Soho Notebook in Panama, Archive Beige

The British talk about the weather; Smythson has now bound it in leather. The Bond Street stationer, founded by Frank Smythson in 1887, has joined Burberry, founded by Thomas Burberry in 1856, on a collection of leather notebooks and games that went on sale in October 2026. Its theme, says Smythson, is British weather and exploration. The Soho notebook is the piece a traveller is most likely to use.

Enter the lining. Open the cover and the inside boards are faced in Burberry's Vintage Check. Outside, the book wears Smythson's Panama leather, a cross-grain lambskin whose texture borrows from the Panama diary Frank Smythson designed in 1908, in a shade called Archive Beige (close to the colour of a trench coat, which is surely the point). The cover is stamped in gold with Come Rain or Shine, which will charm or irritate in equal measure. Scarlet Red, Forest Green and Black are also offered.

Inside are 192 leaves of gilt-edged, pale blue ruled Featherweight paper and a ribbon marker. In the maker's photographs some pages carry rows of check boxes beside small weather symbols, a gentle joke that doubles as a practical log for anyone recording a trip day by day. The notebook is shown in a pale blue Burberry and Smythson box tied with a navy ribbon.

At 14cm by 19.6cm it is a little under A5, and it is handcrafted in England, where Smythson makes its leather goods.

The caveats are structural. This is a bound book, so when the 192 leaves are full there is no refill, and the leather goes on the shelf with them. The cover slogan is also a matter of taste. What the construction buys is a sense of occasion: as a travel journal for someone who keeps them, it makes sense, and as a shopping list, rather less.

Two old British houses have found something to agree on, and it is the rain.

Photographs courtesy of Smythson