
A Tale of Two Londons - qb
http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/04/mysterious-residents-one-hyde-park-london.print
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JacobAldridge
My 8x great grandmother was actually born in 18thC Knightsbridge. She stole
some clothes and a spoon (which she tried to dispose of in her "privvy") and
was sent as a convict to Australia on the First Fleet in 1788.

Ultimately, she would bear children to 3 men across 3 convict colonies - one
of the guards on the ship en route to New South Wales, my 8x great grandfather
who would become the first hangman of Norfolk Island, and a freed convict in
Tasmania.

In modern London, as opposed to the London she left, that would probably earn
her a reality tv show.

~~~
bearmf
Just curious, how did you manage to recover her story?

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JacobAldridge
In my case, I was lucky enough to connect with a distant relative who had done
a lot of the research, and then confirm parts of it (I was at uni at the time
- love a large library and databases!).

Her being a convict helped with the record keeping, of course - court records,
ship records, habitation records on the ground. And even by the time she was
freed, these were all tiny colonies* so recording everyone was pretty easy.

*How tiny? Well they evacuated the ENTIRE colony of Norfolk Island in about 1807, shipping them all to Hobart which was in need of a larger population. Even then, her daughter (my 7x great grandmother) was something like the 143rd wedding in the colony (now state of Tasmania). Compare that the USA circa 1807 which had 17 states in the union and a population of about 6 million.

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jacques_chester
The USA was settled much earlier and has turned out to be a much richer ground
for british institutions -- particularly agriculture -- to flourish in.

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hkmurakami
The article link points to the print page, which only displays 1 out of the 5
total pages. (I think qb was trying to spare of us popup & advertising hell
which I appreciate, but it looks like it didn't work quite perfectly this
time)

Here's the default page:
[http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/04/mysterious-
residen...](http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/04/mysterious-residents-
one-hyde-park-london)

(btw this pagination system -- while nice that it doesn't reload pages -- is
driving me and my eyes insane!)

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rvkennedy
The property prices, and thus rents, are why Silicon Roundabout will have a
very hard time building a true startup ecosystem in London. Young people just
starting out are paying most of their monthly income on rent. How can they be
encouraged to take a financial risk when they have such crazy outgoings? How
can people from the regions be attracted to London to build businesses when
they can't get digs within easy reach of the hacker spaces?

The City is a whole separate problem - they pay very _very_ well for good IT
talent, siphoning a lot of good people who would otherwise be ideal for the
startup market. You could go into finance for a few years, build up some
security before starting your business, but who will you be able to hire when
you do?

~~~
bearmf
All of the above is also true regarding Silicon Alley in New York. Just visit
expatistan.com and do a comparison. Housing is actually slightly more
expensive in New York. As for your point two, Wall Street pay is not what it
used to be while software engineering salaries outside of banks have been
increasing steadily for a couple of years. Nobody doubts NYC status as a
startup hub anymore.

Point one is also increasingly true for the SFBay area itself, but there are
not enough banks there for them to be a problem for startup recruiting. You
could also do a comparison on expatistan.com and see that housing is only 7%
less expensive in SF than in London. However, IT salaries there are probably
the highest in the World.

If current trends in London continue: startups start to pay more and banks
keep laying off people. This is probably a good thing.

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jseliger
>Point one is also increasingly true for the SFBay area itself

This might be one reason why Seattle continues to thrive: its rent, although
rising for the usual reasons related to land regulation, is still far lower
than SF or NYC, it already has two very large tech companies there, it has no
income tax, and it's a fun place to live.

Google and Facebook are both steadily expanding their Seattle-area offices for
reasons that make sense to me: moving from the SF area to Seattle means a de
facto 15 - 25% pay raise for people making $100,000 or more a year.

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joonix
This is what happens in democracies. The local councils and city governments
open their doors and drool over anyone willing to buy property. Property price
rises and thus increases the revenues they can bring in any play with. There
is almost no incentive for a government to keep housing affordable. Then we
end up with disenfranchisement on the scale of London's: Londoners and actual
British citizens and residents are told kindly to screw off while the
billionaires build their playground and stash away their dirty money. You see
this in Vancouver, Sydney, Hong Kong, New York; the list goes on.

~~~
walshemj
Well Tory boroughs sold off a lot of the social housing stock and in at least
one case where caught trying to use it to gerrymander - there are senior torys
hiding out in countries with now extradition to the UK to this day.

Ironically one of the recipients of this council housing sell off in
Westminster I worked with was a very left wing lesbian - She had great fun at
election times with the Tory election canvassers.

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gadders
They sold the housing stock off to the people that were actually renting the
council houses, increasing home ownership and enriching a generation of
working class people.

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SEMW
Which is all well and good if the council replenishes their stock of council
housing. I.e. if they use the sale money to buy or build more, so having it be
a permanent mechanism to help people lift themselves out of poverty.

But they didn't. What they did instead was sell them off without getting any
more, and used the money to cut taxes. Which is fine for the generation who
benefited from that round, but means the safety net is no longer there for
future generations.

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gadders
Well, steps are being taken to free up council houeses now - EG fixed duration
tenancies (rather than council houses for life), kicking out union Fat Cats
like Bob Crow [1] and other people that could afford to live in private
accommodation.

[1] [http://metro.co.uk/2011/04/03/bob-crow-gets-taxpayers-
help-w...](http://metro.co.uk/2011/04/03/bob-crow-gets-taxpayers-help-with-
rent-despite-earning-145k-a-year-648306/)

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hencq
As an aside, the article points out how the City of London is a separate
entity from greater London, but doesn't go into a lot of detail about it. This
video does an effective job in explaining how things work:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?internalcountrycode=NL&v=Lr...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?internalcountrycode=NL&v=LrObZ_HZZUc)

~~~
agwa
That's interesting, but it doesn't address to what extent someone in the City
of London could skirt British laws or taxes as the article implies. In 1771,
the aldermen of the City of London were able to bar Parliament from entering
the City of London to arrest a newspaper publisher who had broken the law by
publishing transcripts of Parliamentary debates. Does the City of London still
have that kind of autonomy?

~~~
gadders
No. It has a separate police force, but I don't think the boundaries are as
strict as they are for, say, state boundaries in the US. Pretty sure a Met
Police Car wouldn't stop a pursuit because it entered the city.

//edit//Although in Victorian times I believe it did inhibit attempts to
capture Jack the Ripper.

~~~
RobAley
Indeed, all Police Officers in the country have their powers throughout the
whole country, regardless of which Force they belong to. There are courtesy’s
that are usually observed when crossing into another force area in pursuit of
a criminal, the control room of the other force is informed (and usually asked
for help), and local officers will often take over or lead the pursuit if they
are available, though this is more because they know the area better. Upon
arrest, the criminal will usually be "booked in" at the local police station
but then transported back to one of the original force's police stations for
processing. Criminal law is the same across the country, so there is no sense
of different jurisdictions. There are some more formalities going into
Scotland, which has slightly different criminal laws, but nothing that stops a
good chase! Theres no benefit to the criminal of "getting across" internal
borders (akin to state lines in the US). Getting across a border externally
means crossing the sea, and even then co-operation between European forces is
getting better.

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rayiner
I've always wondered how much of this is paid for by oil money. How much of it
is the result of middle eastern sheiks needing to find a place to store the
oil wealth they've plundered from their countries?

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joshAg
"Perhaps the most striking fact about One Hyde Park and the London super-prime
property market is what it tells us about who the world’s richest people are.
Many people think the greatest winners of globalization today are financiers.
A decade or so ago, that may have been true. But today another class sits
above even them—the global commodity plutocrats: owners of mineral rights, or
dominant players in mineral-rich countries in sectors such as construction and
finance that benefit from commodity booms. Hollingsworth notes in Londongrad
that the oligarchs he studies became rich “not by creating new wealth but
rather by insider political intrigue and exploiting the weakness of the rule
of law.” Arkady Gaydamak, a Russian-Israeli oilman and financier, explained
his elite view of accumulating wealth to me in 2005. “With all the
regulations, the taxation, the legislation about working conditions, there is
no way to make money,” he said. “It is only in countries like Russia, during
the period of redistribution of wealth—and it is not yet finished—when you can
get a result. . . . How can you make $50 million in France today? How?”

Russia’s former privatization czar Anatoly Chubais put it less delicately:
“They steal and steal. They are stealing absolutely everything.”

London real-estate agents confirm that these commodity plutocrats dethroned
the financiers some time before the financial crisis hit. “I can’t remember
the last time I sold a property to a banker,” says Stephen Lindsay, of the
real-estate agency Savills. “It’s been hard for anyone to compete with the
Russians, the Kazakhs. They are all in oil, gas—that is what they do.
Construction—all that kind of stuff.”

Even the Arab money has taken a backseat to the new buyers, says Hersham. “The
wealth of the ex-Soviets is incredible,” he says. “Unless you are talking
about [Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Lloyd] Blankfein or [Stephen Schwarzman], the head
of Blackstone, or the head of one of the very big banks, there is no driver
from the City of London at these levels anymore.”

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notahacker
The ironic thing is that with the "exclusivity" of neighbours like that, you'd
have to pay me to live there.

It's disappointing how little interest the government has taken in taxing the
ridiculous capital gains resulting from the high-end London property bubble;
these "investors" probably contribute less to the British economy per pound
earned from their speculation than anyone else, and in many cases it's a
similar story in their homelands

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triplesec
This article is good, but its structure keeps the meat until the end. It's not
well-thought out in that respect. The payoff, that it's not the bankers who
have the money, but the oligarchs and privatisation thieves and bandits from
Russia is surprising. I want more data, more analysis, more stories, more
evidence than this, about what ahnd how, and what geosocially this means for
the next 30 years. A laundry list of who might actually live in one expensive
building is no good unless you tell us who they are and then do some numbers
on it, using these statistics to inform us the more. Poor outcome to this
article and it missed several tricks, even while mostly still engaging us in
the ownership envy that this piece really represents.

