East-West

by Unknown

  Further up there’s the London Ritz, opened in 1907. It’s steel-framed, custom-built for twentieth-century modern luxury, but completely clad in Beaux Arts stone, the interior the definitive version of that Fancy French style, so distinctive that in 1909 the American art historian Bernard Berenson described the seamless world of the international rich as ‘Ritzonia’: ‘Ritzonia, carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.’

  Across Bury Street from the Ritz there’s Chris Corbin and Jeremy King’s The Wolseley, a perpetually smart restaurant in a perfect fantasy twenties building. A restaurant that’s become, in just one decade, another centre of the world. Jeremy King told me that ‘Green Park is a transport hub. The Mayfair money men come here for breakfast – the earliest sitting – then they go on to Canary Wharf by Tube. The fashion-and-PR “ladies who breakfast” come later. Roger Katz from Hatchards told us that we’d changed our stretch of Piccadilly – he said we’d given people a reason to come back here. The Wolseley was a car showroom. There’s a line in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time where someone says “He’s just gone down to Piccadilly to buy a Bentley”.’ Oliver Peyton, caterer to the Thinking Classes with his cafés and restaurants in the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection, Heals and the Royal Academy, says: ‘Piccadilly’s still got a bit of allure. It still retains a sense of London-ness – much of Mayfair is a foreign country now. There’s always somewhere to go round here, a seedy basement club, something. The Gents in Piccadilly Circus was always famous for cottaging. My gay staff were always going there. And till recently there was that famous Formica Café behind the Circus. There’s a lot of good seedy history there. The Regent Palace Hotel rented rooms by the hour.’

  The most important, most defining visitor attraction in Piccadilly is the Royal Academy. The high Victorian front of 1873 is stuck on to Lord Burlington’s original house of 1718. It has that vast-for-London courtyard, those wings with learned societies. It puts on blockbuster exhibitions. Its great season-opening middlebrow pot-boiler Summer Exhibition runs from June to August. And it’s in an exciting growth spurt now, combining the front and the ‘back’ (the old Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens). Or there’s the Albany, a sort of Regency apartment block reworked in 1802 from Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany’s London house. It’s sublimely haut-fogey with its ‘sets’ and its precious tenants (in about 1990 I seriously considered buying a big Albany set with a view down Savile Row. It cost about double a comparable flat in, say, South Ken. Friends teased me out of it; I wasn’t old enough or fogey-precious enough to live in a museum. I am now).

  Anyway, the Saumarez-Smith point is that with all this – and there’s masses more – Piccadilly the street feels still oddly less than the sum of its parts. It’s not a Grand Allée now, a big architectural conception, like Portland Place or The Mall, nor a high Victorian parade of class confidence, like Pall Mall. It’s not exactly where the toffs live. And it doesn’t feel that lively; they don’t open flagships there.

  The best Piccadilly buildings – the RA, St James’s, the Albany – are all set back from the street. It doesn’t hold together; it’s too big and too varied. Too trafficked and bus-laned. While street histories are popular book and TV subjects, there’s been no big book about Piccadilly since about 1920.* It’s got sublimely useful access to extraordinary places – the Piccadilly Line runs under the street from Piccadilly Circus to Hyde Park Corner via Green Park. There are three stops on the same line on one street – and it’s stuffed with history – but the Edwardian heart’s gone out of it.

  The Piccadilly Line was officially opened by David Lloyd George, then President of the Board of Trade in Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal Government, on Saturday, 15 December 1906. Lloyd George rode the length of the Great Northern Piccadilly and Brompton Railway (GNP&BR), its mouthful name until 1928, from Hammersmith to Finsbury Park. At the opening lunch in the singular, Victorian-exotic gold-mosaiced (1874) Criterion Restaurant on Piccadilly Circus (still there, restored and revived like the neighbouring Criterion Theatre), Lloyd George commended the new line for being electric (we were behind the US and Europe in the number of electrically powered passenger miles travelled here, he said) and for being an example of co-operation between private enterprise and the great municipal authority of London. Lloyd George was right to worry about Britain falling behind technically and industrially. And that was a bit of mixed-economy thinking before its time; the Tube joined the public sector in 1933 as the London Passenger Transport Board.

  The new Piccadilly Line had freebooting capitalist origins. It was part of the gloriously Edwardian-sounding Underground Electric Railways Company, by then the leading business in underground development. The UERC had already launched two other new-generation, deep-tunnelled, electric-powered Tube lines that year, elaborately named ones that later became the Northern Line and the Bakerloo Line. The UERC had been assembled in a series of takeovers by Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837–1905), American Master of the Universe and transatlantic commuter, using advanced financial engineering and – mainly – American shareholders’ money. They brought in new European and American technology for the engines, rolling stock and deep-tunnelling machines. And they built the giant Lots Road Power Station by the river in Chelsea in 1905 to supply the electricity.

  The original Piccadilly Line proposal was for a short, sweet and very smart line. It would take people from South Kensington Station, serving the late 1860s Italianate stucco cliffs of the South Kensington development, up through Knightsbridge and Mayfair to Piccadilly Circus, the centre of the Known World. It’d been conceived by one of the businesses Charles Yerkes had taken over, the Brompton and Piccadilly. Once in the Yerkes combine, the proposal was bigged up in 1901 by merging it with another Yerkes acquisition, the Great Northern and Strand Railway. It was extended to Hammersmith in the West, and to Finsbury Park, a growing Pooterville junction to the North-east, with a spur from Holborn to the Strand (for the theatre traffic) opened in 1907.

  For me, the core proposition of the pre-merger Piccadilly Plan – the heart of it – remained about moving smart people to nice places. There was more to the economic rationale of course: the South Kensington to Piccadilly line filled a gap in the network. Piccadilly was originally a Bakerloo Line station, and South Kensington had been part of the Mark 1, 1860s, Metropolitan, steam Underground set-up, trains running in shallow ‘cut and cover’ tunnels. The new line pulled them together usefully, connecting North, South and West.

  The Northern extension was a mixed blessing. It ran on to Leicester Square and Covent Garden – then very much the Pygmalion flower and produce market – then through mid-town Holborn, home of insurance companies and growing law firms, the dull heavy lifting of the Edwardian financial empire, to Bloomsbury’s Russell Square, for the British Museum and the growing university. Then it went on to King’s Cross: the King’s Cross hinterland was always grim, if you look at Henry Mayhew’s nineteenth-century social-geography map of London streets. The stations that followed weren’t exactly peachy either. Caledonian Road for Pentonville Prison, Holloway Road for the working-class bustle and the immigrants, on to Arsenal (originally Gillespie Road) and Finsbury Park, where tram and overground connections took early commuters out into the growing north-east suburbs.

  The two stretches – Finsbury Park to King’s Cross and Piccadilly to South Ken – were practically Disraeli’s Two Nations. Piccadilly itself at that point was still obviously the grandees’ Grande Allée, with Devonshire House, the Duke of Devonshire’s massive London house opposite Green Park (demolished for a block of flats in 1924) and many more toff town houses besides. Clubmen still ruled an empire – or thought they did – from St James’s: the Spencers were still in Spencer House; the Duke of Sutherland was still in Stafford House – now the Government hospitality joint Lancaster House – t
he massive house, where Queen Victoria, on a neighbourly visit from just up the road, said, ‘I have come from my house to your palace.’ Marlborough House, built by Wren and his son for the Marlboroughs, was still a royal overflow palace. (Edward VII and Alexandra had lived there before he succeeded in 1901.)

  Piccadilly gave on to two of the grandest areas in London. Even now the updated, 2003 Pevsner,* hardly excitable, says of St James’s: ‘The houses of this select area include some marvels.’ In St James’s, the royal palaces – Buckingham and St James’s – are the least of it. Hermione Hobhouse’s Lost London gives you some idea of how stuffed with Grade-I*-plus-plus architecture Piccadilly itself, Mayfair and St James were before the First World War.

  The Piccadilly Line is the tourist trophy line. Transport for London’s Consumer Insight Manager, Ian Pring, told me that the Piccadilly Line had significantly more tourists than other lines – it’s got Heathrow at one end, after all. Other Tube lines do useful and interesting things. The Central takes the investment banking population of Holland Park and Notting Hill to the City. The Circle circulates past some smart places – Heavy Kensington, W8, Sloane Square and then Westminster. But the Piccadilly simply has more trophies on its original route than any other line. More A-List Tourist Attractions: South Ken for the museums; Knightsbridge for Harrods and the rest; Green Park for the Royal Palaces; Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square for a night out up West, in every guidebook for 150 years. Covent Garden, long after the smarties left it, remains a massive draw for young tourists – it’s huge in Japan, big in Beijing; Russell Square for the British Museum and its six million visitors a year (Holborn is equidistant, but it’s boring. Russell Square is Bloomsbury proper.) They’re all organized, street-signed, stacked with those especially tacky yet dull British souvenir shops. And yet all quite incontrovertibly world class.

  The Piccadilly Line is the hyper-money line too. The houses and flats around that original South Ken to Piccadilly stretch are some of the most expensive in the world (‘prestigious’ is the tacky estate-agent speak for them). Mayfair, St James’s (St James’s is mainly flats and not many of them, but the price per square foot is still shooting up) and Knightsbridge/Belgravia with its painfully ‘bling’ new Global money, are Super-Prime. South Ken and Gloucester Road are Prime, full of four-million-pound flats and pushing-ten-million-pound houses, now churning with runaway Euro-trash. Plus Bloomsbury and Earl’s Court, differently wrecked, but with massively charming class-correct, borderline Prime pockets – where three- to four-million-pound flats are quite common now. The centre of the Piccadilly Line, in other words, runs through where the other half lives.

  It’s all wrapped in the dark-blue ribbon of the Piccadilly Line livery on the famous map. It’s the colour of pony-club prizes and Tory rosettes. The Blue Riband, the Gordon Blue (Cordon Bleu). If the line’s most central stations were a group of hotels, they’d call it an ‘upmarket collection’, like the old Savoy Group. The areas round the core stretch of the Piccadilly have money and cultural capital in spades.

  Boiling Mayfair

  It’s boiling in Mayfair now. It’s particularly hot on the Piccadilly side – rather than the Oxford Street one – and in the part served by the unremarkable-looking Green Park Station, rather than Piccadilly or Hyde Park Corner. It’s boiling in money, there’s a complete moronic inferno (little Martin Amis has his moments), involving the global super rich and the people who serve them. Let’s hear it for Ukrainian trophy wives. Sometimes the people who serve them are super-rich too. They never get to be less than hyper-rewarded by our little British standards.

  Flight Capital, big runaway money from dodgy dangerous places, is a major part of it. The recent runaway rich from the Arab Spring and the Euro meltdown have compounded the overheating in Mayfair, pushing it from hot to a rolling boil. If London’s a safe haven for these super-rich refugees, then they’ll go to famous, familiar places. You won’t get Golden Greeks and Milanese Moneybags setting up in Shoreditch or Stoke Newington. That’s why Prime Central London is so like Hounslow Central; they’re both so vibrantly multicultural, darling.

  The super-rich – the global serious money people – come from absolutely everywhere to live, work and trade in twenty-first-century Mayfair. As house buyers, they particularly come from Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, according to estate agent Savills’ research about the buyers of Prime property (average price £3 million), Super Prime (£6.5 million) and Ultra Prime (£15 million on average). They’re usually often absentees. The primest houses and flats in Mayfair’s new Super-prime developments are, according to Yolanda Barnes, Savills’ Head of Research, bought almost entirely by non-doms, the Rich List euphemism for foreigners. The tiny clutch of Brits in at that level are really non-doms too, defined by their tax status and time spent in their various houses and offices around the world. They’re lost to us.

  Then there are the money men. The other overlapping players in the Great Game of New Mayfair plutocracy are people who work in Mayfair/St James’s huge but secretive finance sector. Mayfair is the world’s ‘second City’ of hedge funds, private equity firms and ‘family offices’. But unlike the Square Mile, with its familiar names, its huge purpose-built eighties-on-steroids corporate buildings, its giant atria with those obvious corporate art collections, the Mayfair City is discreet. There are, according to my spies, more than 500 businesses in Mayfair money land, but with relatively small workforces – a couple of hundred at most, most of them with five to twenty people all up. They’re not exactly working in shacks, but because there’s been very little high-drama development of the Shard kind – giant sites boarded up for miles, towering cranes, all that – Mayfair has been utterly transformed on a rather quiet basis over the last fifteen years. Little companies have floors in anonymous, upgraded blocks. Some work behind hollowed-out Georgian façades with built-out, built-on backs, 40-foot rooms where you least expect them. And always with the newest kit.

  This is where intimidatingly clever young men – it is overwhelmingly men, and young, they can’t hack it much after forty – use spectacular computer power to do things incredibly fast. They’re people who will, most of them, have started in the clunky old City, and been drawn here with transfer fees and the promise of being that much closer to the money. Unlike the City, which is show-off and secretive by turn, this world is constantly and constitutionally secretive. They don’t advertise. They don’t need strings of public-affairs people and sponsorship programmes at the RA up the road, like big banks. They don’t have that many stakeholders who remotely matter to them. Most people don’t know they’re there. They’re like sportsmen working to their peak, offsite, or – the more popular comparison – gamblers. But gamblers with a system and an infrastructure of super-fast computers, all hanging on the heartbeat of every important ‘feed’ – from the various stock exchanges, the Bank of England, the everything, all crammed with instructions – if this, do that – digital betting where a millisecond’s advantage can make billions.

  The Mayfair hedge fund industry is Europe’s largest by a mile. Yet no one, so it seems, has really mapped it for laymen, profiled the firms, looked at who owns them, and from where, who works in them (my friends say it’s about 30 per cent Brit managers and 70 per cent everyone else), what their rewards look like and what they mean for the area, for London and for the country more generally. You’d think at least one of the one hundred or so departments of sociology in British universities would have looked up from studying Transgressive Transsexuals in Thamesmead for a moment to raise some grant-funding to look at how this fantastically important culture actually operates.

  Hedge-fund guys, for all their Richard James bespoke, Regency Buck suits, are actually monastic madmen. A friend tells me he has a replica computer kit – a wraparound wall of screens reporting the world just like the one in his Curzon Street office – in a walk-through study next to his bedroom at home in South Ken. He wants to follow things in real time into the night
. The distress of Hedge-fund Wives is legendary: they’ve lost their men to a force as absolute as fanatical religion or the military. The same spy says they often have weepy girly drinks at San Lorenzo, one of Saint Diana’s favourite restaurants, in Beauchamp Place. There are compensations. Made-it hedge-funders like Crispin Odey and Alan Howard feature on the high stretches of The Sunday Times Rich List.

  Strictly speaking, New Money Mayfair is more than hedge funds. There are ‘private-equity’ houses like Permira, Blackstone or Hamilton Bradshaw. They’re businesses which acquire other big businesses after pulling apart their accounts in very forensic ways. They analyse their assets and their people and their vulnerabilities like someone intent on a hostile takeover. Then they get the firms to take on a mountain of debt to allow the private equity firm to buy them and transform them. It’s brilliant. It’s alchemy. Private equity firms own massive tranches of British business now, famous names like Boots and Bookers.

  And then, smartest and most secretive of all, there are the ‘family offices’. The world has more billionaires than ever – rich people with a few hundred million are pretty common-place – and billionaires have so much private business to transact, so many investments, different asset classes – art, property, equities – to look after in so many time zones and tax jurisdictions, that the old systems of lawyer, banker, accountant, aren’t enough. If you’re really rich, you warrant an office with two or three smart ex-bankers and some well-connected girls looking after everything from the new shooting estate in Scotland to your teenage son’s Ferrari.

  An old ex-City friend works for an Arab, doing this stuff – he’s still got children in the expensive years at expensive schools. He looks after his employer’s family, they look after him. In Mayfair, another friend looks after a roster of the Euro-rich. He and his partners handle fifteen families – the most modest has around two hundred and fifty million pounds of ‘investible wealth’, the richest has ‘a billion plus’ – in an office that’s so oppressively elegant, with its contemporary art-and-museum-quality everything, that it sets me on edge just waiting five minutes in reception.