Off The Fence: Lord Lucan Rides Again

And it's back to Yellow Bittern

Dear Readers,

Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a jolly little newsletter. We’re reaching the end of our competition for the snazziest photo of Issue 21 out in the wild. All you need to do is send a photo through and you might win some Bollinger champagne. Tag us on social media or send it via editorial@the-fence.com

Let’s park the printed world for a moment. Feast your eyes: after months and months (seriously, months) of design deliberations, The Fence’s new website – The UK’s Only Magazine Site – is live and in living colour. 

Have a click around, and once you’ve done so, give a round of hard-earned applause to designer Stef Michelet and TF superfan Will Pelham for steering our regeneration. The entire back catalogue is fully indexed – our fingers still creak in the morning, so trust us, they’re indexed – and the archive has never been more searchable. 

The whole thing has turned out beautifully, if we may say so ourselves – different, we hope, to what you might find elsewhere. That said, it has only just launched, so if you spot any bugs or snags on the site, do us a favour and let us know at support@the-fence.com.

We’re producing gorgeous magazines and we now have a website that captures the detailed design and vaunting imagination of the printed product. All available at a very low cost.

There was very extensive feedback on our Yellow Bittern featurette last week. So extensive, in fact, that we asked resident gannet Joe Bishop to write more about the restaurant that everyone is talking about (this month, at least).

Table for Two

A few months ago, a friend of mine told me about a pop-up in Vauxhall he wanted to try. He said the guy who runs it drives over the pond to France, loads up on delicious produce and wine, brings it back and cooks up a merry storm, with some very reasonably priced plonk. I said, oh, that sounds alright, I’m up for that, sure. And so we went. 

It was held in Italo, a lovely delicatessen on a charming square in Vauxhall. There was barely space for the servers to squeeze through the tables. The food had the muted fun of rustic Irish fare; hunker down for winter food, with a giant block of communal cheese. We asked the proprietor for a wine recommendation, as there wasn’t a list. I was excited for this more than the DIY grub, hoping for a cheap bottle of something very serviceable, in that way you can only really get in France. 

Sadly when the bill came, it emerged that the bottle was not a cheeky bit of duty-free supermarket rouge, but set me back 70 fucking British pounds. And as this was a cash-only affair, I was sent traipsing to the nearest cashpoint in the lashing rain to squeeze out an extra 40 quid, as I’d not factored in this scorpion tailing. When the proprietor deigned to pay our table any notice, tearing him away from hobnobbing with friends and pouring them glasses of gratis vino, it felt very much as if we and our sodden cash were an imposition.

So imagine my utter shock when this same proprietor, Hugh Corcoran, of The Yellow Bittern, a new restaurant-cum-bookshop, which has been open for barely a month, and only on weekdays at lunchtime, took to the soapbox to complain about his new customer base. They’re not ordering enough food, he whined. They’re sharing starters and mains and they’re not guzzling enough 70-pound bottles of wine.

The Yellow Bittern is the brainchild of Corcoran and his business-and-life-partner Frances Armstrong Jones, a journalist, magazine editor and daughter of the Earl of Snowdon. Corcoran, who is bepricked with a hammer and sickle tattoo, is seemingly a dedicated communist, and has a large portrait of Lenin hanging in the restaurant. An Irish man foisting Irish food on the metropolitan English classes, forcing them to pay in cash and make postcard bookings, and all the while bankrolled by aristocratic moolah… paging Doctor Freud.

Outside of the political implications of such an outrageous bit of bullshit, it is simply terrible form. As much as Hugh bewails that it’s a ‘privilege’ to go to a restaurant, and one must be ravenous when engaging in such an action, he forgets that it’s also an incredible privilege to run a restaurant that serves radishes and butter and a £40 chicken pie – in central London – for ten hours a week. He should be grateful every time a curious diner peers their head in the door looking to eat some of his largely uninspiring but competently cooked food, and be inconvenienced in every other way for the privilege. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of yeasayers in the comments were other chefs, locked away in their kitchens, largely seething with hatred at having to cook food for other people, a job they have chosen to do, and are allowed to stop doing at any given moment. 

While I understand the perils of hospitality post-COVID are great, the way this restaurant has been opened smacks of an unbelievable arrogance. What’s worse is that it’s coupled with this interminable whimsy, this dated rusticism, this reactionary mindset for a time of gouty boozy lunches; a Poppywatch for pinot noir and pâté de campagne. I like getting smashed at lunch as much as the next man, truly I do, but the world has moved on. If the already encroaching level of sycophantic write-ups are to be believed (the FT joined the Guardian today), The Yellow Bittern is the only place in London you can get a glass of wine on a Wednesday. It simply isn’t true, and I daresay it never has been. 

If Hugh’s gambit with his excoriating Instagram post was to court a certain type of journalist into covering the restaurant, turning the humble pie and radish shop into a discourse lightning rod, then a chapeau is in order. It’s certainly done the trick. But it’s also a gambit with roughly zero potential downsides. The food and ‘lifestyle’ writer class are, of course, smitten with this sort of twee gimmickry, something that allows them to be party to an ‘in crowd’ and to perform some ghastly simulacrum of ‘bohemianism’.

The Yellow Bittern is a smarmy living museum, a sickly love-in to a certain type of food culture authentocrat class obsessed with good taste. But nothing, in my opinion, is in worse taste than insulting the people attempting to keep you in business. 

You can follow Joe on Twitter here. He is shadowbanned there, but he is a good guy.

The Naughty Rhombus

At the start of this century, the population of Soho was about 3,600. The most recent census has it at 2,600, with the real number likely lower. It seems that the residents of London’s liveliest neighbourhood are in terminal decline. Who is forcing them out? 

Francisco Garcia spent six months speaking to Sohoites, and his long-read is now available to savour online.

Everyone in London has an opinion about Soho, but it’s a pleasure to give their residents a voice. Do let us know what you think of the piece.

RIP Frank Auerbach, who died today

Mega Mega White Thing

Once again we’re asking you to send us some of your public house horror stories. Perhaps someone was sick on you at a boozer south of the river? Maybe you had to watch someone die in a gastropub in South Kensington? Or maybe you simply had to listen to Sir Keir Starmer’s stilted Gooner banter in The Pineapple over a pint of £7.60 Estrella. Whatever it is that has set you against a particular London pub we want to know. Ping an email over to editorial@the-fence.com and satisfy our cravings with nominations for the bad, the ugly and downright evil side of publand.

Bamfords Revisited

The success of Rivals on Disney+ (of all places) has spurred a new interest in carefully manicured No Man’s Land, the Cotswolds. Whilst Minnie Mouse being rogered by a huntsman in full pinks – or whatever it is Rivals contains – will hopefully remain on screen, there are plenty of examples of real off-screen rotterdom going on in this particular Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Our favourite family with a good taste bypass, the Bamfords, were back in the news this week, on the receiving end of some chunky grants by Claire Coutinho in favour of whom had made some chunky donations. The Fence’s long running contention is that what marks the Bamford’s out is not this run-of-the-mill corruption, but rather their sensory crimes against interior design and their consistent inflation of the consumer price index with the tags on Carole’s shops full of old toot. So forget Rivals and dive into some real Cotswolds villainy, courtesy of Claudia Cockerell’s piece here.

This Is a Story About a Girl Named Lucky

As we discussed in weeks gone by, there really is a lot of top-tier stuff on the box at the moment, which is handy for various reasons. A new three-part documentary on iPlayer on the case of Lord Lucan has landed. Simply entitled Lucan, after the (allegedly) homicidal peer, it follows the son of Sandra Rivett, who is convinced he has uncovered the man who murdered his mother living as a Buddhist in Australia.

Chris Morris meets Freddie Mercury?

What follows is a caper, played for laughs at the expense of Sandra’s son, Neil, who is obviously deeply damaged, and is also petty, obstreperous and vindictive, a stock character from the golden era of British sitcoms made real.

It is, it goes without saying, wildly exploitative. What were the BBC compliance department thinking? Still. You should watch it – if anything, it shows how far you have to go to score a commission these days.

In Case You Missed It?

TF features editor Séamas O’Reilly discusses Troubles-drama Say Nothing with its makers, for the Guardian.

Some editor-on-proprietor tussling as Lord Chazza Moore navigates the legacy of the departed Sir Henry Keswick.

Over at WIRED, Adam Baumas reports that online sleuths have finally found ‘the most mysterious song in the world’ – and they’re just getting started.

The astonishing legacy of Frank Auerbach, who died today.

Adam Fromm asks: Which Contemporary Film Snob Director Are You?

A 1,001-track playlist of Songs Where The Entire Song Title Is Just The Name Of An Actor.

And Finally

David Attenborough has been a fixture of our televisions for so long, it’s hard to imagine a world without him. What will we do when he is no longer around to soothe us into comforting dread with another mind-bendingly well-shot documentary series, undergirded with dire warnings for a dying planet?

As the broadcaster turns an impressive – and impressively lucid – 99 this coming May, you’d be forgiven for thinking we’ve seen his every coquettish gesticulation to a transitional fossil, that we’d heard each beautifully marbled sentence and breathlessly breathy narration. That is, until this week, when an entirely new series by Sir David was discovered, and beautifully restored, by amateur archivists.

Fabulous Animals, first broadcast in 1975, is a six-part series about cryptozoology presented by a young (i.e. 59-year-old) Attenborough, in which he surveys the storybooks of old and extrapolates the provenance of fantastic beasts of myth from their real-world counterparts. It’s a beautifully soothing time capsule from a simpler time of queasier colours and thinner pullovers, retrieved from the abyss by an aficionado known only as SkinnyV The Basement Archivist, who appears to have been searching for the series for some time.

Come for the dragons, stay for the jumpers, and we hope you’ll agree – good things do come to those who wait.

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That’s it for this week. If you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, then give that ‘like’ button just below a hit. We’re not sure it serves any purpose but let’s just see what happens. These newsletters are quite good, if we say so ourselves, and crucially free. Or we might propose that you buy a subscription for yourself or a friend. It’s a very good deal indeed.

Enough. We’ll join you on Friday. Another newsletter. There’s something to look forward to.

All the best,

TF