The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook: The First Guide to What Really Matters in Life

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Ann Barr, who has died aged 85, will be remembered for adding the word Sloane – to describe a fashionable upper-class young woman – to the English language. Ann was deputy editor of Harpers & Queen (now Harper’s Bazaar) when her first book, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, co-written with Peter York, was published in 1982. It described in colourful detail what her readers were like. It was mischievous, gossipy and funny, like Ann herself. Wallis was the co-founder with Lord Stevenson of the management consultancy SRU Ltd, and during the 1980s developed the SRU Group of nine specialist business consultancies. He was appointed Chairman of a Department of Trade and Industry Committee in March 1994. The committee was set up to examine the future of leisure in the UK as part of the British Government's 'Foresight' initiative. Diana was a major cautionary tale. Sloanes had loved her at the beginning (her ‘Shy Di’ portrait in that three-row pearl choker on the cover of our book said it all!). The costumes are among the show’s greatest delights. Moments into the first episode, we understand their importance when Lady Violet (played by Ruth Gemmell) trills, “Your dresses have arrived!”, prompting her daughters to stampede from one drawing room to another to examine their ensembles for an audience with the Queen. “This one is quite ravishing,” Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) declares of a white satin gown with an empire waist, puff-sleeves and delicate gold embroidery.

After what had seemed like decades of an intellectual moratorium on big picture discussion of class and inequality, it was everywhere (I’d been told by broadcasters before 2008 “that’s so not today’s issue,” when I’d wanted to look at the rich as anything but lifestyle options, and immediately after 2008 it was off the table). The story is local and global. This January, Oxfam weighed in too with the unforgettable big picture story that “Oxfam expects the wealthiest to own more than 50 per cent of the world’s wealth by 2016. The world’s 85 richest people,” they said, were about to be “worth as much as the poorest 3.5bn of the world’s population.” By the end of the decade, smart Sloane survivors in London were consciously drabbing down the vowel sounds but smartening up the dress codes, avoiding anything that said old-world amateur. Going modern. It infected many of us seriously. Gold signet rings began to sprout on bare little fingers. Vowels stretched. We began to dress like our grandparents. And look what damage it did to bright young minds. I recall taking a young Sloane Scottish, velvet hairband, gorgeous in taffeta gown with tartan sash to a charity ball in London during this heady period, and, when the party eventually ended, she turned to me outside the Dorchester with a sparkle in her eyes. ‘I know what we should do now,’ she murmured. ‘Let’s go to Sloane Square and jump in the fountain.’ A chill November morning, 3am, and this was the most alluring possible end to a night out for a girl bitten badly by the bug.

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When Diana Spencer began to appear in newspapers in the summer of 1980, Sloane Ranger style started to gallop down to the high streets,” York has noted. “Suddenly, a Sloane – as we saw her – was the most interesting and publicised person in the world.” And one, perhaps, ripe for gentle pastiche. Although Sloanes are nowadays supposedly more widely spread and amorphous than in the past, they are still perceived to socialise in the expensive areas of west London, most notably King's Road, [4] Fulham Road, Kensington High Street, and other areas of Kensington, Chelsea and Fulham. The pubs and nightclubs in these areas are popular with Sloanes, [ citation needed] in particular the White Horse pub, known as the "Sloaney Pony" in Fulham, and Admiral Codrington, known as "The Cod", in Chelsea. [4] Armstrong, Lisa (19 January 2007). "Just don't say yah... OK?". Times Newspapers Ltd. pp.Section 2 pp4-5 . Retrieved 19 January 2006. Jane Austen, however, always stayed on Sloane Street on her visits to London – perhaps less desirable than nearby Mayfair but considered up-and-coming, given that it (and Sloane Square) had only been laid-out in the late-18th century, named after the Irish doctor and slave owner Sir Hans Sloane, who had owned the land on which it was constructed. This was also the year, 1982, when Kate Middleton, the future Duchess of Cambridge (Downe House, Marlborough College, University of St Andrews, History of Art) was born. Did the rising Middletons pore over the Sloane Ranger Handbook and then the Good Schools Guide?

There can be little doubt that the Hooray Henrys of 1980s Chelsea would have felt right at home in Regency England. One look at the second series of Bridgerton, which launched on Netflix last week, shows just how the early-19th century elites paved the way for the Sloane Rangers who followed in their footsteps. Things end really badly for Tim. Conned out of everything he’s got (shades of the disastrous Sloane-decimating Lloyd’s Names disaster of 1997), he ends up sleeping in a cardboard box outside the Lloyd’s building.Ann lived in Notting Hill for half a century (to her parents’ dismay – “Who’d live north of the park?”) and kept Alan’s belongings in her flat for years. When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2009, she initially managed at home with a daily carer. In 2011 she moved with Turkey, her pet for more than 25 years, to a nursing home in Pimlico, where her brother Greig’s weekly delivery of fresh flowers always brought a smile to her face. My first writing about Sloanes – massively edited and improved by Ann, in Harpers & Queen magazine as was (it’s now called Harper’s Bazaar) – was a huge hit in a relatively small pond: Sloane Land itself and among London media types. It wasn’t Big in Barnsley or Bolton then. The Sloane Ranger proposal came from Martina (Tina) Margetts, [1] a sub-editor on Harpers & Queen who worked (with fellow sub-editor Laura Pank) on the 1975 article. [2] In her early twenties she had found herself amongst this social group while undertaking a course on fine art at the Victoria and Albert Museum.