Losing our heritage

Surely, I said, the RAF cannot have bombed them all. No, she said: it was the ‘economic miracle’ which had done for them. Wealthy West Germans had spent the 1960s bulldozing fuddy-duddy old houses and building nice modern chalet bungalows in their place.

Soon we will be able to give the same answer in response to the question, why is there not a single fireplace or original architrave left in the whole of Chelsea, Kensington or Hampstead? The answer is London’s own economic ‘miracle’. The City is so wealthy now that you cannot show off your wealth simply by buying a nice house and living in it: you have to gut it and fill it with all the latest fashion accessories. Or, better still, if you want to impress your hedge-fund colleagues, demolish it and rebuild it, leaving only the façade to keep the local planners happy. One agreeable old house in Upper Phillimore Gardens was recently sold for

£12 million, before being bulldozed bar its stucco façade. It will be replaced with a concrete structure, kitted out with quartz washbasins and a kitchen floor finished in armadillo’s penis, or whatever the latest fashion statement is.

Until recently I thought the practice of disembowelling old houses had died out, the middle classes having acquired enough in the way of architectural education to appreciate old buildings and that you don’t improve them by destroying their original fittings. But apparently not. What your granny did to her semi in the 1960s — rip out the fireplaces and put in some nice practical gas fireplaces instead — is being repeated on a much bigger scale in some of London’s prime residential streets. Walk around them now and you can hardly move for the skips — many of them full of kitchens and bathrooms which were only installed a couple of years ago.