About Us

.

Hi, nice to meet you. My name is Stefan. My wife Ellie and I started this London travel & food blog in March 2016, roughly nine years ago. I’m doing the blogging and travel planning, while Ellie is responsible for our social media, executive decisions, and looking cute on pictures.

We are both feeling like we’re in our early 30s, even though I’ve turned 50 last year, while attempting to row the notorious Northwest Passage, and my good wife might look more than ten years my junior, but isn’t. Originally from Sydney (Ellie was born in Seoul, but left as a kid) respectively Munich (me), we both relocated to London roughly 20 years ago and became British (dual) citizens. We blog about everything that’s fun: London, travel, food, culture, outdoor adventures, and whatever else we come across.

 

That’s us canyoning in Portugal 7 years ago.

The blog was named in reference to a Dylan Lewis sculpture at Berkeley Square (Mayfair, London) that has now been relocated somewhere else. The sculpture looks like some half-beast, half-man barbarian and we really like it. It has so much wild energy, like much of Lewis’s work! The coat hanger gorilla (yes, it is made of coat hangers) in the feature photo is from the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition 15 years ago, and it’s the next best thing to the Barbarian sculpture, of which we didn’t manage to take any good photographs. We do not live at Berkeley Square, but only a short walking distance away from it. The limited company I use for my day job as a freelancer has its registered offices at Berkeley Square, so we use the address for the blog as a “c/o address.”

Our email address is: berkeleysqb[at]gmail.com. We’ll respond to every email and comment. Join us and more than 35,000 followers on Instagram, X, and Facebook. Our handle on all three platforms is @berkeleysqb.

You can zoom in and out of this map and move the map around to see other regions (keep mouse left-clicked while over the map and just move cursor).

 

The pins show locations we’ve visited in the past (individually or as a couple), in some cases many moons ago.

We both work full-time in finance. Mainly in London, but also abroad, sometimes for many months in a row. Fun facts about us:

  • Ellie spent one year teaching English in Seoul, where she was born.
  • I once spent a month as a paid consultant in Papua New Guinea. In an unrelated incident, the country’s prison wardens went on strike and released all the prisoners. Exciting times.
  • Ellie has a scuba diving license.
  • Right after uni, for about a year, I drove a 30-year old fork lift truck in 12-hour shifts around a warehouse in Barcelona for a living. In summer, the heat in the unventilated building could reach well above 50C/122F. These fork lift trucks had defunct forward/backward buttons, leading to many shelves being pushed over (no harm to humans, great fun, actually).
  • Ellie is no fan of stand-up comedy, but I occasionally do 5-minute gigs on London’s open mic circuit.
  • Whenever I try to talk Ellie out of booking another crazy trip and suggest to go hiking in Scotland instead, she likes to remind me of the great trips she went on before she met me, and which included: hot air balloon ride over the pyramids in Giza, quad bike ride in the Wadi Rum desert, and visits to the ancient ruins in Petra and Troy, thus ever so gently implying that her life has already slowed down a lot and shouldn’t be allowed to turn into complete dullness.
  • I am a trained car mechanic.
  • Ellie has moved more than 20 times over three continents. I have moved over 30 times over four continents {>3m; registered resident). We stopped counting countries we’ve visited at the count of 60, a few years ago, but it must be a fair few more countries by now.
  • Our height difference is a substantial 36cm/14in.
  • Ellie is very good with maps & finding her way around (even though she regularly says left when she means right and vice versa), but not so much with maths. Watching her trying to divide the total number of kilometres’ distance by the number of days or similar is one of the great joys of my life.

We usually visit Australia, Germany, France, and Austria at least once every year, and do a lot of travel inside the UK (mainly Scotland, Snowdonia, Lake District, Cotswolds). In 2025, we are additionally planning the following trips:

  • Fisherman’s Trail (Portugal)
  • Hiking & swimming with humpback whales in Bora-Bora, Mo’orea, and Tahiti
  • Summit attempt Mont Blanc (me) & Tour de Mont Blanc (Ellie)
  • Ocean-rowing (Scotland to Norway; only me)
  • K2 Base Camp Trek
  • High-altitude trekking in Kyrgyzstan
  • Four Base Camp Trek (4 BCs of eight-thousanders in Tibet)

I’m also currently writing a book about my Arctic expedition. And I’m planning on doing more caving, rock-climbing, long-distance open-water swimming, stand-up paddleboarding, white-water kayaking, and ultra trail-running. Naturally, Ellie has lots of plans for our social life, like plays she wants us to see, concerts, flower shows, events like the Tweed Run, fancy dress parties, art exhibitions, cafes, and restaurants.

Over the years, we have gradually been doing more and more of the things we do as collaborations, meaning we get held free of cost in turn for posting honest reviews on the blog and on social media. It is not entirely without pride when I say that we’ve never been disappointed. Our collaboration partners almost always rank in the top 10% of their peer group, in some cases they are new start-ups or have recently changed ownership and are yet to receive any (new) reviews. It makes us feel good, assisting readers in finding the best activities, tour operators, restaurants, hotels, and so on, while helping those great businesses find even more happy customers.

Ellie & I hope that you enjoy our blog and social media, and it would be lovely to see you again soon. Comments & feedback are always massively appreciated, so don’t be shy.