EDITOR’S LETTER

We’ve moved office. Yes, after more than 30 years, ES Magazine — along with our big sister, the Evening Standard — has left the building. So long, Northcliffe House, Kensington. Please note: PRs bearing gifts, friends texting ‘I’m round the corner, fancy a coffee?’ and that weirdo who used to send me unintelligible equations scrawled on leaflets that we nervously joked were coated in anthrax, our new address is Alphabeta, 14-18 Finsbury Square, EC2A 1AH.

I’ll miss the monstrously huge pet koi carp at the old office, the nuns of the Chapel Convent Assumption pottering around like extras in a 1970s horror film, the Elephant and Castle pub on Holland Street, the spitting distance to Clarke’s restaurant, my Whole Foods sashimi ritual, and that my home was a 12-minute Uber ride away.

I was at Northcliffe House for just one year but it’s funny how attached you get to daily routines. It’s also shocking/embarrassing how quickly you — and by you I mean me — can cover your desk in stuff. Mine had become a shameful spectacle: books on cosmic symbols and old Nova magazines, a patchwork of notes and receipts, party invites and random presents. What can I say? My desk is a living entity and it likes mess.

Our new HQ is a swanky upgrade and I’m no stranger to the area; I worked nearby at Dazed & Confused towers for the best part of a decade and spent much of the late Nineties in nearby, longgone dive bars and back-door clubs. Now I have to find all my new places. I’ve located a good local Japanese restaurant, which has become my regular lunch haunt (sashimi sat at the counter) and some team members (you know who you are) have given the pub opposite it double thumbs. The creature of habit in me is relieved.

Even better, as I’m typing this I can see shoot print-outs and page plans starting to gather around my keyboard. It’s happening again. There’s a comforting reassurance in the inevitability of it all. Hello mess, my old friend.