Roughly 22 per cent of the global super-rich (UHNWIs measured here as those with $50m+) live in Europe. The majority reside in the US (51 per cent) and Asia-Pacific regions.14 In the UK we can find roughly a hundred billionaires, with their combined wealth of $253bn, of whom around 95 live in London itself according to the Sunday Times rich list, more than in any other city in the world. The city’s rich are located mostly in the central districts of Mayfair, Belgravia and Knightsbridge (the core of the super-prime property market), the city’s northern suburbs and outside it to the west.15 London has also become increasingly popular over the past decade as a destination for the world’s rich: 2018 saw the largest single-year influx of HNWI ‘golden passport’ seekers (over 114,000) in the past ten years looking to use investment in the UK as a means of accessing citizenship.
The rich are not islands, even when they live on them – wealth is never simply self-made, nor does it make one self-sufficient. They are dependent on a range of bespoke private services, advisers and institutions as well as the publicly planned, designed and managed city around them. They are supported by the property buyers and agents required to source the right home, family offices to manage accounts and personal affairs, the lifestyle managers needed to locate tickets, contacts or access to key events, and numerous financial service providers who offer advice and products. All this can be conceived of as nothing less than a life-support system firmly located in the alpha city and without which the wealthy would soon struggle, like a luxury yacht in the doldrums.
The lifestyle and service needs of the rich create a distinctive geography driven in large part by their seeking maximally advantageous locations for their homes (whether first, second, third or fifth). Choice of location is determined by the proximity of workplaces (if they are so burdened), financial service providers, private schools (such as the French school in Kensington or the American schools to the west of the city) and leisure and cultural infrastructure. Neighbourhood and home life is set alongside the need for additional rooms for visitors, and the use of one or more of the seventy-five 5-star hotels (the most in any single city – New York has fifty-nine, Dubai sixty-one) and the seventy Michelin-starred restaurants in the city. For transport, the twenty-five luxury marque car dealerships are essential; for leisure, the opera houses, theatres and public art galleries (of which two, the Saatchi and Newport Street, have recently been built with private money, while a further four have seen extensions or wings added thanks to the largesse of the rich). There are more than 250 banks in London representing 26 countries, many offer bespoke services for the wealthy, even among many of the larger banks as well as by so-called family offices that run the financial and practical affairs of the richest. London also has four universities ranked in the world’s top forty (New York has three) for educating offspring.16
Some of the most spectacular changes generated by the rich and their investments can be seen in the city’s many new buildings, the product of perhaps the most dramatic construction programme undertaken in the city in the post-war period.
The built environment, in the shape of new housing developments and a transformed skyline, expresses in solid forms of steel and glass the flows of capital beneath them, indexing the rising fortunes of the wealthy themselves. The many and massive high-rise constructions in particular reshape the city’s ambience, infusing it with the aura of money and signifying the acquisition of the city by capital. This shining new built environment offers a glimpse of the deeper economic and political forces reshaping the city, creating new ranks of beneficiaries and changing the look, feel and function of London for everyone who lives in, works in or visits it.
One way to appreciate the scale of the changes is to focus on the city’s new high-rise skyline, a massive alteration to the built fabric of a city that, like its European counterparts, had always been characteristically low-rise. This is still an unfamiliar landscape to many – the average age of London’s skyscrapers (buildings taller than 100m) is only fourteen years.17 Even by 1950 New York could lay claim to 140 such buildings, and Chicago twenty-nine: high-rise buildings signified the technological and economic advances of the US, which itself epitomised the meaning of urban life in the twentieth century. London had to wait another decade before it saw a building that exceeded the height of St Paul’s Cathedral (111m) – Pimlico’s Millbank Tower, built in 1963 and soon to be converted into a 5-star hotel and luxury apartments by one of the city’s billionaires, who was given planning permission, with no requirement for affordable housing, by the then mayor, Boris Johnson. The first London skyscraper to exceed 150 metres was the NatWest Tower, built in 1980 in the City of London, just prior to its ‘big bang’ deregulation and expansion in 1986. In fact, only thirty-three buildings higher than 100 metres were built in London as a whole between 1960 and 2008, or roughly a skyscraper a year.
It gives some idea of the step change in the city’s economy, and its links to real estate, to know that in only the past decade (the alpha years of 2008–18) a further forty-four towers have been completed. The city has arguably been a late developer, but much more is to come, as we will soon see. London’s dramatic new skyline divides opinion between those who feel it speaks of a new confidence and see it as a mark of global success, and the many others who argue that the rampant reach skyward has destroyed the character of a once distinctive and beloved city.
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London’s geographical centre does not lie at Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament – symbols of the city’s regal and democratic power respectively. Any milestone or sign showing the distance to London terminates at the equestrian statue of the last absolute royal, Charles I, in Trafalgar Square. If we were to seek the city’s political heart we might look to Westminster, the traditional home of Parliament and the various ministries clustered along Whitehall, and to 10 Downing Street. We might also want to bring in the city’s thirty-two local governments and their role in planning and administering the capital, as well as the relatively new role of the mollusc-like City Hall, designed by a super-wealthy architect, and home of the city’s mayors since 2000. These places symbolise the democratic sources of regulation and management of the city, but are they the locus of its power today, or should we look elsewhere to understand what makes the modern capital tick?
In order to understand the ways in which political and democratic institutions are connected to the interests of capital, we might begin our search in the discreet offices of the hedge funds located in former merchant’s homes in Mayfair, in the City of London certainly, and perhaps in the Bank of England. Yet, in many ways, a search for the city’s economic, social or political power base is doomed to yield empty chairs in spacious rooms – power is a more elusive and deeper capacity than any particular building or institution might suggest. As the city changes and new institutions, wealthy individuals and those binding these sites and key players together emerge, a contemporary search for the centre of the city must recognise the power that emerges from the laws, movements and interests of capital and the few winners it has produced. Here we may be reminded of the claim to the heart of the city made by the Center Point tower, built in 1966, longstanding emblem of a previous housing crisis and now of the alpha city’s resurgence as it is converted into super-luxury flats.
Seeking the heart of a city that runs in ever greater alignment with the interests of wealth and the wealthy, we might look to key buildings such as the Shard, within spitting distance of City Hall and emblematic of the key forces shaping the city. The ninety-five-storey, roughly 1,000-feet high building, a mix of offices, hotels and residences (most of them still empty years after completion), was bankrolled by Qatari sovereign wealth fund monies. Like many others in central London, this was a building constructed by new international wealth searching for a place to grow.
Similar funding bankrolled the Candy Brothers’ One Hyde Park development (designed by Richard Rogers) overlooking the Harvey Nichols department store in Knightsbridge. Such buildings exemplify the sway of capital and its imprint on the city today. Very little of this architecture offers a sense of public contribution or new spaces for circulation and social life, unless one counts the sky garden of the Walkie Talkie building, 20 Fenchurch St, where this concession to provide a public space