In the twenty five years that followed, Pimlico remained to a large extent a working class enclave with a few islands of wealth such as Dolphin Square and Morpeth Mansions. Situated between Westminster, St James Park, Buckingham Palace, Belgravia and Chelsea; Pimlico was bordered on the south-side by the River Thames. On the opposite banks of the river was Nine Elms and the glowering Battersea Power Station.
At the beginning of the nineties with the pressure of London’s burgeoning population and growing prosperity, the face of Pimlico began to change. Strategically placed at the very heart of London it became a desirable place to live, especially those homes with fine Victorian façades in the half mile square area between Saint Georges Drive, Sutherland Street, Warwick Way and Lupus Street. These were progressively bought, renovated and transformed into much sought after homes and appartments.
Then, the Westminster City Council and other housing institutions sold off their properties, which over the course of two decades went from being affordable rented accommodation for Pimlico’s post-War population, composed mostly of working and lower middle class residents, to the homes of a growing class of younger West End and City professionals.
Victorian homes that had been sold for six hundred pounds in 1950, went for three to four million in 2015, and council flats that sold for sixty thousand in 1990 went for six hundred thousand. The whole district became gentrified with mews flats and mansions sold for fortunes.
When Jack Reagan went into property after selling his engineering firm, he had without realizing it struck a goldmine. Having lived in Pimlico for the best part of his life he had quite naturally chosen the district for investing his capital and by 2015, he had become a very wealthy man.
It had taken him years of hard word to build up his engineering business and when it was bought by a Finnish group it netted him near ten million pounds, which he immediately put into property. A decade and a half of investing carefully, judiciously buying and selling, had made him a rich man as the value of certain of his properties rose five fold.
B
attersea Power Station – architect’s image
With interest rates at an all time low Reagan borrowed to invest. and turned his attention to Nine Elms where first he bought flats at Riverlight Quay, then in the Battersea Power Station development where he signed options on off-plan homes in what was incongruously called Switch House West, on the lateral flank of the vast building’s main turbine hall, bringing the total value of his property portfolio to more than one hundred million pounds.
By leveraging his loans he increased his acquisitions and hence the potential added value. As time passed he became more prudent, but logically he could not see how property values in that golden rectangle as he called it: between Westminster Bridge and Battersea Bridge to the south, flanked by Buckingham Palace Road and Victoria Street to the north with some overflow into Belgravia, could possibly fall.
In Victorian and Edwardian times, when those large town houses had been built, the district had prospered. Those properties had been owned by the upper middle and upper classes with their live-in servants. With WWI those classes were hard hit and there was a move to suburbia with the development of train services from Victoria Station.
The arrival in 1926 of the huge smoke belching Battersea Power Station in the Nine Elms district, on the south bank of the Thames between Battersea Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge, did nothing to discourage the flight to a suburban ideal. From Grosvenor Embankment, on the north side of the Thames, what looked like the flames of hell were visible once darkness fell and throughout the night the deep sound of rumbling and clanking could be heard in Pimlico. Coal was unloaded from barges around the clock to feed the boilers that produced the steam to drive the turbines, generating the electricity for the capital, and the clinker shipped down the river to provide landfill and raw material for cement works.
The power station was finally shut down in 1983, and for the next twenty years the site languished; the focus of seemingly endless speculation and financial scandals as it changed hands from one would be promoter to another.
A little further east of the power station, towards Vauxhall Bridge, Nine Elms, a derelict industrial zone with its railway station and sidings, gasworks, waterworks, industries and warehouses, was up for grabs. In 2000, the vast one hundred and ninety five hectares brownfield site was set for one of the greatest urban transformations central London had ever seen. Much larger than Hyde Park and situated less than a mile upstream from the Houses of Parliament the site was ideal location for new office space. Together with hotel and residential developments it would form the core of a new business district adjacent to the iconic SIS Building otherwise known as MI6, which was completed in 1995.
1. Petula Clark a pop singer who came to fame in the sixties
LONDON
As the likes of Kennedy, Barton, Reagan and O’Connelly got richer, millions of Britons became poorer. Since the start of the millennium the lucky ones saw a prodigious rise in the value of their assets, which after a brief moment of fear in 2008-2009, recovered, going from strength to strength as new players from Asia entered the market pushing up bidding pressure.
In less than two decades, many rich and wealthy Chinese were propelled onto the world scene, out of the blue, as if by magic, from nowhere. The most visible were the founders of mega businesses such as Dalian and Alibaba who had accumulated staggeringly huge fortunes. This success, to varying degrees, was replicated one hundred fold, with the emergence of a new order of very high worth individuals, whose fortunes stood between several hundreds of millions and a billion or two dollars. A truly spectacular metamorphose with an entirely new business class emerging, bringing with it huge buying power.
Unheard of Chinese businesses were buying companies, manufacturing plants, trade marks and real estate. Their owners jetted into London, Paris, Frankfurt, Rome, all desirable locations from which they could watch over their investments grow from the comfort of their own luxurious homes.
The London property market expanded at an exponential rate and in the wake of very wealthy buyers, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of individuals capable of buying prime properties and other assets appeared.
The emergence of this class of nouveaux-riches investors was a global phenomena, armed with seemingly limitless capacity to invest in property, they flooded into European cities and London in particular. These newcomers transformed London into a brash mega-city as they poured their wealth into the capital and the privileged south-east corner of the England.
At the same time large swaths of the UK were bypassed, ignored, as if they were inexistant, regions devastated by decades of deindustrialisation and decline. As to London’s working classes, they were even less financially secure than before the Great Recession, having on average less than a week’s pay set aside for emergency needs. A third of the population was unable to afford adequate housing with young especially hard hit by falling wages, forcing large numbers into debt and enduring economic hardship.
With a total of twenty seven million households in the UK, the net incomes of the top decile was some ten times that of the lowest. Apart from the mega rich, the majority of the supposedly privileged top decile enjoyed an annual income of eighty thousand pounds, which was far from allowing them to buy a family home in central London.
Sarah Kavanagh of Gutherie Plimpton told Reagan it would require an income of three hundred thousand pounds and a down payment of at least ten percent to buy a central London property worth one million pounds, that is to say a two or three bedroom flat in Pimlico.
Traditional middle classes migrated to Hampstead, Highgate, Fulham, Chiswick, Wandsworth, Clapham, Balham and beyond. The territory of the working class: Brixton, Walworth, Camberwell, Deptford and Peckham, was invaded by a wave of yuppies and urban professionals as its traditional population was pushed further and further from the centre.
The rebirth of Edwardian and Victorian well-to-do family homes in Central London
, abandoned for three generations to a postwar population of working class families and Irish immigrants, started timidly in the early eighties and reached new heights with the appearance of a new breed of owners who could count on an annual income of between two hundred and fifty thousand and one million pounds, who represented less than a quarter of one percent of all Britons.
The question begged who were they? Those who could buy such properties or the fifty thousand new one million pound appartments in gestation in and around central London.
Men like Reagan and Barton were both were non-Doms and neither actually owned property in the UK. Directly that is. They like certain other well-heeled Brits used holding companies in tax havens such as the Virgin Islands, through which properties were legally acquired. However, not all were legally speaking above board, certain non-Doms paid for their properties with funds of doubtful origin, some by fiscal evasion, others through the ill gotten gains of corruption or crime.
The City of London had become a paradise where itinerant capital could be transformed into property via offshore holdings on islands where secrecy prevailed thanks to a cascade of screen companies designed to obscure the identities of the real owners.
Reagan’s Westminster properties, like almost one in ten of his wealthy neighbours properties, were held in offshore companies dissimulated behind this impenetrable veil of secrecy. Men such as Saïf Gaddafi, the hapless son of the late dictator, had owned multimillion pound properties in the same London district through a Virgin Island company.
In Knightsbridge, visible to any passer-by, next to the luxury Mandarin Oriental Hotel - a remarkable historic Edwardian-style building, stood a discordant group of four not particularly attractive modern twelve storey glass towers. It was One Hyde Park, an astronomically expensive appartment block, a singular illustration of how the rich contrived to protect their money through offshore companies.
One of the appartments was owned by Rinat Akhmetov, a fabulously rich Ukrainian oligarch, friend of the strange spin doctor, who it was reported to have paid one hundred and thirty five million pounds for the two thousand five hundred square metre property via a holding company also located in British Virgin Islands. The oligarch’s stupefying wealth and tax optimisation methods contrasted brutally with the dramatic plight of his fellow citizens trapped between poverty and Putin’s iron fist.
It was estimated more than thirty six thousand London properties were held by offshore companies, forty percent of which were located in the British Virgin Islands, many of which were owned by oligarchs, princelings, dictators and gangsters in whose countries democracy was a dirty word.
MARK TWAIN
Every year tens of thousands of Central Americans were murdered with nearly twenty thousand in the Northern Triangle alone: a zone situated between Lake Nicaragua in the south and the Mexican provinces of Quintana Roo in the north-east and the Chiapas in the west, a deadly triangle that englobed six countries. A lot of that was to do with drug trafficking and gang warfare, but kidnapping was high on the list and a rich man like Kennedy would almost certainly attract an unhealthy attention.
It was sufficient reason for Tom Barton to be seriously concerned about Kennedy’s safety. His friend’s fascination for Central America was fraught with danger.
Kennedy was oblivious to those facts as he plunged into a collection of Mark Twain’s newspaper articles. What attracted his attention was the writer’s correspondence for the San Francisco Alta California in 1867, published in a book entitled Mark Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown in which the writer recounted his travels across Nicaragua during his voyage from San Francisco to New York.1
At that time it was another world and travelling was for the fit or the desperate. Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, had neither a weak constitution nor was he desperate. As a journalist he had the means to travel in comfort, not like those who travelled in steerage on a voyage that took weeks and cost the weakest their lives.
Pat had flown from Panama City to Managua, the departure point of his voyage of discovery, the goal of which was to explore for himself the route of the future canal.
He set from the capital in a chauffeur driven Toyota south towards Rivas, a little over one hundred kilometres, there they turned right for San Juan del Sur. The village lay in a small protected bay which had been chosen by nineteenth century shipping companies for its calm waters that were ideal for anchoring steamers offshore, offering protection for lightering cargo and passengers.
In December 28, 1866, Mark Twain with seven other passengers, after a ten day sea voyage from San Francisco on the steamer America, were on the first boat to disembark in the small Pacific port, where they continued overland on rickety diligences drawn by mules and horses for the twelve mile journey across the isthmus that separated Lake Nicaragua from the ocean.
At that time San Juan consisted of a few tumble-down wood frame shanties; a ramshackle cholera ridden landing stage that served as a transit point for passengers and goods en route between the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of America. Until 1851, it had been a sleepy fishing village, then, with the discovery of gold in California, everything changed as thousands of fortune seekers and adventurers headed West.
In 2015, Kennedy discovered a surfers paradise with its unspoilt beaches, hotels, restaurants and tourist musts. There was little point in lingering and Pat instructed the driver to continue to La Virgen situated on the banks of Lake Nicaragua, less than half an hour by car, a journey that had taken Mark Twain three and a half hours through a landscape he described as:
‘bright, fresh green on every hand, the delicious softness and coolness of the air the interest of unknown birds and flowers and trees.... Many of the trees were starred all over with pretty blossoms. There was no lack of vegetation, and occasionally the balmy air came to us laden with a delicious fragrance. We passed two or three high hills, whose bold fronts, free from trees or shrubs, were thickly carpeted with softest, greenest grass—a picture our eyes could never tire of. Sometimes birds of handsome plumage flitted by, and we heard the blythe songs of others as we rode through the forests. But the monkeys claimed all attention. All hands wanted to see a real, live, wild monkey skirmishing among his native haunts. Our interest finally moderated somewhat in the native women; the birds; the calabash trees, with their gourd-like fruit; the huge, queer knots on trees, that were said to be ants’ nests; the lime trees; and even in a singular species of cactus, long, slender and green, that climbed to the very tops of great trees, and completely hid their trunks and branches, and choked them to death in its winding folds—so like an ugly, endless serpent; but never did the party cease to consider the wild monkey a charming novelty and a joy forever.’
The writer went on to describe the four hundred passengers on horseback, muleback, and in four-mule diligences, as the wildest, raggedest and most uncouth procession he had ever seen.
S
an Juan – Nicaraguan Pacific Coast
Arriving at La Virgen, to the south of Rivas, Pat, from a small lakeside jetty, contemplated the dark form of Concepción, the huge volcano that rose out of Maderas Ometepe Island. It looked menacing as a sharp squall whipped up the waves under as a bank of dark clouds scuttered across the otherwise blue sky.
According to plan a fast boat had been hired to take him across the lake to San Carlos, following the nineteenth century passage taken by Mark Twain and the planned route of the canal. The distance was over one hundred kilometres, a steady journey of six or seven hours, there were no towns of interest on the Island or on the south shore of the lake.
Settling down Pat soon tired of the monotonous view of the lake and the volcanoes. He pulled out Twain’s account of his journey and started to read:
The Daily Alta California, March 16, 1867
New Year’s Day.
Out of the midst of the beautiful Lake Nicaragua spring two magnificent pyramids, clad in the softest and richest green, all flecked with shadow and sunshine, whose summits pierc
e the billowy clouds. They look so isolated from the world and its turmoil—so tranquil, so dreamy, so steeped in slumber and eternal repose. What a home one might make among their shady forests, their sunny slopes, their breezy dells, after he had grown weary of the toil, anxiety and unrest of the bustling, driving world. These mountains seem to have no level ground at the bases but rise abruptly from the water. There is nothing rugged about them—they are shapely and symmetrical, and all their outlines are soft, rounded and regular. One is 4,200 and the other 5,400 feet high, though the highest being the furthest removed makes them look like twins. A stranger would take them to be of equal altitude. Some say they are 6,000 feet high, and certainly they look it. When not a cloud is visible elsewhere in the heavens, their tall summits are magnificently draped with them. They are extinct volcanoes, and consequently their soil (decomposed lava) is wonderfully fertile. They are well stocked with cattle ranches, and with corn, coffee and tobacco farms. The climate is delightful, and is the healthiest on the Isthmus.
Our boat started across the lake at 2 pm, and at 4 am the following morning we reached Fort San Carlos, where the San Juan River flows out—a hundred miles in twelve hours—not particularly speedy, but very comfortable.
Pat’s ride was not as comfortably sedate as the steamer described by the American writer, his was a jarringly noisy two deck river boat. Fortunately the wind had dropped as had the waves when he settled himself on the upper deck, which not only offered a better vantage point, he also avoided the spray and could relax to enjoy his reading matter and study his collection of maps.
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