East-West

by Unknown

It’s just the kind of thing to give the London broadsheet journalists who managed to view it the vapours. They implied it was vulgar, overpriced and other (every effort had been made to ensure the owners never met ordinary Brits. Their cars were brought up in a lift from the underground car park. They never touched a pavement). These considerations didn’t stop the Ukrainian mining tycoon Rinat Akhmetov paying one hundred and thirty-six million pounds – the most ever paid for an apartment anywhere at the time, so the Candy brothers’ publicity said – for a double-sized penthouse affair. Apparently he’s spending another fifty million on the interior.

  Last year a new Knightsbridge hotel, the Bulgari, was opened opposite One Hyde Park by the Italian-jewellery brand Bulgari. Bulgari is popular in Middle Eastern and Asian Big-Money markets. Reviewing the Bulgari’s restaurant, A. A. Gill, The Sunday Times’s restaurant critic, set the scene by describing Knightsbridge as ‘about as prestigious as a multi-storey car park after a tramp’s bladder infection convention. The hotel sits obliquely opposite those two blocks of flats that boast they are the most expensive square feet in the world. But what this burb does have is a drug dealer’s sensitivity, an adoration of cost without the faintest concept of worth’. He described the Bulgari Hotel’s own style as ‘post-minimal megalomaniac’s mausoleum’ and called it ‘a laughable temple of waste’. The new Knightsbridge is probably impervious to this sort of thing; the new people – mostly absentees anyway – aren’t fretting over British broadsheets. If they did hear about it, they’d put it down to jealousy.

  Over the course of the nineties, Sloane Street, starting from the Knightsbridge end, became a major shopping street, completely lined with global luxury-brand shops. The same shops as in Fifth Avenue, the Champs Elysées in Paris, Serrano in Madrid and the Via Monte Napoleone in Milan. And the twenty-first-century Bond Street. Designer-brand shops from Milan, Paris and New York – very few of them from London. It was fantastic for Sloane Street’s grand landlord, the Cadogan Estate, as rentals shot up. Like other parts of Super-Prime Big London, Knightsbridge had achieved lift-off, up and away from the rest of the city – let alone the rest of Britain – and into that strange airborne continent that Robert Frank called ‘Richistan’.

  Design for Living

  Bloomsbury is one place where you’d expect most of the locals to get Lesley Green’s 1906 Russell Square Tube Station. They’d get the design references – a strong Arts & Crafts undertone with faintly Frenchy top-notes. They’d get the ox-blood faience tiles, they’d understand the arched windows above. Bloomsbury is London’s absolute epicentre of early twentieth-century design understanding, of visual nuance-getting. There’s the huge presence of London University all around. There’s the LSE further down in Houghton Street. Then there’s the generalized miasma of the Bloomsbury industry: biographies, films, TV and picture books on Charleston. There’s the British Museum, the Architectural Association’s school in Bedford Square. There’s the cultish Brunswick council block of 1972, gentrifying at a lick, as its former council flats get bought by architects and art directors. It’s hectically architectural in every sense. It’s very late eighteenth century in its core architecture, the great Bedford Estate squares (Bedford, Bloomsbury, Russell), and the wonderfully long, narrow, sooty, London-brick Gower Street. And it’s festering with blue plaques. More than practically anywhere. Many of them for the Bloomsburys, of course.

  Towering over it all is Senate House, the University of London’s power centre. When it was built in 1936 it was London’s second tallest building after St Paul’s Cathedral. A curious sort of short skyscraper, a mix of New York and Euro totalitarian. It’s by Charles Holden, the star architect of the Piccadilly Line. (It featured in the film of George Orwell’s 1984 as the Ministry of Truth. Orwell thought it was the visual metaphor for modern repression.) I first thought about living in Bloomsbury in the late eighties. It was central, historic and architecturally delicious. I assumed you’d only got to ask and you’d get a range of grandly seedy first- and second-floor flats in the best squares served up by eager agents. But there seemed only to be one agent, the interestingly named Frank Harris, and he didn’t have anything like that to sell, because the squares weren’t for people. They were completely sewn up between London University and other Good Works and knowledge-industry institutions. Plus lawyers, everywhere. They couldn’t be privatized, buzzed up. I gave up and went to Marylebone.

  But I was looking again in 2011 and by then Bloomsbury had developed a bit of a property market in one corner. And a bit of a smart street scene around Lamb’s Conduit Street featuring several clothes shops and restaurants suitable for youngish types who’ve had a design education. The Bloomsbury look is very distinctive, different from the Shoreditch look, its younger art-school cousin, or its more self-consciously rich, sharp, Regency Buckish relation, the New Savile Row style.

  The new Lamb’s Conduit Street look for men – interestingly there’s not so much for women – combines a whiff of Fabian fell-walking – strong shoes and thick tweed – with several decades of New Design references. Oliver Spencer at No. 62, for instance, has jackets called ‘Navigator’ – grey, five buttons, done up to the neck like a character in a Merchant-Ivory film – Signalman or Polzeath (in davenport green). Folk, over the road, feels that bit Dutch. Just like the original Bloomsburys you feel there’s a fair bit for thoughtful girls who are boys who like boys to be girls who do boys like they’re girls who do girls like they’re boys* if you get my drift. There are waistcoats – not morning-dress Correct Form or self-consciously flamboyant ones like in Jermyn St, but ones in dark, sensible tweeds and checks. Waistcoats for characters played by Mark Gatiss. Or a reader of The Chap.

  It’s a very particular style, Bloomsbury 2012, tremendously niched, but you’ve got it all aggregated successfully round here. And I can hack it. I can talk design fogey quite convincingly. I know enough to recognize a suppressed pilaster or a Coade-stone overdoor (the John Soane Museum is down off Southampton Row in Lincoln’s Inn Fields). I didn’t do history of art, let alone architecture or trad garden design, but if you ask me ‘Can you feel it?’ I’m so there.

  Updated fogey design is comfortable, reassuring, curiously classless – over-educated, rather than overbred. And it’s quite overwhelmingly Brit. It doesn’t have to be expensive either, because fogeys recognize and cherish what other, less educated eyes overlook. A nice, 1770, Cuban mahogany table with scratches and a wonky leg. An unframed lithograph by one of Frank Pick’s Tube-poster artists – Frank Brangwyn or McKnight Kauffer.

  Ben Pentreath, architect, is the poster boy for this corner of Bloomsbury. I completely see the point of his smart little shop in delicious 1730s Rugby Street just off the main drag of Lamb’s Conduit Street, even though I’m a bit more vulgarly Mayfair Modish by instinct. I like its combination of eighteenth-century vernacular, Eric Ravilious prints and fifties Penguin taste. Ben Pentreath – his Ben Pentreath Ltd website says ‘shop’, ‘inspiration’, ‘interiors’ and ‘architecture’ on its smartly retro homepage and among his posts are ‘To Garsington’ and ‘House and Garden in the Early Sixties’ – seems to be consolidating a particular band of taste. Could he become the Cath Kidston of the design-educated classes? For Men. He is an architect and a retailer, a man with an eye and several missions in life: one of them, for instance, is to bring back loose rush-matting. This corner of Bloomsbury’s mini-boom is built on the fight-back against bankers, bling-aggressive development and boiling globalism. There are practically no Middle-Easterners or Russians – and not many breeders either because there’s not much in the way of private gardens. Bloomsbury is about design-conscious singletons and Dinkys. Ben Pentreath – and don’t judge him too hastily for it – oversees the Prince of Wales’s Poundbury development, roundly hated by most architects as pastiche. (Poundbury strikes a blow for Old Vernacular and Ben Pentreath says that it’ll wear in nicely, look populated and humanized and altogether better as it ages.)

  Pentreath says the dead h
and of the university killed the rest of Bloomsbury, but Lamb’s Conduit Street and the local landlord, the Rugby Estate, have provided that little quantum of solace for people like him. As we sit outside I see a) a friend who runs the design bit at the British Council, b) her architect friend who runs a practice with an interesting name and c) two West End gallerist friends (strictly contemporary) who’d crept away to plot. The following morning I told my architects, Steven and Will, I’d been in Lamb’s Conduit Street. ‘We really like Oliver Spencer’, they say.

  Heaven SW7

  South Kensington is a deeply reassuring country of the mind. I lived in South Kensington, off the Old Brompton Road – five minutes max from South Ken Station – from 1979 to 1989. Two floors in Cranley Gardens. Originally a classic case of Stagnant Gardens, SW7, 1870-ish stucco, with lots of multiple bell sets, and ‘hotels’ down the Old Brompton Road end, Cranley Gardens was originally tattier than Onslow Gardens to the East, though architecturally identical. The late William Rushton, the cheery Private Eye cartoonist, lived in the Edwardian mansion block above Christie’s in Old Brompton Road back then, which should give you a heads-up on the style of the place in the eighties.

  I’d bought the flat from the actor David Hemmings, but the whole thing was done through agents. When I eventually met him, a few months later, only thirteen years after his golden-boy performance in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), based on the sixties star photographer David Bailey, the one who made love daily, I was shocked to see he’d become Caligula. He was heavy, baggy, so theatrically corrupt-looking, you were almost waiting for him to take the rubber mask off.

  Our house was quite a Cut Above at first. Just three big two-floor flats (nobody in London said duplex then). Not cut up into tiny flats. A morose bachelor doctor – fabulously untidy – was on the two floors above me. A lady casting director from the films, above that (the first time I went to the Beverly Hills Hotel I found her on one of the pool loungers). But while I was in Cranley Gardens in the later, post-Big Bang eighties, clever developers started making smart two-floor flats for the new banker boys, all fixed up. The show flats were done in Instant New Sloane, with antiques and chintz. Our house looked positively dowdy beside them.

  I was still using the Tube, off and on, at the beginning of my South Ken decade. I worked in Westminster by then, behind Victoria Street, in the God and Government quarter, very near where they built the Channel 4 building in Horseferry Road. I’d been terribly excited by the idea of Westminster, but was it ever boring – Victoria Street was just like Croydon: dull shopping, dull corporate headquarters and dull Government buildings, mostly late sixties).

  But I loved my ride to St James’s Park Station, set in Charles Holden’s 1928 London Transport headquarters building. South Ken Station – a first-generation Victorian chuffer station, but refaçaded by Leslie Green in 1906 – had an arcade of real shops, including the Anglo-Persian Carpet Company, which sold serious rugs and carpets. The station was completely woven into Old Brompton Road life, always faintly tired, never Chelsea- or Belgravia-smart, but never full-on Earl’s Court tacky either. It was Tottering-By-Gently country with, even then, a fair few Euro-types around. Thierrys and Hugues with heavy hair. Because of the local population there was something inexplicably clubby about the station, about the relaxed way even the young Sloanes – technically wage-slave commuters in late twentieth-century mass transport – treated it. Girl Sloanes on the Tube – the girls often got off at Green Park to work in the Cork Street galleries or do directors’ lunches then – were still the girls who’d given us the first line of the original Harper’s & Queen Sloane Ranger article, ‘Look, Caroline, there’s Caroline’.

  The whole Sloane world was moving on while I was in South Ken. The Big Bang and those smart flats were pushing them out. Married Sloanes were going South. The pioneers went to Clapham and Battersea – the first seventies/eighties breeder territories – and then way out into deeper South London. They went to Wandsworth and beyond, to the very Tooting/Balham borders. Their children, born in the late eighties, are, some of them, sharing in Shoreditch now. If they’re lucky, they’re in Pimlico.

  Now, South Ken is getting seriously international and expensive. Mainly because of the Frogs; it’s France’s sixth city, or something like that. Practically every thirty-something French haut-bourgeois City-banker boy in London and his missus want to live there (overflowing to neighbouring Earl’s Court and Pimlico) The sixteenth arrondissement has decanted to London. They like the 1860s stucco, the Lycée, the museums. And Bute Street – our original little street of butchers and bakers and cheery cheap Thai and Indian restaurants – has gone bilingual now. And, of course, they like Christie’s South Ken acution rooms on Old Brompton Road. It’s not as expensive as the St James’s global-money auction rooms in King Street. In South Ken the general Christie’s catalogues still say ‘interior’ rather than ‘important’ pictures and furniture. They’re nice things for decoration – five to twenty thousand, rather than millions.

  Today South Ken seems cleaner and that bit sleeker, and the Euro-trash migration means houses and flats are more seriously expensive too. Polished up. But it’s still not exactly that buffed or chic. It hasn’t changed utterly in the way, say, Notting Hill, has over the same period. It still looks comfortable, familiar, a nice buffer zone between the Global Plutocratic villas in the adjoining Boltons, SW5, or the bankers bought-up reaches of Serious Chelsea and Heavy Kensington, W8. In Heavy Kensington, all the Philimore Estate big houses seem to have been rebuilt for Super-Money types behind the façades (they say all that digging out for swimming pools is affecting the water table there). And it’s an aesthetic world away from the full horror of twenty-first-century Knightsbridge.

  Terminally Tacky

  Earl’s Court is hugely well connected. The big old Victorian District Line Tube Station – redesigned by Harry Ford and Leslie Green for the Piccadilly and Brompton opening in 1906 – is practically a terminus in its in own right. South-west London changes there for everywhere. Heathrow, of course, but also the deep Hackett and Boden comfort of Richmond, Ealing and Wimbledon at the ends of the District line too. Lovely upper-middle suburbia. Rugby-loving country.

  Earl’s Court is world famous for a sort of Midnight Cowboy transient tackiness. The picture is of the hopelessly rackety Earl’s Court Road, with its ratty little restaurants, and its very historic patterns of immigration – Aussies! Gays! Everyone else! Kangaroo Valley! Leather Lane! (The Australians seem to have gone home, the gays have gone to Southwark.) Earl’s Court is for people you can’t quite place. Young couples with battered luggage.

  Earl’s Court seems resolutely, almost perversely unimproveable. It looks beyond gentrification, twinned forever with Praed Street in Paddington and Vauxhall Bridge Road, Victoria, in terminus blight. It’s a complete con, of course. Earl’s Court doesn’t want, doesn’t need a moment more gentrification. Just plot its location. SW5 shades into South Ken at around Ashburn Place, where 5 becomes 7. Just up the Earl’s Court Road on the smarter east side, it shades into the impossibly expensive cluster of roads with extra big Italianate villas called the Boltons (the Little Boltons, Tregunter Road, etc.). Average house price: fifteen million pounds plus.

  ‘Edgy’ Earl’s Court borders stonking wealth and relates directly to the Home Counties’ sunlit uplands and beyond. There isn’t an echt working-class area in sight; you’d have to get across to Fulham’s rough North End Road for that (more than a mile away). This after all is where Earl Spencer bought his daughter Diana a flat, back in 1980. (Coleherne Court, as you might expect, is now seriously expensive: average flat price – pushing three million pounds).

  The Midnight Cowboy Ratso-ness of the main drag tells you nothing about the streets behind: those huge, rather dark Edwardian mansion blocks, and yet more Italianate-stucco Kensingtonial houses with big flats – Earl’s Court Square’s houses have spectacularly big rooms.

  The smarter Earl’s Court residents, a combination of ol
der haut-Bohemian upper-middle-class people and their successors, pioneer Euro-trash bankers, talk up the ratty multiculti street scene, but they know they’re five minutes from the Lycée and Bute Street. In other words Earl’s Court remains perfectly safe for Earls and their children, though still not as expensive as South Ken. If you’ve got somewhere nice to go to at the weekend and smart shopping just up the road, why should you care how many bureaux de change and insanitary-looking little restaurants there are round the corner?

  If you want to see Earl’s Court in action, go to the Troubadour, the Veteran Folk Club on Old Brompton Road. The Troubadour was originally founded in 1954 (they say Dylan played there in the sixties). Its original decoration – early agricultural implements with the Woody Guthrie feel – is wonderfully, assiduously preserved, but you won’t see a single old bearded folky there. For the last twelve or so years, since it was carefully rethought by a couple of (good regiment) ex-army marketing men, the Troubadour, like the Firehouse Club in Cromwell Road, has been heaving with cool Sloanes. Have Sam and Dave been there? You know they have.

  My widowed great-aunts, my grandmother’s older sisters, lived together in one of those ratty, tall, Italianate-stucco Earl’s Court houses in their final years. I discovered the maple-seed game there at six, sending them helicoptering down from the top floor to the small garden below. In my mind’s eye, it’s Patrick Hamilton territory, but the truth is I can’t remember what they or the house looked like inside, just that everybody was a bit shuddery about Earl’s Court when I asked them.*

  One of my Earl’s Court spies, the art-gallery owner Jonathan Ross, says I’m being too cynical and that it remains eternally transient. The Australians may have gone and the legendary gay pub, the Coleherne, famous for its leathered-up customers and the row of hustlers outside, may have been replaced with a gastro pub, but there’s always a new group. Many more South-east Asians have arrived, he says, including a cluster of Thai ladyboys who twitter around in the supermarkets.