You know, I’m not sure the new, in-by-a-squeak Tory MP for Croydon, Gavin Barwell, has quite got it right when he says that ‘London is turning into Paris’, what with the rich dominating the centre and the poor pushed to the suburbs. If only. Obviously, it’s true that there’s a species of social cleansing going on in the rich boroughs but it’s more subtle than that.
I went to see my favourite facialist in Belgravia this week – she’s fabulous; she comes from the East End and her granny used to make her shoplift as a child – and the view from Motcomb Street is alarming. Because so much of it is owned by the Grosvenor Estate, it’s at the mercy of ever increasing rents – I ask you, does the Duke of Westminster actually need more money? – and the latest round has meant that the business she operates in can’t afford to stay there. They’re not alone. Annick Goutal, the French perfumers, has shifted and apparently the receivers came in to take over a linen shop nearby; it seem Starbucks is closing too, and when they go, you know something’s odd. Word is that Elizabeth Street, which has Poilâne, an outpost of the fabulous Parisian bakers, could be going the same way.
And who is left? Well, almost the only people who can afford to shop or buy property in this area are Arabs. There used to be a hefty contingent of Russians, but lots of them have gone, once sanctions started to bite in the wake of the conflict in Ukraine. (If you want to see the effect of sanctions, make for Belgravia.) Indeed one celebrity hair salon round there does a roaring trade opening all night during Ramadan – king’s ransom for a cut and dry, and tips to make your eyes water.
Now, I do realise that this neck of the woods was never what you’d call mixed – the people I used to know in Lowndes Square were rather grand Brits who kept a little flat there for the Season. But the point is that astronomic rents are turning the place into something weird and unrecognisable, dominated by one group, Arabs, and utterly unaffordable for anyone other than the super-rich – an alien and alienating place rather than just a rather grand one. And it wouldn’t happen in Paris. It used to be the case there, and may still be the case, that when a business closed another in the same line would take its place; so, a perfumer would be replaced by another perfumer, a butcher by a butcher. That way, you preserve the interesting diversity of a neighbourhood. I wish it happened here.
London went Labour, according to Barwell, because of disquiet about, among other things, this state of affairs. He may be onto something.
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