“Architect, engineer, builder of your own fall
Consider Cleopatra, consider Eve and recall
How the apple and the asp were but props in the scene
How they distracted Eve and Cleo from what might have been!”
From Cleopatra Ni Machchhi by Bachchoo
Walking through the Victorian-terraced streets of Notting Hill I feel vaguely nostalgic. There is a terrace of six Victorian houses on each side of Stanley Gardens where in the late ’60s and early ’70s I lived in bed-sits there. At first, I shared a basement with a friend from Cambridge when we graduated and each got teaching jobs in London.
The building belonged to a Polish landlord. On the top floor of the five-storey house lived a painter called Praful Dave, who instantly became a friend. He had one attic room and shared his shower and bathroom with two other flats on the second and third floor. On the first floor there lived a mysterious young lady who seemed to have different Arab visitors each night and on the ground floor there was a hippy community called “The Divine Light Family”.
We spent happy days of sex, drugs, rock-and-roll and political agitation of the demonstrative and leafletting kind there. Portobello Road was the next along and it would be thronged at the weekends by the flared-trousered, flower-power international generation which believed (mistakenly as it turns out, even though Bill Gates was part of it) that it had inherited the earth.
At the end of the street was a church and we used to greet its caretaker as we passed. I lived with my then girlfriend and late wife Mala Sen for a year until the landlord said we had to go. He was selling the building. We had no legal rights to stay. At the time we called it “ethnic cleansing” because our Victorian-terraced street was being sold to rich white people and we were being forced to move from the one room we occupied to one or maybe two rooms in the further reaches of London.
Mala and I moved to South Clapham, still relatively central on the London underground and bus system, to a flat in a modest Victorian terrace. When I revisited Stanley Gardens this week and stood in the street, a middle-aged Asian man and woman emerged from the main door and got into a chauffeur-driven car. I walked up the steps to see how many people lived in that building. If it was divided into flats, as it had been in my days there, there would have been seven doorbell buttons. There was only one with an answer phone arrangement.
The old church caretaker was sitting outside his church and remembered me. “All Arabs, Russians, Indians and Pakistanis on the street now,” he said. London has become one of the property hubs of the world. Foreigners buy London property not because they intend to live here but as an investment whose value is guaranteed to grow against the rate of international inflation. It has become the property magnet for the people whom the media have taken to calling “oligarchs”. In the last few years this has meant that large swathes of central London have been bought by filthy-rich people from abroad, who acquire properties that they don’t intend to occupy or let. They may pass through or use them as holiday resorts, but their main intention is to invest their money in assets whose value is bound to multiply unless the government of the UK takes measures to regulate the property market so that housing becomes affordable for the indigenous British public.
But why would the Tory government take any such measures? The occupiers who can afford such properties bring money into the country. The election held on Thursday, May 7, brought the present Tory government to power. On Friday the 8th, these buyers swamped central London’s property market with orders of £500 million, nudging the price of property in central London up by 10 per cent.
This trend results in a new form of ethnic cleansing, only in this round the ethnically cleansed are not the bed-sit generation, the hippies and Indian artists, but the native middle and upper-middle class British.
This phenomenon has had a peculiar effect in India. According to the analysis of Nick Cohen writing in the Spectator, there has been in recent years a flood of Indian buyers of central London property at exorbitant prices. Cohen attributes the Indian government’s restriction of the amount of money that its citizens can take out of India each year to the drift of the rich to the London property market. According to Camilla Dell a property consultant, after the limit was imposed “prospective Indian clients wanting to buy something in London put their deals on hold. But they soon found ways of getting round the restrictions”.
Indian readers will accurately speculate on these “ways of getting round the restrictions” and I am sure finance minister Arun Jaitley’s department has some insights into the phenomenon. The transfer of London property to these phantom-occupiers has had a peculiar effect on London. The city centre was and is thronged by tourists for most times in the year, except for the dreariest winters. Parliament Square and the South Bank, Trafalgar Square, Piccadilly Circus and the shopping centres of Oxford Street and Covent Garden are, of course, crowded with international visitors — and international chains of coffee shops and restaurants have established themselves in these central areas. The richer residential patches of central London where tourists have no business have become ghost towns.
The drift of the middle classes and young British, who can find the money to buy or rent a room or a flat, to the areas which were once poor slums has seen a transformation. The streets of areas such as Peckham or Walthamstow have again acquired the feel of artisan villages with thriving restaurants and cafes, boutique shopping and even shops selling antiques for the home and arts.
