnock Road. Curiously a couple crew members had shirts with Guardians of the Galaxy printed on it.

As the filming of the Guardians of the Galaxy has already wrapped up and is currently in post production, the only logical conclusion was that (OMG, this was when my jaws dropped when realisation hit me), they were a Marvel Studios film crew filming the next Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero movie - Avengers 2: The Age of Ultron! With crews and visitors in t-shirts bearing Captain America's logo and Converse's Chuck Taylor All-Star logo (you know with the big five pointed star in the middle, you didn't need to be a genius to figure it out. The symbolism was strong. It all hinted that whatever was going on in the ballroom had something to do with Captain America.

Browns of Brockley review

I have a confession. When I was first introduced to Brockley, the area we now live in, it was through the wonder of London's specialty coffee scene. Brockley is an odd place to visit for coffee, but it was how it was. In any case, our chance visit to this part of Lewisham opened our eyes to its lovely Victorian housing stock, many of which were largely ignored, but so many potential. The rest was history.

Browns is located conventionality in a row of terrace opposite Brockley railway station, making it an ideal spot to hang out in the wee morning when a train breaks down somewhere down the line. The shop is small and unassuming from the outside, and neutral and unpretentious on the inside. Delicious cakes and bagels greet you as you enter the shop. Oh, and the sweet smell of good coffee.

Get your own sign in London Underground Johnston

Hibernacula is a pop up art gallery featuring photographs, prints, poetry and fine art by some of East London finest artists. You can find them at an old office beside Leytonstone London Underground station. One of the artist who is exhibiting there is Russell Frost of Hooksmith Press. Originally from New Zeland, Russell has a small selection of his Letterpress prints on display as well as a working vintage letter press and London Underground's famous Johnston typeface press blocks. Up till 26 February, you can have anything you like set in arguably one of the world's famous typeface. So, what are you waiting for? Go.