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 and using strategic marriage as a means of entering the upper social echelons, helping to access and reproduce new and dynastic wealth. This could not be done from a distance and without proximity to the kinds of connections and institutions that were only to be found in London.
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
