and the French. Many of the new rich live in the wonderful homes and massive mansions that were built on earlier waves of wealth. They include Lakshmi Mittal, who lives in what is known as the Taj Mittal on Kensington Palace Gardens, Roman Abramovich, Leonard Blavatnik, Alisher Usmanov, China’s richest businessman Wang Jianlin, the Sultan of Brunei, Tamara Ecclestone and John Hunt, who owns the elite estate agency Foxtons. Next to Regent’s Park live the Sultan of Oman, the Prince of Brunei and members of the Saudi royal family, in the enormous ‘lodges’ and terraces created by the Prince Regent’s architect John Nash in the early nineteenth century.
In areas like Highgate and Hampstead many of the mansions built by people who made their fortunes in soap, coal and brewing have been bought by wealthy Russians, who tend to live much more privately than did the patrician but ultimately short-lived wealth dynasties that built the residential landscape on the ridge. Athlone House, which was originally built by a financier, became a care home between 1955 and 2003, when it was sold to the Kuwaiti royal family. It was recently bought for £65m by the head of the private investment company Alfa, Mikhail Fridman, who started out as a construction engineer. Like many homes in the key alphahoods, the property was purchased from offshore. Adjacent to Athlone is Beechwood House – one of at least two residences in and around London belonging to billionaire Alisher Usmanov (metals and mining, a stake in Arsenal, with another home in Surrey at Sutton Place). It was previously owned by members of the Saudi and then Qatari royal families.
Perhaps the key home here is Witanhurst. With its sixty-five rooms it is the second largest home in England after Buckingham Palace, yet still apparently not large enough for Andrei Guriev (fertilisers), who bought the property using a company (Safran Holdings) registered in the British Virgin Islands, and then reportedly expanded the building to include underground car parking and a massive indoor pool and cinema.
London has become a world increasingly made by and for the new rich. Yet few of them are fully or even mostly resident in the city. Today, instead of retreating to a rural pile as their forebears did, they are more likely to be found in other tax-efficient cities, such as Geneva, Dubai or Monaco, or in homelands around the world such as India, the UAE, Pakistan, Nigeria, Lebanon or Israel. While the city’s new rich are a hyper-mobile group who circulate between many places critical to their tastes and needs, many of them still see London as the key place to engage with others in the wealth bloc – building alliances, advancing business opportunities, and drawing on its uplifting arrangements and configurations of people, places and experiences that London alchemically brings together.
If the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie initially struggled to join the ranks of society, their co-opting of and co-presence in the city eventually became a means of bypassing the strategies of class closure or rejection on the part of the ruling elites. Similar processes have occurred in more recent decades. In the 1970s, when London was on its knees, money talked louder than social networks, while snobbery regarding who was part of society faded by necessity, as new entrants like the oil-rich Arabs came to take up residence in areas like Knightsbridge and Mayfair.
The Clermont Club, a gambling house set up by the middle-class entrepreneur John Aspinall, was the setting for what some have identified as the kind of no-rules capitalism that pervaded the city in the 1980s, and in which new players could enter and vie for power outside of the establishment rules. The Mayfair ‘set’ offer an interesting case study of the changing power structures as London shifted away from being an imperial force in the post-war period. Key figures like James Goldsmith, Jim Slater, Tiny Roland and the founder of the SAS, David Stirling, adopted a vision of the UK as a fading imperial power whose gentlemanly capitalism and establishment were being undermined by complacency and adherence to rules. In this context, shareholder seizures of company control and asset stripping proved an effective means of wresting power and generating remarkable if sometimes short-lived fortunes. The group appeared to be anti-establishment while adopting a kind of retrotopic vision of Britain as a nation that could restore its economic pre-eminence at least for those prepared to risk their own and others’ capital. The story bears some relationship to the contemporary impression of new money and anti-establishment elites who, in order to usurp power, have sought to use Brexit as a means to construct a narrative of a country in decline.
Today’s alpha rich are not a mono-form power bloc. Identifiable sub-groups are clustered by nationality (the British, of which there are still many; Russians, Hong Kongers, Emiratis and so on), source of wealth (commodities, energy, food and brewing, media), and industry sector (finance, development, industry). Most of the new money has emerged in recent decades, rather than being dynastic. Where some proclaim a more porous and meritocratic corporate world rewarding a new generation of go-getters and innovators, others have charted shifts in the scale, intensity and asymmetrical reward systems of the global economy. These changes have had the effect of producing many new entrants to the wealth elite, often with relatively little effort on their part, facilitated by state monopoly positions, tax evasion, offshore finance and, in some cases, dubious or criminal trade.
A portrait of London’s wealthiest can be painted in miniature by examining media reports of the owners of apartments at One Hyde Park, the epitome of the city’s contemporary wealth elite and the destination of the spoils from many mineral and energy-rich countries.2 This development, in which apartments are frequently purchased via an offshore company, transformed the fortunes of the Candy Brothers, Nick and Christian, one of whom himself owns an apartment in what has been described as the only ultra-prime development in the city. From a variety of sources we can learn something of what others have described as the ‘shadowy’ residents of the development. There are eighty apartments in this opulent, semi-fortified block that sits a stone’s throw from Harvey Nichols, perhaps two from Harrods.
The wealth of One Hyde Park’s residents appears to be based almost solely on new money, made from privatised energy fields, from the monopoly control of telecommunications, real estate, pharmaceuticals, oil, property, gambling, and, allegedly in some cases, from organised criminal involvement. The list of nationalities is long, including Russians and those from Lebanon, Malaysia, Australia, Qatar, Nigeria and Taiwan, among others. Only one UK national has been reported to live there, other than Christian Candy, who bought duplex penthouse D for an estimated $270m.
One Hyde Park represents the top tier, the billionaire metropolis in miniature. Across the city, the estimated number of such masters of the universe is almost a hundred. This is a small number of singularly powerful individuals who have a high impact in social, economic and political terms. Among London’s billionaires are Brits like Jim Ratcliffe, James Dyson and Philip Green. In addition, Russians such as Roman Abramovich, Oleg Deripaska and Alisher Usmanov are a significant group, as are those from the Middle East and East Asia. They are courted by politicians but often avoided by journalists, who have become fearful of litigation. Such figures are able to construct a world for themselves, a city whose social order and economic underpinnings are designed to place no obstacles in their way.
Many will point out that the alpha rich are also notable for their demonstrations of largesse. Certainly the use of personal foundations and charitable giving has become significant, but this remains paltry when compared with the scale of personal wealth. It is also the case that the British super-rich are significantly less generous than their US equivalents, though some have managed to make a mark on the apparently public world of the city’s galleries and museums. For example, Lord Ashcroft reportedly has the largest collection of Victoria Cross medals in the world, estimated to be worth more than £30 million, and paid the £5m needed to build the Ashcroft wing at the Imperial War Museum, in which they could be housed. He is also Chancellor of Anglia Ruskin University. Anthony Bamford has given millions to the Conservative Party and some tens of thousands to charity.
New and international wealth seeks a place in the city by selective giving in order to build reputation and acceptability. In a recent profile of Len Blavatnik, the Financial Times reported that he paid £41m for his mansion in Kensington Palace Gardens in order to assist his entry into the London elite. In the process he reputedly purchased the advice of a lord and a knight. Blavatnik has
