Lilah Parsons’ London

Favourite London areas
I love Notting Hill and the Westbourne Grove area. I love all aspects of London, at the moment I’m trying to decide where to live, everyday it’s somewhere different. I keep thinking of Brixton, then I’m thinking of Islington and Angel. At the moment I live in Kensington but I really love the Notting Hill area. What I really love is that London is like a collection of villages so places have completely different feelings. I lived in Whitechapel and that’s totally different to where I live in Kensington now, but I love that. I’m just such a London girl!

Travel and transport
I wish you could get everywhere in 20 minutes. I’m not sure how it would happen, teleporting would be the ideal but I’m happy with 20 minutes. Because I have friends who live all over the city I just wish that when I’m in Notting Hill I could pop down the road and see my friends at Shoreditch House.

What I miss when I'm away
When I’m away I miss the buzz and the attitude of the people. I lived in Paris for a bit when I was modelling and I definitely missed the openness of the fashion that people have in London. I kept on getting lots of frowns for wearing short skirts. In London everyone is a bit more open fashion-wise, it’s much more experimental and fun. And New York I love, I lived there for a while, then again I just missed the sense of humour that people have here. I also missed M&S food.

Nights out
On a typical night out I’d quite possibly have dinner in Soho, then I’d probably end up at a cocktail bar. There are some great cocktail bars in Soho like Experimental Cocktail Club, Hix Bar and The Lucky Pig. I’ll often end up Soho House, or Electric Diner on Portobello Road. I might end up at The Box, that happen’s occasionally. Then I’d probably end up at a house party.

Shopping
I love all the little boutiques round Westbourne Grove, they have all the little French ones like Maje, Sandro and Zadig & Voltaire, however they’re all quite out of my price range, so I also get a lot from H&M which is just on High Street Ken which is really near me. I also love Portobello Road. In Pimlico there’s a car boot sale called Capital Carboot that’s really cool, you can get some amazing bargains there and I often sell stuff there as well which is quite fun. I always have so many clothes so I try to get rid of them before my flatmate goes mad. And actually I went to Westfield the other day, and it’s got everything under one roof, I’ve never been a mall person but it’s really good.

Work
My favourite presenting gig so far has been for a big American initiative called We Day, it’s a charity. They brought it over to the UK for the first time this year and it was live at Wembley Arena. It was a really amazing thing to be a part of. It’s a big charity to inspire but also reward all the kids who’ve done so much for charity.

I’ve met so many interesting people, Bruno Mars was probably one of my favourite people to interview for MTV, and the other day I interviewed Foxes. She’s going to be massive, I’m a big fan of hers and that was really fun. I would love to interview Katy Perry.

Modelling
I got into modelling by being scouted. I first got scouted when I was a teenager still at school but I wasn’t living in London so it wasn’t going to work, I was at boarding school in the country. And then when I was 19 or 20 I was at art school and I got scouted at a party in East London, and that’s kind of how it happened.

When I was modelling I used to have random gaps of time in my day, so I’d think of ways to fill them in between castings, and I remember being by London Bridge and finding myself in the Old Operating Theatre, which is well, an old operating theatre, so I went in and had a little tour of that.

The biggest highlight of my modelling career was having a billboard in Times Square. That was pretty amazing.

I still do a bit of modelling but I stopped doing it full time because I felt that I’d done it for three or four years and I’d enjoyed it, but I wanted something with a bit more longevity maybe, something where I could get a bit more involved. Because I‘m creative and I’d been to art school, I‘ve always loved fashion and I’ve always wanted to get involved and have opinions on things, but as a model you’re literally just like the mannequin really, whereas as a presenter people ask my opinion, it’s nice!



Lilah is represented by MiLK Management