On Friday last week I took a wander outside the office mid-morning to replenish the onefinestay milk supply (for the third time in two days...our milk consumption has rocketed in recent days as the team rapidly expands, and we started providing free cereals for the morning munchies). Turning the corner off Bowling Green Lane I was greeted by lines and lines of film trailers and double decker buses. I quickly discovered that this temporary trailer park was in fact nothing less than a major motion picture film set on the move!

Highly excited by the prospect of seeing a celeb in the flesh I skipped back to the office to let everyone know that Meryl Streep was outside shooting scenes for “The Iron Lady”, the new biopic about Maggie Thatcher. I even snuck a peak into her wardrobe trailer, which was decked out wall to wall with the somewhat dowdy skirt suits which Maggie was so famous for. Poor Meryl.

I have to admit that looking at promotional shots for the movie, Meryl does in fact bear an uncanny resemblance to the great Iron Lady herself, and am interested to see the film later in the year.

Spot the difference...

It actually got me thinking about the amount of filming that takes place across London. Barely a day passes that I don’t walk past a camera filming something or someone (although rarely on this scale). After all, every street in London has its own story to tell and I often forget how lucky I am to live in a city so full of incredible architecture and history.

It was on this note that a fellow onefinestayer pointed out that one of onefinestay’s apartment buildings actually features prominently in Woody Allen’s 2005 movie Matchpoint. Parliament View, a striking modern curved glass building overlooking Westminster, is where Chris and Chloe find their first home in the movie. Check out the film promotional trailer for some great shots of this building and across London: 

So for anyone fancying a little taste of the movie-star life for themselves, why not check out our very own onefinestay home at Parliament View:

http://www.onefinestay.com/home/parliament-view/

Matthew joins onefinestay fresh from everyone's favourite glasses website, Glasses Direct. An astrophysicist in hiding (no, really!)  he is most often seen hunched over his computer doing complex stuff with databases that none of us non-techy folks understand, Matthew is whipping our tech team into word class shape. Now over to him...

When did you join onefinestay?

 January.

And what is it that you do?

I design and build technology that helps the unhoteliers run the unhotel.

Where do you live in London?

I live in Putney, south west London. It's one of the "nappy-valleys", ever
popular with families who want a little space but still to be "in town". The
annual Oxford vs Cambridge boat race starts from Putney bridge. Any other
weekend morning you'll still find the river full of rowers, and the boat
houses spilling out boats and wellington-booted, lycra-clad, oarsmen and
women.

Where do you wish you lived in London?

North London is where I first landed in the capital and it still has a
special feel for me. There are beautiful double-fronted houses in Islington
just a few minutes from Upper St and its surprising collection of
independent restaurants, gastro pubs like the Albion on Thornhill road and
one of my favourite theatres in town, the Almeida.
It's a great part of town. There are so many other places I could wish to
live though - East London and it's beautiful brick warehouses converted into
stunning loft apartments; canal-side in Camden or overlooking Hamstead
Heath. Perhaps the ideal would be to try each of these for just a few days
once in a while... I wonder how I could do that!?

What is your favourite type of tea and why?

That totally depends on the time of day. I'm a great fan of Royal Blend from
Fortnum and Masons in the morning, and Earl Grey works very well for me in
the afternoon with biscuits. Green teas in a thai or chinese restaurant are
wonderful though: plenty of places in China Town and Soho will serve a
wonderful jasmine tea flower that opens up in the glass.

When making a cup of tea, do you pour in the milk or the tea first?

Milk!? I take it black!

What is the furthest North you’ve been?

I think Stockholm... although further north in an aircraft but I don't think
that counts.

What is your favourite word?

"System Healthy". OK - two words. But two words that mean our site is happy
and I can rest easy.

When did you last get lost?

I got properly lost sailing in the Mediterranean from Tunis to Sardinia
after going to sleep and leaving the skipper on watch. It was a filthy night
and when I awoke I found the crew had made many course changes and not
recorded any of them. The satnav was broken (later I repaired its fuse with
a chewing gum wrapper) so I finally got a position by radioing a ship in the
distance and asking for a radar fix. The dent in my pride has yet to
recover!

What was the best experience you ever had on holiday?

Driving the Canning Stock Route in Australia. It is a 2000km track with
now-disused wells every 25km or so along which cattle were driven between
western Australia and the Kimberley. It's one of the longest and most remote
4x4 tracks on the continent (you have to book a drum of diesel to be left at
a fuel dump half way along a few months ahead) and we were fortunate to be
one of the first along it after a couple of years when it was rendered
inaccessible by flooding (we swam in the
desert!) Having a lot of range in our fuel tanks we were able to visit some
of the sites off the main track including one camp spot which had the most
extraordinary rock art and carvings we'd seen on the whole trip. It was a
very special place. Later we discovered that one of those carvings had been
dated to 40,000 years and were told that it is the earliest data point
dating aboriginal presence on the continent.

Tell us a secret.

I once went to a Mel C concert at the now-demolished Astoria on Charing
Cross road. I enjoyed it.