Land of the Shifty
London Spyplane Report Summer 2025
Blackbird Spyplane remains your fully reader-powered independent miracle.
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Mach 3+ city intel for traveling the entire planet is here.
If you’re in Paris this week, where Erin and I have come to see a bunch of the people behind some of our favorite clothes in the world, you’re invited to a party we’re co-hosting in the Marais tomorrow, Wednesday, June 25th, with our friends from Neighbour and Lady White Co.
We’ll have wines from Novice, n.a. spritzes from iessi, and music selected by Yu Su. 51 Rue Volta, Paris, 75003, from 6 p.m. til 9 p.m.
Here’s today’s Plane —
When you live in a declining imperial superpower, there’s something complexly comforting about watching a documentary by Adam Curtis. He’s an unparalleled portraitist of the haunted contemporary West, arranging messy and seemingly unconnected swathes of history into funny, strange, moral, angry, poetic, depressing, and revelatory films.
Every night for the past week, our “bedtime story” has been watching a chunk of his latest film, the five-part Shifty. Technically, it’s about “living in Britain at the end of the Twentieth Century.” But in its hypnotic, montage-style survey of the last ~40 years — the rise of Thatcherism, the collapse of industry, the increasing virtualization of life, and the dystopian consolidation of what Curtis might call “hyper-individualism” — it’s a documentary for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the noise, violence, stupidity, sadness and confusion of life circa 2025, and wonders how we got here.
Erin and I started watching Shifty in London, where we traveled earlier this month to engage in Unbeatable Recon for Spy Nation. The documentary was part of an all-British cultural diet I’ve found myself inadvertently observing on this trip.
Flying over, I went to sleep before takeoff, as prescribed by the helpful jetlag-mitigation app we just wrote about. Before we landed, I had just enough time to watch the new Mike Leigh drama-comedy, Hard Truths, about a deeply angry woman living in the northwest London suburb of Harlesden (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), who berates and terrorizes everyone she encounters, including her meek plumber husband and even-meeker adult gamer son. One way to think of it is as a much sadder and much more uncomfortable Curb Your Enthusiasm, except it’s about a depressed middle-class London housewife instead of an annoyed multimillionaire Brentwood comedian. John Waters called it “a wretched experience I’ll cherish forever,” which is a great way to describe many of Leigh’s best movies.
When we got to town, I hit Daunt and picked up paperbacks of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Vile Bodies, neither of which I’d read before, even though people who know I love P.G. Wodehouse have been telling me to check out Waugh for years. Brideshead is a wistful, un-Wodehousian novel about beautiful, sensitive, sarcastic upper-class boys who spend a ton of money, drink self-destructively, flunk out of Oxford, and, in the passage I just read, help London cops beat up working-class demonstrators during a 1926 general strike.
It’s a simple, obvious thing, but I recommend reading books and watching movies from and about a country you’re visiting, while you’re there. You get to look at X-rays into the life & soul of a place as you move through it in real time.
Now let’s get to the recon —
Our smash-hit “Wonders of London” Travel Guide remains a fantastic resource when it comes to doing fun things in town. We’ve heard this from travelers and London-based Spyfriends alike.
On this trip, we balanced visits to old favorites with places we’ve long wanted to hit but never had the chance, plus one monumental newly opened gem. Below are all but one of the top highlights of our week — we’re saving the best of the bunch for this coming Thursday’s sletter.
An afternoon at the brand-new 👍 V&A East Storehouse
Wow. This place just opened on May 31, and it didn’t disappoint.
The compressed version is that the Victoria & Albert Museum owns untold kilotons of world-class s--t: ancient relics, masterpieces of classical art, emblems of modern design, treasures obtained through colonial plunder, etc. Rather than let the vast majority of that illustrious s--t sit unseen in a climate-controlled warehouse, they turned the warehouse into its own publicly visitable museum, as seen above.
Art and artefacts are arranged on palettes stacked on top of each other in all directions across four stories, grouped according to loose thematic harmonies that allow for unexpected juxtapositions. The effect is a bit like navigating a massive, extremely rarefied junk shop (complimentary.)
In addition to the works on palettes, there are fully built-out installations of more elaborate V&A holdings, like one of the gorgeous Frankfurt Kitchens, designed by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, pictured bottommost above. (There’s another one of these at MoMA now, too, FYI.)
Or Frank Lloyd Wright’s little-seen, wood-paneled Kaufmann Office, designed for a Pittsburgh department-store magnate:
You can also peer into clean rooms and watch V&A conservation efforts happen in real time, as seen above, which is tight.
Our only note is that most things on display don’t have placards — if you want to know what a given piece is, you scan a QR code with your phone. Presumably this is because creating placards for everything would be a Sisyphean task, but someone’s still doing that back-end work for the codes, no? I ask because, in 99.9% of cases, scanning QR codes is life-force-depleting behavior we prefer to avoid, and places that make people scan QR codes is an antisocial development to be resisted, whether it’s restaurant menus or museums. It also puts an added layer between you and explanatory context for the deluge of work you’re seeing, and the risk is that everything gets flattened into a contextless vibe, like you’re walking through an enormous Tumblr.
That small criticism aside, though, the place rocked. Major abbondanza energy. Admission is free, and the E3 Bakehouse serving food on the ground floor is a slapper.
Artwise, in London we also hit the 👍Tate Modern, where we grooved upon a trippy Pipilotti Rist video, and 👍 The Barbican, where the building itself is a wonder, and where the art gallery had a cool show of old Giacomettis mixed in with new Huma Bhabhas.
Next up—
A half-hour spent with our jaws dropped looking at furniture, lighting, art and other objets for sale at 👍 The Peanut Vendor
Right by Victoria Park, just off the handsomely houseboat-lined Regents Canal, sits the studio and showroom of The Peanut Vendor, a top-notch vintage home-goods & design seller we’ve followed on IG for ages and finally visited.
Barny Read and Becky Nolan co-founded the shop in 2008, and moved to this location ten years ago. Their focus at the moment is on early- to mid-20th Century pieces from Italy and France. We hung out a bit with Becky, who told us she and Barny were about to head down to France, near Cassis, for a combination holiday / antique-hunting mission. Separately, Erin and I each clocked a small art-decoish hammered-pewter handled vase, silhouetted above left, produced circa 1930 by a dude named René Delavan. We are famously A.C.A.B. (Against Checking Any Bags) and I could stuff this vase into one of my carry-ons no problem, so we copped it. The Peanut Vendor ships all over the world, though, so we could have gone that route, too.
Email The Peanut Vendor to make an appointment. Their shop is online here.
BTW the deeper-cut midcentury-furnishings spot 👍 Two Columbia Road, in Shoreditch, has lots of cool things, too.
Food & more
Our Wonders of London Guide, linked earlier, has the lion’s share of our food & clothes-shopping intel for the city. Standouts of this trip included…
The goated 👍 Rochelle Canteen, where we had the best dinner of the week. We got a simple, fantastic lunch the next day nearby at the very charming 👍 Leila’s Shop with Spyfriend and illustrious Industrial Designer John Tree. We went pescetarian mode, successfully, at the hallucinatorily meaty 👍 St. John, tapped in at Ottolenghi spots Nopi and Rovi, loved the old-school cozy vibes at 👍 Andrew Edmunds, and got fish ‘n’ chips at 👍 The Fryer’s Delight, which I’ve been dreaming about ever since Spyfriend and painter Issy Wood told me about it during my last visit to London. We had espressos on arrival standing up at the blissfully unchanged-for-decades 👍 Bar Italia, and I had a great early-afternoon Guinness at 👍 Ye Olde Mitre, a tucked-away classic pub where they teacups from the ceiling. We sadly ran out of dinners and did not get to eat at Tamil Prince, “an Indian restaurant in an old pub” that Spyfriend Saager Dilawri told us about.
On the recommendation of Spyfriends in our London Chat (thank you), we hit 👍 Dennis Severs’ House for a daytime tour (the nighttime candle-lit tours are apparently gas, but they don’t offer them in the summertime because it’s so light out so late). The less you know the better, but basically it’s a house museum created by a wily, since-deceased eccentric from Southern California, crammed end-to-end with weird, centuries-spanning antiquities for a very cheeky frozen-in-time experience — kind of like 👍 John Soanes’ Museum, but funky and insane.
👍 The Margaret Howell Sale Shop, not far from the MH flagship, remains a true trove of hitters on deep discount. Before hitting Daunt Books, near two stunner-packed locations of 👍 Mouki Mou (who carry Auralee, Arts & Science, Dosa and Oliver Church, among other labels), we went to 👍 Perfumer H for some A+ scents. Back in 2023 I bought a 100ml bottle of “Rain Wood” for $180 and still have a fair amount left. They now charge £180 (!) for their 50ml bottles, in a wild illustration of scentflation. And yet it lasts long enough, and smells great enough, that it’s still kind of worth it? I said f--k it, bit the bullet and shelled out for a “Lemon Tree” and a “Pepper.”
And finally, the trip wouldn’t have felt complete without —
A visit to the HQ of the excellent London clothing line 👍 Sono
Back in September of 2023, Blackbird Spyplane broke the news about a mysterious new unisex line called Sono, co-founded by two designers, Stephanie “Sono” Oberg and Simon Homes, who’d worked previously at places like Lemaire and The Row. Sono’s clothes are straightforward but sly, cut with a roomy elegance from natural fabrics. As we put it in that post, they “manage to speak volumes saucewise, but in sotte voce tone….”
On our last day in London, we visited Sono’s studio. It also doubles as a store, where you can schedule a time to come try on clothes while the small Sono team works around you. When we popped in, Stephanie was shooting their SS26 lookbook at one end of the space.
Some of Sono’s clothes are made in England, but most are made in a French factory whose other clients include Comme des Garçons and Hermès (Casey Casey, too, at least until they moved most of their production to Portugal). As you’d expect, the level of construction and finishing is exceptionally high.
Simon showed us around, and gave us some insights into what they do.
As you can see on the season breakdown chart above, Sono’s approach is to execute some couple-dozen styles across different fabrics. Of the SS26 samples they were shooting ahead of their Paris showroom, we were struck by several clothes cut from a floral-print organic cotton, topmost above. Simon showed us the reference piece for this cloth: a jacket from the Caucuses Mountains they’d bought from a vintage vendor in Spitalfields Market. They’d scanned the source print in black and white, asked a friend to color it using watercolors, and turned that into a new fabric (the pattern is printed, and visible on both sides).
There were also pieces cut from organic-cotton poplin in blocky stripes of pale yellow and pale blue-violet (pictured above bottommost) — complementary colors that vibrated off each other with quiet power. Others were cut from thick garment-dyed denim and heavy cotton twills that will reward punishment, softening and gaining in character through wear. “Some customers are going to complain,” Simon said. “They’re going to say it’s too heavy. That’s great.”
Sono are online here, and their IG is here.
Coming in this Thursday’s Plane?? The No. 1 Thing We Did in London, which, as it happened, involved taking a short train ride out of London.
P🎨E🎨A🎨C🎨E until then — Jonah & Erin
Barbican is sick—the Noah Davis show there was great. Recommend checking it out to anyone in LA as it is now there <3
For more on the olfactory tip, highly recommend the Avestan shop in soho. A mysterious yet welcoming door leads you into a warm and sparse shop with 2 items in total. A singular fragrance, in oil and spray. Prices are confoundingly affordable given the location, around 30/50£ a bottle. The fragrance itself it only available for purchase in store in that location only, making for a super unique and rare experience, and on top of that, the fragrance absolutely slaps.