Minton - Big capital: who is London for?

Anna Minton is a writer, journalist and Reader in Architecture at the University of East London. Her first book, Ground Control, was published in 2009 to widespread acclaim. The Royal Commissions Fellow in the Built Environment between 2011 and 2014, she is a regular contributor to the Guardian and a frequent broadcaster and commentator. She lives in South London with her partner and their two sons.

Anna Minton

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BIG CAPITAL

Who is London For?

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

India | New Zealand | South Africa

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

First published 2017

Copyright Anna Minton, 2017

Photographs copyright Henrietta Williams, 2017

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover images: Getty

Cover design: Richard Green

ISBN: 978-0-141-98500-8

For all those who shared
their stories about the housing crisis with me

Surrounded by boxes yet again, about to move knowing that we will be moving again in the new year. I have cleaned and painted the new flat and its still a dump with damp patches and a moth eaten carpet throughout. I am forty-six and I have lived in over thirty houses and I still have no security. This was posted on social media at the end of 2016 by Jan. She has a good job earning almost 40,000 a year, her husband works full time, they have two children and this is what they have to put up with. These are some of the replies her post elicited, none of which registered surprise: Truly a tragedy isnt it. Other countries so different. Its so tough. I have a work capability assessment on Monday that could lead to issues with my benefits and therefore my rent. No security either exhausting. What a nightmare. There is nothing more destroying to peace of mind than moving because you have to. I moved a number of times last year before getting to Berlin. Im lucky that I have this place now but living in another country with another language is not necessarily a dream to chase. The current situation is broken isnt it. Unless its sorted out quickly very few people will get through.

In the adverts on the hoardings all over the city is another London, populated by smart-looking people and luxury balcony apartments. This is the destination of choice for foreign investors and the new global elite of oligarchs, billionaires and the super-rich who make up the so-called alpha elites, who are attracted by the UKs very favourable tax environment. Entire neighbourhoods in the alpha parts of London St Johns Wood, Highgate, Hampstead, Notting Hill Gate, Kensington, to name but a few have changed out of all recognition over the last decade. Estate agents refer to these centrally located super prime areas as the golden postcodes. They have long been wealthy places, home to monied communities from all over the world as well as the English upper classes, but in the past, like most of London, they were also mixed areas. Now even the wealthy are displaced from Kensington by multimillionaire Ultra High Net Worth Individuals, who in turn displace others from central London to suburban areas, creating a domino effect that ripples out through the city, with the consequence that average-income earners and the poor move to the periphery or out of the capital altogether, placing pressure on housing and prices around the country.

Simultaneously, Londons much-loved skyline is being transformed by one of the greatest waves of new construction seen in the city, with no fewer than 300 planned luxury residential towers going up. Nine Elms, a huge development which stretches from Lambeth Bridge to Chelsea Bridge, will be home to the luxury Battersea Power Station Complex, the new US embassy and Embassy Gardens, which, with its Sky Pool suspended ten storeys up in the air between two luxury tower blocks, is at the pinnacle of new London: a playground for the rich, built on an inhuman scale. From Nine Elms up to Vauxhall and along to Southwark and Blackfriars bridges, mile upon mile of serried ranks of balconied apartments in gated complexes have already been built and at Elephant and Castle the Australian property developer Lendlease is working with Southwark Council to render the area unrecognizable, replacing with a forest of luxury towers the affordable housing which once characterized the area. Outside some of these buildings anti-homeless spikes prohibit homeless people from sitting or sleeping on the pavement.

Since 2008 much has been written about the housing crisis. Exploring the fallout from that years financial crash, which combined large increases in wealth in property assets for the richest with widespread austerity, Big Capital makes explicit the links between the sheer wealth at the top and the housing crisis, which does not affect just those at the bottom but the majority of Londoners who struggle to buy properties and pay extortionate rents. From the removal from their homes of people on low incomes to the use of property purely as profit and no longer as a social good, the active flouting of democracy by business and local councils alike, the scandal in housing benefit and the pressure on individuals and families at all income levels, this is a new politics of space. Replacing the politics of class, these trends are not limited to London. The same circuits of global capital are also transforming San Francisco, New York and Vancouver in North America, European cities from Berlin to Barcelona and towns and cities in the UK, from Bristol to Manchester and Margate to Hastings. This has led to a constant hum of debate about the impacts of that much misunderstood term gentrification. But this isnt gentrification, its another phenomenon entirely. The flood of global capital is being allowed to reconfigure the country.

Gentrification is one of those terms, rather like affordable housing, that lost its real meaning long ago. It was first coined in 1964 by the sociologist Ruth Glass, who used it to describe the changes taking place in Islington, as middle-class families moved into old working-class homes and did them up, creating desirable Victorian residences. One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded by the middle classes Once this process of gentrification starts in a district, it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced, and the whole social character of the district is changed, she wrote. Fifteen years ago the academic Loretta Lees wrote about super gentrification to describe the impact of the new class of finance professionals in New York and parts of London such as Barnsbury and Notting Hill Gate. Although it has always been a contested term, gentrification adopted positive connotations associated with improving areas. But the speed of capital flows into places between the 1960s and the early 2000s bears no comparison to what is happening today. The rate of return on London property, even in a market slowed by economic uncertainty, far exceeds growth, let alone wages, which are among the lowest in Europe. It is these rates of return on property that are driving the reconfiguration of London, boosted by policy decisions carried out by local authorities, which are in tune with deliberate changes in housing policy and the property market, designed to take maximum advantage of the attraction of London real estate to global investors. This has little to do with the process that Glass or even Lees describe, which saw capital invested in gentrifying parts of the city at a much slower rate, over generations rather than a few years: as such, it is crucial that the impact of global capital and foreign investment is scrutinized for its local effects.