These massive changes and apparent improvements helped to mask their flipside – disinvestment in local neighbourhoods, demolished estates, evictions, rising homelessness and, alongside these changes, the apparent loss of an ethos of care as support for those in need was systematically withdrawn. As the money flows of finance and property seeped into numerous districts, providing many with windfalls, city governors were reassured that all of this stuff was a simple and self-evident good. Yet viewed today, the rise of an alpha city seems to have been based on a Faustian pact, a contract taken out on the zero-contracted, with the price for success being the exclusion of the poor souls of the city while capital and the rich ride on.
London is a vast, almost unknowable automaton, a complex city machine incorporating new and old elites, modern-day merchants, immense homes and corporate megastructures. Taken as a whole, this city, alongside a handful of others globally, is a key node in a global economy founded upon endless cycles of extraction and growth. The beneficiaries are small in number and rewarded in an abundance beyond everyday comprehension. What this also means is that those doing well out of the system are less concerned about its more pernicious outcomes. Today we know that the system’s economic priorities yield winners and losers in a rigged game designed to channel ever larger dividends to those already winning.
To understand the condition the city finds itself in, we must understand the traditional alliances of state, capital and City. To be sure, the positions, networks and interests of each overlap in complex ways. Yet the power of money also lies in its subtle ability to co-opt and align those whose work is in some way connected to servicing capital or the rich themselves. This of course includes the bankers and other servants of wealth, but it also includes politicians, local councillors, planners, developers, builders, real estate agents, luxury fashion retailers, department store workers, chauffeurs, restaurateurs, art, wine and antique dealers, auctioneers, bank clerks, servants, car dealers, tailors, delivery folk and indeed anyone whose livelihood is connected to the wealthy. Wealth becomes a city industry in its own right.
To understand this confluence of interests we must look beyond what is happening to house prices one month, or observations about where the city is going another. To get at the substance beneath the froth of such commentary we need to examine the deeper structures of the economy, the nature of the political system with its conflicting interests, alliances and divisions, the standing stock of housing, and the influence of money and the moneyed on the city. It doesn’t matter too much whether prices for mansions are tumbling or rising because the rich have already occupied them (unless you happen to be an estate agent or a government relying on tax revenues from such sales), nor does it matter when falls simply generate new opportunities for cash-rich international buyers to snap up assets at bargain prices – the same people are in power, and the same logic of capital is in operation. We need a longer-term and macroscopic view of such matters, one capable of tracking the processes, institutional life and socio-economic forces that are making and remaking the city in the interests of the wealthy.
The members of the city’s power bloc – a complex amalgam of networks, institutions and elites whose perspectives are shaped by a common interest – now seek to move away from a sense of patrician obligation and stewardship. Whether this be through residences behind gates and high walls, holidays on yachts or inaccessible beaches, investments in schemes to avoid or evade tax, or in exclusive hotels – the general sense is of a grand escape, the ever further secession of the successful and of the cash they command. Understanding what has happened to the city as money has reshaped it requires work, but the dividend is an insight into how to devise and plan for a city better based on principles of fairness, inclusion and social justice.
To understand London is also to comprehend the workings of our society, economy and polity, of which it is both product and creator. But to really know the city we must become analysts skilled in divining the complex social and economic forces that ultimately shape its material fabric. A city is not a natural occurrence. To be sure it evolves, but it does so according to the designs of its politicians, builders and planners, the competing interests of the powerful, the existing laws and regulations, and the accommodation of the regressive results of these forces by the powerless. In the past, the state and ruling class came to have an interest in maintaining, preserving and securing the amenity of the city. Projects were undertaken in the form of recreational parks, hygiene works, new infrastructure, public housing and transport networks, as a means of preventing dissent, disease and disharmony among the working classes, but also for the middle and upper classes who collectively benefited. Today’s elite appear to show little interest in such social contracts or obligations. London is a city apparently the poorer for the wealth condensing there.
This book offers an impression of London at this moment, as a city facing the paradoxes of a post-crash decade, defined by an increasing meanness in terms of social support, alongside the simultaneous rise of the super-rich and their capture of the city. This disconnection of fates has been arbitrated by its less wealthy elites, through their efforts in the political and corporate domains. We must remember how the commitment to public cuts was forged in a class politics born of a machine hardwired to protect the position of the corporate, political and capitalist elites. But perhaps what is new today is that even those managing this system sense that its limits may have been reached, that its injustices and excesses have become too much, or perhaps too obvious. The decision in July 2019 to deny planning permission for the proposed ‘Tulip’ viewing platform in the City – funded by a Brazilian billionaire and designed by a super-rich architect with an ‘educational’ agenda – was a sign perhaps that such white elephant projects will at least be challenged when they lack any genuine social benefit.
Social need has been put into the shade by the easy wins of free-floating global capital and the billions of laundered cash flowing through real estate and finance. That shade has been amply provided by the many tower blocks built for wealthy investors. The needs of the city’s poor, most of them in working households, appear to be further eclipsed and side-lined by the statistics highlighting service sector growth, the contribution of finance to the economy, and the rocketing redevelopment of the city – the stuff that has to be kept going because it is good for us all! This impression of good health is a story enthusiastically narrated by those among the political class favoured by capital and the wealthy.
Many may feel that this book’s central argument is overplayed and unjustified. In what possible sense could this cascade of wealth into the city have a contaminating effect on its life? What kind of naïve, envious position is being privileged in an account that questions the contribution of the rich? What would we do without these great wealth creators if they all upped and went somewhere else? The time-honoured claim made for established wealth and corporate life in general is that their activities and investments have the effect of ‘lifting all boats’. But this core proposition, indeed this ruling set of ideas, today appears increasingly unsustainable and is everywhere being eroded.
According to Oxfam’s annual survey, in 2018 the number of billionaires who owned as much as the poorest half of humanity stood at twenty-six – enough to fill little more than a third of the seats on a new London Routemaster bus. Yet the system that produces such evident excesses has its massed ranks of defenders. While the world rushes headlong towards numerous precipices, whether they be political, ecological, economic or social, its fundamental structures continue to create subsidiary winners who become the cheerleaders of capital and capitalism. Today the hollowness of this vision is everywhere being pointed out and denounced. Increasingly, the exclusive and excluding landscape of new and unaffordable homes is generating a simmering rage, a substrate of feeling throughout the city whose consequences we do not yet know.
What does a city run for the rich mean for everyone else? Certainly its effects and costs can