Destinations
The Holiday That Gets More Expensive When Everyone Else Is Broke
Think back to early 2009. The news was all about banks going under and mortgage holders in freefall. The phrase ‘staycation’ had just been introduced to the British public as…
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What the Counting House Used to Teach You
There is a gap in your education. Not your fault. Not your teachers' fault particularly. Just a clean missing section of your education that almost nobody notices until you try…
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Credit Scores in the UK: How They Work and How to Build a Better One
How credit scores in the UK really work: the three credit reference agencies, what is on your credit report, what helps and hurts, building credit from nothing, fixing errors and a 90-day plan.
The Awkward Pause at the Card Reader Has a Very Specific Birthday
Everybody knows the feeling. The meal is done, the plates are gone, and in walks the waiter with the little machine, which he tilts towards you. On the screen there…
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The Accidental Reason Cottages Are Almost Always Cheaper Than Hotels
Every summer, millions of people do the same thing. They open a comparison site, type in their dates, wince at the hotel prices, scroll down, and discover that a cottage…
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The Secret Language of Crypto
The word "crypto" comes from the Greek kryptos, meaning hidden or concealed. It's where we get "cryptic", "cryptography", and – if you fancy a morbid turn – "crypt". So right…
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The Shape Nobody Chose (But Everyone Made)
Watch a murmuration on a cold November evening and your brain immediately goes looking for a conductor. There must be something at the front deciding when to swerve, when to…
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The Foreigners Who Taught the British How to Enjoy Themselves
Knowing exactly what you want is a peculiar sort of confidence. And until recently you had absolutely no idea. The British upper classes in the mid-nineteenth century were the richest…
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The Oldest New Money in the World
Museum collections in London hold small copper discs about the size of a shirt button, struck in the seventeenth century by coffee houses, taverns and shopkeepers. No king's face on…
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The Postman Bitcoin Never Needed
For most of recorded history, moving money meant moving something. A coin in a leather pouch. A written promise on paper. A ledger entry copied by hand from one book…
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The Nine-Hundred-Year-Old Test That Decides If Your Side Hustle Is Illegal
There are rules from HMRC for deciding whether you owe tax on the extra money you make. These ‘badges of trade’ were written in 1955, commissioned by a government panel…
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The Hours Nobody Wanted
It’s 2 am in a house. Every other person in the house is asleep. The whole street is deserted too. In the spare bedroom, someone is carefully wrapping up a…
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What the 3am Shift Made While You Were Asleep
Somewhere between midnight and the first grey light of a Tuesday, a woman in Dhaka is pressing seams. The room she's working in is about the size of a medium…
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The Tailors Who Invented the Future (Before Anyone Knew It Was a Job)
The colour consultancies in London are looking very glossy today. Lots of mood boards and Pantone swatches. A confident person in a very good coat will tell a room of…
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The Marketplace That Used to Have a Barmaid
Pubs built before about 1970 still show the layout of the main bar and of other rooms such as a back room, a snug and rooms behind side doors, which…
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The Wages Envelope and the Dashboard: What Happened to the Money You Could Hold
A photograph that exists in most British families from the 1970s, even if nobody quite knows where it's gone. The photograph is of a kitchen table with a wages envelope,…
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Your Credit Score Is a Product. You’re Just the Factory.
There's a quiet joke buried inside the credit system, and it's not something that people really explain to you. Building your credit history can sound like something you do for…
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The Market That Never Lets You Sleep
There is a particular kind of madness that comes with owning cryptocurrency. You wake at 3am, for no obvious reason, and before you've even remembered what day it is, your…
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When “Budget” Travel Gets Expensive
In the fourth hour of refreshing a flight comparison site, the cheapest available fare to Malaga is somehow more than you paid to fly to New York three years ago.…
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“Budget” Is a Meaningless Word on a Holiday Listing
Organic on a food label could mean nothing legally. Battery-farmed eggs, sprayed-to-the-stalk strawberries, value mince – all could be labelled ‘organic’ with no consequences for the supermarket. You would stop…
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The Market That’s Never Watching What You Think It’s Watching
The news comes through at half eight on a Tuesday morning. Unemployment is up and businesses are closing. The supermarket queues are long and anxious, and people are struggling, visibly.…
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The Holiday Club That History Forgot
Before Judith Chalmers was on the telly selling you Tenerife, before the Thomson brochure landed on every doormat in Britain, and long before anyone said the words "all-inclusive", there was…
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The Classroom That Existed Before the Curriculum Noticed
Personal finance quietly appeared in the English national curriculum for the first time in 2014, and politicians were fairly pleased with themselves. It would teach school children about budgets, interest…
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The Day Off That Only Some People Were Allowed to Have
Seaside holidays were invented in 1871 by Sir John Lubbock in a short piece of legislation which became the Bank Holiday Act. It gave wage earners four protected days off…
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The Day the Payslip Stopped and Nobody Warned You
Millions of British people spend decades of their lives working towards a specific Friday. They arrive unprepared on the Friday after retirement begins. The money does not arrive. There is…
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The Grand Tour Never Ended. They Just Changed the Paperwork.
Sometime in the 1660s, a young English aristocrat would have been sent to the Continent by his father with a sheaf of letters of introduction and a bill of exchange…
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Your Landlord Used to Be Your Credit Score
In the pubs of 1950s Britain, going for a drink and ordering a pint you did not pay for there and then was not unusual. To 'put it on my…
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The Toll Road Nobody Told You About
Somewhere between you clicking "buy" on your investment app and the shares appearing in your portfolio, a small, quiet procession of middlemen has helped itself to your money. Not by…
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The Committee That Used to Decide What Was Cool
Somewhere in London in 1974, a fashion editor was having lunch with a buyer from John Lewis. By the time they'd finished their wine, the colour of next spring's cardigans…
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The Voluntary Price That Tells Economists Exactly Where You’re Embarrassed
Most prices are fixed before you arrive. The coffee is £4.50. The price of the train ticket will be whatever eye-watering figure the algorithm decided at 6am. You pay it…
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The Financial Advice Your Parents Gave You Is Quietly Wrecking Your Credit Score
Most of us grew up with a fairly simple idea of what "being good with money" looks like. Don't borrow what you can't pay back. Clear your debts. Cut up…
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The Tip That Stops Being Yours the Moment You Leave It
One of the quiet moments in most British restaurant meals is when we tap our cards, squint at the little screen, and add ten or fifteen percent to the total.…
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The Child Who Wanted to See Their Bit of the Factory
A seven-year-old who has just been handed a share certificate – usually from a grandparent who thinks it's a good lesson – tends to ask the same question almost immediately.…
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Your Hands and Feet Are the Thermostats. Dress Them Accordingly.
There is a moment, usually somewhere between nine and eleven at night, when you stop feeling properly awake. You might put it down to the wine, or the sofa, or…
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The Communist Bureaucrats Who Accidentally Explained the Stock Market
Somewhere in Moscow in 1965, a committee of Soviet economists sat down to decide how much steel the country needed. They had ledgers, production figures, targets handed down from above.…
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The Holiday You Book When You Don’t Know Who You Are Anymore
There's a specific kind of afternoon that precedes a certain kind of holiday booking. The house is quiet in a way it hasn’t been before – not peaceful, just wrong.…
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The Doctor Prescribed the Maldives
A wealthy Englishman of the late eighteenth century was sat down by his physician and told, with complete professional authority, that his lungs required the air of Harrogate. Not mountain…
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The Refugees Who Taught Britain to Be Embarrassed by Last Year
Somewhere in the 1690s, a cloth merchant in Spitalfields picked up a length of silk brocade, held it to the light, and announced that the pattern was finished. It wasn't…
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The Expiry Date Stamped on Your Money
Most things you own will eventually stop working. The kettle fuses, the sofa sags, the phone battery swells to the size of a small pillow. But money? Money is supposed…
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The Line a Mapmaker Drew (And Why It Decides Where You Holiday)
There is a drystone wall somewhere on the North York Moors. On one side of it the heather is wild and purple, photogenic enough for a shortbread tin. On the…
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The Towns That Knew What You Were Going Through
A woman was having breakfast alone in a guesthouse in Sidmouth in the 1960s, for the first time in thirty-seven years. She had chosen the scrambled eggs without asking anyone,…
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The Airline That Decides Where You Fall in Love
You can ask people why they went to Kraków, Faro or Paphos — the food, the architecture, the history, a friend's recommendation, something they'd always wanted to see — but…
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The Arithmetic Your Brain Does Wrong (And Why Saving Money Feels Impossible)
It’s not that people fail at saving because they don’t understand money. Just about everyone can explain a savings account. Almost everyone understands that you have to spend less than…
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The Maths You Do at the Table Was Invented Quite Recently
Before anyone printed a suggested service amount at the bottom of a bill, there was no arithmetic involved in tipping at all. A diner in Victorian London who wanted to…
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The Eighteen Months You Missed While the Trend Was Happening
Trends are already over by the time you read about them. What’s of interest is the process of trends spreading from the margins into the middle of ordinary life. What…
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The Number on Your Screen That Was Never Really a Debt
Log into your student loan account. Look at the balance. It’s six figures for people who borrowed to study over the last decade or so, and it sits there glowing…
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The Money You Save While You’re Dreaming
If you bank with one of the big app-based banks, at around 3am tonight an automated process will quietly shift a few pounds from your current account into a savings…
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The Exchange That Forgot the North (And Why That Explains Your Unease About
Taking a stroll through the City of London on weekdays, it seems that the trading floors, the glass towers and the men in expensive coats looking at phones have always…
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The Loan That Was Never Allowed to Be a Loan
Somewhere in the small print of your student loan documentation – if you ever find the nerve to read it – there is no contract in the sense a bank…
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The Shift Nobody Else Wanted (And Why It Pays Better)
Nobody books a 3am alarm on purpose. It's an ungodly hour that the overwhelming majority of adults will go to considerable lengths to avoid. And it turns out that a…
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The Actuary’s Verdict: What Your Life Insurance Premium Says About Your Life
Your biography – written by someone in an office you will never visit – is shorter. There’s no mention of that embarrassing gap year, or of that promotion which you…
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The Day You Put the Money In Matters More Than How Much You Put In
We all know saving money. Put some aside each month and don't touch it. It will grow. Saving money is simple. There is more to it, and almost nobody talks…
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The Coins in Your Pocket Are Lying About What They’re Worth
Take a handful of change out of your pocket. Look at the brown pennies, the fifty pence pieces, and the thin five pee coins. They all look like money. But…
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The Year Millions of British Women Officially Became Financial Strangers
The quiet legal revolution that took place in Britain in 1974 was almost unremarked. The Consumer Credit Act was followed a year later by the Sex Discrimination Act. They meant…
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