Peter York, real name Peter Wallis, born 1943, is a British management consultant, author and broadcaster most famous for co-authoring Harpers & Queen's The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook with Ann Barr. He is also a columnist for The Independent on Sunday, GQ and Management Today, and Associate of the media, analysis and networking organisation Editorial Intelligence.
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Peter Wallis was the co-founder with Lord Stevenson of the management consultancy SRU Ltd, and during the 1980s developed the SRU Group of nine specialist business consultancies. He was appointed Chairman of a Department of Trade and Industry Committee in March 1994. The committee was set up to examine the future of leisure in the UK as part of the British Government's 'Foresight' initiative. Peter Mandelson worked as a consultant to SRU between 1990 and 1992.
SRU was sold to Brunswick Group in 2000[1]. The relationship foundered, and SRU was bought back into private ownership. It remains intensely private, and has no public website.
As Peter York, Wallis has made his most high-profile offerings, from writing the Sloane Ranger Handbook and being Style Editor of Harpers & Queen for 10 years, to financing The Modern Review.
He published a series of essays in social and cultural observation in the magazine Harpers & Queen during the late 1970s. Written in the style of Wolfe's new journalism, these were collected in the book Style Wars (1980). Following the enormous success of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982), itself an extension of such social observation, Peter became a sought-after media commentator on English social trends and traits. A further collection of essays, Modern Times, was published in 1984. Peter York's Eighties (1995), co-authored with Charles Jennings, was both a book and a BBC television series.
Dictators' Homes (2005), published in the US under the title Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World's Most Colorful Despots, explored the interior design favoured by dictators as a reflection of their despotic characters.