Walking plutocratic London: exploring erotic, phantasmagoric Mayfair

ABSTRACT

Exploring fragments of a spatially calibrated dialogic between wealthy lives and the landscapes of their production and enactment describes this paper’s central aim. The dynamic between plutocrats and their neighbourhood coproduces both, exposing social and built architectures simultaneously; revealing scraps of information about who plutocrats are and how they live, plugging a gap in the literature on elites with a mobile-micro-spatial-biographical approach. Certain kinds of plutocrats live and play in Mayfair: others visit its hotels, restaurants, clubs and casinos, all of which form sites of plutocratic production. No abstract fraction of accumulated assets as scholars exploring capital and eliteness as social categories imply, capital works through bodies and emotions; it eats, sleeps and pleasures itself in London’s wealthier neighbourhoods. The rising fortunes of the ultra-wealthy are one of the defining issues of our time (see Mike Savage, blog 1st July 2015 LSE website), and yet there are few close encounters with how they live and their impact on cities. In this paper, I show how wealth is lived and played in Mayfair – one of London’s wealthiest neighbourhoods. Walking through Mayfair at night I explore its phantasmagorical qualities as a plutocratic playground, describing the city making and lives that result from pursuit of pleasure.

KEYWORDS:

• Walking
• plutocrat
• city
• erotic
• phantasmagoria

Acknowledgements

Life in the Alpha Territories (2011–2013) the research project underpinning parts of this paper was funded by the ERSC. Roger Burrows (Goldsmiths and Newcastle), Mike Savage (LSE), Mike Featherstone (Goldsmiths) Tim Butler (KCL) Luna Glucksberg (Goldsmiths) and Rowland Atkinson (Sheffield) are my fellow researchers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Caroline Knowles is the Director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths. Her research probes aspects of globalisation, particularly circulations of people, as migrants, and objects.

Notes

1. For more about the behind-the-scenes private-equity financing of Mayfair: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/financial-careers/09/private-equity.asp http://www.interviewprivateequity.com/what-do-private-equity-investors-do

2. On hedge funds: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hedgefund.asp

3. On Family Offices and dynastic wealth: www.theguardian.com/business/2016/mar/12/family-office-private-wealth-funds A family must be worth at least US$100 million to be managed by one of the multi-family offices, and over US$250 million to have their own office (Glucksberg and Burrows 2016). They manage more than £700 billions in assets (David Batty, Guardian, 12 March 2016).

4. Source: Who Lives in Mayfair 2015 http://wetherell.co.uk/market-reports/2015/lives-mayfair-2015/

5. For more about London’s current club economy: http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21665062-having-become-more-open-clubland-thriving-home-home

6. Thanks to James Weitz for identifying this car.

7. Source: Inside Claridges, BBC Two documentary (2016).

8. This is difficult to establish, but Hollingsworth and Lansley (2010) suggest this rate.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/K002503/1].