How Fifty Shades Darker is making Londoners get kinky this Valentine's Day

Taylor and Zayn cavorting in St Pancras, knee-tremblers on the Beeb: this Valentine’s Day looks Fifty Shades filthier, says Phoebe Luckhurst
Kinky London
Shutterstock / oneinchpunch

London is not prudish. Ours is a proudly liberal city populated by tense high- achievers. Duly, the combination has always created a healthy enthusiasm for sin. We are unashamed — indeed, conversely, it is romance that we find mortifying. Every year, as the Valentine’s Day juggernaut careers into town scattering confetti and sincerity, we respond by rolling our eyes with exaggerated disdain before continuing to waggle our tongues lasciviously and letting our eyes linger too long.

But this season, quotidian sin has taken a high-octane turn — one involving whips, chains and handcuffs. Childish innuendo has given way to explicit demands; nipples are chasing freedom for personal rather than political reasons. We are winking at strangers and sexting wantonly on the Tube. London has gone a bit Fifty Shades.

It started, unexpectedly, with Taylor Swift and Zayn Malik. Individually they are an all-American sweetheart and a former member of a determinedly sanitised boyband invented for tweens. But together, in the music video for the soundtrack to the new Fifty Shades film, they are lust personified.

Obviously this is the soundtrack to a film about BDSM — the sex was never going to be implied. But Taylor and Zayn do not rest on their laurels: they really give it one. Crucially, the video was shot at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in King’s Cross — which means it is London’s sex tape, basically. Sure, it is a very stylised one with high production values that does not actually feature any sex. But its influence in London’s latest sexual awakening is not inconsiderable.

The city also owes some debt to Apple Tree Yard, the BBC thriller that is both celebrated and maligned; it shows a sex scene taking place within the Palace of Westminster. If the millennials are getting their rocks off to Taylor and Zayn, political wonks are fantasising about taking someone into the broom cupboard and thrashing it out with more energy than is customary at PMQs.

The raunchy mood has animated other hotels besides the Renaissance, which have sexed up their offerings for this year’s Valentine’s Day. Granted, the average Londoner will not be checking into a five-star room next Tuesday evening but the packages might be seen as a bellwether of our proclivities.

London's sexual awakening: Taylor Swift cavorts in the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel in King’s Cross

Formerly, hotels offered limp proposal packages proffering obedient butlers and fragrant bouquets, elegantly rendered but sexless in their formality. This year’s offerings are saucier. South Place Hotel near Aldgate is offering a one-night Valentine’s package including a Koibito “love kit” — which contains massage oil and a tickling feather. Moreover, all the hotel’s bedrooms have blackout blinds for channelling the low light of the Tayn/Zaylor video. There will also be a selection of “complimentary risque films” and a “James Bondage Kit”, including a vibrating gold finger and PVC bondage tape, explains South Place’s assistant head of concierge — and “romance guru” — Cristina Pazo Campos.

The Zetter Townhouse Clerkenwell has devised a ménage à trois cocktail menu for those who have recruited a third member for their Valentine’s Day celebrations. Meanwhile, the Mondrian on the South Bank suggests its lovers create “their own abstract piece of art”. The package is called Love and Paint; couples are invited to check in to one of the hotel’s suites, where they will be presented with a black canvas, three jars of body paint, a brush and slippers. “What happens next is entirely up to the couple,” reads the event’s billing. “What happens on the canvas, stays on the canvas.”

Fifty Shades Darker is released in cinemas this weekend

It does, until one of you — loaded on the included bottle of Perrier-Jouët — broadcasts the whole thing on Instagram Stories. No worries: a little live-streaming slap and tickle is consistent with the libidinous mood.

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Of course, while the capital is kinky, its inclinations aren’t tacky. Each package includes a (figurative) pinch of salt with its (literal) serving of sauce. We adopt Fifty Shades with an appreciation of irony; ultimately, we are having too much fun with the tickling feather to worry too much about what it symbolises. Everything is — of course — consensual and respectful.

It is also intelligent, and we indulge an academic appreciation of the carnal. Ultimately, learning the theory is important for its application. Much of London’s erudite set were at General Assembly’s Future of Dating, Sex and Tech panel at The Hoxton, Shoreditch, on Tuesday, where the panel considered AI seduction and virtual-reality pornography.

Farmacy in Notting Hill is hosting a “Tantra, cocktails and conscious breathing” workshop on Valentine’s, held by therapist Katia Boustani. The two-hour session will cover topics including “increasing your libido and sexual drive”, “elongating and empowering your orgasms” and “simple Tantric exercises for couples to enjoy and then take home and apply that night”. You are duly reassured “there will be no nudity during this workshop”. Shame.

The Book Club in Shoreditch is planning a new monthly event series, promising it will cover “everything that school sex education missed out”. This is not the same as watching your anguished geography teacher ease a condom over a banana — sweat beading at his temples, palms like clumsy hams — but an open approach to the sensual that doesn’t take away any of the fun.

The first session, on February 21, entitled “Kissing, Cuddling and Pegging: Oh My, What Millennial Men Get Up to on Friday Night”, examines modern masculinity and sexuality; the next, BDSM for beginners, features a star turn from “performance artist and sex educator” Master Dominic. Shy novices are reassured that “there will be no audience participation”.

Current affairs: Ben Chaplin as Mark Costley and Emily Watson as Yvonne Carmichael in the BBC’s Apple Tree Yard
BBC/Kudos/Nick Briggs

Later in the year there will be a talk focused specifically on female pleasure — hosted by no-nonsense representatives from Ladies Come First. Guests are promised homework: “cunnilingus and colouring in”. Incidentally, in the spirit of inclusion, Nineties erotic emporium Sh! is inviting all genders to the shop’s basement for the first time over Valentine’s weekend.

Obviously, none of these plans involves actually seeing the new Fifty Shades. The consensus is that it is limp and unerotic, and that if your worst kink amounts to watching it, then you are incorrigibly vanilla. There is little lewd inspiration to be taken from the tacky rendering of a boring relationship between two unimaginative characters.

If you do need visuals to get off, the Barbican is screening Les Biches, a titillating French film about a threesome, and the Prince Charles Cinema is showing lovers-on-the-run film True Romance. Thrills and real chemistry can be assured.

Buckle up — literally — because London’s on a darkly seductive bent. These sins aren’t deadly, they’re thrilling.

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