Nicholas Shaxson writes: Up until the 18th century, Knightsbridge, which borders genteel Kensington, was a lawless zone roamed by predatory monks and assorted cutthroats. It didn’t come of age until the Victorian building boom, which left a charming legacy of mostly large and beautiful Victorian houses, with their trademark white or cream paint, black iron railings, high ceilings, and short, elegant stone steps up to the front door.
This will not be the impression a visitor now gets as he emerges from the Knightsbridge subway station’s south exit. He will be met by four hulking joined-up towers of glass, metal, and concrete, sandwiched between the Victorian splendors of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, to the east, and a pretty five-story residential block, to the west. This is One Hyde Park, which its developers insist is the world’s most exclusive address and the most expensive residential development ever built anywhere on earth. With apartments selling for up to $214 million, the building began to smash world per-square-foot price records when sales opened, in 2007. After quickly shrugging off the global financial crisis the complex has come to embody the central-London real-estate market, where, as high-end property consultant Charles McDowell put it, “prices have gone bonkers.”
From the Hyde Park side, One Hyde Park protrudes aggressively into the skyline like a visiting spaceship, a head above its red-brick and gray-stone Victorian surroundings. Inside, on the ground floor, a large, glassy lobby offers what you’d expect from any luxury intercontinental hotel: gleaming steel statues, thick gray carpets, gray marble, and extravagant chandeliers with radiant sprays of glass. Not that the building’s inhabitants need venture into any of these public spaces: they can drive their Maybachs into a glass-and-steel elevator that takes them down to the basement garage, from which they can zip up to their apartments.
The largest of the original 86 apartments (following some mergers, there are now around 80) are pierced by 213-foot-long mirrored corridors of glass, anodized aluminum, and padded silk. The living spaces feature dark European-oak floors, Wenge furniture, bronze and steel statues, ebony, and plenty more marble. For added privacy, slanted vertical slats on the windows prevent outsiders from peering into the apartments.
In fact, the emphasis everywhere is on secrecy and security, provided by advanced-technology panic rooms, bulletproof glass, and bowler-hatted guards trained by British Special Forces. Inhabitants’ mail is X-rayed before being delivered. [Continue reading…]
And?
I grew up in Knightsbridge. My parents still live there. Nice place really.
Those who find themselves on the privileged side of inequity, generally don’t see inequity; they see normality. For me, working in Knightsbridge offered a rare glimpse of how the aristocracy operates and how they perceive the world as a collection of objects that by and large operate in their service.
“rare glimpse of how the aristocracy operates and how they perceive the world as a collection of objects that by and large operate in their service”
That’s a bit of a generalization don’t you think Paul? Sure some people are like that but you don’t have to be rich to be that way. Its too simplistic and, frankly, rude.
In the course of my life, I have been lucky to engage with a very wide range of people, from shoeless peasants to royalty and the people who I have found to have the most extravagant sense of entitlement have most often been those who were fabulously wealthy. The more wealth someone has, the more selective they can be about how they use their time and the more freely they can buy time from others.
One of the great myths in America is that entitlement is the affliction of the poor — or as Romney had the audacity to put it, the 47% of Americans who won’t take responsibility for their own lives.
The relationship between wealth and selfishness is not some nasty prejudice being spread around by the poor — it’s scientifically established. No doubt this is a generalization and doesn’t apply to everyone who is wealthy, but that’s the nature of generalizations — they do not have to be applicable in every instance in order to be valid.
“the people who I have found to have the most extravagant sense of entitlement have most often been those who were fabulously wealthy. ”
Is that not a truism?
You won’t feel more entitled if you are less wealthy. Grading yourself against others necessarily implies if you have more and socialize with those who have less, you will either feel guilty and want to divest yourself of what you have, or you will feel entitled to what you have at ANY level.
“The more wealth someone has, the more selective they can be about how they use their time and the more freely they can buy time from others.”
Yes so? That is why we strive to gain wealth for what we want to achieve. More free time and more choice. All you are saying is that some people have more than others and you imply that this is unfair. How do you propose to rectify this supposed injustice? Do you think it can be equalized fairly? And if so, how?
Before conflating crony bankers and their buddies in government with everyone who owns wealth, may I ask how you propose to determine who gets what to do justice for society? And in the process, how do you make sure that everyone is fairly treated?
Is fair individual treatment negotiable when the general welfare is concerned?
The fact, or the suggestion, of your link that those who are most wealthy are the most selfish doesn’t negate the problem of who determines how to change the imbalance. How do you know the person in charge of taking from one group and giving to another isn’t skimming off the top along the way? Hasn’t the very way this crisis played out prove otherwise?
I get the resentment from my liberal friends, but the solution never seems fully fleshed out. It’s always the utopia that has been denied. Maybe the utopia is actually dystopic when you get down to the details. But its always pretty easy to point fingers when you cant be bothered with what happens after you get what you want.