Spectator Life

Let’s say you’re a young woman working in London, and you own a one-bedroom flat in Islington. You fall in love with a chap who has a nice house in Devon. You marry him.  As soon as you do that, you’ll no longer be allowed to park your car outside your Islington flat in the daytime, except on a meter for a maximum stay of two hours. A married couple is only permitted one primary residence between them, and the larger country house will most likely be designated the main home. In all central London boroughs (not just Camden as in this example), you’re not eligible for a resident’s parking permit if the dwelling is your second home, even though you pay the full council tax. Worse: you’ll soon be paying double the council tax.

From Henry James and T.S. Eliot to Wallis Simpson and (albeit briefly) Taylor Swift, US expats have had a long love affair with London. But over the past year the number of Americans – overpaid, what with their favourable exchange rate, oversexed, possibly, and certainly over here – has been escalating fast.  In 2024, 6,100 Americans applied for British citizenship, the most since records began – in what’s been dubbed the ‘Donald dash’. And it seems it’s the wealthy who are leading the charge. According to estate agent UK Sotheby’s International Realty, four in ten of the $15 million-plus properties sold in the British capital last year went to US buyers.

Like most non-renting flat-dwellers, I call myself a home-owner or owner-occupier, but that isn’t quite true. I don’t own my flat; I am a leaseholder. What I bought was the right to occupy it for however many years are left on the lease – and as the lease runs down, the flat is worth less and less. Conversely, this is why, if you were so minded, you could find a prime London flat for a (relative) pittance if the lease has only a few years to run, and why long leases generally come with a premium.

The other day, while on my lunchtime walk, I passed a woman on a mobility scooter holding an impressive-looking doobie. Later, on my bus home, a bloke got on having just extinguished a joint, bringing the overpowering stench with him. Some commuters don’t even bother to put them out. All you can do is sit and tut passive-aggressively, hoping they’re only going a few stops. While cannabis use has slowly declined over the past 25 years, it seems that you can’t escape it in public. Perhaps part of the reason is that so few people now smoke at all, even tobacco. It makes weed far more noticeable. The other reason is that the police don’t bother punishing those caught. Most are either let off with a verbal warning or a fine.

During the course of last year, Alex Greaves and his wife Sarah seriously considered moving out of London. The couple, who live in Southfields in the south-west of the city with their sons aged two and five, were tempted the idea of a new life in the country – inspired largely by friends’ idyllic tales of moving to the sticks and into a home far grander than anything they could possibly afford in the capital. In the end, though, Alex and Sarah decided to stay put. And they are not alone. In the past year the number of Londoners leaving the city has dwindled dramatically. Research by estate agent Hamptons found that during 2024, Londoners purchased just 5.7 per cent of all homes sold beyond the city limits. This is a decade-long low, and down from a peak of 8.

We have a pied-à-terre in Soho, which is convenient when I am in London, even if the street outside our tiny house is sometimes a little raucous at night. The neighbourhood is lively and fun, but my visits come with the difficulty that, in Soho, so far as I can tell, there is nowhere to dispose of your rubbish. I saw recently that Bristol City Council wants to limit collection of its wheelie bins to once a month. In much of Britain, it is already fortnightly. But at least they have wheelie bins. Westminster doesn’t allow wheelie bins in Soho; the pavements are too narrow. I assume this is the case also in other constrained neighbourhoods. Our shiny new Labour-controlled Westminster City Council seems to have given up collecting rubbish.

'John' has a dirty little secret – one so shameful that he has insisted on anonymity in order to tell his story. Last year, while in the process of buying a three-bedroom family house in Whitchurch, Hampshire, the 42-year-old office worker committed an act which, while perfectly legal, could kindly be described as ruthless. ‘We made an offer for the house, a bit below the asking price, and it was accepted,’ explains John. ‘But over the weeks that followed we started to have second thoughts. A few friends and family members were surprised at how much we were paying for the property. ‘It got to the point where I was hoping the survey would show something bad, so we could renegotiate, but it didn’t.

The suggestion that the Prince Charles cinema in London’s West End could be closed down was the least surprising news of the week. This sort of thing, fuelled by soaring property values, has been happening in Soho and its periphery for three decades now and shows no sign of relenting. The Prince Charles isn’t strictly in Soho, being just south of Shaftesbury Avenue, but it has always felt like it belonged there, with the other left field, misfit and seedy enterprises that gave the place its character and reputation. It was built in 1962 but, on the edge of Chinatown, was just too far off the main drag of Leicester Square to ever really thrive. By the 1970s the Prince Charles was mostly screening soft porn: Emmanuelle and later Caligula.

I sometimes wonder if a property lawyer dreamt up the idea that an Englishman’s home is his castle. Over the years, it’s certainly been a lucrative concept for the legal profession, especially when said castle is worth a few bob. Barely a week goes on when one of the posher papers doesn’t feature an expensive spat in an equally expensive neighbourhood. The latest feud I’ve seen involves a brook that runs through two properties – one owned by an artisan potter, the other a part-time painter – in the bucolic Leicestershire village of Thrussington. The row over who owns the right to this peaceful babbling has so far cost the rival parties a nerve-jangling £300,000 after it was heard by three judges in the Court of Appeal last month.

Earl’s Court as I first remember it was where Australian travellers found a cheap bed for the night. It was also the place to go for beers with unfamiliar labels, and bags of kiwi fruit, a rare delicacy in the 1980s. And at a time when Neighbours was riding high in the TV ratings there was fun to be had eavesdropping on conversations littered with ‘fair dinkum’ and ‘strewth’. There are some troubling details: skyscrapers being built in a largely low-rise Victorian neighbourhood and the way streets at the perimeter of the site will be overlooked and overshadowed  Older generations will remember earlier waves of immigrants. There were the Polish soldiers who were resettled there after the second world war and set up shops, cafes and clubs.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when the skyline of London was dominated by the work of one architect: not Sir Christopher Wren, but Colonel Richard Seifert. But while Wren is universally admired, Seifert has been reviled. Architects hated his success; the public his uncompromising brutalist aesthetic. Yet now, more than two decades after his death, that appears to be changing. Seifert – who did a spell in the Royal Engineers during the second world war and then insisted on being addressed by his military rank throughout his life – was often said to have had more of an impact on the capital than anyone bar the creator of St Paul’s.

John Lewis recently returned to its roots, resurrecting its ‘never knowingly undersold’ price-matching promise. But it’s hard to imagine how the company, which opened its first store on London’s Oxford Street in 1864, could apply this undertaking to its latest venture. For, not content with supplying the nation with sofas and curtains, lightbulbs and sewing patterns, John Lewis wants to provide the actual homes to put these items into – dipping its corporate toe into the world of 'build to rent', or BTR. The retailer has unveiled plans to construct almost 1,000 rental flats at three company-owned sites – above a Waitrose store in Bromley, south-east London; on a brownfield site in West Ealing, west London; and on a warehouse site in Reading, Berkshire.

Most people assume that once a blue plaque is installed, it's there to stay. That is not always the case. Around 50 of the over 1,000 official plaques are no longer in situ on their original building – almost always because that building has gone. Now English Heritage, the charity I work for, is asking for help from the public to track down any of the lost plaques that may have survived. In all likelihood, both early Byron plaques are completely lost – potentially somewhere within the foundations of John Lewis In 1867, the Society of Arts inaugurated its new memorial scheme with a plaque to Lord Byron, marking the poet’s supposed birthplace at number 24 Holles Street, near Cavendish Square. A little over 20 years later, number 24 was demolished and the plaque was lost with it.

The backlash against plans for a Gail’s bakery in Walthamstow made me think about my own experience of gentrification. When I moved to my suburb of Bristol nearly 20 years ago, it was still a largely white working-class area. It was also a temporary home to many of the students from the local university. It felt slightly down at heel but, judging by the impressive size of some of the houses, had once been quite prosperous. Black and white photographs from the early 20th century show the now non-existent tram running down a high street populated by soberly dressed Edwardians.

They came straight off the back of a lorry and were placed carefully – top to tail - in three cat carriers, two hens in each. Broken feathers stuck from the air vents, bright, suspicious, amber eyes peered out. We drove them home, listening out for any squawks of distress, but they were silent. Bemused, exhausted, probably wearily resigned to whatever fate awaited them next. These former battery hens, who’d spent the entirety of their short lives living in metal cages no bigger than a sheet of A4, should have been on their way to slaughter These former battery hens, who’d spent the entirety of their short lives living in metal cages no bigger than a sheet of A4, should have been on their way to slaughter.

My first brush with Artificial Intelligence was the Furby – that hideous speaking Gonk with eyes that blinked. You could hear the cogs turning. It felt basic, even for the 2000s. My techie ex got it for me as a birthday present. Like babies, this infant technology responded to clapping. It was weird and dull. Having exhausted its repertoire, I discarded it beside the sofa. One night, weeks later, we were sitting together and heard the whirr of its eyes opening, and it just said, the once, clearly in its strange little voice, ‘Boring’. We laughed. That was as good as it got. Alexa is not sexy like my old satnav, who sounded like Joanna Lumley as a bored dominatrix Alexa, though, is the real deal: my android in a can, my useful housemate. I consult her often.

I don’t trust a lot of what comes out of universities’ gender studies departments – which seem to me to be more political activism dressed up in academic clothing. But I am not quite convinced, either, of the scientific rigour behind the University of Zoopla’s claim that parents are being far more generous in gifting house deposits to their sons than they are towards their daughters. The property portal has put out a press release this week claiming that daughters are granted an average of £51,671 towards buying a home, compared with £65,004 for sons. The finding, it says, was based on a poll of 1,000 first-time buyers, 630 of whom had received some degree of financial help from their families.

Labour appears to be planning to make housing a big priority for its first weeks in power, which is perhaps unsurprisingly, given that it will have gained power thanks in part to the growing number of frustrated young would-be homeowners. We are being led to expect a housebuilding bill within three weeks of Keir Starmer taking power, to effect the party’s promise to build 1.5 million new homes over the course of a five-year parliament. There is a very large Nimby tendency in the environmental movement Labour’s manifesto suggests what will be in it: local authorities will once again be set housebuilding targets, abolished under Rishi Sunak. There will be an extra 300 planning officers, funded, so it says, with higher stamp duty bills for overseas buyers of UK property.

Two days before leaving this country for Italy – where, defeated by southern British house prices, I planned to fight for a long-term visa and buy a home – I finally found the exact flat I’d been dreaming of, here in the UK. True, it wasn’t in East Anglia, where I grew up and most of my family still lives, but Shropshire, a county which intrigued me and which emerged over time as my second choice. Green, landlocked, with endless castles, hills and valleys, Shropshire is about as remote from the capital as you can get. It has Ludlow and Shrewsbury, medieval towns with rivers, courtyards, timbered buildings and a pleasing Shakespearean ring to their names. Nearby is Wales which, since two epic holidays in my youth, has been a kind of Holy Land for me. What’s not to embrace?

In these febrile times, there is one place to take refuge and that is in the Lakeland catalogue. Change and decay in all around I see, as John Henry Newman observed, but at Lakeland there is still a universe where you can conquer the perennial problem of taking the tops off strawberries, so tricky if they are a little underripe, with a Chef’n’Stem Strawberry Huller (£8.99), combine a blender with a separate coffee grinder with the Lakeland Blender (£69.99), keep insects off cake outdoors with a food umbrella (£4.49) and deal with wet laundry when you don’t have a washing line with the Dry Soon heated airer (from £99). There is no problem in domestic economy that is not covered somewhere, somehow, by this house and kitchenware retail company.

Living off the beaten track was idyllic until one night last November. At 1 a.m. during a particularly heavy downpour, a group of hooded men came onto our property and tried to burgle us. Lulled into a false sense of security after three months in our rural home, we’d casually left our 25-year-old Land Rover Defender next to our barn, rather than locked away inside as it would normally have been.  What if the crims refuse to leave and want a fight? What if one of them gets fatally injured on my property? What if I get banged up like Tony Martin? The thieves had come prepared. Two of them scaled the fence and disabled our electric gates, ready for a quick getaway. Another one waited in the lane, engine running.