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While I was running some errands ahead of a work trip I'm taking later this week, I passed the new Store St Espresso coffee bar on Bishopsgate, just opposite Liverpool Street station. The cafe only opened a week ago today so of course I had to check it out. I first visited the original Store St Espresso — located, funnily enough, in Bloomsbury's Store Street —  over a decade ago  and it featured in  one of my earlier London speciality coffee guides . When I was still living in Marylebone and working in King's Cross, I often frequented the coffee shop and its  second location on Tavistock Place , which was originally called Continental Stores. The threequel is in Hammersmith, making the new Bishopsgate spot the fourth in the Store St family. Other than the A-board outside, the shopfront is currently in incognito mode. There's a wooden bench, with a small, integrated table out front, and you can spot the espresso machine and grinders on the counter through the large f...

The original Gentlemen Baristas  has been one of my favourite coffee shops in my neighbourhood — Bermondsey and Borough — for over seven years. While spending a lot more time closer to home over the past few years, I've been stopping by more often, usually to get a piccolo to go. If you like your coffee shops to combine cosiness with dapperness, this is the place to go. The GBs have expanded since then, with their Park Street shop next to Borough Market, being another of my favourites among their ten locations. The cafes are cousins rather than sisters, some retaining a more rustic style, while others, like their new flagship on Piccadilly , occupy rather grander digs. The Piccadilly cafe opened in September 2021 and I popped in for a 'Winterlude' visit in late December. The facade and entranceway of 162 Piccadilly are particularly impressive, though you'll probably need to cross the road to properly appreciate the building's architecture. But you can do that afte...

The original  Rosslyn Coffee  has been one of my favourite London coffee shops since I first visited in 2018 , thanks to its consistently excellent coffee, warm hospitality and gorgeous design. It's through Rosslyn that I discovered artist Melisa Dora , whose mugs and other ceramics adorn my shelves at home, and it was also thanks to them that I first heard about Saint Nine Coffee , now also a favourite of mine. When Rosslyn opened a second coffee shop in Moorgate — just around the corner from Moorgate station — in October, it immediately went on my to-visit list. But as it's only open on weekdays and a little too far for a lunch-break walk, I was only able to stop by when I had a day off just before Christmas, after brunch at Where's Fred's , which is a short walk away. Located on London Wall, just around the corner from Moorgate station and the Barbican, the coffee shop occupies the end of a small period terrace in the shadow of the glistening skyscrapers of the City ...

For the second year running , rather than picking my top five leaps  of the year, I've picked five stories that sum up my travel highlights of the year. It has, of course, been a year with very little foreign travel. It's also the first year in 15 years where I haven't been to New York a single time. I miss the city so much and can't wait to return. But I'm grateful that I was able to travel to one new country ( Malta ) and one new European city ( Porto ), as well as taking short trips to  Edinburgh and Canterbury . I've also spent time with family in Oxford and Walsall, and spent a little more time in Birmingham , usually on the way to Wolves matches. My motto for the second half of the year was carpe diem — if a trip or event was possible, I would try to do it as soon as I could, before the situation changed again. 1. Leaping into Malta's Blue Lagoon Like many people, I had to cancel a lot of travel plans last year, including seven international trips, a...

What with one thing and another, my 2021 end-of-year round-ups have been slightly delayed, such that it is now already 2022. In this post, I'm highlighting my five favourite novels that I read in 2021, as well as five more that almost made the shortlist.  For the second year in a row , I've read fewer than 100 books this year — I know that for many people 72 is still a lot of books, but for someone whose yearly tally was once as high as 200 , it feels like a big drop-off. The reasons are also the same as last year: I'm no longer commuting into the office (I would usually read at least two books a week on my daily 1h30 round trip bus journeys) and I've been travelling a lot less. I still find it difficult to make time to read in the evenings, unless I'm really gripped by what's currently on my Kindle or in my paperback. Before I jump into this year's list, I'd like to give a quick shout out to BookShop.org , a UK-based online bookshop that supports indepe...