It’s hardly a cultural capital, but Mariehamn offers cruisers a certain charm

While almost everyone considers Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine a tragedy, I suspect Finland’s Åland islanders don’t mind the boost it’s given to their tourism industry.

To anyone unfamiliar with the region, Åland is a puzzling place for a cruise ship to stop. An archipelago of, literally, thousands of islands with a population of just over 30,000 between them, it’s a middle-of-nowhere sort of place scattered in the sea between Sweden and Finland. There’s no road access. Ferries take four hours from Stockholm and about seven from the main Finnish departure point. There’s little industry, few towns and not much to see beyond the pretty … though not spectacular … landscape of red granite boulders rising from the waters, clothed with pines and birches. It’s as if a petulant giant scattered his bag of marbles and left nature to cover them over. Despite this world of near-pristine wilderness, disturbed occasionally by hunting and fishing cottages, Åland’s tiny capital has an impressive port facility capable of landing and processing more than its whole population (12,000) ever day. Why? Alcohol.

Thanks to its quirky history … founded by Russians, fought over by Swedes and Finns, now part of the later but linguistically and culturally more of the former … the islands are not part of the EU customs zone. Ferries heading to and from Mariehamn can sell duty-free alcohol. Given the high taxation on booze in Northern European countries, the exemption is enough to spark a whole industry. Evidently many Swedes don’t even bother getting off the boats; they just book a round trip, fill up their cars with bottles and enjoy the seascapes.

Cheap, bulk alcohol is, of course, not much of a lure for international cruise passengers. But the cruise lines had to find places to go on round-Baltic cruises once the Ukrainian war closed Russian ports, and Mariehamn had the facilities.

St. Petersburg, it is not.

In fact, if you were to be dropped magically onto one of the town’s streets with any signage and license plates removed, you might swear you were somewhere in the northern half of the American Midwest. Straight, broad, tree-lined streets are populated by clapperboard houses with steep eaves decorated with gingerbread woodwork. Windows are picked out in brightly-coloured wooden frames. Neat gardens sit behind white picket fences. Almost everything in late 19th century, and looks to have been built within just a few decades. Mariehamn channels the spirit of places like Muskegon, Michigan, that boomed at the height of the Industrial Revolution and became economic backwaters soon after. 

All of this makes it a pleasant place to take a stroll, especially if you’re fond of Victorian architecture. Mariehamn was blessed by a lady named Hilda Hongell, Finland’s first female master builder and the designer of more than 100 buildings in town. Forty four remain, including the one she built for herself and her family, and most are in excellent condition. Little variations of colour scheme, roof line, gable decoration and wooden ornament differentiate the various houses. There are also several buildings by Lars Sonk, Finland’s most famous architect, including one delightful summer house that looks like a mash-up of the cottage from Hansel and Gretel and a Viking long hall. The money that drove the late 19th century building boom wasn’t alcohol, but shipping. Currents around Mariehamn mean its port almost never freezes over, making it a central point in the Baltic supply chain as steam ships stepped up the pace of international trade. Tsar Alexander II established the place (he owned at at the time) and named it after his wife. Local shipping magnates recognised an opportunity and poured money into development. Near the port you can see the tall ship Pommern, an example of the vessels from which they earned their fortunes, now art of a maritime museum.

Even if you don’t have a guide to tell you that the place was master-planned in the 1860s, you’d figure it out. Europe just doesn’t do grid plans this ruthless, with the exception of Roman ruins. The town centre is bisected by one particularly grand, double-width avenue with a promenade down the middle between rows of Linden trees, overlooked on each side by particularly large houses and churches. There are even several consulates, which seems odd for the size of the place but is more logical when you consider the politics of international supply chains. The most striking scene in town right now is the gracious mansion behind a very tall, very secure-looking fence flying a very large Russian flag. The middle of the promenade across the street is full of the Ukrainian colours and peace signs, and has been re-named “Ukrainaplatsen”.

I wish I could say that the business district at the end of this avenue was worthy of the build up. It is, sadly, a disappointment. I’d been hoping for the collection of galleries, boutiques and craft shops, balanced with cute cafes and atmospheric pubs and restaurants, that you often get in resort towns. But this high street was a resolutely local affair, there to provide basics to locals rather than charm to visitors. Worse, the Victorian beauty of the residential streets disappears in the commercial district. It’s dominated instead by blocky, characterless cement blocks from the late 20th century.

A bus tour got us out of the town centre, continuing the theme. Great landscape, a charming vernacular architecture in the housing stock, but properly ugly commercial properties. Luckily there simply isn’t much of the latter. Our drive explored narrow strips of land linked by multiple bridges and populated by groups of summer cottages. Just outside Mariehamn we wound up to the top of a high hill with sweeping views of the archipelago.

We were blessed with a sunny day that, when out of the wind, almost passed for warm. I can certainly see the appeal for someone who wants an outdoorsy holiday in beautiful surroundings. But Americans, certainly, can find similar landscapes in Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin and the like. It was a unique place to see that I can’t imagine ever getting to without the re-route from St. Petersburg. But it’s no match to the cultural capital of Russia. I question why Viking didn’t go direct from Stockholm to the Southern shore of the Baltic, trying Riga, Latvia or Tallinn, Estonia. Or even the old Hansa port of Visby on Sweden’s Gotland. All would have been far more significant on the cultural front. But I suspect none of them have a fully formed booze cruise port. I can’t recommend Mariehamn is you want a cruise that gives you significant destinations at every stop. But if you want bragging rights to visiting a quirky place that almost everyone you know won’t have heard of, Mariehamn is a good place.

Gimme, gimme, gimme … a few more days in Stockholm

Many European capitals have a historic centre that can be covered easily on foot and you can get a good sense of them in city break over a long weekend. Not Stockholm.

The Swedish capital sprawls over 200 inhabited islands and thousands more without people. A carefully-planned itinerary over three days got us to our top three cultural attractions and included a picturesque wander through the old town, but we left with several top picks on our list … notably the Vasa Museum, a harbour tour and Drottningholm Palace … untouched. The first two are where most visitors start. What did we do differently?

We were on a hunt for Vikings, celebration of a local holiday and infectious pop music. With a few adjustments had we known more in advance, we probably could have fit at least one more attraction in. But we enjoyed every moment and, given it was the opening salvo in a two-week holiday, felt no need to rush.

Stockholm is the departure city for our “Viking Homelands” cruise, an adventure around the Baltic, up Denmark and along the west of Norway that’s been high on my Anglo-Danish husband’s holiday dream list for quite a while. So it seemed fitting to start out with his ancestors, those famed longboat raiders of yore.

Swedish History Museum
Here’s where careful research helped enormously. A simple search for “Vikings” and “Stockholm” will point you directly to something called the Viking Museum in Djurgården, an island given over to cultural and entertainment attractions. This “museum”, however, is an entirely commercial enterprise that’s low on actual artefacts, high on admission price (189 krona, just under £15), and heavy on irritated TripAdvisor reviews. Nowhere in the first couple of search return pages will you find the Swedish History Museum, despite the fact that it has the largest single collection of Viking artefacts in the world. This includes a jaw-dropping treasure room with more than 3000 objects (440 pounds of silver and 115 of gold) and a main exhibition hall renovated just two years ago to bring it to the highest interactive standards. If you need proof of why to be wary of Google searches, here it is. Though, admittedly, it should also be a motivator to the museum staff to search optimise their web presence.

I have spent a lot of time exploring Viking culture since acquiring my own Dane, and this is indeed the best collection we’ve seen all in one place. Though the museum at Jelling, Denmark, still edges Stockholm out for the best use of audio-visual interpretation, and perfection would include a proper Viking ship like the ones at Roskilde. But that’s picking holes in what is otherwise an exceptional collection.

Start in the basement, where museum builders blasted a vault into the bedrock to secure jaw-dropping treasures. Real pirates may not have buried their treasure, but Vikings did. A lot. The museum’s “Gold Room”, which lies down a showy painted staircase and through some impressive vault doors, shows off the finds from scores of “hoards” unearthed across the country. There are mountains of coins here, dating all the way back to the Romans and spanning the then-known world; proof of the Vikings’ impressive reach. Heavy chains and bars of precious metal were other ways of carrying cash. But easiest on the eye is a dazzling variety of jewellery, most notably some exceptional gold collars. 

Once you’ve gawped your fill, head upstairs to dive into an exploration of who these people actually were. There’s more treasure in these galleries, but the real focus is on the domestic objects that tell us how they lived, from ornate drinking horns and glasses to humble craftspeople’s tools, swords to ploughshares. Individual sections explore runes, writing and the stories that defined them; craftspeople, their tools and art; the farming and trading life beyond raiding; and the fascinating area of religious beliefs, an often confused mash-up of paganism and Christianity. There’s plenty of interactive fun to be had here, from tying sailor’s knots to writing in runes to exploring a 3-D model of the Viking religious world, from the serpent wrapped around the World Tree all the way up to Valhalla.

There’s enough here to easily keep you busy for a couple of hours, and that’s without wandering upstairs to similarly interactive galleries that explore the rest of Swedish history, everything in English as well as Swedish. The History Museum is a bargain at 150 krona (£11.67) for adults, and despite our attendance on a holiday weekend Sunday it wasn’t hugely crowded. Highly recommended.

Skansen
By sheer coincidence we were in Stockholm on Walpurgis Night, a festival of bonfires that welcomes spring and has long roots back to Christian witch burning and pagan festivals. We were assured by both the internet and locals that the best place to experience Walpurgis would be at Skansen, a 75-acre open air museum that houses a collection of historic architecture from around the country, moved here to form one of the world’s first “folk parks”. So we arrived around 2pm, assuming there would be lots to do to keep us busy until the entertainment programme started at 8:30 pm. The limit of internet research again reared its head, this time not in our favour.

While an enormous bonfire was laid, an intriguing line-up of bands was promised and the web site insisted Skansen was open all day and into the evening on this holiday, none of the historic building interiors were actually open. Wandering in and out as employees in historic dress spin tales was supposed to be part of the appeal of the place. The web site also implied there would be people in folk costumes dancing and generally enlivening the place. In reality, other than the girls at the gate and a few people emptying rubbish bins, we wondered if anyone was working there at all. There’s only so much time you can spend wandering around looking at the outside of historic rural buildings, no matter how charming the parkland they’re set within is. The six and a half hours until Walpurgis kickoff that had seemed necessary now felt like ann eternity. And the plaza where the show would take place was on the highest part of Djurgården, lashed by the winds racing along the watery channel below. (Baltic is synonymous with freezing for a reason.) Waiting around was going to be bone chilling. We couldn’t leave and re-enter, or we might have headed to the nearby ABBA or Vasa museums. Instead we checked out early, leaving space for smart locals who probably weren’t going to turn up for another hour.


Despite that planning misfire, I had a brilliant couple of hours walking around the park. A wide variety of buildings are all laid out in beautiful environments. There are a couple of affluent country estates with formal gardens, several farms of different styles complete with farmyards and animals, summer houses, churches, hunting cabins, festival halls and other civic buildings. There’s even a small town centre with commercial buildings of the 18th and 19th century. It’s all very picturesque, though would clearly be even more attractive in late June once the gardens were in full bloom.

My favourite bit, however, was the zoo. As a childless cultural tourist, I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a zoo on holiday. But since it was built in to a cultural attraction, I had the freedom to wander. Sadly the otters were as absent as the employees, but a quartet of Swedish brown bears had just emerged from hibernation and captivated me for quite a while. The bear enclosure here is beautifully designed with several different areas ringing a hillside, offering the bears everything from a bathing area with waterfalls to woodland climbing spaces to a grass lawn for napping in the sun. All with glass panels for the humans to peer through in appreciation.

A bit further along is a wolverine enclosure that I also found compelling. I knew they could be vicious beasts, but I had no idea they were so cute. An owl enclosure and unusually bold red squirrels completed my joy. (British reds are almost extinct and those that exist at home are notoriously shy.)

Big picture: Skansen is delightful but wouldn’t have made it into our top three without the Walpurgis lure, and that didn’t live up to the hype.

The ABBA Museum
You might not expect it, given how much opera and other “worthy” culture dominates the pages of this blog, but we agreed in advance this needed to be our No. 1 cultural destination in Stockholm and it didn’t disappoint.

British readers are chuckling, while the Americans are no doubt perplexed. “You’ve got to be kidding … why?” reacted one university friend. I admit, I didn’t “get” ABBA when I moved to England, either. They’d only had one No. 1 hit in the States, didn’t tour much there and were consigned by most Americans into a mental bucket with all the other tacky things from the ‘70s that deserved to be left in the dustbin of history. Then I moved to a land that was ABBA obsessed, even before Mamma Mia revived ABBA’s work on stage and screen. Every British celebration that wants to fill the dance floor resorts to their tunes. Not only do most Brits know most of the words, the Swedish quartet seems to unlock British inhibitions faster than free pints at the pub. After 25 years of exposure in my adopted homeland I now see the group as superlative artists who created the best pop songbook in history. Yes, even better than Michael Jackson. If your head is in that place, then it’s no wonder their attraction ranks higher than Viking loot, resurrected boats and harbour tours in a visit to Stockholm.

The museum, tucked in between Skansen and the roller coaster-packed Gröna Lund on Djurgården, is built into a basement of an unimpressive modern building. The delights below belie the humble exterior. The museum combines costumes, memorabilia, news coverage and informative labels to tell the band’s story from their individual musical beginnings. Each was already forging a successful musical career when an impresario put them together and created magic. The story here not only covers their glory days but brings things right up to date with the films, stage shows and further careers of each member.

There’s some fabulous insight into their song writing processes and whole rooms lifted from special places in their lives: their main recording studio, the inside of the cabin where they did most of their writing, the costume shop. The collection of original costumes is a delight, and if you want to have a rest you can watch a whole concert recorded in London in 1979.

The best parts, however, are the interactive experiences. There are karaoke booths next to that recording studio where you can pretend you’re laying down a track. Try sound mixing one of their hits to see the impact the right balances have. Pose for a photo shoot and have your face hilariously grafted onto one of the band members’ bodies. Or, best of all, step up on stage to perform as a fifth member with avatars of the band from their heyday. 

At 250 krona (about £19.50) it was the most expensive bit of sightseeing we did in Stockholm but worth every penny; completely unique and pure fun. With an infectious soundtrack. Do book in advance, however. Tickets sell out and, even if available, walk ups have to wait until there’s room in that magic basement.

Later that afternoon we checked onto our cruise aboard the Viking Jupiter, and the next day took their escorted tour of the old town. With 48 hours in the city now under our belts, the size and transportation logistics around town dissuaded us from packing anything else in.

The old town is a lovely place to ramble. It’s mostly baroque and pastel painted in architecture, hillier than I’d anticipated and characterised by narrow, cobbled lanes. There were fewer shops than I expected so, though we had little free time after our guided tour, I didn’t feel deprived to be ushered back to the bus. Like Skansen, it seemed more about looking at the outside of buildings than interacting with anything.

It was clear by then, however, looking across the water from the palace at the skyline of impressive museums, civic institutions and historic neighbourhoods, that we’d barely scratched the surface. Brits may be able to get to Stockholm easily for a holiday weekend, but you’ll need more than that to get to know

Gardens, food and architecture vie for perfection at The Newt

The Newt in Somerset is a legend on the English luxury hotel scene, but one I hadn’t experienced yet despite its embodiment of things I love: great locally sourced food, historic houses, impressive gardens, cider, and the Chelsea Flower Show. That changed this week when I joined friends for an indulgent lunch and a wander around the property. 

One of the first warm and cloudless days of the year made the journey there as lovely as the event itself. While driving 90 minutes for a lunch date may seem mad, the southwest’s A303 is one of the loveliest roads in the country, starting with the sweeping vistas of the Wiltshire downs and a drive by Stonehenge before the hills start to close in and you’re winding through the picturesque coombs of the West Country. Hilltops offer spectacular views over undulating countryside luxuriating in the spring palette of newly lush green fields, speckled white with sheep and this year’s newborn lambs, and the shocking yellow of oilseed rape just coming into bloom. Often the 303 is made miserable by slow traffic, but I was blessed with a smooth run. At xxx you peel off onto smaller roads. More bends, more climbs and plunges, but now with the occasional character cottage or venerable old barn at the roadside. It’s not a drive I’d want to do at night, or in bad weather, but in good conditions it’s glorious.

The final approach to the hotel seems calculated more for great views and building anticipation than for speed. You’ll need 10 minutes more from the time your satnav tells you that you’ve arrived before you are finally parked up. You’ll skirt the estate walls, catching enticing glimpses of the hillside gardens, and go by multiple gate houses and entrances before finally reaching the main gate and essentially doubling back on yourself to get to the house. There’s even a view from the drive carefully placed to show off the house in all its glory, across a field inhabited by rare English white cattle. Parking is out of view of the house and its guest accommodation, cleverly hidden behind high hedges and spreading along some modern barns that serve as the administrative hub of the estate. A cheerful lad in a striped jacket, dressed more like he was heading to Henley than working in Somerset, sat in a shepherd’s hut, greeting guests and directing them to the house.

While we’re not in the Cotswolds here, the golden stone, 17th century architecture and cosy sprawl of adjoining farm buildings is much the same as you’d find in any small estate in neighbouring Gloucestershire. There’s something about the architecture and feel of the exteriors that reminds me of Snowshill Manor. But there are no crowds of tourists here. Only hotel and restaurant guests enter this way, and there are few enough of those to make it quite likely you’ll be on the approach on your own.

You work your way up a stone path lined by old outbuildings now restored to a level of perfection their original builders couldn’t have imagined. An old barn has had one wall replaced by a seamless sheet of glass, showing off a gym with equipment overlooking a small formal garden ablaze with spring bulbs. A granary, still perched on its rat-defying pillars, offers detached accommodation. Places once used for brewing, baking, laundry and storage become hotel rooms and a luxury spa wrapping around an outdoor pool. At the end of this tiny agrarian complex, two pillars mark the transition to “the big house”, in truth the kind of modestly-sized place that would have been occupied by the gentry who show up in Jane Austen novels, not the aristocracy.

Interiors are traditional with enough modern twists to make it clear they’re catering to a clientele that has both money and a taste for the latest trends. Like any self-respecting luxury hotel these days there’s no obvious check in desk, just a staff member or two popping up to enquire into your business on property. On this ground floor there are several lovely sitting rooms, each with a different vibe (drawing room, library, garden room), one of the best boot rooms I’ve ever seen kitted out with Barbours and wellies for all, a magnificent floor-to-ceiling diorama of a riverbank teaming with taxidermised wildlife and a restaurant of two halves. Part is all panelling, fireplaces and tradition, while the bit next to it is an old yard now glassed over, kitted out with orange and lime trees and with a view of the open kitchen. It was in the latter that we settled for our lunch.

The Newt is one of those places that’s deadly serious about local sourcing and, like Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir or California’s French Laundry, makes a big deal of its vegetable gardens. Which means that the whole menu skews towards the vegetarian, with three of the five starters and three of the five mains being virtually meat free. Where proteins looked to the animal, they were pork or beef raised on the estate or fish landed that morning on the nearby coast. It’s probably the first time in my life I went for two vegetable-based courses not because I was watching calories, or trying to save the planet, but because they appealed the most from what was on offer. It’s hard to beat just-cut, early season English asparagus, of course, especially when paired with a fresh egg topped with just a bit of crispy bacon. (There’s the “virtually” on the meat free front.) My main was a buttermilk-fried celeriac, essentially treating the humble root vegetable like southern fried chicken. It was probably the best meat-free main I’ve ever had; you had no feeling that you were sacrificing anything. The celeriac really was just as good as chicken would have been. Then we split some ricotta and olive oil cake, puncturing a big hole in the local sourcing story with its side of plum compote from fruit brought up from the owner’s estate in South Africa.

We walked off our relatively virtuous lunch with a stroll through The Newt’s famed gardens. I now understand why they’ve put their money behind Chelsea Flower Show sponsorship, even though they’re not a proposition that markets to the masses. These are people who are serious about gardening, and want a place in Britain’s highly competitive horticultural firmament. 

A series of terraces leads down from the house, the direct eyeline taken up with sloping lawns and fountains while over to one side a series of garden rooms are stuffed with perennials and, at this time of the year, a broad range of tulips. Whatever path you follow, you end up in the vegetable garden that just supplied most of your lunch, as much of a work of art … though not quite as large … as the famous vegetable parterres at Villandry. This ruthlessly traditional garden is left by a radically modern, undulating metal pergola that my friend, a local, told me drips with squash in the late summer. Above it is the real treasure of The Newt: the national apple collection.

There are a lot of magnificent apple orchards in England, and I never thought I’d see one to beat the wonderful walled garden at Houghton Lodge, Hampshire, with its centuries-old apples. But The Newt may just beat it. Apples from every county in the country are laid out in ascending terraces, all of them artistically shaped. There are diamond, diagonal and low-fence espaliers, goblets, spirals and pyramids. It’s a tour de force of artistic mastery over nature; the closest the English get to the Japanese obsession with bonsai. It’s easy to imagine how glorious this place is when all of those artistically-placed branches are laden with fruit, but late April as the blossom started to come out was magnificent. I suspect two more weeks will see this unique orchard at its peak.

The South African owners made their money in their Babylonstoren vineyard, and they’re taking the same fruit-to-bottle approach with the apple collection here. The Newt is becoming increasingly known for its high-end ciders, and cider-making time here is quite the event. Even now, in the off season, the equipment for the harvest and making is impressive.

A spring afternoon at The Newt was a beautiful connection with all that’s best in the English countryside. But I suspect it’s even better in the autumn, when the fruits of the harvest are rolling in and making what fills the table and the glass even more glorious. Looks like I have yet another item for the bucket list.

One of the greatest stories ever told beckons all ages at the Ashmolean

I was obsessed by Greek and Roman mythology as a child. While my peers delighted in Barbie dolls, dinosaurs or Matchbox cars I could recite the 12 labours of Hercules and pretended to be a priestess of Vesta with my imaginary sisters. As you can imagine, this was not a recipe for childhood popularity, though I’m pretty sure it did lay the foundations for a career that turned out to be, ultimately, all about story telling. 

One of the greatest of those Ancient Greek stories is that of the Minotaur, the fierce half-man, half-bull creature imprisoned in a maze in Crete and fed on the war booty of young Athenians until the hero Theseus navigates the Labyrinth and kills the man eater. The brilliance of the current exhibition on the topic at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is that it’s all about the story. 

An unprecedented loan from the museum at Heraklion, modern capital of Crete near the ruins of Knossos, means you’ll probably never see this many top-quality Minoan artefacts in one place without getting on a plane to Greece. One hundred of the objects on display have never left the country before. And I doubt anyone has done a better job of untangling the fact and fiction archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans twined together early in the 20th century. There are even arresting video installations that pull parts of the show into the realm of modern art. But the Ashmolean doesn’t major on any of this highbrow stuff. Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality pulls you in with the legend and keeps visitors of all ages interested with solid story telling. The art, history and learning come by osmosis.

You’re plunged into the story from the ticket desk, when designs covering the walls and a dog-legged path to the exhibition’s start make it feel like you’re in the labyrinth itself, stepping through a door and into a dark room to be confronted by the monster himself. This version is a near life-sized statue, a Roman copy of a Greek original. 

Over his shoulder runs a series of films that tell the whole set of stories surrounding the Knossos monster, with typography, graphics and pacing that will satisfy even the shortest attention span. Dig deeper, and this room emphasises the tale’s enduring grip on the imagination, from ancient vase decoration through a Picasso print and a labyrinth-inspired London Underground art installation, with plenty of detours into early Christian maze design, Renaissance painting and Baroque gardens. 

Like Troy, one of the most compelling features of Knossos was a “real or imaginary” debate. Did the cities actually exist, are had they simply been made up as settings for fantastical tales. Both showed up in ancient writings, but there was no trace of them in the modern world. After Heinrich Schliemann found and excavated Troy in the 1870s, the archaeological world fixated on Knossos, and found it soon after. Up until very recently, you would have learned that it was discovered and excavated by an Englishman named Arthur Evans. He’s still the first answer Google gives you to the “who discovered Knossos” question.

But that’s not quite right. The appropriately named Minos Kalokairinos should have the credit. The wealthy businessman and Knossos enthusiast, whose family owned part of the site suspected to hold the lost city, did the first excavation in 1878 and was confident of what he’d found. But politics got in the way. At the time, the Ottoman Turks owned Crete and treated the locals poorly. Any treasures unearthed would probably get transported to museums in Istanbul. 

But the Turks liked the English, and were happy to do a deal with Evans, who was the curator of this same Ashmolean Museum. As concerned as the locals by the possible removal of treasures, he didn’t start digging until after the Ottomans left in 1898. That, and the fact that Evans made sure a museum in nearby Heraklion was built to house the greatest of the treasures he unearthed, is probably why the Greeks don’t hate him in the way they loathe Lord Elgin for his legal (at the time) purchase and transport of the Parthenon marbles. 

But whether he meant to or not, Evans did steal something from Greece: Kalokairinos’ credit for discovering Knossos. Which is why it’s particularly appropriate that the museum he once directed is the one putting on this show, and working so hard to set history straight.

Once we clear up those details, it’s into the main gallery where a treasure trove of artefacts from the palace site unfurls. There are architectural fragments, wall paintings, pottery, furniture, jewellery and ceremonial axes. While Evans might have left most of the artefacts on Crete, he brought home what’s probably the best archive of documentation on the excavations in the world. So this exhibition is possibly even better than a trip to Heraklion when it comes to putting the artefacts in context, complete with beautifully drawn maps and cut-always from the exhibition.

Just as when I saw these treasures for the first time in Heraklion, I was stunned by a mastery of colour and design which makes these 3000+ objects almost modern. Colours and patterns might comfortably grace a set of linens today. The octopus and other sea life swirling across pottery wouldn’t look out of place in a chic kitchen store. The wall painting of olive trees is so close to William Morris’ willow pattern you have to wonder if the late Victorian designer saw and copied. 

And then there are other things that are profoundly alien. While the naked bull jumpers might just turn up in a death-defying YouTube stunt, and beg a connection to Spanish bull fighters, the bare-breasted priestesses holding wriggling, live snakes aloft in their gripped hands are undoubtably from a very different world.

There’s enough of the odd and the exceptional here to keep viewers of all ages interested. Unusually for me, I was in the company of three young people, all of whom found items to interest them here. The curators’ most obvious play for that audience, beyond the focus on storytelling itself, is to include one of the Assassin’s Creed games. Designers Ubisoft included a quest through the ruins of Knossos to slay the Minotaur in their Odyssey installment. In the exhibition, an enormous screen follows an ancient Greek heroine through the ruins to her confrontation with the monster while a display panel explains just how seriously the designers took the history and architecture, actually working with the Ashmolean to get things right.

Not only is this gallery a compelling and vivid bit of world building after seeing all the bits and pieces that would have furnished it, but it’s a real talking point for families. This was the part of the exhibition where my 13-year-old godson was most engaged, showing off his knowledge of the Minotaur and explaining details he’d taken in while playing the game. His mother had the revelation, for the first time, that gaming might be educational and not a complete waste of time. A win for everyone.

While the curators don’t pound the point home, the Ubisoft inclusion is also appropriate because this mix of history and imagination, with some artistic liberties taken to engage audiences, is exactly what Evans did 120 years ago. He rebuilt and restored the site in ways modern archeology would no longer tolerate, and made conclusions about the people and functions of the palace that were based as much on guesswork and personal preference as fact. Even the name we give to this culture … the Minoans … was made up by Evans rather than drawn from history. In my experience, one of the reasons that Knossos is so spectacular to visit is precisely because Evans’ world building gave us a colourful, tangible portal to a vividly imagined past. Whether it’s any more accurate than wandering through in Assassin’s Creed is still a matter of hot debate.

The final parts of the exhibition contain a gallery on newer discoveries in areas around the original excavation, and a video installation inspired by Evans’ fanciful restorations. The 18-minute ramble by Elizabeth Price is narrarated by imaginary, robotic curators who have been asked to clear up the hard drives of the Ashmolean and the neighbouring Pitt-Rivers museum. They draw unexpected, beautiful but often completely wrong conclusions from their mash up. Though meant, at its 2016  creation, to be a comment on what the restoration may have gotten wrong in Knossos, the automated voice prompted me to think about how AI might interpret and curate our artefacts of a world suddenly stripped of humans. It was very weird, but it’s now the thing from the exhibition I’d be most keen to see again.

I suspect I may indeed get back for a second viewing. While Labyrinth was great for a family outing, there’s a second layer of discovery I’d like to make with a longer, quieter visit. Like all great stories, multiple tellings reveal new things.

Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality is on at the Ashmolean until 30 July. 

Elton John is a legend at the top of his game as he says farewell

If you are really lucky, at least once in your life you’ll be in the presence of a true legend. Given how long it takes to become a legend, however, the stars will probably be past their prime by the time this happens. Not so with the 76-year-old Elton John, whose voice and piano-playing virtuosity are as dazzling on his retirement tour as they were when I first saw him live in 1982.

That epic concert beneath the St. Louis Arch doesn’t feel like it was 41 years ago. But Elton’s made a lot of music and lived a lot of life since, which combined to make this concert a very different experience. Thanks to the remarkable ephemera you can find on the internet, I can tell you than Elton played only 10 songs at that early concert. If memory serves, the short set was because much more was unendurable outdoors on a shade- and air-conditioning free stage beneath a reflective hunk of stainless steel in the brutal heat and humidity of a St. Louis summer. Four of the 10 songs were, and remain, unfamiliar.  Half a lifetime later at the 02 the setlist was up to 20 with a two-song encore, and every tune was familiar. Much of the night was a communal sign-along. 

Elton’s hits have had a way of embedding themselves in your life, so that a heavily middle-aged crowd wasn’t just saying Farewell to the Yellow Brick Road … they were travelling down their own Memory Lane. By this point the Elton John songbook is so rich, in fact, that even with more than two hours of almost constant performance there were still plenty of classics he couldn’t fit in. You could feel the love tonight, but Lion King fans weren’t going to get to hear that one.

A fabulous video montage of career highlights behind the triumphal and now-autobiographical chorus of I’m Still Standing reminded you of the missing melodies and other highlights across an immense and spectacularly diverse career. It also reinforced the kindness and humour that’s flowed through his life, from his charitable foundations and support of younger artists to his willingness to reveal difficult times in Rocket Man and his hilarious comic turn in Kingsman: The Golden Circle.

As you’d expect, video and production values were an integral part of the show, bringing depth to the songs and providing a remarkable sense of intimacy despite the reality of 20,000 people squinting to see one guy at a piano. Elton also spends plenty of time talking to the audience, and there’s a real sense of coming home. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour will include more than 300 gigs by the time it wraps in Stockholm this July, but here he’s playing within the M25 that also embraces his birthplace in Pinner, and a car will whisk him home to David and the kids near Windsor after the show. Elton has always been a proud Englishman and good neighbour … I never ran into him when I lived in the next village, but local stories of his generosity and good nature were abundant … and in London those qualities somehow seemed to shrink the arena to something more intimate. This was a friend, saying goodbye to the friends who’d helped him survive and ultimately thrive. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house by the end.

But there was a lot of fun to be had on the way to that teary farewell. Like the perfect wedding DJ, Elton’s set majored on numbers that had the audience on its feet dancing and singing along. That included some of the classics re-worked at a different tempo, including Rocket Man, and most notably the Cold Heart remix from 2021. (Who’d have thought I’d have a pop No. 1 at the age of 75, he mused.) Slower numbers like Levon and Candle in the Wind cut in to give everyone a chance to rest and sway, still singing along, before the next rise of pace got you back on your feet. 

The encore and farewell was the most perfectly pitched piece of the evening. After several minutes of requisite darkness in which the crowd roared for more, Elton returned in his third costume change of the night. An elegant dressing gown replaced the sequinned jackets, amusingly paired with the “curfew 22:15” notice on the tickets. This would not be a late night, and the now famously tea-total Elton is well beyond his years of wild excess. Instead, he sat down and gave us Your Song, changed from a standard of romantic love to a sincere thank you to his fans for their love and support. And then, as expected given title of the tour, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. At the end, he left the piano and stepped onto a platform that slowly lifted him up the stage and swallowed him into a star field that turned into the Yellow Brick Road album cover, with the older Elton who’d just left us disappearing over the horizon. It was the 21st century equivalent of one of those remarkable Baroque assumptions of the saints into heaven, and it left an emotional and exhausted audience in a similar state of reverent awe.

And that is the kind of experience legends can deliver. Thank you, Elton. May your retirement be long, healthy, and full of love.

Two decades on, Locanda Locatelli's star still shines for elegant simplicity, regional cuisine

There are just three Italian restaurants in London blessed with Michelin stars. Though each is distinctive from the other, all three present a view of the world's most popular cuisine that's far removed from the pizza and pasta joints most people associate with the word Italian. Closest to my heart has always been Locanda Locatelli, which celebrates its 20th year with a star in 2023.

It was the first place I'd ever been that elevated Italian food to fine dining. Many of the dishes were
familiar ... the major cultural influence of my childhood was Italian-American ... and I cooked some of them regularly, but chef Giorgio Locatelli worked a magic that took flavours to a different level. Yet he did it while retaining the simplicity, and the celebration of key ingredients, that's so essential to Italian food. He also maintained a rare authenticity to regional recipes. Downmarket Italian Anglicises everything, upmarket tends to bring in a lot of French influence, or goes off piste with crazy experimentation. Giorgio's kitchen serves up dishes that might come straight from a nonna in Palermo or Piedmont, just refined to their finest essence.

It's been 11 years since my last visit, and I'm delighted to say that absolutely nothing has changed. So you could just read my last review. But to give two decades of quality its due, I'll write on.

It was a special occasion, as any visit to the Michelin stratosphere and its related prices should be. An adopted nephew provided the excuse: a young foodie whose tastes in both food and wine are already quite sophisticated, we'd offered a Michelin-starred meal if he made his expected A-level grades. His success meant we got to accompany him on a culinary journey while his parents get to fund King‘s College London. A clear win for team Bencard.

We decided to go for the full four-course Italian extravaganza: antipasto, pasta, main and pudding. Clearly, I didn't read my own review before we sat down or I would have remembered "you could do the traditional four ... but the portions here are large enough to make that rather excessive." Hey ho. We were in excess territory. The menu was so tempting it would have been hard to decide what to forgo, with the antipaste looking particularly tempting. I actually thought of having two or three of those instead of the traditional courses.

Our young scholar started with scallops, the husband opted for pigeon legs accompanied by pigeon-liver pate on crostini and I went for burrata with grilled fennel and grapefruit. The last was a riposte to all of the times I've been positive I don't like grapefruit in savoury salads. It's clearly all about the balance, which Locatelli's somehow manages to get right. The scallops were a revelation for our lad, who'd never had them cooked with their corals still attached and was pleasantly surprised. My husband's delighte with the pigeon was sharpened by an exquisite bottle of schioppettino that he proclaimed a perfect match. (This little known variety from Friuli is one of my favourites and something I'll order whenever I see it on a menu. The sommelier's unfeigned joy when I chose it was one of the best parts of the meal.) Meanwhile, the lad and I had tucked into a carricante (white) from the slopes of Mt. Etna.

Thankfully, Mr. B had moved to pumpkin tortellini for the next course so switched wine colours, or we would have needed another bottle of the red. Our scholar and I both opted for the lobster with spaghetti, which was good but lacked the sweet acidity this dish has at its best, with ripe, fresh summer tomatoes. I should have gone with my other choice, gnocchi with a wild venison ragu. Not only would it have been more seasonal, but I've never really managed to make good gnocchi at home, so it's always informative to sample a professional offering.

Our guest clearly won the contest of the main courses with slices of char-grilled ribeye on cavolo nero, its simple perfection a textbook definition of great Italian food. I chose roast rabbit leg wrapped in parma ham, again defaulting to something I love but always have trouble cooking. (The difference between raw and overcooked rabbit is minuscule.) Mr. B left the rest of the schioppettino to us, moving on to a truffle-crusted fillet of brill and the rest of the bottle of carricante. Even though I loved my dish, I was looking with envy at the others. Everything managed the trick of being delicious comfort food while at the same time elegant and sophisticated.

Only a broken oven saved me from the sad inevitability of powering through a dessert when I was already stuffed. But I would have happily continued on through a pistachio shuffle and chocolate chip ice cream,  combining some of my favourite flavours in the world. Fortunately they did have some pistachio ice cream, so we could end with a bit of sweetness without approaching a Mr. Creosote moment. Locatelli's only uses the pistachios from the Sicilian village of Bronte, famed as the most flavourful in the world. One small quenelle of the ice cream here has more flavour than a gallon of the green stuff in your typical gelateria. With flavours this intense, less really is more. 

I have been to many Michelin-starred establishments since my first visit to the then newly-celebrated Locanda Locatelli. In many ways, this place is an aberration. While the food is beautifully plated, it's closer to what you could attempt at home than the gels, towers, cubes and swooshes that so often turn a dinner plate into modern art. There's no tasting menu. Nothing is re-invented or de-constructed. The front of house staff is resolutely Italian, in a city where almost every top restaurant features a United Nations of talented youth ambitious to get ahead in this high-end industry. It feels like a warm, welcoming family restaurant, not a palace of cutting edge gastronomy. Forget all the extra pomp and circumstance, Locanda Locatelli's star is for what's going on in your mouth. After 20 years, I'm happy to say they still deserve it.

Angela Hartnett's Murano and the legendary River Cafe hold London's other two Italian stars. I adore Murano and it was the other option for this lunch the moment our scholar chose Italian. Giorgio got my vote simply because we hadn't been there in so long. Angela's is more formal, more likely to infuse the core Italian cuisine with innovation, and will offer you a chef's tasting menu. It's a very different approach, but equally delicious and I'd happily contribute my discretionary income to either place. My River Cafe experience, so long ago that it pre-dates this blog, didn't encourage me to try again. Though their team deserves credit for being the first to bring high-end Italian to London, I just didn't think the food was that exceptional for what it was (I was spending a lot of time in Italy at the time so comparing accordingly). For me, the restaurant also suffered badly from its tough-to-get-to Hammersmith location and its industrial warehouse vibe, not an atmosphere I enjoy in restaurants. That's not to take away from the River Cafe's accomplishments: this is Ground Zero for Italian fine dining in London, their cookbooks have been hugely influential and the list of chefs who trained here (Jamie Oliver, Theo Randall) is extraordinary.

You can do better than Pennyhill Park's spa, but the complete on-site experience is hard to beat

Readers who've been with me from the start will remember that this blog began in a world of corporate hospitality and expense account lunches. Much of that disappeared within a year of my first post, thanks to the 2008 crash, pushing most of my reporting into self-funded territory if I wanted to keep writing. But I do still work in marketing, and there are occasionally projects that yield fringe benefits worthy of a blog post.  

This week that meant two days at Pennyhill Park with an overnight stay in a baronial room and 90 precious minutes in its well-known spa. 

Any search of the Top 5 day spas in the South of England is likely to feature Pennyhill, long established as  an indulgent retreat from the capital. Lying just off the M3 a few miles west of the M25, it has easy access from London and sits in a particularly affluent bit of the commuter belt. Sharing the property with the training base for the England rugby team doesn't hurt, either. 

My early-morning visit ticked all of the boxes you'd want from a luxury retreat. The building itself is
exquisite and stands separate from the hotel. You enter through an impressive, if pointless, octagonal foyer with central table and towering flower arrangement, then head down a long hallway with windows on either side offering views of the outdoor pools and the sylvan location. Though the whole site is built on a gently-sloping hillside, the architects have cleverly arranged the buildings to make everything seem more dramatic, as if the spa is in the bottom of a steep valley, with sides formed by the dramatic bulk of the main hotel and its hotch-potch of outer buildings. 

It's all designed in a "ye olde worlde" style, with crenellations, leaded windows, uneven roof lines, massive wooden doors, clock towers and outbuildings all trying to give the sense of a traditional English village built around its manor house. It's obvious most of it is new and the original manor house around which it's all built isn't even 200 years old. You run the risk of slipping into amusement park-style tackiness when you take this approach, but Pennyhill manages to avoid this with tasteful interiors that mix traditional and modern with particularly exquisite wallpapers and floral arrangements throughout.

At the heart of the spa is a large indoor pool with a glass wall along one side looking over the outdoor spa facilities and the main hotel. Its pool deck includes lots of loungers and a large, elevated hot tub. Across an entry foyer with a champagne bar (not functioning, of course, during my 7am visit) is a thermal suite with sauna, steam rooms, a cold bucket shower and an alcove with about a dozen heated tile loungers for cozy napping. From here you accessed my favourite bit of the spa, at least for a visit in early March: a heated pool with a variety of massage jets you entered indoors, but then swam through a panel into the outdoors. I've enjoyed pools like this in Missouri and Germany, and love the way it gives you a pain-free way to swim in the open air in the depth of winter. (Though I couldn't help thinking about the wastefulness of heating an outdoor pool all winter in the current energy crisis.)

Also outdoors is a large rectangular pool for regular swimming (also heated, but only to 21c/70f where the jet pool was at 28c/82f), scores of loungers and tables for eating and drinking. There's also something they called the Canadian Hot Tub, a multi-levelled set of steaming pools tiled entirely in black. I didn't try anything that required dashing through the bracing winter air. Heartier souls were doing morning laps in the outdoor pool.

Pennyhill's greatest differentiation point, in my spa experience, is its opulent changing rooms, complete with sculptures, sofas, state-of-the-art Dyson hair dryers and the most comfortable bar stools I've ever encountered for settling in to do your hair and makeup. The showers aren't cubicles but individual tiled rooms, with space to retreat from the water to lather up with high-end spa products before stepping into a torrent of rain from above and multiple jets hitting you from the side. This isn't just a locker room to wash and change in, but part of the overall lounging space.

As ever when I'm enjoying a treat funded by someone else, I ask myself whether I'd spend my own money on this? For the spa, bluntly: No. While Pennyhill is sumptuously beautiful, on a one-to-one comparison its facilities are pretty much the same as those at my regular Nirvana Spa, with the exception of the changing rooms. The tile loungers are even the exact same make. Nirvana's outdoor space is smaller, but it has more indoor pools and its pool with the massage jets is about three times the size, with far more different kinds of jets getting to more of your body. The difference that I suspect would bother me the most is that Nirvana's tile loungers are in a quiet room sealed off from the rest of the spa where only the sound of a fountain and the occasional snore of someone napping intrude, where at Pennyhill their position just off a nexus point between several thermal facilities must mean it's a fairly noisy area. 

A spa day at Nirvana with access to the basic facilities and a meal (no treatments) will cost you around £100, at Pennyhill it's £255 and weekdays only. Weekends are reserved for hotel guests.

What do you get for your extra £155? My guess is exclusivity. Nirvana has grown over the years to become an enormous complex hosting many hundreds of people at once. Though it's tough to tell when you're enjoying the facilities before general opening hours, I suspect Pennyhill's total number of spa-goers at any one time is far, far lower. You're likely to have more space between you and other guests there, and I suspect the whole scene will be quieter and the guests skew older. At these prices, you're unlikely to encounter the gaggles of chatty hen parties that are Nirvana's most irritating feature. (Fortunately, there are so many different spaces at Nirvana you can usually escape.) If you're looking for value for money and variety of spa facilities, Nirvana wins decisively. If you want to impress the hell out of someone, or you're looking for a memorable romantic retreat, Pennyhill leads.

Pennyhill's bigger differentiator, of course, is its hotel. Though Nirvana breaks ground on its own 70-bed retreat this spring, it's unlikely to approach the Pennyhill experience.

Pennyhill sits in glorious isolation within 124 acres of parkland. Its distinctive buildings spread out from the original new-gothic mansion and it incorporates some spectacular spaces one suspects were designed with wedding photos in mind. This includes a covered walkway from car park to main entry turned into a fairy tale bower with branches and hanging silk flowers. There are two magnificent staircase halls, a glasshouse spilling out onto lawns and a range of beautiful conference/event rooms that mix traditional design and massive windows bringing the surrounding countryside in with modern considerations like ample charging points, good acoustics, room for AV production and speedy WiFi.

The 124 rooms (one per acre?) are all individually designed and range from more traditional spaces to split-story spreads and accommodations that sit in their own outbuildings. Comparing rooms was a lively topic of conversation at the conference. I was on a hall dedicated to rugby heritage, where each room bore the name of a country's original national stadium (pre-sponsorship and naming rights). I was in Lansdowne, where a stained glass panel of the Irish Rugby Football Union's crest separated the entry hall from an enormous bathroom with a tub on a showy tiled platform, separate from a multi-jet shower room.  The sleeping area (below) was about twice the size of the average British home's sitting room, with wood panelling, traditional furniture and an enormous window overlooking the gardens. Others reported rooms with four-poster beds, balconies, funky internal ceiling lines or separate offices. One had a staircase leading to a room with a pool table.

Food and drink was, as you'd expect at this level, top quality. I'm being very serious about Weight Watchers right now, so my eyes and nose had to do more work than my taste buds, but I can attest to one of the most beautiful breakfast spreads I've ever seen. The pastries alone put Pennyhill in a separate category, of a size, variety and (apparent) flakiness that made it clear they were either prepared in house or came from a boutique bakery. The snack tables throughout the conference groaned with more tempting bakery products. Fortunately for me, they also consistently featured bowls of fruit with such perfect colour, shape and shine I had to test the first time to make sure they weren't wax.

The lunch buffet was as various as breakfast, with a broad range of innovative salads to balance the spread of hot food.

Our formal four-course dinner on the Thursday night was unapologetically fine dining, logical considering Pennyhill's lead restaurant, Latymer, holds a Michelin star. Had I been spending my own money, portion size might have been an issue. Even in the world of plates-as-art, the starter of two bites of roasted beetroot with a 50-pence-coin sized swirl of aerated goats cheese, some artfully placed micro herbs and dots of gel seemed comically minuscule. But I had the satisfaction that four courses at that size weren't going to do my diet much harm. The same couldn't be said for the champagne the staff were happy to keep pouring when our side of the table decided to stay on that rather than move to either of the excellent red or white choices. I can only resist so much temptation, and the indulgence of the night before gave me the motivation to get to that pool by 6:45 the next morning. 

Bottom line: If you're planning a top-end executive conference or event, Pennyhill Park is an ideal location. If you want a memorable, blow-the-budget weekend of food and spa indulgence, this is the kind of place that will wow your partner and stay in memory for years to come. If, however, you're looking for a fabulous day spa to soak away your stress, save yourself some money and book into Nirvana.