But a look in his eye suggested sudden wariness. London has always been a wealthy city, but it has seen a step-change in its fortunes in recent decades. Though right now the market is on ice and has seen the volume of sales decrease, it is still the case that numerous super-prime homes are sold each year. Many of these sales are to wealthy urban Brits but a substantial proportion, often much more than half in some neighbourhoods, go to offshore anonymous buyers through trusts, or to wealthy international investors and buyers.
Property becomes something to borrow against , buy and trade on an upward rising bubble of prices, fuelled by more speculation and borrowing, and the arrival of many more people from around the world with bundles of cash to spend. Today it is estimated that around 42, properties in London have been purchased from these sources.
He wished me good luck with the research. London is a receiver and maker of the global finance economy. Its resplendent position is derived from intertwining histories, of the industrial revolution, of fortunes made by old and new elites jostling for place in growing cities. It is a history that takes in empire, its subsequent fall and the eyeing of new opportunities in order to retain an economic, if not military, position on the global stage.
The City of London is critical to this series of changes and, with it, the political system has taken on and helped to broadcast the apparently commonsense view that what is good for this goose is good for the country more broadly.
The City is linked to other golden egg-laying entities — numerous tax havens , flows of international capital and so on. Much of this goes on in a high trust, low regulation environment designed to capture this wealth and maintain a powerful homegrown industry on the back of it. As one walks these areas, small glimpses of the incredible niceness of life at the top can be gleaned: a sense of ease, comfort and confidence.
This world has been mothballed by COVID, but lockdown for the elite is not the same thing as for everyone else: with ample space and money, they suffer the least. Walking over Charing Cross bridge one day last year I saw a wall of cranes standing above the Shell Centre. Yet this case has remained among a mere handful targeted at those laundering illicit proceeds and whatever happened to a report on Russian money in British politics?
A property investor told me he knows that there are many thousands of these cases but that they will never see the light of day. Why should politicians and police forces become overly moral about crimes where the only seeming impact is to create a market in overpriced homes? I turned back to my copy of the Guardian and read that , preventable deaths have been linked to austerity cuts to public services.
Money and investment capital is a force to be reckoned with. It propels the construction of high-rise blocks, carves out the ground beneath palatial homes by the thousands, created new super-prime residential blocks and delivered fortunes to those mediating these changes.
JCBs are left entombed inside — perhaps as many as 1, over the past two decades — not worth the cost of extracting them. Yet to suggest that the rich are an unadulterated gift to the city would be a mistake. One way of thinking about what London has become is to describe it as an alpha city. This term denotes a pre-eminent position in the global capitalist world economic and political order. But we can also use it to offer a deeper idea about what the city has become — a grasping political and economic machine whose very culture is infused with the need to maintain its position via an open faucet of global capital because, well, this will float all boats, right?
You will know this argument, but you may not be fully aware of the rotten foundations on which it stands. The city works in concert with its property lobbyists and, via appeals to the need for development and unending rounds of global capital investment, to help ride out the risks of economic downturns and reverses. Come rain or shine, the city works hard to position itself as the preferred destination of many of the international super-rich.
Yet, simultaneously, this is a city where an estimated , have lost their homes from the demolition of housing estates. The city is a site of wealth creation, but also a place in which the areas in which the rich live — its alphahoods if you will — enable social and power networks to become established in both open and shadier ways. Instead there is an idea, a sense of how the city should work and what it can deliver, and this notion galvanises and animates many tens of thousands of people who work to ensure that it is protected - because their own pay cheques rely on it.
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