How to launch a domestic goddess

Last night the first salvos in this Christmas's battle of the books were fired, when Nigella Lawson threw a party to launch How to be a Domestic Goddess, Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking.

It is a book that will surely do for the baby boom generation what Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance did for their forebears.

Not since the dawn of the 18th century when Jonathan Swift penned "A full and true account of the battel fought last Friday between the antient and the modern books" has the literary world been locked in such a titanic struggle. This Christmas the media cooks go head to head in an all-out battle for sales. But whereas the "battel" recounted by Dean Swift three centuries ago was located in the St James's Library, last night's skirmish was fought in a building site down a dark alley just off the Goldhawk Road, across from Shepherd's Bush market.

A chilly Monday night is not the best of times to go looking for a party on a building site, let alone a building site in a dodgy west London suburb. And yet in the spirit of our contrapuntal times, last night an unfinished restaurant in W12 was exactly where it was at. OK, OK, maybe Dame Joan Collins, Sir Elton John, Posh, Becks, Grant, Anthea and the marketing team from Cadbury were not on hand to propel this event into Hello! heaven. However, there were a few well-known people: Panorama's Mariella Frostrup and her fellow TV personality Penny Smith, starlet Natascha McElhone, a couple of members of the Fox family, telly supremo Alan Yentob, the Hon Rosa Monckton, boss of Crown Jeweller Asprey and Garrard, Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman and Tatler editor Geordie Greig. Adding a splash of St Moritz, a touch of St Tropez were AA Gill and Nicola Formby positively glowing from a recent appearance in Hello! - he looking tanned and relaxed in jeans and Icelandic knitwear, she sexily sultry in cords and barely buttoned blouse from D&G. Thank God for the Gills.

What it lacked on the tabloid social Richter scale it more than compensated for with seismic social significance. These were the people that mould the celebs: the publishers, the agents, the editors, the TV mandarins, the restaurateurs - the social architects of 21st century London. Last night's party was one of those intriguing collisions of personality and postal code that happen now and again in London. As people bumped into each other they said things like "weren't you at lunch at Le Caprice today?" - not something one tends to hear that often on the Goldhawk Road.

But then this building site is shortly to become the Bush Bar and Grill, a collaborative venture between Charlie McVeigh, the man who reinvented Woody's as the coolest destination of the late Nineties, and Tony Mackintosh and Tchaik Chassay, who gave London the Groucho Club and 192. Nigella Lawson, the domestic goddess of the title and Vogue columnist, lives a few doors down the Goldhawk Road. Natascha McElhone, whose parents are great friends of Nigella and John Diamond, also lives locally. Alan Yentob, who works up the road at the Beeb, is a friend of Tchaik.

And me? Well, I live across the road, and am hoping to sell Charlie McVeigh my old Mercedes.

But don't take my word for it, last night Shepherd's Bush witnessed something rare and beautiful - Victoria Mather, the ultra-posh travel editor of Tatler, a woman more at home around the pool at the Splendido in Portofino or the Byblos in St Tropez, made a state visit to the Bush.

Chef Rowley Leigh of Kensington Place, a genuine bona fide resident of Shepherd's Bush and another Christmas cookery writer, described by his publisher, Vicky Barnsley - whose husband Nick Howard is a Kensington Place regular - as the James Joyce of food, has even given Shepherd's Bush its first residential acronym. NOUSOW stands for "North of Uxbridge, South of Westway" and is the sort of thing that Tatler readers love. Fellow chef, restaurateur and author the River Café's Rose Gray described the event, the location and the heavies at the end of the alley as "quite New York, just like East Avenue around 24th". The mixture was an enticing one of what she called "a little bit of danger and a little bit of safety".

Certainly one person felt it was safe enough to leave a Bentley, with smoked-glass windows - very ghetto fabulous - parked at the entrance. Natascha McElhone thought it was a lot to do with the area being home to a great many journalists keen to talk up their house prices, and she is partly right. But then that would not account for a young woman from Ed Victor's office wearing a T-shirt which read "DA BUSH" on the front and gave the postcode on the back. She claimed to have bought it somewhere like Top Shop.

Can Shepherd's Bush really be so fashionable that they are already making the T-shirt?

Thirty years ago this was Steptoe country. Even when I moved here, unable to afford West Kensington - forget even thinking about Notting Hill - in about 1987, I remember at least one estate agent telling me with a hint of pride that Shepherd's Bush was not an area that they covered. Now it is an Alan Ayckbourn drama waiting to be written - indeed, had Alan been there last night, he could have found an agent, a publisher and probably got it commissioned for TV. Forget Shepherd's Bush being the new Notting Hill; Notting Hill is yesterday's Shepherd's Bush and I am thinking of cashing in, getting downwardly mobile and moving to Belgravia.