Young Italians flock to London – for just the same reasons it scares me

Although I live in the country in Northamptonshire, I go to London often — almost once a week — and I find it more and more intimidating. This isn’t just because of the skyscrapers that spring up boastfully everywhere, parading one’s own insignificance, but also because of the aura of terrifying wealth that pervades its central area and now even its inner suburbs. Fifty years ago, when I got married, my wife and I bought our first London house in Kensington Park Road, Notting Hill, for £9,500. I wonder how many millions it is worth now. My parents, who were quite well off if not exactly rich, lived in Knightsbridge to be near my father’s office in Bowater House, an ugly modern glass block that straddled the entrance to Hyde Park opposite the end of Sloane Street. Bowater House has since been replaced by No. 1 Hyde Park, a Richard Rogers group of apartment buildings described on its website as ‘the most exclusive address in the world; a residential scheme whose beauty, luxury and service place it in a class of its own on a global scale’. A flat there sold the other day for £140 million.

London was then a great city, of course, as it always has been, but it was also cosy and modest about itself. Although ‘Swinging London’ was discovered in the Sixties, the city retained an old-fashioned air in which Harrods, later sold to Mohammed al-Fayed and more recently by him to the Qataris, was a haven in which old ladies with wicker shopping trolleys could take a rest in the great hall of the long defunct Harrods bank. Glamour was something one associated with foreign cities like Paris or New York. London was a city of exciting secrets but one that on the surface appeared rather slow and drab.