East-West

by Unknown

  The global rich, increasingly, live in Mayfair. The Grosvenor Estate has been returning the best old buildings, ones that were converted to post-war offices, back into grand houses for people who won’t spend much time there. The people who look after their money – some of them astonishingly rich too – work there. And a lot of the world’s most expensive objects are sold there too. The art trade, the jewellery trade. And luxury-brand everything. London sells nearly 20 per cent of the world’s ‘fine art’, the third biggest seller after China and the USA. The largest part of that trade is in Mayfair and St James’s. Forget Shoreditch. Art has become another global asset class, like Mayfair property. You don’t have to know anything or give a toss, because there are people to do it for you. Independent curators like my sublimely elegant supremely connected Euro-friend who will introduce you to artists and dealers or take you on studio visits if you want do the tour (more likely it’ll be your wife, the guy from your private office or your decorator; you’re out making money).

  Mayfair and St James’s are absolutely humming with very superior butler types – many of them well-bred Brits. We’ve become very good at looking after the rich. Think of the butler character in Arthur, played by John Gielgud. Think of Stephen Fry as Jeeves – all enabling away, smoothing the path. They’re earning a very fair whack – as family-office men, smart estate agents or super-concierges, like the clever boys in Ben Elliot’s Quintessentially business, or as frontmen for luxury-goods companies and the rest – but they’re not usually the principals, the owners, the definably super-rich themselves. They’re super-help. The driving force is somewhere else, usually somewhere offshore.

  Mayfair and St James’s, on either side of Piccadilly and served by the two entrances of Green Park Station, often get bundled together now. There’s a new linking theme between them: those hedge funds, private equity houses and ‘family offices’. They’re the new Money District, ancient areas, taken over by the global rich. The fleeter-footed, less corporate global rich. People with their own and their family’s skin in the game.

  Dignified and Ancient: St James’s

  St James’s is thick with Importance and Royalty. The dignified rather than the efficient. It’s more than just anciency, though it is, most of it, pretty old. It makes you feel, in a completely fraudulent way, that your own mission there might be that much more important. ‘Important’ is the word senior auctioneers like Christie’s – their headquarters are in King St, St James’s – use for old objects and pictures which are going to be quite stonkingly expensive. ‘Important’ is, say, a Chippendale (big-brand) commode, made originally for a major toff (hence provenance and historic interest) in a singular design (where craft becomes art) with only one known companion piece (in another grand house or major national collection). ‘Important’ is a full-length stunna of a late-eighteenth-century beauty in costume, as in Lady X as Diana the Huntress by Gainsborough or Reynolds.

  ‘Important’ is code for ‘You’re in a world where million-pound prices are commonplace; are you cool with that?’ The Big Art market on either side of Piccadilly is important. (Mayfair has Sotheby’s and Cork Street; St James’s has Christie’s and all the dealer streets around it.) The money there is big and getting bigger. The buyers come from everywhere. It’s increasingly Monopoly-board money, asset-class money. It’s all about investment now.

  Historically Mayfair did modern (starting with Cork Street in the thirties) and St James’s was more trad. Jay Jopling’s original White Cube Gallery in Mason’s Yard has changed all that. The power base of St James’s is changing behind the façades.

  St James’s clubland looks important. Pall Mall’s row of mid-nineteenth-century palace fronts by Barry and other architectural dependables is meant to impress. Those clubs were built for the expanding upper-middle class of the military and the professions, academics and clerics, many of them pumped up by empire. They’re palaces for men who usually didn’t have their own.

  The full-on toffs clubs – the ones for men who did – are earlier and smaller: White’s, the Turf, Boodle’s and Brooks’s. Everyone’s constantly amazed at how the clubs, most of them, keep going. They’re maintaining high production values and period drama in buildings worth three thousand pounds a square foot minimum, as something else, but they still only seem to look after a few snoozy old coves in massive rooms. The occasional film-location fee and event-hosting payment can’t keep them afloat.

  The real Power Establishment, even back when Henry Fairlie wrote about it in his Spectator essay of 1955, wasn’t a gang of old Pall Mall clubmen. Real power went wider, to the great corporations, to the emerging medialand people, to Americans. But palace-fronted clubland remained tied to the notion of English gentship – an essentially middle- to upper-middle-class English idea with a romantic Victorian and Edwardian history. And so over. It’s difficult to rework the Pall Mall clubs without the gentish Not in Trade world-view – and the working lives – that drove it. You can’t discuss business and share papers in a proper gentlemen’s club. So careerists go somewhere else.

  I thought about living in St James’s. I nearly bought a flat there a couple of years ago. (Piccadilly, south side, come out of Green Park Station, right past the Ritz and right again.) I could’ve gone to Jermyn Street and Savile Row every day. I could’ve been Burlington Bertie. (‘Burlington Bertie’ was originally a successful music-hall song of 1900 about a Piccadilly and St James’s toff flâneur performed by the male impersonator, Vesta Tilley. It’s a lost Piccadilly world where ‘Everyone knows me, from Smith to Lord Rosebr’y’. But the parody version of 1915 – ‘Burlington Bertie from Bow’ by William Hargreaves, sung by his wife Ella Shields, in white-tie drag – became truly, epically famous – ‘I’m Bert, Bert, I haven’t a shirt. But my people are well off, you know.’)

  The flat I nearly bought was very St James’s. It was in an Edwardian chambers over the shop – art dealers, of course. It had a giant drawing room, smallish kitchen and three medium-sized bedrooms. The owners obviously entertained a lot with hired help – when they weren’t in their house in Norfolk or their villa in Tuscany (I don’t have either). The main bedroom was overlooked by the back of Christies’ King Street auction rooms. These well-connected Brit specialists (Old Masters, important furniture) and their Euro-trash colleagues could look right in from across the narrow street. I found this vaguely disconcerting, but the owners clearly didn’t care: they didn’t have shutters or nets. It seemed expensive and probably wasn’t. I wanted that bit more room and a better outlook; you wouldn’t care if you were only there two days a week.

  Jermyn Street, round the corner, isn’t quite what it was. It never has been. It was a branch of the Shaftesbury Avenue theatre trade, selling the glorious dream of clubman taste to club men, Anglophile Belgravia Americans, Hong-Kong millionaires and Home-Counties snobs. New & Lingwood, for instance, made a lot of having a branch in Eton and a bespoke shoe brand, Poulson and Skone. The others let you know, subtly, that top people shopped there because they Knew the Form.

  That worrying Victorian idea of genthood still hangs heavy in Jermyn Street. Most of the original shops are called X and Y, as in Harvie and Hudson, Turnbull and Asser, Hilditch and Key, and feature dull twenties wood panelling to get the tourists in the mood. The great staples and stalwarts of the gent’s wardrobe – ladder-stripe shirts, gingham ones in blues and pinks, reassuring retro materials like Sea Island cotton – feature in so many windows you suspect they must all be made in the same factory. This is where you can get every piece of self-consciously archaic gent’s furnishing – embroidered velvet slippers, smoking jackets, proper morning dress, proper white tie – all delivered in a totally non-ironic, class-correct way, with not a hint of the Shoreditch dressing-up box or the Fabian-fell-walker design tradition. The buyers and sellers are roped together in a conspiracy to carry on as if this fake Wodehouse-y exchange is all perfectly normal. The assistants go home to Bexley and put on their trainers.

  Jermyn Street
isn’t a closed community any more. Some of the biggest operators on the street are relative newcomers, like Thomas Pink, conceived in South Kensington for a younger kind of City Sloane and owned by the French luxury combine LVMH. And some – like T. M. Lewin; the M&S of the Home Counties professional classes – have windows shouting how many shirts you get for a hundred pounds. And there’s the odd bling shop like Vincci, selling the kind of ‘Italian’ looks mainly bought by Middle Easterners (very white trousers, colourful shoes with a lot of applied metal). Multiple retailers and middle-class mail-order houses have flagship shops here – for the address.

  Jermyn Street’s changed but without getting design in the process, let alone fashion. If you’re peddling the idea that all those ‘classic’ styles – mostly updated between-war staples – are so ineffably right they emerged with Creation itself, then to introduce design would be to let in light on magic. But there is cleverness and quality on the Street, working with the importance of small differences. Emmett, up the Piccadilly end, has a sort of Chelsea-buck feel – it started in the King’s Road – and much more interesting materials, used in shorter production runs. And Emma Willis, the only woman on the Street, makes better, subtler things for tall toffs.

  I’ve been going to Jermyn Street, the Arcades and Savile Row window-shopping practically since I had pocket money. And all at the same time as I was actually buying Top of the Pops clothes from the King’s Road – and later from Eurotrash Bond Street. It wasn’t just about getting gravitas at twenty-two; there was something compelling about it all, not just quality (as cheap clothes weren’t so good then), but a whole aesthetic that you knew you could rework and recombine for an altogether sharper look. And over the last thirty years a raft of businesses, firms now much larger than any of the old Jermyn Street operators, have run with that idea, pumped up that British vernacular style and those materials. Ralph Lauren, Hackett, Paul Smith – even Tommy Hilfiger – have made international businesses selling a kind of WASPy, vaguely Jermyn Street-y, Anglosphere taste back to the world. As for me, I’ve got a room stacked with thirty years of Jermyn Street shirts, cords and moleskins now. But I keep going back.

  If Jermyn Street sells class-correct taste, then Savile Row, over the other side, in Mayfair, has traditionally sold the social armour-plating of bespoke tailoring. There are all those old tailors who claim ‘Fifty years on the Row’ – old Cockneys, old Greeks, plus the odd young woman working down there in the basement windows. But New Money’s utterly changed Savile Row. It’s nothing like so self-consciously archaic as Jermyn Street. New Money’s brought in fifteen-year overnight successes like Richard James and Oswald Boateng, who started locally from high-design, high-end, ready-to-wear for sharp thirty-somethings in hedge-land and property, marcoms and entertainment, and then went into bespoke because the money was there. Alongside Poole’s (established 1806) and Anderson and Sheppard (established 1906), the kinds of tailor with Royal Warrants, there are newcomers like William Hunt, who makes Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen’s Jason King revival suits with their bell-end cuffs for around three thousand pounds a pop.

  New Money and the money from multiples means much higher rents in Savile Row. It’s a hot street with a lot of entrists – and that drives the old operators out, round the corner. The tailors on the Row want to turn their practices into brands. They want to create ready-to-wear packages that they can sell into those new Chinese shopping malls. And that means big money; getting new Chinese owners, like Gieves & Hawkes did. The ancient military tailor at No. 1 Savile Row is on its second Hong-Kong Chinese owner, and is now set up with a mass of Asian licences and concessions in both new worlds of boiling money.

  The Bling Ghetto

  Knightsbridge Tube Station has two entrances, one at the Sloane Street corner and one on the corner of Hans Crescent by the side stairs and escalators entrance to Harrods. It tells you what matters round there – shopping. Knightsbridge is something of an Un-English Activity now – a key counter on the global-property Monopoly board and nothing to do with England. In Knightsbridge, properties – not houses or flats, but properties – are bought by seriously rich people who aren’t concerned to find somewhere to live – they have places everywhere (and London will never be the No.1 place for them compared to Riyadh or Kiev). These non-resident aliens often don’t even see the places they buy themselves. The family-office guy will do that. If the numbers and the tax things can be done – i.e., if it can be owned in an accommodating off-shore tax jurisdiction, then it’s fine.

  If over a fifteen-year-period, 80 per cent of the best, meaning the most expensive – irrespective of whether they’re beautiful or hideous – places in an area are bought on this basis by those kinds of people, then it changes dramatically. The prevailing tone in Knightsbridge now is silly foreign money. Silly for the size of it, absolutely dwarfing anything home-grown, and silly for the silly things it buys, the awful cartoon-y bling of it all.

  Knightsbridge has been transitioning for more than twenty-five years. It was a mid-late Victorian infill development on the park with an aristocratic and plutocratic mix – dowager marchionesses, brittle plutocrats, old Americans. It had big flats and pretty secondary squares, but nothing with the sheer heft and Cubitt architectural unity of its earlier, grander, neighbour, Belgravia, down the other end of Sloane Street. But twenty-five years ago something approaching haut-bourgeois, local, normal life could be lived in those nice tall narrow houses and big flats.

  But there was always expensive shopping and, from the early eighties on, a flush feeling. As money returned to Big London and tax rates went down, British New Money – City, advertising, property and retail – reappeared and went shopping. Knightsbridge was brilliantly located, and a familiar national proxy for rich and smart. Especially for out-of-towners.

  Then Knightsbridge went global. In 1984 the controversial Egyptian businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed bought Harrods department store. Harrods was always the defining presence of Knightsbridge, for its size and its brand, as London’s archetypal high-end department store. (Its neighbour, Harvey Nichols, was younger, more fashionista and, by the nineties, in Hong-Kong Chinese ownership and famous for its role in Absolutely Fabulous.) In 1984, however, Harrods was distinctly dull, under-invested and relatively unprofitable.

  Al-Fayed hugely expanded Harrods’ franchise. Initially he sold it to every aspiring suburb of London and beyond with powerful TV advertising. And then he got airborne, targeting the people he knew, the emerging Middle-East wealth that had started to travel to London – or to flee there – in the seventies. The traditional Harrods role – as quartermaster for the settled, couth, local rich – was ditched. High-spending New Money – particularly from the Middle East – was the future. That decision, combined with successive waves of Flight Capital and a new, more confident cohort of younger Middle-Easterners (the Saif Gaddafi generation) has made Knightsbridge unrecognizable over the last twenty years.

  Knightsbridge has a new OTT image now. The Concours d’Élégance of young Arabs in cartoony hyper-cars – Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maybachs, customized Rollers and the rest – around Harrods, and the New Cafe Society along the Knightsbridge stretch, with teens and twenties wearing full-on, luxury-brand everything out of the store window, became the style of the area. Knightsbridge went from the aspirational next step up for the upper-middles of South Ken to becoming … a bling ghetto.

  As well as completely unaffordable. Knightsbridge appealed to the biggest, loudest, most body-guarded-up kind of money (the Eastern Europeans joined up in the late nineties). It became big on the map for a mass of new global money from everywhere. Along the way it’s become less attractive to Americans and Western Europeans who, in any case, were being wildly outspent.

  More recently Knightsbridge has been defined by an extraordinary development – what people used to call a block of flats – One Hyde Park, next door to the great 1902 bulk of what had been the Hyde Park Hotel (bought and renamed as the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park Hotel by a
Hong-Kong Chinese hotel group in 1996). One Hyde Park is a new ‘business model’ for super-expensive apartments, invented by the Candy Brothers, a pair of young English property developers who Went Global practically from the start. They bought trophy sites (the Knightsbridge one, the Chelsea Barracks, the Middlesex Hospital in Mortimer Street, W1), brought in trophy architects and marketed trophy apartments globally at the newest, biggest money. They charged an extraordinary premium for them – three and four times the price per square foot of neighbouring flats and houses. Then they publicized the sales and the prices.

  The architect at One Hyde Park was the global style star Richard Rogers – or at least his practice – but still nobody seemed to like the buildings that much. The interiors were done by the Candys and their own practice in a style that came to be known as the New Knightsbridge Look. Broadly, it’s a smarter Dubai Hilton-plus-plus style with a lot of boys’-toys technology – remote-controlled everything, ostentatious security, panic rooms, bomb-proof glazing – and internationally understood branded finishes, furniture and accessories. Known-Value Items like expensive stones and marbles, fancy finishes like macassar ebony and silver leaf. Lots of off-whitey creamy, mushroomy colours in cashmere and velvet, lots of hard surfaces. And no antiques, tchotchkes or pictures. (The Candy customers don’t reckon that stuff.)