Back to London after the Christmas break spent in Sicily & Milan with A&M, we had a dinner yesterday at the Shangri-La Ting Lounge restaurant at the Shard. Food is OK, not so bad – but definitely not something that I will remember forever. Views are stunning instead. Iconic views – as many would say here in London.
Iconic venues are opening all around. Towers. Buildings. Parks. Bridges. It’s the new tendency in London. The last: today Sky Gardens and its three restaurants open at the last floor of the Walkie Talkie.
“Reserve your place at this iconic address” they say. And I hardly try to understand what this really means, and why an address should be iconic. Until I discover that I am not the only one:
Could this usage (of the term iconic) please end in 2015? And with it, could we also see the end of the habit of calling places “public” when they are not? Again, 20 Fenchurch Street, better known as the Walkie Talkie, is at the top of the game: the “Sky Garden” at its summit is “the UK’s tallest public park”, you are told, when you ring its booking line. I don’t think they mean “tallest” – this would mean that the park was exceptionally vertical – but “highest”, meaning a long way off the ground. But then they might have faced rival claims from Snowdonia or the Cairngorms, so they need some linguistic fudge.
That said, we will visit this new iconic venue, next Saturday. And we will test the food and enjoy the views. Of course I won’t forget to (deeply) think about the inner meaning of the iconic term.
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