How the super rich conquered London
Rowland Atkinson received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council for elements of the research drawn on for this article.
Over cups of tea in his ramshackle London home I chatted with a novelist. It felt a valuable opportunity, given his multiple fictional treatments of London, to discuss the city’s rapid changes that I was also writing about.
Talk inevitably turned to its expanding population of wealthy residents. He told me that he had once thought about writing a novel about the super-rich, but concluded that it would ultimately be too boring. What could one say about people whose lives were not connected to others? What would the characters be shown to do with their limitless time?
In the 1950s, the acclaimed sociologist C Wright Mills observed that the idea that the elite occupied a “sad, empty space at the top of society” was, in many ways, simply a way of becoming reconciled to the fact that we are not rich. The actor Michael Caine later appeared to rework Mills’ statement when he commented that “the idea that money doesn’t buy you happiness is a lie put about by the rich to stop the poor from killing them”.
Today, the idea of a politics of envy in the UK seems to serve much the same purpose – proposals for tax reform and greater contribution are met with disdain – often referring to the choking of ambition, deterring wealth creation or, worst of all, the rich moving elsewhere.
