According to Knight Frank, – the leading seller of £5m-plus homes in the capital, between March and April in the past year, super-prime London prices recorded 42th monthly increase; on the basis of data published by Zoopla.com prices in the City are around £10.000 sq ft, for a small terraced house you can pay until £14.000. In the City of London (Notting Hill, Kensington e Chelsea) housing price is on average £14.500 sq ft and, considering the whole town the housing average cost is £592.000.
London’s housing – be it for owners or for tenants – is a sphere of growing inequality and unaffordability. Housing in the capital city is the most expensive in the country, there are more households than dwellings, an increasing number of potential households cannot form because of the extent of housing pressure and there is far more overcrowding than elsewhere.
Last month The Observer published an article by Alex Preston about most exclusive homes in London. The British journalist made up a detailed cover story about a wealthy godmother looking to relocate from Paris in the wake of François Hollande’s punitive tax increases, in order to visit some luxury properties on sale. Except “Lego house” in Bishops avenue – 21,000 sq ft with seven bedrooms, 2-bed staff cottage and a 0.75 acre park selling at £40m – the two other properties Person visited are in Kensington, which is regarded together with Chelsea as the ghost town of the super-rich, a definition that underlines the “buy to leave” phenomenon where super-rich overseas buyers purchase prime London properties with little or no intention of using them as anything other than growing investments.
Kensington palace gardens, flanked by big plane trees and dotted by gun-toting guards in front of every gate, is the most expensive street in London (and one of the more expensive in the world) to buy a house. Too large for a single owner, the houses of this street were turned over time into embassies and consulates and only in recent years Kensington Palace Garden has started being recolonised by private owners: three years ago Roman Abramovich bought the former home of the Russian ambassador for £90ml; another house belongs to the king of steal, Britain’s richest men, who also purchased two more houses there for his two sons, now owning a total value of £500m in the street.
Less than ten minutes walking from there, hidden behind a corner, you can find a tiny street which, in spite of retaining the word gardens in its name, shows a totally different environment. When one walks over there is thrown into a sort of “Neapolitan suk”: unrefurbished houses, falling plasters, a flourish of unmodernized guest houses and also a few brothels surviving in spite of everything.
Here, nothing is left of the grandeur of Kensington Palace Gardens, except for the tiny Armenian embassy, almost hidded and indistinguishable among the other houses of the street
Since some month, in this street lives I., a well-read Italian lady with a flâneur attitude, who ten years ago, as in a sort of gamble as it is buying a house in London, invested an inheritance here and now that her children are grown up has moved in one of the two little flats she had purchased in the capital.
In this Victorian terraced house with a leaking roof, she lives together with the owners of the other flats: a penniless Serbian girl who never pays the common bills, a Chinese gentleman who has just bought the ground floor apartment, a couple – an American lady and a very British landscape architect – who also own a cottage in the countryside and use the Kensington flat just as a pied-à-terre and, in the basement flat, a teacher of economics at Birkbeck University.
In the last five years I.’s 430 square foot little flat almost doubled his value and, thanks to Russian and Chinese billionaires coming, the property market bubble is still growing. With the rent of the other apartment, at London I. not only can afford to live in London without working, but she can also pay the fee for a master degree in one of the best university in the city.
Owning a flat in London is like finding a gold mine – she told me when I interviewed her for the alternative housing project I’m carrying out for the London School of Economics. You can realise it when walking or taking a drive through Kensington, where British owners are becoming rare, being replaced by foreign investors, at present mainly Chinese and Russian, who leave their properties empty for most of the year.
Its description Preston’s article, where he says that in 2013 85% of new houses in London were sold to non-UK buyers and in Kensington unoccupied houses increased by 40 percent only last year.
Both The Observer’s article and what I. told me have drawn my attention on a few more aspects of London’s housing habits. First of all the “underground” environment: I. says that the British willingly extend their houses downward creating subterranean worlds where they live in the dark, which is quite a natural habitat in a City where ‘commuters’ spend much of their time on the Tube (the London Underground is the oldest in the world and also one of the most extensive). In his property surveys, Preston has been visiting underground swimming pools, cinemas, squash courts, libraries, dining rooms and dancing rooms, sport facilities and even golf play grounds simulators.
All this was confirmed by Preston’s estate visits, where he see swimming pools, cinema, squash courts, libraries, dining rooms and dancing rooms, sport facilities and even a golf simulator, all in the basement, all empty.
The emptiness and the silence of the Billionaires properties described by The Observer’s journalist contrasts with the noisy mood and thriving atmosphere described by I. for her street: on the one side the London super-rich who seek exclusive residences built to exclude, protected by ferocious security guards and insuperable gates, on the other side I. that lives in the town (and not above it) , goes shopping at Tesco, takes metro and bus and everyday knows people, “because life in London is the best you can dream in your life, you can have everything at hand and at the same time feel an absolute sense of freedom”
Unfortunately the colonisation of London by foreign investors has excluded everyday people from central London and nowadays the genuine character surviving in the I. narrow street seems to become rare.
[In the picture a air photo of Kensington palace gardens, the most expensive street in London]
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