Are you a plate flipper? I can’t stop myself. Same with glasses. The labels on the towels. Where is this stuff made, I wonder? Often the answer is a delight but too often a disappointment.
Hotel groups have – like lots of brands – locked on to the fact that people are seeking authenticity. And when that comes to travel it means delivering that cliché, “a sense of place”. Guests don’t want to arrive in a room stripped of connections to the spot where it sits and where, as you awake, it’s hard to recall if you are in Milan or Minnesota without opening the curtains.
The only trouble is, if you are a hotel group, it’s very hard to stop your central buying team from dispatching the same plates, towels and even art, to every property in your portfolio. It’s quicker and cheaper.
I’m in Mallorca on holiday and have been doing a lot of crockery flipping. Last night we ate at a hotel where they emphasise the efforts they have gone to provide a made in Spain – and in particular Mallorca – experience. There’s lots to admire. Yet a quick flip of the plate reveals the mark of an Italian crockery company, the glasses are etched “made in Slovakia”, the pepper grinder is German.
Just down the road from our home in Palma is an example of what happens when a hotel is created by people who want you to flip the plates – and read the wine label, ask where the food is grown, even who made the sofas.
The Terreno Barrio Hotel, which opened this year (we have reported on the project), is owned by hotelier Lydia Piñero and was developed through a series of creative conversations with friends and designers. She was figuring out how to build a hotel that was truly of place and which could be of benefit to its neighbours (this would lead to adding co-working places, an outdoor gym now used by locals). And she signed Ohlab architects, an ambitious practice run by Jaime Oliver and Paloma Hernaiz, to deliver the scheme.
Instead of going to fast-turnaround contract furniture companies, Ohlab commissioned island makers to create as much as possible in Mallorca. It wasn’t easy, took time and required businesses to rescale. But as I sat at the rooftop bar the other night – drinking local wine, eating Mallorcan olives – I realised that there is a subtle manifesto about the future of hotel design in every fibre of this building.
There’s another take on this idea down the road in the new Mandarin Oriental resort at Punta Negra, which also featured in the supplement of our just out Med, Mountains & More newspaper. This Hong Kong-anchored hospitality player could have docked with a property that gave just a few nods to local talent to appease guests – but it hasn’t. And one of the best things they did was to hire the art advisor and curator Paloma Fernández-Iriondo, who filled the resort with specially commissioned artworks by artists based or born in Spain and whose stories reflect Mallorca’s history as a cultural crossroads. She installed works – such as Fran Aniorte’s tiled Balearic Constellation – that are riven with meaning but also fit with a Mediterranean hotel vibe. Fernández-Iriondo focused on finding artists without representation and located many of them by driving around the island, knocking on studio doors. It’s commendable – it took time and required them to ignore the easy path.
I don’t want to put Italian crockery makers out of business. But as hotel brands offer up increasingly elaborate stories of provenance, it’s important that they are true, that their stories withstand scrutiny. We need brands to do the hard work, to be genuine. Otherwise, the plate flippers will catch them out.
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Settling on a scent for the summer is a delicate pursuit. The warmer months call for bright, clean perfumes to wear on coastal holidays and weekend escapes. From a chilli-and-lime-infused scent by Australian perfumer Flâner to a heady combination of fig and cedarwood from Italian luxury house Bottega Veneta, we have selected our favourite options for your seasonal rotation.
Five of our favourites are listed below, and the full ten feature in Med, Mountains & More, our seasonal summer newspaper. If you’re not a subscriber, pick up a copy of the paper here. Subscribers can enjoy the printed copy delivered to their door, and read the digital version here.
1.
Iris Root
by Loewe
“I love the contrast between the soft powdery elegance of iris and the fresh, pomelo facets of timut pepper,” says Loewe perfumer Núria Cruelles. “It gives the fragrance a luminous, effortless quality that feels perfect for warmer days.” Part of the Spanish luxury house’s Crafted Collection, Iris Root comes in a glass flask that features trapped bubbles in its surface – inspired by the bullicante technique used in traditional glassblowing – and with a granite cap.
perfumesloewe.com
2.
Balliamo
by Bottega Veneta
This summer, the Italian fashion house is expanding its perfume offerings with Alta, a new collection of 10 scents. Each combines an ingredient from Italy with a far-flung counterpoint (think blood orange with North African neroli or plum with Spanish labdanum). We will be wearing Balliamo – a heady combination of Italian white fig with American cedarwood – to the aperitivo. bottegaveneta.com
3.
Neroli 36
by Le Labo
“A scent that I always gravitate toward in the summer is Neroli 36, a fragrance centred around the luminosity of orange blossom but with a solar, slightly salty, mineral quality underneath,” says Deborah Royer, the global brand president and creative director of Le Labo Fragrances. This particular perfume has a white floral component, with top notes of orange blossom and mandarin, plus a musky, tonka-bean base. “Neroli is a note that you expect to read as purely radiant or floral but this has a quality that feels sun-warmed and intimate.” lelabofragrances.com
4.
A Sigh of Dawn
by Frassaï
For Natalia Outeda, the Argentine founder of Frassaï, the key to a good summer perfume is balance. “It should have presence without weight,” she says. “I like a fragrance that has some transparency and breathes throughout the day.” Her pick is A Sigh of Dawn, a crisp scent that combines notes of green mandarin, fig and cedarwood. Her advice on how to wear it in the sun? “When temperatures rise, I like to spray perfume on my clothes and in my hair.”
frassai.com
5.
Bergamot
by Perfumer H
When the mercury climbs, the founder of Perfumer H, Lyn Harris, reaches for the citrus scent of bergamot. “I have always loved the freshness of old Italian colognes and wanted to capture that feeling in a way that felt natural and effortless,” says British perfumer Harris, who added sprinklings of clove, frankincense and lavender to the bergamot to achieve this nostalgic scent. “It reminds me of swimming in the sea.” perfumerh.com
Copenhagen Fashion Week has been celebrating its 20th anniversary edition in the past week, drawing international buyers and editors to the Danish capital as it continues to carve out a distinct identity in an increasingly crowded fashion calendar. But whether it’s the brands being showcased or the mission underpinning the week, that effort to be distinctive hasn’t always gone according to plan.
On the mission front, a key element of Copenhagen’s positioning in the past few years has been a framework for sustainability, which was introduced in 2020 to establish the city as a benchmark for responsible fashion. Among its provisions was a requirement that at least 60 per cent of each participating brand’s collection be made using recycled or deadstock materials. But that requirement was suspended for the spring/summer 2027 season, while the criteria is apparently undergoing revision.
Still, the event’s appeal has always extended beyond its sustainability ambitions. This season once again brought together many of the designers who exemplify Copenhagen’s collaborative and close-knit creative community. Showcases favour intimacy over spectacle, opting for pared-back settings – from the garden of a museum to the backyard of a family home – rather than the grandeur associated with some of the industry’s larger fashion capitals. “Copenhagen Fashion Week has always been about something broader than the runway,” says Isabella Rose Davey, chief operating officer of Copenhagen Fashion Week. “I’ve seen inspiring creativity across every aspect of what goes into making each edition better than the last and it’s those elements that continue to set Copenhagen Fashion Week apart.”
The schedule also served as a reminder of the region’s most compelling emerging designers. Among the highlights was Nicklas Skovgaard, a semi-finalist for the 2025 LVMH Prize, who staged another of his signature theatrical presentations in a deserted car park on the edge of Nordhavn. Models emerged from vintage cars, wearing colourful, checked, 1960s-inspired silhouettes that were co-ordinated yet distinctly individual. “The collection is ultimately about different expressions of femininity, where glamour, emotion and individuality exist side by side,” Skovgaard tells Monocle. The designer, who has shown at Copenhagen Fashion Week for the past three years, attributes much of the event’s appeal to the network of designers, makers and collaborators behind it. “It has never lost sight of the local creative community that makes it unique,” he says. “There’s a real sense of openness and collaboration here.”
Among this year’s signature moments was the homecoming of By Malene Birger. Founded in 2003 by its namesake designer and long regarded as one of Denmark’s leading fashion labels, the brand returned to Copenhagen Fashion Week for the first time in six years. Its showcase also marked the runway debut of newly appointed creative director Emilie Martinsen-Kønigsfeldt, who presented a collection built around the brand’s signature sleek tailoring and a restrained monochrome palette. For Martinsen-Kønigsfeldt, returning to Copenhagen was as much an introduction to her vision for the house as it was a gesture towards the city where the brand was founded. “It’s a way to reconnect with the community that has helped shape Danish fashion on the global stage,” she adds. “The show itself is intended as both a celebration of our return and a statement of where the brand is today.”
At a time when some of the week’s best-known names have chosen to look elsewhere – Ganni, arguably Denmark’s most internationally recognised fashion brand, left the Copenhagen schedule in 2023 in favour of Paris – the return of an established house such as By Malene Birger suggests that there is still confidence in Copenhagen Fashion Week’s ability to shape the conversation around Nordic fashion. As it enters its third decade, the real question is not whether it can compete with the scale of Paris or Milan but whether it can remain true to the qualities that have made it distinctive. In a city that is modest in size yet rich in creativity, the event’s greatest strength is the innovative ideas and people behind it.
For more on Copenhagen Fashion Week, tune in to Monocle Radio’s conversation with CEO Cecilie Thorsmark on ‘The Globalist’.
At its best, a summer reading list isn’t one list at all. It’s a set of options matched to conditions and mood. What you might want to read on a plane isn’t the same as what you’d want to read on a beach lounger at 16.00, half asleep and sun-drunk – or even drunk-drunk. It’s about finding books that match both mindset and situation.
Long-haul flights need scale, something big enough to swallow the hours. Poolside afternoons need pace and perhaps a little mischief, narratives you can dip in and out of without losing the thread. A warm evening on a terrace is for a story that could spark your dinner conversation. And when the rain comes, reach for something a little more weighty.
As the host of Meet the Writers on Monocle Radio, I’ve read many different books in many different places. I’ve learned the key to choosing a good book is to match it to the place you’re in and the weather in your head, not just the conditions outside. Here are 14 titles that do just that.
‘The Odyssey’
Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
Ancient Greece
Good for: Long-haul flights or beside a wine-dark sea.
Homer invented travel writing. The Odyssey tells the story of a man trying to get home and everything standing in his way. Emily Wilson’s translation – the first complete English translation of the book by a woman – presents a modern take on the ancient work with far more attention paid to the women, the enslaved people and the power structures that were brushed over by earlier translators. Read the book and you can weave it into discussions about the Christopher Nolan film that was released in cinemas this summer.
‘Jan Morris: A Life’
Sara Wheeler
United Kingdom
Good for: Waiting at a departure lounge.
Jan Morris was a prolific Welsh journalist and writer, whose work encompassed travel writing, foreign correspondence and everything in between. Sara Wheeler’s biography does justice to a genuinely singular life, including Morris’s transition, and the decades spent writing about Europe’s cities with real love and precision and questions of identity. Few people saw more of the world or wrote about it with less vanity.
‘Lázár’
Nelio Biedermann
Switzerland and Hungary
Good for: A week away, when you want a century in your carry bag.
Lázár follows a Hungarian family across a century of upheaval, from the Habsburg Empire to the First World War, through fascism, Soviet occupation and the 1956 uprising. Impressively, Nelio Biedermann was only 22 years old when the book was published earlier this year. This is a big, confident book from someone barely out of his teens and one of this year’s genuine European discoveries.
‘Baldwin: A Love Story’
Nicholas Boggs
Brooklyn, Leukerbad, the south of France and Istanbul
Good for: Relaxed mornings, coffee on the boulevard.
Washington-born Nicholas Boggs tells James Baldwin’s life story through the people who loved him and the people he loved, from mentor Beauford Delaney to Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss painter who became his first great love in Paris. The story goes from Brooklyn and the south of France to Paris, Tuscany and Istanbul, and the months at Happersberger’s family chalet in Leukerbad, Switzerland, that gave Baldwin the isolation to finish his debut novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain.
‘The Disappearers’
Marlon James
Jamaica and the US
Good for: Intellectual stimulation on the second week of holiday.
Marlon James won the Booker Prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings and he’s back on this year’s long list for The Disappearers. The latter book takes place in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1988: eight gay men gather to rehearse a play. Though they are strangers to each other, they’re bound by the one thing they can’t mention. One night a mob violently attacks the group and what follows is a story about the aftermath. This is not a gentle book.
‘The Shadow of the Object’
Chloe Aridjis
Mexico, the Netherlands and USA
Good for: An overcast afternoon indoors when you want something a little uncanny.
Chloe Aridjis grew up shuttling between Mexico, the Netherlands and the US, and that unsettled quality runs through her fiction: it’s visual, faintly eerie and never quite goes where you expect it to. The Shadow of the Object opens with a dog bite from the elderly family German Shepherd and moves through a Mexico City hospital ward, an unlikely friendship and magic lanterns. The book made this year’s Booker longlist.
Listen to a conversation with Aridjis on ‘Meet the Writers’.
‘Netherwood’
Jake Arnott
UK
Good for: Late-night reading, when you’re feeling brave.
A literary thriller built around Aleister Crowley and Britain’s occult undercurrent, including the communes, the counterculture and the folk horror lurking behind the picturesque seaside postcards. Jake Arnott has always been drawn to Britain’s alternative histories, and Netherwood is him at his most atmospheric, mixing fact and fiction. You might not want to read it alone, though: it’s pretty scary.
‘Our Last Resort’
Clémence Michallon
France
Good for: A languid afternoon on a yacht or at a resort.
A French writer’s take on an American obsession, a luxury resort in Utah, a group of cult survivors trying to rebuild and a murder. Michallon brings an outsider’s eye to a very American kind of story, which is part of what makes it work. A fast-pace read for the poolside.
‘Lust’
Erika Lust
Sweden and Spain
Good for: Sharp, sexy thinking.
The aptly named Erika Lust grew up in a Swedish household that didn’t talk about sex, then moved to Barcelona and built one of the best-known adult film studios. The book argues that porn is a mirror of society’s problems rather than the cause. Part memoir, part feminist rallying cry, Lust goes behind the scenes on the film sets, into the casting and the consent conversations, and makes the case for pleasure as something worth taking seriously. Intelligent rather than sensational.
‘All Fours’
Miranda July
USA
Good for: Reading with a book club.
Sexually frank and very funny, Miranda July’s novel takes on midlife desire, a marriage under pressure, menopause and reinvention. Pair it with Lust for the same subject from two directions: one fiction, one criticism. You will have an opinion and so will everyone else who reads it.
‘Exit Wounds’
Peter Godwin
Zimbabwe, UK and US
Good for: A family holiday or the flight home.
This one is personal: Peter Godwin is my brother. Exit Wounds moves between Zimbabwe, London, New York and Lakeville. It’s about family, war, exile, ageing parents, a marriage ending and three strong women. We’re touring Western Australia together with the book in October. If you’re there, come and have a chat. Or just buy it and I’ll get a drink out of my share of the royalties. Cheers.
Listen to an interview with Godwin on ‘Meet the Writers’.
‘Attention-Seeking Behaviour’
Aea Varfis-van Warmelo
UK and Greece
Good for: A train journey, or when you need something to argue about.
The narrator is a compulsive liar and she tells you upfront. A young London journalist, she spins outlandish stories, trying to work out where the lying started and what it has cost her. Woven through the book is a real history of lie detection, from Ekman’s discredited theory that a flash of expression gives away what someone truly feels to the polygraph’s long and shaky career in policing. Fiction, memoir and essay run together, I found it utterly compelling.
‘Astronaut!’
Oana Aristide
Romania, Greece and Sweden
Good for: A rainy day when you want something darkly funny.
Romania, 1989, the final months of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rule. A detective is told to pin a string of murders on a man-eating bear rather than admit a serial killer is loose in a country where killers officially don’t exist. Meanwhile, an eight-year-old girl gets pulled into her elderly neighbour’s plot against the regime. It is dark and funny and examines what it costs to keep believing an obvious lie. Aristide is a co-founder of the Syros Literary Festival (with me and my brother), which we’ll be holding in the Hotel Aristide Hotel in Greece in April. Come along to meet Oana and many others on this list.
Listen to a conversation with Aristide on ‘Meet the Writers’.
‘Porcupines’
Fran Fabriczki
Hungary and USA
Good for: Reading at an airport bar.
Szonja arrives in Los Angeles from Budapest at 18 for what’s meant to be a summer visit and never quite leaves. The book moves between Cold War Washington, late-Communist Budapest and the bright sunshine of early 2000s Los Angeles. The title comes from Arthur Schopenhauer’s fable about porcupines huddling together for warmth and pricking each other in the process.
American media loves a political bunfight, especially an intraparty one. The New York Times reports that moderate Democrats are preparing for war with the party’s progressive wing after the victory of Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan state primary this week. The Third Way, a centrist Democratic group, says that it plans to spend $15m (€13m) to help defeat the democratic-socialist movement, as embodied by the likes of El-Sayed and New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani.
For a party that should be on the upswing, thanks to the general unpopularity of Donald Trump, spending money against a wing of your own party is obviously not a good look. But nor are many of the prescriptions of democratic socialism, not simply because they’re further left but because their chief ideas are not new. “Medicare for All”, the key policy platform of El-Sayed that would bring an NHS-style system to American health care, is a well-worn topic. So are promises to “take money out of politics”.
The current battle among the Democrats is largely about whether moderate common sense or stick-to-your guns progressivism is the best way to defeat the Republicans in November’s midterms. Progressives present themselves as the ones with the passion, beliefs and conviction needed to oppose Trump’s Maga ideology, compared to the moderates sorely lacking in identity and backbone. But the focus, for both sides, should be less on who’s most passionate and more on new and innovative ideas. Let’s be clear: Medicare for All is a pipe dream in a country as hopelessly divided as the US, something that has been talked about for decades without ever having a real path to becoming law. So is abolishing ICE. For all the agency’s faults and misuse under Trump, it’s responsible for monitoring US borders. How about some pragmatic, daring, left-wing fixes for American health and border security that actually have a chance?
Agree or disagree with his approach, Trump has upended traditional policy and got things done: for example, through pressurising pharmaceutical companies to sign deals giving the US “favoured nation” status, thereby lowering drug prices. It’s a surprisingly statist bit of intervention from a Republican president (one that Democrats probably wish they’d thought of) but at least it’s something new. Democrats need bold-but-enactable policies in response. Because while they might succeed in rallying their own voter base by keeping the state-run health-care dreams of Bernie Sanders alive, it won’t win them elections in moderate swing states.
The UK’s prime minister, Andy Burnham, has made some steps in this direction: a more left-leaning Labour leader than his predecessor, Keir Starmer, he’s started off with practical fixes aimed at tackling the spiralling cost of living. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni is an example from the other end of the spectrum, a right-winger who preached political stability (a rare feat in Italy) as a means of staying in office. Therein lies the rub: any anti-establishment candidate who enters government still has to adapt when their ideals collide with the realities of office. If we really want to rebuild trust in politicians, why not try campaigning on things that are actually enactable?
The point here is that, whether they’re progressive or moderate, fresh ideas are the way forward. Democrats of all stripes need to work together ahead of November to reform their manifesto and expand their voter base, rather than merely playing to their die-hard supporters. Trump was re-elected in 2024 not by his base but because of inroads he made into minority communities, independents and even younger voters. Democrats can wring their hands as long as they like about how he achieved such a miracle but it’s a reality that still needs to be addressed by the party. Otherwise, despite an unpopular war and the rising cost of living, Republicans will once again hold on to Congress in November.ublicans will once again hold on to Congress in November.
Milan is a city of bakeries. In some areas, it feels as though there’s one on every street corner, peddling the sweet delights that Italians often start their days with (we’re thinking pistachio-cream-filled croissants). In recent years, a new wave of bakers has been setting up shop alongside old-school businesses. From spots serving ancient grains and cinnamon rolls to babka and cruffins, here are five of Monocle’s favourites.
Signor Lievito
Run by Latvian baker Natalia Nikitina, a resident of Milan for more than 15 years, Signor Lievito is a small Nordic-inspired bakery located in Porta Romana. You can place online pre-orders for bakes ranging from cinnamon rolls and lemon cruffins (a cross between a croissant and a muffin) to flan parisien (a vanilla custard tart) and pick them up the following morning to avoid queues. The shop’s design was overseen by Hannes Peer (who recently worked on Merano’s Hotel Aurora) and features terracotta tiles, abstract line drawings and a Foglio wall light by Tobia Scarpa. One thing: this bakery’s name definitely sounds better in Italian. In English, it translates to “Mr Yeast”.
Via Maestri Campionesi 26; signor-lievito.com
Tondo
This tucked-away spot in the Isola neighbourhood refers to itself as a “radical oven” for artisanal bread. Set up by Silvia Cancellieri in 2020 and focused on sourdough, Tondo cares deeply about the provenance of its raw ingredients, including the organic flour. Bread is always centre stage here, with special loaves made from ancient grains and buckwheat. Pick up a slice of speciality focaccia or a brioche filled with cream and topped with blueberries. Planning on staying in Milan a little longer? Tondo also teaches courses in bread- and focaccia-making.
Via Cola Montano 12
Davide Longoni
Davide Longoni arguably set off the new wave of bakeries in Milan. His café-cum-bakeries mean that you can sit down for a coffee, juice and a pastry, or alternatively take away a loaf. Longoni uses grains grown south of Milan and sells everything from dried pasta to wine. His shops have expanded into nine locations, two of which are inside markets. Longoni is also a serial entrepreneur, opening a vegetarian Indian restaurant Govinda in the city centre and founding food magazine L’Integrale in 2020, which is run by Iperborea publishing house.
Various locations; davidelongoni.com
Slow Bread Lab
This off-the-beaten-track bakery might be the best spot for bread in Milan right now. To reach the shop, visitors must ring a doorbell and walk through an inner courtyard, where they can enter the kitchen to buy takeaway goods. The space was founded by husband-and-wife team Michele Dogati and Kaisli Kiuru, who changed professions to open the business. Kiuru says that they bake pastries and seeded loaves with the same love as when preparing something for their own family – and we would be hard-pressed to disagree. After picking up a loaf, cross the street to visit another Monocle favourite, Balay, for Philippine-inspired dishes.
Via Achille Maiocchi 29
Pan
“This is the kind of space that you can find in New York, London or Tokyo,” says Pan co-founder Alice Yamada. “But it was missing from Milan.” She has a point: the Japanese-inspired bakery and café that she founded with business partner Yoji Tokuyoshi wouldn’t look out of place in any of the world’s great metropolises. Its clean neutral tones, prevalence of wood and flashes of green details seem to be going down well with punters, if the tables of people eating ham-and-cheese shokupan (Japanese milk bread) sandwiches are anything to go by. Yamada and Tokuyoshi turned to Studio Wok for the interiors with sage-green drapes hanging from the ceiling, which are inspired by noren curtains. Recent additions include takeaway counter Piccolo Pan and lunch-focused Pan Deli in Porta Nuova.
Various locations; panmilano.com
Monocle’s Quality of Life Survey, now in its 19th year, grew out of a debate about what makes certain cities good places to live. When we started, there was a proliferation of indices using data sets to rank cities on liveability. Many of these are useful resources but we believed then, and still do, that liveability is about more than hard data points such as GDP per capita and ambulance response times. What makes a place great hinges on unquantifiable factors, such as the beauty of its architecture, the excitement of its nightlife and the quality of its retail offering. We drew up a questionnaire and sent it to our global correspondents.
Nineteen years later, we still send our survey to people whose opinions we trust. Using their answers – and a list of metrics that cover areas such as governance, security, the cost of living, transportation, culture and nightlife – a team of Monocle editors decides the final top-20 ranking. Every year we tweak the questions and data points to reflect the times. For our 2026 survey, we placed an emphasis on excitement and ambition: how pleasurable it is to live somewhere and whether a place feels optimistic about its future.
This year we also sought specific data points from property specialist Knight Frank and EIT Edition’s Copenhagenize Index 2025, which has its own ranking based on how favourable cities are to cyclists – its bicycle modal share measures the proportion of total journeys on bikes each day, while its protected bicycle infrastructure records a city’s discrete and safe cycle lanes. You might notice that no cities in the Americas (except Vancouver) or Africa made the cut this year, largely because of issues around safety and inequality. We do not claim that our survey is the final word on liveability; indeed we hope that it will be the beginning of a friendly and lively debate. For the first time, we’re sharing excerpts of our correspondents’ answers and the data we used to decide which cities made the cut.
The Monocle Quality of Life Survey
The basics
1.
What is the population (both in the city proper and the metropolitan area)?
2.
What are the average hours of sunshine per year?
Getting around and away
3.
Is public transport clean, affordable and efficient?
– What is the cost of monthly travelcard?
– What per cent of journeys are taken by public transport?
4.
Does the city have a good cycling culture?
– What is the cycle share per cent of all journeys?
– How many kilometres of safe cycling infrastructure are in the city?
– Is there a public bike-share scheme?
5.
What number of international destinations are served by the city’s airports?
Urban life and vibrancy
6.
Can you get a decent meal after 22.00?
7.
Are the streets safe, busy and lively at night?
– What is the usual time that bars close on a Saturday night?
– What is the city’s murder rate?
8.
Is the city welcoming to newcomers?
– What has been the per cent of population change in the past year?
9.
Are people integrated well?
10.
What are the levels of trust in police?
Housing
11.
Is housing attractive, abundant and well-made?
– How many homes were built in the last year?
– How many social housing units are there?
12.
What is the average rent for a three-bedroom property in city centre?
13.
What is the average cost to buy a three-bedroom property?
Education
14.
Is the public school system a success?
15.
What is the per cent of people with a university education?
16.
What is the number of universities in the top 1,000?
Business
17.
What is the average time it takes to register a business?
18.
What is the tax regime like?
– What is the average salary in the city?
– What taxes are set at the city level?
Media, culture and sport
19.
Is there a good city newspaper?
20.
How many cinemas are in the city?
21.
How many public swimming pools does the city have?
Retail
22.
Are shops open on a Sunday?
23.
Is there a good retail scene?
– How many independent bookshops are there?
– How many vape shops are in the city centre?
24.
How much does a flat white cost?
Health
25.
What is the average life expectancy?
26.
Is it a supermarket or a fresh food city?
Environment
27.
How much green space is in the city?
28.
What’s the park culture like?
Infrastructure and planning
29.
Does the city have ambition? How does it talk about itself?
Notable responses
Tokyo
Fiona Wilson, Tokyo bureau chief
Tokyo’s 23 special districts are served by one of the world’s most extensive and punctual public-transportation networks. Trains, buses and stations are meticulously cleaned every day. Graffiti and litter are virtually non-existent. Fares are distance-based, starting at 170 yen (€0.91). Eighty-four per cent of the area inside Loop Road No 7 (encompassing central Tokyo) is within a 10-minute walk of a train station, while an efficient bus network connects the rest of the city proper.
Lisbon
Carlota Rebelo, senior foreign correspondent
Public transport in Lisbon has a great cost-benefit ratio. It’s cheap for a European capital (single tickets range from €1.50 and €1.90 depending on whether you top up a travel card or use contactless payment) and has a good network comprising metro, trams, bus, urban trains and the boats across the Tejo. However, in recent years waiting times have increased, driven by a rise in demand as more people have moved to Lisbon.
Vancouver
Tomos Lewis, Monocle’s Toronto correspondent
Vancouver is a cycling city. It has spent years building hundreds of kilometres of protected bike lanes, many of which connect to other parts of the network, such as train stations, bus stops and park-and-ride locations. City Hall says that 13 per cent of commuters cycle at least part of their daily commute. The network also makes use of Vancouver’s stunning natural setting – the 22km route along the city’s sea wall is frequently used and a big draw.
Vienna
Alexei Korolyov, Vienna correspondent
Vienna is still fairly conservative when it comes to late dining (and drinking): strict noise rules kick in from 23.00 for establishments on the ground floor of residential buildings and kitchens tend to close towards 22.00, though many places in the tourist-heavy first district continue serving later.
Seoul
David Lee, Seoul-based Monocle contributor
South Koreans have a word for late-night eating: ya-sik. Ordering fried chicken, jokbal or ramen after 22.00 is a civic ritual. Most neighbourhoods still have 24-hour restaurants with dishes such as sundae-gukbap and kongnamul-gukbap. Local chain Kimbap Heaven also remains a staple.
Sydney
Callum McDermott, Sydney-based Monocle journalist
Even though Sydney’s beaches get all the headlines, residents take most advantage of the parks. They’re evenly distributed across the city, from Centennial Parklands, a sprawling network of large parks in the east, to Sydney Olympic Park and Western Sydney Parklands, Australia’s largest urban park, in the west.
Kyoto
Luke Tamada, editorial intern at Monocle’s Tokyo bureau
Seasonal events such as hanami (cherry-blossom viewing) and koyo (fall foliage) bring a lot of people to the parks. Spanning 31km, the Kamogawa river cuts through the heart of Kyoto and its banks are a popular hangout spot for all ages. Drinking in public is legal, which means that parks can feel quite lively.
Read Monocle’s 2026 Quality of Life survey here
Were it not for graphite, you would presently be staring at a blank screen. The naturally occurring carbon is a crucial component of the batteries and cooling systems of phones, computers and electric vehicles – and demand for it is expected to cause severe deficits by the end of the current decade. For Western countries, this might prove especially testing. As things stand, China enjoys a near-monopoly of battery-grade graphite, controlling 95 per cent of global supply – and Beijing has demonstrated during its ongoing trade war with the US that it is prepared to at least threaten to restrict exports.
Graphite is therefore worth going a long way to get. Late last year, Greenland’s government granted UK-based mining company Greenroc Strategic Minerals a 30-year licence to extract graphite at Amitsoq, in the south of the vast island. The graphite deposit is not a new discovery – there was a mine there from 1914 to 1922, before demand tapered amid a general economic slump after the First World War. But it is known that the graphite at Amitsoq is the good stuff.
“It’s really rich,” says Stefan Bernstein, CEO of Greenroc Strategic Minerals. “And with graphite, it’s not just about how pure it is. It’s also about the physical properties of the flakes. The main market for graphite today is for anodes in lithium batteries and there you need to change the morphology – the shape of each grain. So it’s not just a question of how clean you get the graphite but also the shape and size of the grain.”
Greenroc hopes to begin extracting this treasure by 2030. “We are aiming for production of about 80,000 tonnes per year,” says Bernstein. “Who knows what Europe’s graphite demand will be in 2035 or so but the mine will provide between 10 and 15 per cent of it.” Bernstein adds that the new Amitsoq mine will also generate about 200 local jobs, with 50 people on site at any one time and most of the workforce commuting by boat from the small town of Nanortalik. “Most other mines in Greenland rely on a fly-in, fly-out workforce,” says Bernstein. “We’re hopeful that we can have a very strong local engagement in the mine, and have people working in it who will still be able to maintain a normal life, like in a mining town in the UK 50 or 60 years ago.”
The EU has granted the Amitsoq mine strategic project status under its Critical Raw Minerals Act – a designation that accelerates the issuing of necessary permissions. Greenland itself has served, this last year or so, as another reminder that Europe needs to look after itself. Indeed, for one bizarre week back in January, it looked like it might need to find a way to defend Greenland from the US. Donald Trump is not the only person taking a close interest in what might lie beneath the ice.
“There’s definitely a boom in interest and investments right now,” says Bernstein. “Mainly from the US and Australia. There’s a close connection between a lot of the investments that we see now and the growing importance of Greenland in a geopolitical context.”
Other hard-to-get mineral resources
Rare earths: Bayan Obo, China
The world’s largest deposits of rare earths lie beneath the desert of the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. A recent survey suggested they might be even more immense than previously believed.
Copper: Escondida, Chile
The world’s largest copper mine is in its most arid non-polar landscape: Chile’s Atacama desert, in parts of which it has never rained.
Lithium: Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia
Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni is the world’s largest salt flat – an expanse of parched whiteness about the size of Jamaica. The brine beneath the salt contains what might be the world’s largest source of lithium.
Cobalt: Katanga region, Democratic Republic of the Congo
By some estimates, nine of the world’s 10 biggest cobalt mines are located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Chinese-owned KFM mine might be the biggest of them all.
Phosphate: Bou Craa, Western Sahara
The phosphates near Bou Craa are retrieved from beneath the disputed desert of Western Sahara and shipped to the coast on a 100-kilometre conveyor belt, the world’s longest.
Quality-of-life rankings are all the rage these days – in part spurred by Monocle’s own annual list – but sometimes it’s worth introducing an indefinite article and considering the quality of a life. Because as the general gist of years proceeds into decades, you start to realise that quality is not a constant – what constitutes a good life at 25 rarely resembles one at 45 or 65.
But in the three Australian cities that made Monocle’s latest Quality of Life Survey – Sydney, Melbourne and Perth – we see that it’s possible to have a national quality-of-life ecosystem; a sort of countrywide relay in which each city takes the baton for life’s various stages.
Sydney
Sydney’s central playground is its harbour, which divides the city but unites Sydneysiders. As a deckhand in my teenage years, I came to know the harbour better than most. But I’ve never ceased to be astonished by its big blue belly, the bottle-green coves that shallow into little blond beaches and mangrove creeks rusting in the setting sun.
Like all paradises, Sydney is a great place to grow up and grow old. It’s a diurnal city: locals rise at dawn and settle at dusk. Children enjoy a playing-outside-until-dark childhood, the loss of which elsewhere in the world is the lament of many parents. It’s safe, sun-drenched and – given that sport is as central to Australian life as SPF50+ and going barefoot – there’s no shortage of activities to keep the ankle-biters occupied. This means that it’s also the sort of place where, if you ask about the nightlife, they will tell you about the possums, bandicoots and flying foxes (none of which, sadly, are names of bars).
The water dictates almost every aspect of metropolitan life: where we socialise, how we get around and, above all, what we aspire to. The local religion is real estate; nirvana a mere matter of “water views”. But this property obsession does not make for easy living when you’re a young adult.
Melbourne
The Victorian capital doesn’t have all that bother of panoramic beauty – and without the pressure to live a perfect life, you can have an interesting one instead. While Sydney encourages early risers, Melbourne convinces you to stay out late, to order that post-dinner espresso and find the next bar on Smith Street.
Hence the city’s embrace of a shabby-chic aesthetic and why, once my twenties were in full swing, the grungier and more open-minded Melbourne seemed like the place to be. The city enabled me to live in diverse inner-city suburbs, where you didn’t have to be a ring-tailed possum to go out at night. There’s always something to do, with vibrant music and art scenes, perpetual sporting action and excellent dining options (don’t be dismayed by the lack of Michelin stars, because Australia has its own system using hats). And Melbourne’s well-earned reputation as a coffee capital means that you’re never far away from a perky piccolo.
Perth
In this national relay, Perth is the curve runner. Melbourne’s possibilities make it an ideal setting to explore yourself but when middle age creeps up on you in a pair of orthopaedic sandals, you might want more space and less clatter. The consistency and stability of Perth means that it’s the Western Australian capital’s time to shine.
Now, I might not have lived in Perth but the more time that I spend in said sandals, the more I realise the subtle attraction of a smaller city that has its act together. To settle down, spread out and make a laid-back lifestyle your own, Perth is hard to beat. After all, on the city’s riverine foreshores you can enjoy more hours of sunlight than any other Australian city. What is more, multiple recent infrastructure projects have smoothed links between the city, the airport and the suburbs. Sometimes you need to go to the world’s most isolated major city just to get away from it all.
Timing is everything
But at the end of all our urban exploring, the baton returns to Sydney for life’s final straight. We prize balance once again, we want ready access to both the slow road and the fast lane. We want to start the day with an early-morning swim, a cappuccino at the surf club, and finish it with a harbour cruise to a show at the Opera House.
One city cannot be expected to meet your quality of life needs forever. Our priorities shift as we grow into different versions of ourselves. Australia’s cities are not only highly liveable but also meet us where we live, decade after decade. When it comes to the quality of a life, Australia has it all.
For more on what makes some cities deliver a better quality of life, join us at The Monocle Quality of Life Conference in Lisbon from 3 to 5 September.
Stroll across Singapore’s historic Anderson Bridge, minutes away from the Central Business District, and the skyline gives way to something improbable: a vast, open stretch of grass. Known as the Padang (Malay for “field”), this ground has been at the heart of some of the country’s most significant events. It hosted post-Second World War victory parades, National Day marches and – since British colonisers set aside space in the 1830s to listen to the nostalgic thwack of leather on willow – cricket matches.
The Singapore Cricket Club (SCC) was founded in 1852 by 28 members of the British mercantile community and military officers. Spectators watched on from the sidelines until a simple wooden pavilion was built as its clubhouse in the 1860s, followed by a larger structure in 1877 as membership grew. The preserved iron-structures and brick extensions of today’s clubhouse, built in 1884, contrast elegantly with the built-up skyline behind it.
Within the club’s membership base – for which fees start from S$4,000 (€2,690) a year – are generations of the same families that made up the club’s earliest years. Today, nearly 5,000 Singaporeans and expats gather under the same colonial-era roof to play cricket or rugby – but also to discuss business deals while sipping a cool Tiger beer. “We protect a sense of belonging by engaging across age categories,” says club president Martin Goerojo, an avid sportsman and long-time member. “Junior, open and masters competitions are all interlaced with social events.”
After a match, players and members alike spill into the clubhouse to fraternise and feast on dishes of chicken congee, seared Hokkaido scallop and lobster risotto. Beyond the table, members mingle through games of chess or mahjong, or take part in wine tastings. The institution’s staff – from the car-park attendant to the barman in the underground Men’s Bar – make a point of recalling members by name.
While the clubhouse itself is a listed building, the SCC is open to change. The Main Lounge, recently refurbished by local firm Studio HP, turned to the tones and textures of art deco for inspiration. Under the guidance of the practice’s founder, Rashi Tulshyan, dark reds and burgundies blend with the original wood panelling of the central bar. Hints of tropical modernism are referenced in the bespoke carpet, which features fan-shaped motifs inspired by the ubiquitous traveller’s palm.
As the club prepares to celebrate its 175th anniversary next year, Goerojo reflects on what lies ahead. “The club has become an integral part of the surrounding ecosystem, and we are always asking ourselves how we can add value,” he says. “Ultimately, it is about being guardians of the Padang.”
scc.org.sg
Though the SCC is named after the popular British field game, members can play 13 different sports thanks to the expansive Padang grounds. These include rugby, tennis and golf.
