The Sloane Ranger is in dire straits

Every few years, an obituary for the Sloane Ranger appears. In 2015, the Telegraph proclaimed their death. In 2022, Peter York himself, co-author of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, wrote a devastating piece in the Oldie on the ‘End of the Sloane Age’. In it, he cast existential doubt on the species altogether: ‘By 2021, there seemed to be every possible shade of Sloane around in London. But were they really Sloanes at all? It looked as if the only way for a Sloane to succeed was to UnSloane themselves.’ 

You might think that if York himself had called time, then the death knell must have well and truly sounded. But no. In August this year, York – Lazarus to the last – reappeared in the Evening Standard to detail how reports of the Sloane Ranger’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Sloane Rangers are still around, York says – they just don’t look like they used to: ‘They want to look and sound like the rest of us.’ Think Prince William’s beard, the way that dad chins now wear baseball caps on the school run, or even the way that Sloane men wear trainers to drinks parties instead of the good old ‘brothel creeper’ loafer. For women, the sartorial shift has been more pronounced. Periodically publications such as Tatler run fashion pieces on the ‘Sloane revival’ in which they detail how piecrust collars and pearls are back in fashion. Sadly, this is nothing more than Sloane drag; the strings of pearls are long gone.  

Really, though, to my mind, the reason that Sloanes are hard to spot these days is that their natural habitat – SW1, SW3, SW5, SW7, SW10 and SW11, in that order to quote York and Barr – no longer belongs to them. Sloanes (and let’s please continue to call them that for Auld Lang Syne) have been pushed out of Chelsea and into the further reaches of the capital as the old postcodes are now populated solely by oligarchs and American hedge-funders. Caroline and Henry’s children could no more live in Chelsea or South Kensington than they could on the moon. Instead, they have ventured to the very edges of where their parents and grandparents once unthinkingly owned the des res: some are in Kensal Rise on the edges of W11, some are in Balham and Tooting, and some – incredibly – are in east London. At a dinner party recently, I sat next to a Gen Z Sloane who proudly told me that he had just bought a flat in Stoke Newington. I wanted to congratulate him on getting on to the property ladder, but as a millennial Sloane I could ill contain my surprise at the postcode. 

If the Sloane Ranger still exists but in camouflage, this is hardly a newsflash. The upper-middle classes – what York termed the ‘marzipan in the national cake’ – have been in hiding for years. Blame globalisation, blame Tony Blair and blame the vogue for therapeutic self-expression, but the Sloane life was ripped apart long ago. If the cautionary tale of the Sloane who forget herself and then imploded used to be Princess Diana – who went from nice ‘Shy Di Spencer’ to Gianni Versace’s best friend – then perhaps the new Sloane morality tale for our times is Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. For Andrew was nothing if not the dim, polo-playing toff one used to meet in Car Park One at Ascot who let money, power and sex get the better of him. 

Under this particular Labour government, Sloanes find themselves in seriously dire straits: VAT on school fees, mansion tax (if they even managed to cling on to the pile), the great wealth transfer chasing the boomers out of their Old Rectories so that the ungrateful sods who they paid the school fees for can buy a flat in south Balham. But riddle me this: do they hide because they are afraid of the bitter court of public opinion, or do they camouflage themselves by preference? I rather suspect the latter. Sloanes have always loved a good prank at a dinner party; what could be more hilarious than living out in the sticks ‘on exercise’ only to discover another undercover Henry in the Tesco Express on the Holloway Road, visible only by his signet ring? Truly, just like school.  

Regarding school days, last week I met a friend for lunch at the newly revamped Sloane Club, whose door I have not darkened since I was a schoolgirl lunching with my granny. Here, at last, the hiding would be over, I thought. But since the refit, it’s all far too shiny: a spa, a vegan menu and even, I’m sorry to say, that most vulgar of things – a gym. Maybe at last the obituary might be justified: I’d rather be in hiding. I’ll wait to hear from Peter York before I call it definitively.