A contender to replace the Charles I statue as the central point of the city today might be the sculpture that stands beside the ultra-prime residences at One Hyde Park. Walking the canopied length of the road to the side of this building one will find the five curious figures of Jacob Epstein’s work The Rush of Green. Completed in 1959, it seems unlikely that its title was intended to refer to the future sea of cash that would come sloshing into what was then a city arguably in economic and demographic decline. There they stand, a mother, father, child and dog, figures seemingly distended in their attempt to evade the god Pan who chases them. With a little poetic licence we might suggest that they are running away from the antiseptic emptiness of the new apartments at One Hyde Park. Yet the rush of cash and rivers of gold have since flowed like a biblical deluge, making any such escape impossible.
If we continue to walk along nearby Park Lane, we might spot a low-loader truck delivering Porsches to one of the handful of luxury nearby dealerships, their young male staff shuttling them to waiting clients. Sit in nearby Mayfair itself for a while and you will likely see well-groomed women exiting from beauticians in perfect synchrony with the arrival of a powerful chauffeur-driven car. With even fairly modest resources one can access a small part of this world by buying a coffee in some of the most famous hotels in the world: the Dorchester, Claridge’s (for the old school), Jumeirah Carlton (for the Arabs) or Bulgari (for the quite simply loaded). Old photographs in the lobby of the Bulgari portray a charming and grounded class of artisan leather-workers and fashionable strollers in charmingly decaying Italian urban centres. Such images appear as the fantasised retreats nostalgically hankered for by the wealthy – quaint, peasant-filled settings that money power has often since destroyed. The reality here, as in the city more widely, is that such luxury is often built upon the destruction of the authentic places and ways of life around it.
Knightsbridge forms the focal point of the global investor’s imagination. The overall effect at street level, belying the luxury and calm within, is the sense that the intersection outside Harrods is perhaps less the heart of a former empire than the central conduit along which capital flows into the city – a place with no allegiance to anything but money, untethered from social obligation or affiliation to place. If you come from China, the Middle East or Russia, and lack direct knowledge about where best to live in London, you can come to rest in these environs, safe in the knowledge that the extended larder and dressing rooms of Harrods and Harvey Nichols are but a step away among a vast array of personal service providers, restaurants, clubs and comfortable neighbourhoods.
For sale (Harrods)
Walk through some of the back streets of Kensington to Chelsea and the growing honeycomb of below-street excavations is indicated by elaborate apparatuses of skips, conveyer belts and impossibly noisy jackhammering, a source of enormous resentment on the part of those who see themselves as London’s true residents and guardians, its long-term wealthy. If this area is the heart of the city, it feels more like a device to enable wealthy bodies and their cash to rest, rather than a living, breathing social space.
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Cities are key components of the global market economy and of the capitalist world system of accumulation. They are centres for the creation, processing and storage of wealth, but they are also places in which value that has been extracted elsewhere is then invested and circulated. This is why the City, as the financial heart of London, has become so important to its apparent success. Cities with significant financial sectors are the key nodes in a world economy that is itself increasingly financialised as more and more aspects of social, economic and political life are dictated to by the finance economy with its proliferation of financial instruments and investments.
The intensity of the flow of capital, both to the City and into London real estate, tells us much about the operation of this system and the state of the world around us. It also says something about the ability of particular urban centres to become major condensers of wealth and points of confluence for the wealthy themselves and their investments. Such cities are sticky places that hold onto these flows through cultural, architectural, historical and social qualities that help them attract business and maintain their economic dominance. Economic theory might suggest that the functions of the City could be fulfilled equally well in a field in Northumberland or on a large rig built in the middle of the Atlantic. In reality, the reason the rich themselves choose to live and invest in particular places like London, New York or Tokyo lies in their need for economic networks as well as the satisfactions to be derived from social connections, the cultural patina of tradition, and the ambience generated by fine streets and residences.
The economy and the city are not run according to some master plan. The city is formed of a highly complex set of interactions within and between politics and commerce and their various captains. The perceived magic of the markets lies in the idea that even without some central system of allocation, the city as a whole works to bring goods and services to companies and consumers with little or no fuss. In reality, such a system is also deeply implicated in political processes that cast these alchemical operations as disembedded from social and civic life, even when it is clear that the markets are closely monitored and managed by governments working in concert with leading economic actors and institutions. The power of markets is ideological as well as economic – their portrayal as open, unfettered and efficient methods of resource allocation remains a deeply held principle among many in the political and commercial worlds. Nevertheless, apparently beneficial market systems have been strongly associated with deepening inequality and the massive enrichment of particular individuals even as they are lauded for creating wealth.
For several decades the allure of the market has inveigled its way into forms of political thinking that have become aligned with the needs of business and finance. This becomes problematic when the background assumptions of pro-market systems become deeply embedded in political and economic life to the detriment of social needs and functions. In short, markets come first and social essentials, like housing, education and health, become secondary issues, instead of being understood as part of a system in which the needs of citizens are paramount. Market principles have become so deeply entrenched that the functionaries of the operating systems underpinning capitalism – government ministers, local authorities, planning departments, chambers of commerce, business leaders and financiers – all begin to sing from the same hymn sheet.
Even after the financial crisis, market-based economic models and ideas continued to dominate discussions, frequently without reference to the ultimate rationale for economic life itself – to address human need. Much of this lopsided thinking can be linked to the way such ideas were connected to the ability of markets to generate enormous windfalls for political honchos, captains of the financial system and dealers in real estate. The danger of these beliefs is that they enabled a massive expansion of wealth among a few while doing little to benefit the city’s residents as a whole.
Conspiracies are not required to bring to life a working model of these interests, systems, ideas and networks. We can call the effect of these processes ‘city capture’. This notion may help us think through what is happening to many cities globally, where the demands of capital are being met with open arms and minds by local elites keen to attract and benefit from the money of the wealthy. The term plutocracy literally means ‘money power’, often conceived in terms of government by the wealthy or the sense that government itself is run at the whims and instruction of the rich. In a plutocratic city like London, this makes local politicians, builders, decorators, butlers and estate agents, among many others, the mediators and facilitators of a process in which the rich themselves appear to have significant power.
That power does not reside solely in the overt actions of plutocrats lobbying government and politicians directly; there is an interleaving of interests and assumptions about what is best for the city that runs much deeper. This makes power, as the capacity to exert some kind of force, something more diffuse and complex than the traditional idea of a power elite or establishment tends to convey. The availability of many tens of thousands of the global rich presents itself as a significant business opportunity. Politics becomes the