Feed Me: London Edition
They’re doing Appalachia cosplay in Shoreditch.
Good morning, everyone. Writing today’s letter from my apartment in Brooklyn. I’m pleased to report that the cantaloupe I got at the Bartel Pritchard Square farmer’s market today is the best I’ve had all summer. Although I might be chasing Sara Tane’s experience with California melon varietals as long as I’m on this coast.
In today’s London Edition of Feed Me (made possible by a heavy assist from Montague Ashley-Craig): London’s growing AI mafia, RIP to the Chiltern Street Air Mail newsstand, Dua Lipa is curating this year’s London Literature Festival, the restaurants going mostly raw in the August heatwave, the BBC’s Gen Z whisperer, and the tech companies who want to pay you to rave.
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In 2020, Shreeji Newsagents (a magazine and newspaper store that had been open since 1982) went through a renovation in partnership with Gabriel Chipperfield and Air Mail. The newsstand was wrapped with Air Mail branding, served coffee in Air Mail cups, distributed printed issues of Air Mail, and hosted events for Graydon Carter’s news startup.
It recently came to my attention that as of May, the Air Mail newsstand — across from Chiltern Firehouse on Chiltern Street in Marylebone — is Air Mail no longer.
Unlike Air Mail’s Hudson Street shop (which Air Mail fully owns and operates), Air Mail treated Shreeji Newsagents like a billboard, paying the newsstand to have its branding on the awning and inside the store. My guess is that in the 2025 sale of Air Mail to Puck, that advertising line item was slashed from the budget.
Anjali Lewis, Air Mail’s former head of commerce and brand partnerships who ran the West Village store (and prior to that, worked for Graydon Carter for a decade at Vanity Fair), left Air Mail in June. She is back in the Carter orbit at Gravity Strategic Partners.
LONDON JOBS
✉️ Project Manager of International Partnerships at Substack. Responsibilities include coordinating logistics for Substack’s UK and international event activity. This includes things like booking dinner reservations, arranging travel for VIPs, and managing diaries. (£45,000 - £60,000)
👔 Full-Time Sales Associate at Anglo-Italian. To apply, email ms@angloitalian.com with your CV and Cover Letter.
🏗️ Environment, Health and Safety Specialist at Anthropic. You’ll own EHS execution across our EMEA sites — running onsite inspections, hazard and risk assessments, and ergonomic reviews on a regular cadence. (£110,000 - £140,000)
💄 Beauty Editor at Vogue Business. The Beauty Editor will oversee the weekly Beauty Edit newsletter, represent the brand at beauty-focused events and work with our executive editors to commission freelance contributors.
🎥 International Publicity Coordinator at A24. This person will work closely with international partners, understanding cultural nuances and communication differences to support cohesive global campaigns.
Today’s Water Cooler was assembled by Montague Ashley-Craig, who I met in London at a Feed Me party.
Regional food is getting hyper-regional. Bara, a neighbourhood café in Peckham championing Welsh produce, has launched a monthly evening service. I went to the first dinner last week and was impressed by how sensitively it was done: Welsh ingredients, Welsh wine, but none of it felt like pastiche or a “bit.” Meanwhile, a new restaurant “shaped by the spirit of Appalachia” has just opened in Shoreditch. Maybe hyper-regionalisation is the natural next stage of the British-coded/American-coded food swap I wrote about last month in Feed Me.
Perfume brands are going hyper-local. Perfume brands have developed a thing for collaborating with cult London neighbourhood spots. Jouissance has created an actual La Camionera perfume inspired by the Hackney lesbian bar; Mugler brought its Starlicious fragrance to Spitalfields dessert shop Humble Crumble; and Loewe Perfumes celebrated its new pistachio-scented candle with an ice cream bar at The Dreamery in De Beauvoir.
London is developing its own AI mafia. Google DeepMind, founded here in 2010, has lost 74 researchers so far this year — but plenty aren’t going far. Former DeepMinders are spinning out startups across the city, including Ineffable Intelligence, Recursive Superintelligence, and CuspAI. Companies founded by DeepMind alumni have now raised more than $14 billion between them.
King’s Cross is fast becoming the centre of the London AI scene. Google and Meta are already there, OpenAI and Scale AI have taken space nearby, Anthropic is just down the road, and Prometheus is reportedly eyeing the area too.
Speaking of DeepMind: Its new home is London’s ultimate “landscraper.” DeepMind is based inside Google’s enormous new £1 billion King’s Cross HQ, a super-long, low-rise building—essentially a skyscraper turned on its side. Less glamorously, the building reportedly spent more than a year during construction battling urban foxes living on its vast new living roof. Very London.
AI firms are coming for London’s rare bookshops. London’s antiquarian booksellers are reportedly being targeted with mysterious bulk orders for old and obscure titles as AI companies hunt for new sources of human-written training data that aren’t already on the internet. The fear is that some could ultimately be dismantled and scanned for model training.
Peter Thiel’s Palantir is suing the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime after Sadiq Khan blocked a proposed £50 million deal to supply AI software to London’s Metropolitan Police force. Palantir says the decision was unlawful; City Hall says the procurement process was flawed. The fight now heads to the High Court.
Meanwhile, the Mayor’s £1.75 Weekend Hopper has already saved Londoners £4 million. Sadiq Khan’s summer Weekend Hopper — unlimited bus and tram travel all day on Saturdays and Sundays for the price of a single £1.75 fare — has reportedly saved Londoners more than £4 million in its first two weekends. Now to get A/C on those buses…
And Khan does not rule out running for a fourth term as Mayor of London. Sadiq Khan is dropping increasingly unsubtle hints that he’ll run again in 2028, recently saying he’s “already worked out” his strategy for the next election. There’s no term limit for the Mayor of London, and Khan — who assumed the office in May 2016 and is currently in his record-breaking third term — is already the longest-serving mayor the city has had.
Dua Lipa is curating this year’s London Literature Festival. Dua Lipa is taking over the Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival this October with her Service95 Book Club. Her newly announced programme includes Zadie Smith, Patti Smith, Mustafa, and Kae Tempest, with Dua herself interviewing both Smiths over the opening weekend.
Nothing will give you $10,000 to throw a rave. London-based tech unicorn Nothing has launched the Club Nothing Fund, giving four independent music collectives or creatives $10K each to put on their biggest party yet. The company is also rumoured to be launching a smartwatch next month.
Skrillex played a surprise set in Peckham. Skrillex turned up for a surprise set at a free party at Jumbi in Peckham on Thursday night. Videos of him dropping UK garage classic “Flowers” by Sweet Female Attitude to the crowd are now doing the rounds online.
Everyone wants to be a mudlarker now. The New Yorker has a great piece on London’s increasingly competitive mudlarking scene, the very London pastime of combing the Thames foreshore at low tide for centuries-old treasure. You can find insane stuff: Roman pottery, Tudor jewellery, Georgian coins, Victorian dentures—essentially 2,000 years of London’s detritus is just sitting in the mud down there, waiting for the tide to go out. It used to be a fairly niche hobby, then absolutely exploded during the pandemic; permits are now strictly limited.
Smithfield—London’s closest approximation of the Meatpacking District—is in the middle of a major transformation. The new London Museum opens in the old General Market this November, and its newly announced food lineup has some serious heavy hitters. Meanwhile, a crop of new restaurants is opening in the surrounding streets. Until now, the area has mostly been known for Smithfield Market, fabric, and the original St John. The meat market, which still supplies much of London’s restaurant trade, is due to leave its historic home in the coming years. With the museum moving in and a load of new restaurants following, Farringdon is going to look very different pretty soon.
London is officially an Ice Cream City. This summer, more than ever, tiny ice cream outfits serving increasingly wild flavours seem to be popping up everywhere. Appropriately, Ice Cream City—Ruby Tandoh’s pocket guide to London ice cream for Vittles—is already close to selling out its second print run. This does not surprise me: London loves a pocket-sized printed guide. Modernist Estates’ Perambulations—walking guides to the modernist architecture of individual London neighbourhoods—are another favourite.
London’s bartenders are swotting up on the snakebite. Food Instagrammer James Dimitri has been making his way around London ordering the very ’80s combination of half lager, half cider and blackcurrant cordial everywhere from pubs to fancy bars. There’s a pleasingly trollish quality to asking a serious bartender for a snakebite, but the bit has become enough of a thing that bars are now apparently revising the recipe in anticipation of his arrival.
London’s pizza scene needs a Five Families sit-down. Williamsburg institution Best Pizza is popping up at The Standard this month, and seemingly every member of London’s pizza cognoscenti turned up to the launch last week. Best Pizza founder Frank Pinello spent the evening slaving over a Gozney oven, slinging out his cult ricotta, mozzarella, caramelised onion, and parsley white pies.
Meanwhile, Max Lewis of Lenny’s Apizza—London’s most vocal New Haven-style pizza evangelist, who partly made his name by beefing with food influencers—has found backing for a permanent site on Henrietta Street in Covent Garden. Better still, it’s around the corner from a slice shop owned by some of those very same former influencer adversaries. London’s pizza wars continue.
The BBC has hired a “Gen Z whisperer.” The BBC hired 26-year-old entrepreneur Brandon Relph to help overhaul how the broadcaster connects with younger audiences, as under-25s increasingly abandon traditional TV for YouTube and TikTok. Relph—who founded his first company at 13 and has jokingly described himself as “the go-to guy who knows the youth”—has joined the BBC’s strategy team.
A dispatch from the A24 Tony preview: At last week’s London industry screening of the Anthony Bourdain documentary, a grande dame of the British food world was overheard whispering, “Tony would have HATED this.”
The Groucho Club is entering its next era. The Groucho—arguably the blueprint for London’s modern members’ club—has unveiled a new identity by my friends at All Purpose. The 40-year-old Soho institution has also been broadening its events programme in an effort to attract a younger crowd.
Even Tramp is getting into wellness. London’s members’ clubs increasingly want to optimise you as well as entertain you. The Arts Club has Lanserhof, 180 House has Soho Health Club, and now even Tramp is getting in on longevity. The famously louche celebrity nightclub has launched Tramp Health, a 16,000-square-foot fitness and longevity club catering to a new generation who apparently see no contradiction between a late night at Tramp and an early-morning workout at Tramp Health.
Has wellness become too much work? In response to British Vogue’s viral “My £1,000-A-Month Wellness Obsession Was Making Me Sick” story, London’s coolest nutritionist, Kat Chan, has written a useful follow-up on the increasingly blurry line between wellness and the wellness industry.
London’s full-body scan obsession is heading stateside. Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s Neko Health, which started in Stockholm, is launching in New York after expanding rapidly in London. When it arrived here, it reportedly amassed a 100,000-person waitlist; it now has four London clinics. The company just raised $700 million in Series C funding ahead of its US launch.
The Savoy just sold off 2,000 pieces of furniture. As part of its ongoing £45 million refurbishment, The Savoy auctioned off around 2,000 pieces of furniture and fittings to the public two weeks ago. According to one TikToker who went along, wardrobes that originally cost £50,000 sold for £80, while £1,500 lamps went for £90 (!).
Nick Jones is selling Loch Lomond’s “Wallaby Island.” Soho House founder Nick Jones and his broadcaster wife, Kirsty Young, have put Inchconnachan, their 103-acre private island, on the market. Anyone from the west of Scotland will know it better as “Wallaby Island”: red-necked wallabies were introduced there in the 1940s and have been roaming wild ever since. The island is on the market for £2.5 million with planning permission for a lodge, boathouse, and jetty. Which seems…cheap? But maybe I’ve just lived in London for too long. As a former Soho House employee, I’m still processing the fact that my old boss owns Wallaby Island.
It’s officially too hot to cook. As we brace for the fifth heatwave of the summer in the capital, Rita’s in Soho is going (mostly) raw for August, with a menu of “raw, cured, lightly cooked, fresh as all hell” seafood and vegetables. Honestly, fair enough.
And lastly… Harry Potter fans successfully rerouted a £430 million power cable to save Dobby’s grave. The Greenlink interconnector between Wales and Ireland was originally due to pass through Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire, where fans have created a memorial to Dobby the House Elf at the spot where his death scene was filmed. After hundreds of objections, developers agreed to reroute the cable to avoid disturbing the fictional grave. The new route instead passes close to actual Bronze Age burial remains.
Nearly 20 years after the final book came out, Britain’s Harry Potter economy is still booming. London is littered with unofficial wizard shops—some of which have attracted scrutiny over their tax arrangements—and Potter walking tours, while filming locations have become tourist attractions in their own right. In June, the FT’s Jo Ellison declared that “Harry Potter has ruined Britain,” taking particular issue with the way the franchise has co-opted the country’s historic places into its wizarding universe. A fictional grave taking precedence over actual Bronze Age burial remains rather helps her case.
The Feed Me merch store now ships to London.
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London beauty black book next? 👀