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Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal has officially reopened Lloyd’s Register’s Grade II* listed headquarters in central London following an extensive refurbishment.

The reopening of the building, now officially renamed the Lloyd’s Register Building, took place during London International Shipping Week, marking a significant milestone in the building’s history and its future as a modern hub for maritime innovation and collaboration.

Originally opened in 1901, the building has undergone a restoration to preserve its architectural heritage and will once again serve as the London headquarters for Lloyd’s Register Group and Lloyd’s Register Foundation, providing a modernised workspace for colleagues, clients, and partners.

During the visit, The Princess Royal had the opportunity to explore the broader themes of maritime heritage and innovation.

The Princess Royal also had a tour of the historic building and was introduced to SHE SEES – a powerful initiative that reimagines maritime history through the lens of women. The project highlights untold stories through striking portraits and collaborative storytelling, offering a fresh perspective on the sector’s past, present, and future.

Lloyd’s Register has a long association with the Royal Family. HRH The Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, visited in 1904 and HRH The Late Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip, was the first person to be elected Honorary Member of the General Committee of Lloyd’s Register of Shipping. A formal painting of him is displayed in the General Committee room.

Nick Brown, CEO of Lloyd’s Register, said: “We were honoured to welcome Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal to officially reopen our historic London headquarters. The reopening of our building is more than a return to a historic home; it is a statement of our commitment to shaping the future of maritime. This building will be a hub where heritage meets innovation, a place where our colleagues, clients and partners can collaborate to tackle the industry’s greatest challenges and opportunities.”

Ruth Boumphrey, Chief Executive of Lloyd’s Register Foundation, said: “Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal’s visit marks a wonderful moment in celebrating our building’s rich maritime heritage and long history, while highlighting the vital work the Foundation is doing to help the global community focus on tackling the world’s most pressing safety and risk challenges.”

To close the visit, The Princess Royal rang the bell and unveiled a plaque to mark the reopening. In addition, she was presented with a copy of the rigging and profile plan for the Royal Yacht Britannia, as produced by John Brown & Co, c1952, plus a copy of the SHE SEES book.

It is bizarre to learn that, despite a career spent desperately trying to fill the dancefloor, reading the room night after night to predict how he might make it pop off, Mark Ronson never dances – “unless you count standing around, bobbing my head, and reciting rap lyrics as dancing”.

Night People is intended as Ronson’s memoir but is as much an attempt to immortalise the people and scenes he came up in as it is a reflection on a childhood shaped by the late-night parties hosted by his parents – first in London, where a distant memory of Robin Williams tucking him in to bed with “Nanu nanu” floats through, then later in Manhattan, when his mother marries Mick Jones from Foreigner.

By his own, self-aware account, Ronson has led a gilded life. Elite schools (Collegiate, Vassar, NYU); sleepovers with Sean Lennon and a cast of New York’s nepo who’s who; hanging out with Michael Jackson; the abundant creative freedom gifted by the safety net of generational wealth. It would be enough to make many readers roll their eyes before turning a single page. Their loss.

Ronson’s talent as a writer enables him to render this privilege, the background glamour, his awkward stumbles as well as successes, with a kind of wry, soft self-deprecation that is genuinely endearing. It helps, of course, that he is a massive nerd. “I had the rhythm to play the music, but not the confidence to let go,” he writes in that throwaway line about dancing. It’s both deeply revealing and hard to get your head around. Ronson would rather spend paragraphs enthusing about the thickness of slipmats required for a specific DJ setup than he would recalling the wild-eyed buzz generated at an afterparty close to dawn. On balance, this is a good thing. There is more than enough bad writing on hedonism in the world. I’ll take the earnest, qualitative review of turntable cartridges.

In Night People, the debauchery – of the best and worst kind – is alluded to rather than gratuitously revelled in. There are passing references to taking heroin (wait, what?) and late nights dieting on a menu of uppers and vodka cranberry, but without the detail that could tip into cliche. Instead, Ronson is faithfully reverent to the many people who helped a gawky Jewish, London-born hip-hop fan from the Upper West Side to become synonymous with the 90s celebrity-model party scene. It’s not an era of New York nightlife that has been particularly eulogised. Understandable, given it was preceded by the white-hot energy of the 70s and 80s and, I suppose, because it’s difficult to romanticise a period during which dancefloors began to give way to velvet-roped club lounges, bottle service and a scene built around being seen.

Still, Ronson gives it a great shot. The impact of mayor Rudy Giuliani’s crackdown on crime and clean up of the city is told through the lens of its night-dwellers. The east coast-west coast hip-hop rivalry is documented through the many characters that kept the city hyped. It’s not supposed to be a definitive history of 90s club culture, though Ronson interviewed dozens of friends, DJs, bouncers, promoters and clubbers to help piece together his memories. But it’s a vivid social and cultural snapshot.

The one-man hit factory, the force who famously drove Amy Winehouse to create her best work, the mega producer who just celebrated his 50th birthday – none of that is here, of course. At the centre of this book is a Ronson much closer to the teenage crate-digger whose mum bought him his first Technics turntables and who blagged his way to the booth. It shouldn’t be as compelling as it is, but for the accompanying soundtrack of deep cuts alone, Night People is well worth a spin.

The political context has been scorched away in Paul Greengrass’s empowering inferno. This is a dynamically shot and earnestly performed real-life disaster movie about California’s terrifying 2018 Camp fire, a darkness-at-noon horror that became the deadliest wildfire in California history, killing 85 people and razing more than 150,000 acres. Greengrass and co-screenwriter Brad Ingelsby have taken their inspiration from Lizzie Johnson’s 2021 book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, about the calamity and the ironically named town caught up in it, pointing up the extraordinary, unassuming courage of school-bus driver Kevin McKay who piloted a busload of screaming kids and their teacher through hell to safety.

America Ferrera plays the caring, if slightly prim teacher Mary Ludwig and Matthew McConaughey is the rough, sweaty everyman hero behind the wheel – with whom, in the time-honoured style of Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, Mary is to have an emotional connection. Before the fire, Kevin had been a loser and a screwup, alienated from his son and ex-wife, on the verge of getting fired from his school-bus-driving job (due to honest errors attributable to family worries) – but of course highly eligible for the heroic redemption that the fire will provide.

As this terrible blaze – sparked by a poorly maintained power line – sweeps across the state, we see everything periodically from the fire’s own point of view, whooshing along with it and the glowing embers through the smoky chaos. A school desperately needs to be evacuated as the fire closes in; no other vehicle is available and Kevin steps up, neglecting his own sick son in the process. (In truth, it is only a bottle of Tylenol he was due to deliver to the boy, who is in any case under the care of his grandma, so it is not exactly a life-or-death dilemma.)

As he drives them through the chaotic inferno, out of radio contact, with the bus encountering gridlock and gun-toting rioters, almost literally bursting into flames with the heat, with air quality near unbreathable and the children losing consciousness, Mary almost thinks the unthinkable: might it not be better to let the kids fall asleep, rather than burn to death? “Don’t talk like that,” says Kevin. Meanwhile, at fire department HQ, the top brass are making increasingly panicky announcements, prefaced with: “Listen up people …”

But wait. Whose fault is all this? The electrical company were found liable in the courts, as the titles over the closing credits confirm. President Trump (whose name is not mentioned in the film) blamed bad forest management. But there is one scene in which the tortured fire chief announces to a press conference that there are more and more fires like this and … his voice trails away, overcome with (understandable) emotion. He can’t quite bring himself to say the words “climate crisis” out loud – but I would have liked to see something on the closing credits about the increasing incidence of these wildfires. This is the point, and the film is in danger of missing it.

Pick of the week
The Savant

Dramas about online life are hard to get right; how much tension can really be conjured by watching someone stare at a screen? This explosive thriller, which stars Jessica Chastain as Jodi, an agent who specialises in infiltrating hate groups, fares better than most. It helps that the subject matter – lone wolf, far-right terrorists whose fantasies spill out into the world – feels grimly relevant. But Chastain also embodies the duality many of us now feel; the impossibility of reconciling online identities with real life. Using the persona “Fleshy MF”, Jodi understands the impulses of her chatroom comrades – and stopping the extremists becomes a challenge with potentially terrifying consequences.
Apple TV+, from Friday 26 September

House of Guinness

Booze, crime, family conflict, street politics and stylish violence: it’s hard to think of a tale more suited to the signature style of Steven Knight. With its ornate dialogue and lavish period flourishes, the essence of Knight is so strong in this drama that it approaches self-parody. It tells the story of the aftermath of the death of Benjamin Guinness in 1868, whose passing leaves a vacuum to be filled by some combination of his four dissolute, complacent, scheming children. Meanwhile, outside their inheritance battle, Irish republicanism is stirring. James Norton, Emily Fairn and Louis Partridge star.
Netflix, from Thursday 25 September

Tulsa King

Sylvester Stallone’s lugubrious wiseguy Dwight Manfredi has had a successful time since he moved to Tulsa. But he’s made a few powerful enemies along the way and, as we return for season three of this generic drama, a few chickens have come home to roost. He’s been cornered by old-money crime family the Dunmires, who are menacing everything he’s built. However, Dwight still has a few tricks up his sleeve, so expect these threats to be addressed with cunning and violence. It remains watchable, largely thanks to Stallone’s lunkhead charisma.
Paramount+, from Sunday 21 September

Sneaker Wars: Adidas vs Puma

The town of Herzogenaurach in Bavaria is an unusual place: despite a population of fewer than 25,000 people, it boasts the headquarters of two of the most prominent footwear brands in the world. With exclusive access to both companies, this series tells the parallel stories of Adidas and Puma, via the warring brothers Adi and Rudi Dassler who built the two businesses, their changing commercial fortunes and various athletes and influencers. David Beckham, Usain Bolt, Neymar and other sneakerheads are among the contributors.
Disney+, from Wednesday 24 September

Slow Horses

Back at Slough House for another season in espionage hell, the Slow Horses gang are a mess, struggling with grief, addiction and the ennui of careers going nowhere. Apart from, that is, Roddy, who is suddenly and mysteriously flushed with self-confidence and seemingly dating a woman way out of his league. Of course, there’s a catch, but how is it related to a spree shooter who has himself been shot in mysterious circumstances and a London mayoral election? As ever, a beautifully sour peek behind the curtains of the British establishment.
Apple TV+, from Wednesday 24 September

Wayward

A magnificently creepy and cold-eyed Toni Collette stars as charismatic guru Evelyn Wade in this drama about a secluded camp for troubled youngsters in rural America. Tall Pines Academy claims to offer “groundbreaking therapeutic techniques to solve the problem of adolescence”. But something much less wholesome is going on, and when teen stoners Abbie and Leile reluctantly arrive, they soon realise things aren’t right. Written by Mae Martin (who also co-stars as detective Alex Dempsey), it’s a clever, sinister spin on small-town isolation.
Netflix, from Thursday 25 September

Cocaine Quarterback

How does a high-flying, all-American college footballer end up a drug kingpin? This gripping if frequently sensationalist three-part documentary tells the wild story of Owen Hanson. The signs were there from early on as Hanson started smuggling steroids. But his criminality escalated as his football prospects declined, and before long he was building relationships with cartels and enmeshed in a world of trafficking and violence. Among the contributors to the series is Hanson himself, who somewhat wistfully reflects on his rise and fall from a prison cell.
Prime Video, from Thursday 25 September