Knight Frank figures show a rebound from a weak first quarter, a tighter West End and a City with more space and far more people looking for it The London office market has spent several years being declared dead and then reported as busy, sometimes […]

A 30 April snapshot shows a 1.6 percent rise, an 8 to 1 rate vote, oil above 114 dollars and a handful of company announcements that moved the index The London stock market report is a small literary form. It reduces a day of anxiety, […]

A north London high street, a flat white and the honest numbers behind the capital’s favourite small enterprise Your Local Coffee Shop Is a Property Business That Happens to Froth Milk On the high street nearest my flat there are, at the last count, nine […]

Why people still spend years memorising every street in the capital when a phone will do it for nothing The Knowledge Is London’s Hardest Exam and Its Strangest Business Decision On a wet Tuesday morning in north London, a man in waterproofs is riding a […]

Where the money in your glass actually goes, and why the landlord is not the one getting rich The Arithmetic of a London Pint, Explained by People Who Pull Them There is a moment, familiar to anyone who drinks in this city, when the card […]

Sandwich shops, dry cleaners and shoe repairers are learning to live on three days a week, and not all of them will The Tuesday-to-Thursday City: How Hybrid Work Rewired London’s Lunch Trade At a quarter to one on a Wednesday, the queue outside a salad […]

Brewers, bakers, mechanics and metalworkers share the capital’s most characterful industrial estate, and the rent is the story Under the Arches: The Small Firms Powering London From Beneath the Railway Every few minutes the ceiling rumbles. Nobody looks up. In the arch where I am […]

For a year small firms have been waiting for borrowing to get cheaper, and the talk in the markets has turned the other way Interest Rates and What Comes Next I have a small overdraft on the business account and a slightly larger opinion about […]

Record prices for the best towers and empty floors in the tired ones: the capital’s office market has split in two, and I have been doing the sums London Office Rents Hit a Record as the Market Splits in Two I work, most days, from […]

Household bills are forecast to jump in January and diesel is near two pounds a litre, and a business has no price cap to hide behind Energy Bills and Small Businesses There is a laundrette at the end of my road that has been there […]

When prices go up, supply is supposed to follow, yet forecasts say office building will decline this year, and the reasons say a lot about British construction UK Office Construction Is Set to Fall Even as Rents Reach Records I did economics at A level, […]

The trade bodies want the tax on a restaurant meal cut, the Treasury has no money, and I counted the closed doors between my flat and the Tube Hospitality’s Bad Two Years Between my front door and Turnpike Lane station there are, by my count […]

Confidence is falling, costs are rising and a Chancellor with little room to move is due to speak on 28 October UK Budget 2026: What London Businesses Are Worried About There is a mood that descends on the British business community in the weeks before […]

A higher threshold would free thousands of small firms from rates altogether, and I went looking for a shop in the capital small enough to qualify Small Business Rates Relief and the London Problem There is a number doing the rounds ahead of the Budget, […]

Fewer new firms, fewer vacancies and graduates with nowhere to go, and I asked three people who thought about setting up on their own why they did not The Start-Up Drought A healthy economy is always starting things. Somebody leaves a job and opens a […]

London shares tumbled as worries about government debt spread through global markets, and the reasons are closer to your mortgage than you might think FTSE 100 Falls as Bond Market Worries Bite: A Plain Guide I try not to write about the stock market going […]

Pedestrianisation promises more shoppers, but the economics of a West End shop are decided by rent and tax as much as by footfall Oxford Street Pedestrianisation: The Business Case and the Bills I have a rule about Oxford Street, which is that I go there […]

The uncle memoir at the heart of the traitor row is part of a lucrative publishing niche, and the business model behind it is more interesting than the gossip Grief, Gossip and the Bestseller Lists Let me say at the outset that I have enormous […]

The traitor claim travelled the world on the word of one unnamed person, and the economics behind that journey tell us a lot about the British media business Follow the Clicks I have covered business in London long enough to know that when a story […]

Every consumer brand fears a public family feud among its founders, and the monarchy is, among other things, one of the most valuable brands in Britain A Brand With a Family Problem Marketing people in London often talk about the monarchy as a brand, sometimes […]

Behind the royal traitor row sit two very different kinds of estate, one run like a commercial property portfolio and one run like a family seat, and both are fascinating businesses Land, Not Just Lineage For all the talk of betrayal and books, the London […]

Strip away the crowns and the royal feud looks like a textbook family-business dispute, the kind that quietly sinks thousands of UK firms every year Call It What It Is: A Family Firm The royal family has long been nicknamed The Firm, a label that […]

Judges rank the sharpest satire covering City business, property and market redevelopment LONDON (June 2025)—This cycle’s review of London business and property comedic writing concluded with judges praising entries grounded in real, ongoing City redevelopment stories. The panel rewards submissions that treat bureaucratic property process […]

Attendees say the extended discussion eventually produced a genuinely thoughtful decision NOTTINGHAM, England – A company’s carefully scheduled corporate rebrand meeting reportedly spent several genuine hours debating a single specific shade of blue, with attendees ultimately unable to reach quick consensus despite the meeting’s original […]

Employees say the flashy amenity looked considerably better in the recruitment photos CAMBRIDGE, England – A local startup’s prominently featured ping pong table, once a centrepiece of the company’s recruitment marketing and office tours, reportedly now gathers genuine dust in the corner of the open […]

The tiered stand’s physics turn out to demand more careful handling than the delicate finger sandwiches themselves would ever suggest Afternoon Tea Patrons Complete Advanced Degree in Sandwich Aeronautics takes the genuinely familiar, mildly precarious physical challenge of navigating a traditional three-tiered afternoon tea stand, […]

Everyone recognises one instantly, and yet a precise, agreed definition somehow remains permanently out of reach The Mysterious “Geezer”: Deconstructing a Quintessential London Character takes on a genuinely distinctive piece of London vocabulary, “geezer,” a term everyone fluent in London English recognises instantly upon encountering […]

An entire announcement system exists to convey information, and yet somehow the actual words rarely survive the journey from speaker to passenger Decoding the London Bus Driver’s Announcer: A Linguistic Study treats a genuinely widely shared, minor transport frustration, the frequent unintelligibility of London bus […]

A genuinely serious institutional story arrived with a setting and cast so specific that comedy writers barely needed to add anything When Sandringham Became a Comedy Sketch names directly what several of the site’s other Sandringham pieces approach more obliquely: that recent, genuinely serious developments […]

How the English slang term prat works, why it survives in a changing vocabulary, and what The London Prat’s guide says about its meaning, history and everyday use English slang changes fast. Words that were everywhere a decade ago are now used only ironically, and […]

A six-century-old fortress turns out to be the most effective zoning restriction modern developers have ever encountered City of London Warns Protecting Tower Views Could Make Skyscrapers Unviable finds an unexpectedly rich vein of comedy in real planning policy, framing a genuine debate about heritage […]

When a government starts benchmarking its own refusals, the dashboard becomes the confession In Downing Street Denies Chaos, Cites Strong Performance in Denial Metrics, the London Prat takes the managerial language of targets and league tables and points it at the one thing no government […]