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.
Today the city still sees other sedimentary displays of patronage and older class and power structures, whether it be the Lord Mayor London’s annual parade, the fading circuit of the royal court, or proms and debutante balls. The annual ‘season’ has been in decline since the 1960s, as has its role in underwriting the boundaries of Society membership. But the city’s richest long-standing families, and of course royalty itself, continue to play a part in the everyday life of the city. Here, land and social position come together, carefully sustained and managed over generations through long-term estate management and succession planning. In 2017 the new Duke of Westminster, inheriting one of the largest wealth dynasties in the UK and indeed the world, paid almost no inheritance tax as the estate was passed to him in a trust. Even so, times and fortunes change, and in 2018 it was estimated that the royal family of Abu Dhabi were now the second largest landholder in Mayfair, while a string of sovereign wealth funds had snapped up enormous amounts of land and assets in the city. The city’s largest residential home after Buckingham Palace was now owned by a Russian oligarch, and a billionaire former owner of a mobile phone empire was building a massive mansion in the heart of Mayfair.
The established rich also include quite large numbers of households that are wealthy if not spectacularly so. Many have lived in London’s alphahoods for several generations, sit well within the 1 per cent in terms of wealth, and resent many of the changes brought about by new money. This is a privileged group bordering the upper-middle and upper class, often having bought property in the 1960s and ’70s, and for whom the massive tide of wealth arriving in the city represents both a symbolic and real challenge to their quiet enjoyment of the city. For this group the major anxieties are the increasing cost of property, the excessive noise pollution from cars and parties, and the question of why the new wealth elite don’t seek to become more integrated in the everyday life of the neighbourhood. A frequent complaint of this patrician elite is that areas which were once relatively diverse and lively urban communities now have the feel of ghost neighbourhoods. This is a group that has been and still is privileged, but which now feels threatened by new money and the sense of an overdevelopment of the city exemplified by its new high-rise and luxury developments.
The ‘new’ new rich
The alpha city has seen its traditionally wealthy groups joined by those who have grown rich in a time of global financialisation, kleptocratic capitalism and the use of new financial instruments and rent-seeking tech platforms as effective methods for making massive personal fortunes. London has been keen to lure this group and, more particularly, their cash.
Changes in the sources of the wealth among the city’s rich offer a barometer of changes in the global economy. Those changes, from the dominance of coal, steel and cotton in the nineteenth century to the role played by finance, tech and media today, can be mapped onto the city’s alphahoods and the architecture of new waves of development that show distinctive contemporary displays of taste and untrammelled money power. Over time these displays and the rich themselves appear to have become more privately oriented, whereas many among the wealthy of a hundred or so years ago would signal their standing through social and political contributions.
The idea that a crusty, outmoded and undemocratic elite has given way to the benefit of ‘self-made’ (the scare quotes are important!) money belies the many contributory factors such as good fortune, selection processes in major corporate outfits (based on schooling or social networks), the use of leverage from monopoly rentier positions, or indeed criminal acts that help to game or infiltrate the system. The rich often occupy a structural position that must be filled while believing no one else capable of doing what they do. Many of them come from a kind of vampiric cluster whose wealth is primarily generated by their ability to draw massive income from their control over capital, property and intellectual property. This group is unchallenged, untaxed and over here. A small coterie of alpha cities are engaged in a competition to attract them, driven by a number of enabling political and economic groups and key individuals.
How might the social location of London’s new money be best described? The traditional class types – working, middle and upper – feel increasingly quaint and unsuited to making sense of the long tail of riches that now extends celestially upwards. Certainly any sense of class or identity founded on traditional measures of occupation, political affiliation or income will not get us far in understanding the gulf between the social top and bottom, and, critically, the ways in which massive advantage and money power are becoming concentrated among the rich. One way to gain some purchase here is simply to follow the money, looking at the sources and systems that deliver such pronounced benefits to such a small group.
Dead Space
This means tackling two key issues head on: first, the question of power captured in the idea of an elite itself; second, how we understand its influence on the urban settings in which it is located. Clearly there are numerous overlaps here, as money connects with other affiliations, institutions, identities and industry sectors. None of this answers the question of whether an upper or ruling class, or an establishment, still exists, or if it does whether it remains influential. However, we can see is that in many cases old money has become adjunct and facilitator to the new capitalists.
