Admittance to the upper circles was also pursued through membership of the city’s increasing numbers of private clubs (there were around twenty-five in 1837, and ninety-eight by 1900), many of which were connected to political parties. Most clubs were clustered within St James’s and Piccadilly, because these districts were historically adjacent to St James’s Palace, which remained the royal court even after Queen Victoria took up residence close by at Buckingham Palace in 1837. While today there are clubs devoted to the arts, media, universities and sports, many are still focused on politics or have strong military connections or aristocratic ties (such as the Reform, home to the Tory Party, Turf Club, White’s and Pratts – where all male staff are called George to avoid confusion). With changes in taste and society over the century, clubs devoted to the arts emerged, such as the Athenaeum, Garrick, Savage, Arts and Savile.
A key route to transformation was the use of honours to transform money capital into political and social standing. By 1890 it was estimated that a quarter of business and commercial families had a peerage. Between 1886 and 1914, two hundred new peers were created,1 highlighting the way in which money was increasingly being admitted to society in what some saw as a kind of ‘bourgeoisification’ of the gentry. The role of the then existing city establishment, formed primarily of the landed wealthy, oscillated between gatekeeping access to good taste and ‘breeding’, on the one hand, and, on the other, slowly admitting new wealth by enrolling it into the ways and codes of the long-standing elite. Up until the late nineteenth century the acquisition of a rural estate was still considered the critical means by which the tastes and power of the landed gentry could be emulated. In fact it is estimated that between 1835 and 1889, 500 new major country homes were built. From the early twentieth century onwards, however, most looked to London’s milieu as the key space in which to do business and engage with others of a similar background. Here access could also be gained to the annual round of Society functions, the ‘season’ that ran from May to September in the city.
London’s changing wealth elite
How might we begin to unpick the groups and individuals that make up the rich of today’s alpha city? One way into this question is to think of them in terms of three more or less distinct blocs. The first consists of the established rich, whose forebears we met in the preceding section. This group includes those with dynastic wealth and the more modest patrician elite who are anchored in the city’s established alphahoods. A second key group is today’s equivalent of the nouveaux riche of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This bloc includes the various industrial, tech, finance, commodities, energy and utility barons. In the third group are the enablers, those who play the role of factotums to capital and the super-wealthy. These are the agents and managers who, in many cases, have become rich themselves, often by growing and deploying other people’s money. This group is critical to the story of the alpha city because it is they who have helped to create the kind of environment conducive to attracting the flows of mobile global capital and ensuring the influence of new money on the city more broadly. The enablers include key figures working in banking, the managers or CEOs of large firms, financiers, hedge fund managers, some politicians, and those working in real estate including developers and builders.
London’s wealthy are by no means a unified establishment, with fractions among the rich who have differing backgrounds, interests and roles. Wealth overlaps with, and has become integrated into, a number of other key domains in complex ways – including politics, finance, the aristocracy and the media. The sense of a capture of the city by the rich is multifaceted, involving the planning of the enablers to bring capital investment to the city as much as any strategic set of actions by the rich themselves. Across the three groups of the old, the new and the enabling rich, there are thousands of individuals drawn from diverse nationalities, working in various sectors, including those whose fortunes are ‘self-made’ and those who have inherited wealth.
Most of London’s resident rich are also residents elsewhere, which adds some dynamism to their relationship to the city and to other places that compete for their wealth by offering more or less open regulatory regimes, preferential tax arrangements, rapid transport networks and low taxes on property. The alpha city’s super-rich include British aristocratic families and estates, media moguls, apparent geniuses from the world of new media, captains of commerce and industry, Russian oligarchs, individuals linked to organised criminal networks, oil barons and other resource magnates, as well as a slew of others linked to old (steel, diamonds) and newer (rare metals, chemicals, pharmaceuticals) commodities that underpin global capital markets today.
A Whirling Social Circuit
The single common denominator of the wealth elite is, of course, their command of personal wealth that has arisen as a result of accidental, strategic or aggressive control of capital. What tends to bind the group is an interest in enlarging or at least maintaining their financial position, an interest which brings with it political alignments connected to the pursuit of low taxes, economic stability and the privileging of finance and open capital borders. Here we also need to consider the enablers, because they are the skilled engineers and mechanics who maintain the magic machineries of capital, looking to ensure that the needs of the rich are met. They are defenders of the rich because their own wealth depends on them, hence their efforts to capture potentially easy money through the lure of the city’s offer.
To some extent we have already encountered London’s established rich. In many ways this group is very much of the city; they are embedded in its everyday life and have been here, in some cases, for decades or even hundreds of years. While their more obvious power, as political and law lords and land-holders, has waned, they remain an important part of the story of the development of the alpha city. We have seen how the use of peerages greatly expanded the ranks of the landed wealthy as honours were used to bring members of the bourgeoisie and international plutocrats into the ranks of the city’s power brokers and political parties. The city’s old money today is formed of the really old money, exemplified by the key estates which still own large areas of central London – Grosvenor (300 acres), Portman (110), Cadogan (93), de Walden (92) and Bedford (20 acres covering Bloomsbury) – and whose collective wealth is estimated at around £22bn. The ‘old’ rich includes the descendants of the ‘new’ families that had emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as the Rothschilds or Sebag-Montefiores. Yet very few of the richest families of even the 1970s are anywhere to be seen among the ranks of the city’s super-rich today.
The patrician wealthy have a strong attachment to place and its use as a social asset. Of course many in the House of Lords were and still are drawn from this group. Here the traditional image is perhaps the Wodehousian archetype of fusty and eccentric landowners eschewing the material trappings of modern life. The former Duke of Westminster was renowned for not being interested in material things, which is easy to say when you own swathes of Britain. While the sense of patrician responsibility has something going for it in a world of tidal money, we must remember that the accretion of luck, land and rents generated a group whose money power is also entwined with forms of political power and more subtle forms of influence. These connections and interests continue to block action on issues like land reform, transparency of property ownership, more progressive wealth taxes and more concerted challenges to money laundering and offshore investment, because many among the wealthy (in London and beyond) are linked to these systems.
The estates are now businesses that have often been taken out of the hands of their respective families. Many have branched out into land and property investments in other cities and nations. Grosvenor, for example, is today run as a Trust and owns property in more than sixty cities around the world. Now as in the past this group maintains its wealth by drawing payments (rents) for land and leasehold properties, but diversification of their portfolios has also been seen as an important element of survival. As a result, long-standing ownership means that this group is active in planning and shaping the look and feel of many of London’s alphahood areas that continue to draw in the world’s new rich.
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