Award-winning holiday park next to one of UK's finest beaches set to triple in size – with 22 new lodges being built

A POPULAR holiday resort located next to one of the UK's top beaches is set to undergo an ambitious expansion.
The award-winning park, made up of wooden cabins, will triple in size as 22 new lodges are added.
5
5
Whitekirk Hill is located in East Lothian, Scotland, just an 11 minute drive from North Berwick.
It first opened in 2019 following a £3 million renovation of the golf club which previously occupied the site.
The location was converted into a modern family-friendly lifestyle hub, which includes a café, restaurant, indoor children's play area, spa, gym, and event spaces.
In 2021, nine luxury eco-lodges were added to the property for overnight guests.
Now Whitekirk Hill plans to add 22 more lodges, tripling the size of its accommodation.
Plans were approved in April, consisting of 12 three-bedroom lodges and 10 one-bedroom micro lodges.
And the resort reportedly plans to add an additional 10 lodges in the future.
The news comes just weeks after the Wild Cairns Outdoor Activity Centre was opened at the 160-acre resort.
This new addition features an axe-throwing area, an airsoft gun range with zombie targets, and a 1.5-mile obstacle course.
Younger visitors can enjoy an indoor adventure playground with climbing structures and slides, perfect for colder days.
Inside little-known seaside spot right next to the country's most iconic sites
Guests can also enjoy garden games, which are available for hire for weddings, corporate events, and private parties.
The resort boasts views of the nearby Tantallon Castle, the Bass Rock, and the Firth of Forth.
Described as the place "where beauty meets adventure", Whitekirk Hill has been awarded a five star rating by the Scottish tourism board.
And if that's not enough reasons to visit this stunning area, one of the UK's finest beaches is also located nearby.
Tyninghame Links, also known as Ravensheugh Sands, is regarded as "one of the finest beaches in the south of Scotland", according to Visit East Lothian.
Paths wind through the adjacent forest, emerging onto the huge sandy bay, with dramatic views of the Bass Rock.
Visitors can park up nearby for just £3 for the entire day.
And if you're a fan of the show Outlander, this area may look familiar to you.
This stunning beach featured in season five, episode two, in what has been described as "one of the most dramatic scenes" of the series.
Whitekirk Hill is located just 46 minutes from Edinburgh, and is well worth a day trip if you're in the area.
5
5

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Telegraph

25 minutes ago

• Telegraph

Dominic Cummings: The British state is fundamentally broken

'He's the angriest man you'll ever meet,' Noel Gallagher once said of his brother, Liam. 'He's a man with a fork in a world of soup.' For those who don't know him, Dominic Cummings often appears afflicted with the same helpless rage – a maverick, furious with the broken world around him and armed with little more than the wrong cutlery. I don't even know if Cummings likes Oasis, the rock band that made Liam and Noel so famous in the 1990s that Tony Blair invited them to Downing Street. But one thing is true, Cummings is quietly plotting his own version of a comeback tour. The World of Soup beware. We meet in his elegant Islington town house, where he lives with his wife, the Spectator journalist Mary Wakefield. It's situated bang in the middle of the metropolitan, satisfied, liberal, elitist enclaves of the city he so regularly excoriates. The downstairs kitchen is a jumbled mess of family life, a rusting child's bike in the garden, comfy battered chairs and a list of school packed-lunch arrangements for his young son chalked on a blackboard. At the end of the garden hangs a large illustration depicting the final scene of the film Modern Times, where the Tramp, played by Charlie Chaplin, is seen walking into the distance with the Gamine, his companion. For a movie about the dehumanising risks of early-20th century industrialisation, it strikes a hopeful note of a better future. Next to it in the garden is a boxer's punch bag. And that sums up Dominic Mckenzie Cummings – a man motivated by a frustration so deep that one feels he often wants to hit something. And also a deeply held sense of optimism that there is something different and better both possible and coming. We can get there the easy way, or the hard way. 'The elites have lost touch' 'There's a bunch of obvious, relatively surface, phenomena, like the NHS, or the stupid boats, that are the visible manifestations of things not working,' Cummings, the former adviser to Boris Johnson and a man so divisive he could go by the title Lord Marmite, tells me. 'But I think what's happening at a deeper level is we are living through the same cycle that you see repeatedly in history play out, which is that over a few generations, the institutions and ideas of the elites start to come out of whack with reality. 'The ideas don't match, the institutions can't cope. And what you see repeatedly is this cycle of elite blindness, the institutions crumbling – and then suddenly crisis kicks in and then institutions collapse. 'In the short term no one can, I think, be reasonably optimistic about politics because the old system is just going to play out over the next few years. 'But there are reasons for hope though, right? One obvious reason for hope is that Britain is pretty much unique globally for having got through a few hundred years without significant political violence.' That seems a pretty low bar – the fact that the UK hasn't suffered a bloody revolution or a fascist or communist takeover. Following the Southport riots and the more recent events in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, I ask if the risks of widespread disorder are increasing – some have even spoken of civil war, a brutal revolution. 'Ummm,' Cummings pauses. '[Violence] is definitely a risk, but a lot of these things are very path-dependent. Countries that repeatedly have violence are more likely to have violence in the future. 'And countries that are good at avoiding it have a better chance of avoiding it. I think that the long term cultural capital that's built up over centuries is an important factor and gives us some chance of avoiding the fate that you can see [elsewhere] of just spreading mayhem all over the world.' It's hot sitting overlooking the garden and Cummings, 53 and 'fit-skinny', provides water in glasses better suited for a fine Burgundy. I point out that he is wearing Berghaus foot warmers despite the temperature nudging 30C. 'I don't get hot,' he replies. My colleague Cleo Watson, with me to record an edition of The Daily T podcast, says that he was known as the Vampire when they worked together in No 10, given his appearance of living in a body five degrees colder than everyone else's. Like Prince Andrew, he doesn't seem to sweat. When the production team's cameras overheat, Cummings is immediately up offering solutions of a fan jammed messily down the back of a sofa. Cummings is what management consultants would describe as 'a solutions-focused, completer, finisher'. Where there is a problem, he believes there is a fix. Whether it's overheating hardware or the dinghies bringing ever more people to the shores of England, all sensible (and clever) people need to do is prioritise it, work out the remedy and implement without fear. 'Stopping the boats is simple – but we need to leave the ECHR' 'Stopping the boats' – Rishi Sunak's promise to the voters which even he now admits was a three-word slogan too far – is now a lead weight around Keir Starmer's Government. The Prime Minister's 'smash the gangs' has been as hollow a claim as what went before. Both are metaphors for the deep malaise across politics, the visible manifestation of an inability to 'do anything'. 'Starmer has literally done exactly what Sunak did,' Cummings says, pointing out that the Labour election pledges of 'putting the grown ups in charge' and 'change from the chaos' has not stopped the forces of political and economic failure and decline. 'He stood up and said: 'This is a complete disaster. It's extremely bad for the country, and I am putting my personal authority behind solving it.' 'So are you going to actually stop the problem? No, of course not. Our actual priority is staying in the European Convention on Human Rights. You're not going to stop the boats, and the boats are just going to be a daily joke on social media and on TV.' Cummings is often criticised for lacking a nuance button – a bulldozer eyeing a system that needs the skill of a surgeon. Sunak said that the boats slogan made a complicated matter seem simple. Just like 'Take Back Control' and 'Get Brexit Done' – the three-word campaign rallying cries for the 2016 referendum and the 2019 election of Johnson both driven by Cummings. Cummings disagrees, seeing unnecessary complication as part of the ancien régime 's defence plan. Make everything appear un-fixable in order to maintain the bureaucratic system that keeps thousands of pen-pushers in their jobs. 'Solving the boats is both trivial and tricky in two different dimensions,' Cummings says. 'I went into this in extreme detail in 2020. Operationally, it's obviously simple to stop the boats. You can deploy the Navy, you can stop the boats. 'The entire problem is legal and constitutional. It's the interaction of how the European Convention on Human Rights and the Human Rights Act and judicial review system works. 'There is complete agreement between specialists who studied this subject that it is not possible for the British Prime Minister now to deploy the Navy and do the things that you need to do in order to stop the boats. The courts will declare it unlawful because of the Human Rights Act. 'So you have to repeal the Human Rights Act. You have to state that you are withdrawing from the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court [the ECHR], you deploy the Navy and stop the boats and you say nobody is landing from these boats. Everyone we pick up will be dropped on an island somewhere. 'No one will be coming to mainland Britain. The boats will be destroyed and the people organising the boats are going to be put on a list for UK special forces to kill or capture the way that we do with various terrorist organisations.' Cummings is in his flow: controversial, blunt, clear. The questions tick over in my mind. How much will it cost? Which 'island'? 'Kill or capture?' via which legal authority, or maybe none. What about the laws of the high seas and the duty to rescue? For Cummings such probing is all so much 'blah, blah, blah' and that, in the end, all challenges can be worked through. The opposite, endless inaction and failure, Cummings argues – where we are now with a crisis on our shores – is worse. And voters can see it. 'As soon as you announce that is your policy and take serious steps to do it, the boats stop straight away because the people doing this are not ideological terrorists who want to die and get into a fight about this,' he continues. 'They're there to make money. So as soon as they realise, oh, an island nation is actually just going to stop these stupid boats, they're obviously going to send the people somewhere else.' 'Whitehall is fundamentally broken' He has a question for Starmer, for our MPs, for the Civil Service. 'Do you actually want to get to grips with the fundamental legal problems and security problems we have in this country or not? The consensus amongst MPs has been for 30 years – no. 'The country doesn't agree with them. Both parties have tried to keep going with the old way and tried to persuade people that it can be done differently. They failed, they've lost the country. The country wants these problems solved. It's going to happen. The ECHR is toast and we'll be out of it.' Starmer's U-turn on the need for an inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal is another case of system failure. Cummings points out that child sexual assault and rape perpetrated by predominantly Pakistani-heritage Muslim men was being raised by people like Tommy Robinson years ago but being ignored by the state. 'The whole wider Whitehall system is fundamentally broken and the people don't know what they're doing,' he says. 'I think in principle it's obviously correct that the country gets to grips with this absolutely horrific nightmare [which] the old system has essentially tried to ignore for many years, decades. 'However, the kind of inquiry is very important […] I think that any kind of normal inquiry led by a judge will be mostly a farce. It'll be easily played by Whitehall. They'll destroy documents. They'll delay and evade – the normal Whitehall approach will be applied.' Cummings says politics now is about priorities – what do you want to solve first and how do you solve it. Starmer's premiership 'vaporised on contact with Whitehall' because he does not understand the need for fundamental change in the whole system. 'There will be a lot of talk about how Starmer can reset, but at the heart of it, I simply think that – like Sunak – Starmer's fundamental core software patch ['tech lingo' for a computer update] is optimised for pats on the head from permanent secretaries [senior civil servants]. That's what he will keep tuning to, because he can't do anything else.' The Conservatives are holed, probably below the water line. 'The Tories are obviously going to get rid of Kemi [Badenoch]. The only question is whether they do it in the autumn or whether they wait until they're smashed up in the May elections. 'So she'll go, after which they'll either put in James Cleverly [the former Home Secretary], in which case, shut the party down – definitively game over. 'Or there will be one last attempt at 'are we over the cliff or are we not?' Can we somehow reboot ourselves?' I ask him if Robert Jenrick, the noisy, TikTok-friendly, shadow justice secretary who films himself apprehending fare dodgers on the Tube, could execute such a reboot. 'He's obviously the person who everyone's talking about for a simple reason – the rest of the shadow cabinet are literally invisible. No one even knows who any of them are. Even people who are interested in politics don't know who they are.' And so to the big question, Nigel Farage and the plausible route to No 10. The two famously fell out (Farage called Cummings 'a horrible, nasty little man') over the referendum campaign, but more recently a rapprochement of sorts has happened, with Cummings having dinner with Farage before Christmas and backing Reform in the recent local elections. 'I thought it was interesting that he wanted to talk about the Cabinet Office and how power really works,' Cummings said of the December meeting. 'He said: 'I've never been in government myself. I've never been a minister. I don't know how it works. I'm now an MP though, and I talk to other MPs and it's clear they don't understand how it works and they still seem very curious about it and it's odd that they don't seem to know how power actually works inside the Cabinet Office.' 'The fundamental question is, does Nigel want to be Prime Minister in 2029? And if he does, is he prepared to build the thing that you need to build to do that? Which intrinsically involves turning Reform into an entity that can go out and engage with the country and bring in all these wonderful people and get some fraction of them involved with politics at the senior level. 'That's the core question. If he does that, then the whole system will undergo profound shock and it'll be a big deal and I'll be irrelevant to it. And if he doesn't do it, he will just be signalling this is the same old shambles and something else will grow.' Like Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s, Cummings understands the need for deep policy work, deep management and delivery reform that means the end of a 'permanent' Civil Service and attention to how you communicate in a way that is truthful and that voters understand. Can Farage find the equivalent of the Centre for Policy Studies? Who is Reform's Sir Keith Joseph? Who is the Maurice Saatchi? I sense Cummings is not convinced Farage has the ability to move beyond 'the guy with an iPhone' and a provocative soundbite. I ask if he would help Reform and, though open, it seems, to any conversation, Cummings knows that Farage has his loyalists and many of them do not like the high-intellect of the guy with a first in Ancient and Modern History from Exeter College, Oxford University. Being a Reform Spartan brooks little room for compromise. 'Change means tearing down the old and building something new' So far, 2025 has been the year Cummings, who now runs his own consultancy, becomes a little more visible – a gentle public relaunch. The interviews are coming more regularly and two weeks ago he gave the Pharos Lecture at Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre. He has attached himself to the Looking for Growth group, a grassroots movement of entrepreneurs led by the academic, Lawrence Newport, who has also put his name to the Crush Crime initiative to radically rethink law and order failings. 'If, in a year from now, it's obvious things have just sunk even further and can't actually change, then I think you'll see a burst of energy from a whole bunch of people saying, OK, right, let's start something new,' Cummings, who is wearing a Looking for Growth cap throughout our interview, says. 'And I think you'll see people from Labour defecting to join it. I think you'll see Tories and Reform people – but, crucially, a whole set of people who are now not involved with politics. We can't go on like this in 2029, in the election, and then have another four years with a bunch of these bozos in charge.' Cummings has spoken of his own start-up party, which remains a possibility, though he gently side-steps whether it might happen any time soon. 'It will certainly not be led by me. And certainly not chaired by me,' is all he will say. I would wager a £5 note that he will be involved if and when the old parties irrevocably fail. Cummings' analysis has clarity. Close the Treasury and the Cabinet Office; rip out the stultifying conformity of the Civil Service and end the job for life culture; make presently 'fake' ministers responsible for the decisions they take; encourage in the young, new talent that presently sees 'tech, maths and money' as more appealing than running the country; bring immigration down 'to the thousands'; embrace AI ('Westminister is always the last place to see anything'); overthrow the stale old media, including the BBC; understand that the public see traditional politics as peopled by incompetents, liars and cheats, and build a new, liberal, libertarian world where the market of good ideas is all that matters. Maybe Dominic Cummings should be prime minister? 'That's a laughable suggestion,' he replies. But all the Labour, Conservative and Reform MPs who regularly contact Cummings 'for a chat' are sure he will have a role. Because the World of Soup is coming to an end. And we're going to need some people with forks to work our way to a new future.

Scotsman

26 minutes ago

• Scotsman

The EIBF has learned nothing about real diversity

Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Last year, the board of the Edinburgh International Book Festival was forced to sever ties with its sponsor of two decades, Baillie Gifford. The threats from protestors to disrupt the festival due to Baillie Gifford's alleged ties with Israel and fossil fuel companies were simply too grave to ignore. Greta Thunberg pulling out of the programme and a pious bunch of petition-signing celebrities helped pile the pressure onto the EIBF and, with regret, they kowtowed. For those of us in the writing world with openly heterodox opinions, it was a sorry but predictable farce the Scottish arts world had brought on itself. This is what happened in a culture that had done nothing but, for instance, pander to trans activists when they were hounding people with reality-based views on sex and chant blindly along with every trendy 'social justice' slogan. If you make political diversity heresy, don't act surprised when the torch-bearers turn on you. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Activist Greta Thunberg, seen at a protest in Paris, cancelled a planned appearance at the Edinburgh International Book Festival over investments in the fossil fuel industry by the event's then-sponsor Baillie Gifford | AFP via Getty Images Alongside the justified schadenfraude there was also tentative hope that a lesson would be learned. That the Scottish literary scene would start to amend this crisis of its own making and start platforming a spectrum of political views. The theme for this year's festival is 'Repair', after all. Alas though, things remain broken. One would think that in the year the UK Supreme Court confirmed the definition of women in law and multiple politicians have rescinded their support for gender self-ID, there might be a single event featuring a notable women's rights campaigner. Quite a few of them have written excellent books recently after all. Victoria Smith. Julie Bindel. Susanna Rustin. Orwell-prize shortlisted Hannah Barnes. The Scotland-focused Sunday Times bestseller The Women Who Wouldn't Wheesht, edited by Susan Dalgety and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, has come out on paperback, in which over thirty essayists (including myself) are featured. Yet nothing. I'm not naive enough to be surprised but it remains highly depressing. One particularly glaring omission There is one omission that seems particularly glaring however, and that is Jenny Lindsay, a performance poet and leading figure in the Scottish literary scene. In November last year she published a book 'Hounded: Women, Harms And The Gender Wars' and there's few texts that would have complemented the 'Repair' theme more aptly. Because before you can fix anything, you have to understand what's gone wrong, and that's exactly what 'Hounded' explores. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Drawing on Lindsay's own experience in the arts, where overnight she found herself a target of wrongthink hounding for the crime of calling out violence against women, her book moves through the psychological, social and democratic harms the normalisation of bullying-disguised-as-virtue is wreaking on society. Lindsay had drawn attention to trans-identified Cathy Brennan, a writer for The Skinny, who'd advocated online for physical violence against lesbians at that year's Pride. For this, Lindsay was branded a 'TERF' and subjected to years of harassment and career disruptions. A matter of days after, Brennan allegedly attacked lesbian and women's rights campaigner Julie Bindel at Edinburgh University. As Lindsay speculated in a recent podcast interview , her being proven right was the most unforgivable thing in her hounders' eyes. Of course, it's at the EIBF's discretion to invite who they please. No one is entitled to a platform. But on the programme are several of Lindsay's most vicious and vocal hounders. Alice Tarbuck, for instance, the Literature Officer at Creative Scotland who brought disgrace on the institution when she was exposed as having actually rang bookshops and demanded they do not stock Lindsay's book. There's also Harry Josephine Giles, who co-authored a censorious petition to The Scottish Poetry Library against Lindsay and fellow poet Magi Gibson. (I confess I've a particular abject loathing for those that orchestrate petitions against individuals, trumped only by my disgust at the sheep who sign them). Statement of allegiance? Giles, whose most recent noteworthy public appearance has been screaming 'Give us wombs and give us t***ies!' to a crowd of baying activists after the Supreme Court ruling, will be appearing at six events in the programme. It's hard to read this as anything but a statement of allegiance to misogynistic bullies over a renewed dedication to freedom of expression. What a concerning indictment of the Scottish arts scene. Susan Smith, left, and Marion Calder, co-directors of For Women Scotland, celebrate outside the Supreme Court in London in April after its ruling on the definition of a woman | PA In the interest of transparency, Jenny is a dear friend of mine. I've known and loved her as a sister in feminism trying to navigate the Orwellian artistic landscape in which we (still) find ourselves. But before that, I knew her as a poet and writer. Without bias, the EIBF has snubbed not only a throughly principled artist but an enviably talented one. Around the time she published her brave, articulate essay 'Anatomy Of A Hounding' in The Dark Horse magazine, I was a creative writing student and seeing first hand the damage ideological hiveminderey was doing, not only to aspiring writers' freedom of expression, but literary quality itself. 'Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others' as Albert Camus said. There are seemingly few artists left that embody this spirit. Jenny is one of them. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad My favourite poem of Jenny's is 'The Schism Ring' from her collection This Script. She opens it by describing the menu for a feminist literary gathering - a superficially inclusive, oh-so-safe borefest of gluten-free and vegan cakes, before going on to describe the meaty, unctuous, mischievously un-PC feast she secretly craves - frogs legs, steak on the bone, duck eggs and full-fat buttery mash. It's a beautiful metaphor for the intellectual hunger so many of us feel around modern feminism, the literary scene or both. It would be disingenuous to say the EIBF doesn't feature a lot of talented, compelling writers outside the likes of Tarbuck and Giles. All the same, I read the programme and see an artistic climate that remains starved, mostly of courage.

The Guardian

30 minutes ago

• The Guardian

Duchy, London EC2: ‘The small plates concept, once so edgy, shows no sign of relenting' – restaurant review

I felt a compulsion to go to Duchy, in east London, because I had dined at its predecessor, Leroy, in 2018, as well as its genesis, Ellory, in 2015. These three different restaurants share DNA. Yes, 10 years have passed, but very little in the pared-back, pan-European anchovies-on-a-plate-for-£12 dining scene has moved on. No-frills decor, bare-brick walls, earnest small plates, staff with statement moustaches despite it not being remotely near Movember. We all know the drill for such places. There will be those exemplary anchovies on some sort of crostini, asparagus because it's in season, some beans, maybe green, perhaps white, fancy French cheese and a tart of the day for afters. While Ellory merged into Leroy via a move from London Fields to Shoreditch, Leroy has become Duchy, it seems, via a simple change of the sign above the door. Front-of-house Alex Grant and chef Simon Shand met at Leroy and have now made this restaurant their own. In pop music terms, visiting Duchy is like going to see Bucks Fizz at Butlin's and the only remaining member is David Van Day, and you're pretty sure he was actually in Dollar, but hey, it's fine, whatever, because they're now cranking through Making Your Mind Up anyway. Still, clearly this 'things on plates, served sporadically' concept isn't broken, and Duchy don't need to fix it, because by 5pm on a Tuesday night, this new/old restaurant is filling up nicely, and by the time we leave two hours later, it's absolutely heaving. The UK restaurant world is patently nowhere near the end of its 'three ravioli dressed in olive oil and a scattering of podded peas' era, of 'Hey, guys, can I start you off with some comté gougères' and 'Yes, we are playing Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense'. There has, admittedly, been a surge of 'authentic French' restaurants in the capital recently – 74 Duke, French Society, Marjorie's, Joséphine – where beret-wearing British restaurateurs seem to be draping onions around their necks and serving up hearty soups, souffles, trotters and Paris-Brests, and very nice they are, too. But this thing that Ellory, then Leroy and now Duchy does, and which was once so edgy, shows no sign of relenting. Two anchovies on two crostini dotted with marjoram leaves arrive for £5, followed by a pile of rather soft, chunkily cut panisse – polenta fries – enrobed in a thick grating of meule des Alpes from Savoie. A vitello tonnato with the veal served tartare-style is topped with what are reportedly shoestring fries, but have tangled into what looks like a deep-fried potato rösti. A highlight is a bowl of al dente Italian flat beans served cold in some type of vinaigrette, and with the pleasing addition of fresh almonds, blobs of rather pungent gorgonzola and a few slices of loquat. Surely loquats are just kumquats with aspirations of grandeur, you might be thinking. Well, you would be very wrong: loquats are bigger, more like a sharp pear in flavour and wholly suitable for matching with a stinky, oozy Italian cheese and some crunchy veg. A bowl of fresh spaghetti with sage is as memorable as the chorus of Britain's last Eurovision entry, and I am truly puzzled by what appears to be Duchy's signature dish: some very damp smoked trout on a bowl of vivid green spätzle that have been cooked until mushy. Thank heavens for the final main course, then, poulet au vin jaune, served on a silky buttery pomme purée with a scattering of outstanding morels. Delicious, although there is always a moment, when I have been fooled again into sharing a plate of chicken and mash, that I think, 'Surely sharing mash and gravy is the type of thing you should only need to do in a national emergency and you're huddling around a brazier with other survivors. Why am I paying £28 for this pleasure?' But, as I say, we are too far down this route to back out now; those brick walls that make conversations bounce around deafeningly, the slice of perfectly fine apricot tart with creme fraiche for afters, the £130 bill without drinks for an adequate, perfectly of-its-ilk, London small-plates dinner. Stop Making Sense is reaching its final track as we pay up, and I'm not entirely sure if the food world ever truly started making sense. Duchy 18 Phipp Street, London EC2, 07874 310612. Open Tues-Sat, lunch noon-2pm, dinner 5.30-9.45pm. From about £40 a head à la carte, plus drinks and service