As a destination for international capital investment, London is a place in which fortunes are made. But it is also a place where those with massive personal wealth seek to make and enrich themselves still further, socially and financially. This is a diverse and international group, originating from around the globe and in particular from the new and booming segments of national economies around it. Of course, London has long been a wealthy city that has attracted the world’s rich, but where in the past they could be found clustered almost exclusively in the West End, today the geography of super-affluent enclaves extends to the city’s North and South and to numerous areas beyond its formal boundaries.
What binds these networks and wealthy quarters together is the dependence of the super-rich on proximity to the social and economic life of the city proper. The key circuits of social life, deal making and political connections have been extended by luxurious and rapid modes of transport that effectively expand the geographical limits of the formal city to take in new suburbs, wealthy towns, and villages with mega-homes. But within all of this the city itself remains critical to the functioning and daily life of the rich and to attracting a global flow of new and visible wealth.
Who are London’s rich and where have they come from? Why are they so attracted to this particular city? The core argument underlying the analysis offered here is that London is critical to the creation of a group identity among the rich, even if there are clear divides and sub-networks within the ranks of the rich themselves. This group forms a kind of congregation; we can see them in the city out in force, but there is no clear sense of community among them due to their increasingly diverse national, economic and political backgrounds. The city also operates as a kind of theatre in which money is translated into social and cultural resources that are sought out by new money (and which old money believes it already knows).
A new nouveau riche, today’s super-wealthy arrivals have come to London as one of only a very few possible locations. They come to do business but also to be received within the city’s existing power networks and those domains that confer status. This kind of access begins with residence in the city’s established luxury districts, its alphahoods, joining its notable clubs, and connecting with others in less formal settings where dusty codes and prejudices can be circumvented in new and often highly dynamic private circuits. If much of London was originally constructed to woo the wealthy from its rural hinterlands, today it plays the same role on a global scale.
A theatre of riches
Much of the city that today we so closely associate with the wealthy elite was already well in place over two hundred years ago. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the West End was already the focus of new residential developments for the wealthy, speculatively built by the owners of landed estates to accommodate aristocrats, merchants enriched by their imperial adventures, and the bourgeois owners of new industries who came to rent leasehold properties in these prestigious enclaves. The history of the alpha city begins with this space and its key role in acting as a melting pot that brought together British and international wealth elites. In this sense the city still acts as this point of social confluence and processer of people and capital, a place in which new social alloys and class compounds are forged and mixed over time.
An important outcome of the work of this machine has historically been its production of a sense of common identity, consciousness and solidarity among its elites, generated by shared residence in these immaculate districts. From this has also flowed the sense of new money jostling to be accommodated within the ranks of the long-term national elite. The historic city and its established alphahoods have long been the critical ingredients of a process through which rich and powerful groups have been formed. Proximity allowed networks to be built and lifestyles enjoyed that were advantaged by access to an exciting range of services, institutions and social opportunities. Underlying these social changes and the formation of a more urban and self-conscious elite lay strong economic incentives.
The story of the building of the West End was one of speculation by large landholding estates, creating the kind of fine streets, homes and semi-rural squares necessary to lure the growing numbers of the rich. The West End helped them to be close to each other but also to the key institutions of court, the economic institutions of the City, and the rounds of events that brought access to ‘Society’. The city of today, now chasing global cash and new ranks of the rich, continues the patterns of association and class formation generated in this formative period.
The social geography of areas like Mayfair and Knightsbridge was the result of building large and thus expensive homes that only the elite could afford. Such homes required a large entourage of staff, and to shops and services with supply chains for luxury items and fresh food that were necessarily short. Living at the right address was critical to securing a position in society, and historians have noted that careful geographical placement in the city was key to being considered part of the right crowd. As a result, more often than not, the residences of the wealthy and the nobility were almost never south of the river. During the seventeenth century, the Earls of Bedford (Covent Garden), Leicester (Leicester Square) and Southampton (Bloomsbury) created the new swathes of the early West End, a geography that pushed further west in the eighteenth century as the Earl of Scarborough (Hanover Square), Earl of Oxford (Cavendish Square), Lord Berkeley (Berkeley Square) and the Grosvenor family (Grosvenor Square) created the cornerstones of today’s alphahoods.
Aesthetically and physically, the arrival of new money gave rise to new urban districts that spoke of the power of this wealth, embodied by massive mansions and palaces and, later on, hotels and clubs. All appeared on a grand scale, often using international styles, such as French-inspired, gothic and classical architecture.
The West End estates were frequently built with a focal point, a central square, with a mansion associated with the estate owner. This would then be surrounded by the houses of new residents and tenants. A degree of town planning ensured more or less self-sufficient neighbourhood units through the inclusion of churches, markets and public houses. Unlike today, servants and other service staff also lived within the West End, making and supplying the goods and services the various households needed. Though elite areas, they were necessarily diverse because of a reliance on ‘help’ of various kinds. It has been estimated that even in these super-rich districts only around 10 per cent of the population were ‘upper class’, while the rest were servants, shopkeepers, publicans and smaller manufacturers.
Some areas of the West End were strongly associated with particular political affiliations: Hanover Square (1717), for example, was apparently built by and for people with Whig and military links, while Cavendish Square (1724) was seen as a Conservative enclave. Despite all the networking and sense of proximity, the West End was never a community in the sense of a connected group of individuals living in a locality. It was in reality a very large yet ‘part-time’ area, as many large townhouses were only occupied during the ‘season’ for a few months before the rich returned to their rural residences. These patterns have some resemblance to what we see of the life of these areas today.
Estimates have been made of the size of the elite occupying this area: in terms of the titled elite, there were around 5,500 in London in 1800; by 1900, due to urbanisation and the conferment of new peerages, the number had risen to 21,700. Among the earliest wealthy groups that returned to London were the so-called Nabobs, who made their fortunes in India in the mid eighteenth century as employees of the East India Company, as well as the families that had made their fortunes in the Jamaican sugar trade. One of the great anxieties about the Nabobs was not only their massive wealth but their use of it to demand, and allegedly purchase, seats in Parliament. This threat of money power to city, nation and society was perhaps inevitable and irresistible, but the establishment attempted to hold on by reducing the powers and scale of the East India Company.
New money, always somehow outside and representing a threat to existing elites, has arrived at the gates of the city for hundreds of years, seeking to integrate with its existing corporate, political and cultural worlds. Newly rich individuals and families looked to sit alongside and be absorbed into long-standing estates and aristocratic circles through education, emulating good taste, seeking political favour