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Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London — the rise of the super-rich
Part guide, part indictment of a yawning wealth gap, Caroline Knowles’s eye-opening book reveals how the capital has changed over the decades
Our family lived in what was once described as “genteel poverty” — the middle-class family fallen on hard times. My father, a literary translator, habitually celebrated the granting of an overdraft extension by purchasing several bottles of vintage bubbly. My mother pinched pennies and managed a stream of lodgers.
But perhaps the most remarkable aspect to the constant threat of financial ruin was how it all played out in the heart of Kensington on Abingdon Road — just opposite where Biba, the iconic fashion store of Swinging Sixties London, opened its first outlet. Not only that, but we also actually owned the house we lived in, or rather my mother did as her parents had lent her the deposit. She purchased the house for £5,000 in 1960.
In today’s money, that would be £100,000. In fact, the self same house would now be valued at anything between £5mn and £10mn. Poverty, genteel or otherwise, is no longer an option in this part of Kensington. In those areas where it does exist in the north of the borough, it can come with appalling risks, as the inhabitants of Grenfell Tower discovered to their cost.
Memories constantly floated through my mind as I read Caroline Knowles’s Serious Money because many of the houses, streets, parks and institutions she describes in her walks through “plutocratic London” provided the very architecture of my childhood. And yet they are utterly different worlds, as Knowles makes clear in her portrait of a city awash with money, some of it of dubious origin and with malign effect on society and politics.
This was not a home — it was a place to show off a huge art collection. The only fakes in sight were the books lining one of the many hallways All cities evolve, but the transformation of London during the 1990s and beyond has been extreme. After the collapse of communism and the advance of market liberalisation and rise of globalisation, the city entered a race with New York for the title of financial capital of the world. The result is paradoxical. London is richer, more populous, more cosmopolitan.
But it is also more corrupt and one of the most unequal and unforgiving cities on the planet. One great difference between then and now are the people; or, rather, the unimaginable sums of money possessed by the people who now inhabit those streets. Our house had a dingy basement, euphemistically called “the nursery”, where my brother and I lived with a view on to the coal shed. Today “basement” means something different. Knowles describes the extraordinary competitive economy of oligarchic “megabasements” of Kensington. Basements now burrow deep into the Earth’s crust — two, three or even four storeys down.
They take two to three years to construct, causing immense damage to surrounding properties. “In one, raw sewage runs through a neighbour’s flat,” Knowles reports. The absence of light and ventilation means that nobody actually lives in the basements. Instead, they are reserved for home cinemas, swimming pools, gyms and garages. One old resident bemoans the arrival of the gazillionaires and spends much of his time fighting to block planning permission for these architectural tumours. Yet before the reader becomes too misty-eyed, the author reminds us that the money that funded the original construction of these magnificent Victorian houses derived largely from the bloody legacy of colonialism. In the 1960s, the scrupulously polite lawyers, doctors, translators and the occasional celebrity who graced those streets benefited, like me, from a long tradition of plutocratic wealth. True, today’s super-rich have taken the pursuit of wealth to unprecedented levels. My wife, an arts journalist, described a drinks party to which she was invited by an ultra-high-net-worth individual from the Middle East in their Mayfair residence composed of two town houses knocked together. “Feel free to look around the house,” the host told guests.
This was not a home, it was a place to show off a huge collection of contemporary art, including Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. An entire double bedroom was given over to a Cornelia Parker sculpture. The only fakes in the building were the books lining one of the many hallways. Knowles quotes another sociologist, Elisabeth Schimpfössl, who has argued that “in Russia patronage of the arts is a way of converting financial resources into cultural credentials”.
This is nothing new and certainly not restricted to Russians — the wealthy of many cultures and periods from Florence of the Medicis through the “robber barons” of the United States have sought to do just that. To this day, many Americans will take their first steps on the road to appreciating art via the legacy of Frick, Rockefeller, Carnegie et al. Ironically, it was a Labour prime minister and his chancellor — Tony Blair and Gordon Brown — who promoted the “light regulatory touch” that encouraged money from across the world to pour into London.
The capital had real advantages over New York — it was much closer to the Middle East, Russia and, of course, the rest of Europe. It had a cultural life that equalled its American rival and it had a lot of grand, cheap property. Housing inflation pushed out the genteel English from Notting Hill, Kensington and St John’s Wood, forcing them to move further west, south and north (Shepherd’s Bush, in my family’s case). The further we enter the plutocrat’s world, the seedier and more alienated it becomes. Areas of Mayfair and Belgravia are dark at night where houses are not lived in Understandably, Knowles begins her plutocracy strolls in London’s financial district in order to have a closer look at the engine house behind much of the city’s wealth. Her models include Virginia Woolf walking around London’s wintry streets, Walter Benjamin in Paris, Raja Shehadeh’s exploration of the Palestinian territories, and, more recently, Iain Sinclair’s London walks.
It is a worthy pursuit, but Knowles’s opening misfires because she also tries to investigate the opaque networks of tax evasion, money laundering and rent-seekers. Writers such as Oliver Bullough (Moneyland), and Nick Shaxson (Treasure Islands) and the FT’s Tom Burgis (Kleptopia) have already been there with such forensic force that there are no new discoveries to be found. Persisting with the book, however, still reaps rewards as the author’s gentle, yet shrewd observations quickly accumulate when seeking out a wide variety of individuals to reveal the quotidian culture of plutocracy. Knowles names them by archetype: Butler, Soviet, Banker, Bags (as in Prada), Sturgeon, Blazer and many more. This is simultaneously frustrating (even if we don’t know them, we want them identified) and effective. Thus reduced, the characters are easier to follow and understand.
The further we enter the world of the plutocrat, the seedier, more alienated and more moribund it becomes. In Mayfair and Belgravia, large areas go dark at night because these vast houses are not lived in. They are either an investment boasting solid returns or, like the Middle Easterner’s art gallery, they aim to project an image of wealth and prestige. The pockets of light in Mayfair advertise the most exclusive night clubs where hideously rich men in their forties and fifties spend £10,000 a night to reserve a prominent table.
As Knowles writes, “promoters” roam the nearby streets (and the internet) offering “girls” the chance to party for free. “Young women live on the ambiguous, slippery edge of the night, part guests and part offering,” she adds. “They must navigate the sliding scale between, at one end, accepting expensive drinks and providing conversation, and, at the other, escort services, casual sex or even upmarket prostitution duties for rich men.”
The mega-wealthy have the wherewithal to purchase people. And they invariably retain large entourages who do everything from folding their trousers to sweeping hotel rooms for listening devices. The perceptive Assistant acts not just as a factotum to his boss, Party. He also provides friendship. It is not of course real friendship because Party, a billionaire, is paying Assistant. But billionaires, Knowles demonstrates, live in a world so rarefied that they never encounter the hoi polloi. Recommended FT MagazineSimon Kuper Simon Kuper: Who are the Londoners enabling the Russian elite? This leads to the author’s sad conclusion that a plutocrat’s life is desperately lonely.
As the Assistant tells Knowles: “[Staff] become your surrogate family, because they’re the people that you spend all your time with.” These relationships, the assistant adds, are “misaligned” as the rich ultimately want — and pay for — both services and companionship. As described, it is a sad lot. But it is difficult to feel too sorry for them as the influence of the global oligarchy fashioned from the excesses of capitalism bears profound responsibility for the dreadful mess we all now find ourselves in.
Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London by Caroline Knowles, Allen Lane £25, 320 pages
Misha Glenny is rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna