Downstairs, Upstairs: The Division of Domestic Space Between Domestic Workers and Super-Rich Employers in London

Abstract

London’s affluent neighborhoods are often reported as places where employers infringe migrant domestic workers’ rights. Much has been written on both the wealthy’s influence on cities and on domestic workers’ lack of rights, yet few have connected these literatures. In this article, I explore one of the UK’s most expensive addresses, Eaton Square, through contemporary and historical planning documents, to unearth a legacy of segregation masked by tactics to avoid public scrutiny. Through interviewing staff at Kalayaan, a charity that supports and advocates for domestic workers, and analyzing their survey data, I find that explicit segregation is being replaced by boundary erasure, with workers sleeping in communal areas and family members’ bedrooms, with little or no access to the city outside. The article questions the conflation of the physical house and social home that is regularly assumed, and argues for domestic workers’ human right to privacy to be enabled, rather than restricted, by spatial and legislative means.

Keywords:

• domestic workers
• super-rich
• domestic space
• home
• human rights

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank everyone at Kalayaan for their invaluable input to the study and to Virginia Mantouvalou for introducing us. Thank you also to my interviewees, to the helpful staff at City of Westminster Archives and to everyone who took the time to provide advice and comments – the anonymous peer reviewers, Diana Periton, Katharina Borsi, Roger Burrows, Rosie Cox, Luna Glucksberg, Kath Scanlon, Don Slater and Helen Lewandowski.

Notes

1. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1925).

2. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972 [1884]), 129.

3. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Mike Savage, “Piketty’s Challenge for Sociology,” British Journal of Sociology 65, no. 4 (2014): 602.

4. Engels, The Origin of the Family, 121.

5. Parreñas defines “reproductive labour” as “the labor needed to sustain the productive labor force … household chores; the care of elders, adults, and youth; the socialization of children; and the maintenance of social ties in the family.” Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 29.

6. See e.g. Anna Minton, Big Capital: Who is London For? (London: Penguin Books, 2017), 12.

7. See e.g. Mary Romero, Valerie Preston, and Wenona Giles, eds., When Care Work Goes Global: Locating the Social Relations of Domestic Work (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).

8. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

9. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).

10. Rowland Atkinson, Alpha City: How London Was Captured by the Super-Rich (London: Verso, 2020); Knight Frank, “Super Prime Market Insight, Autumn 2020.” Available online: https://content.knightfrank.com/research/185/documents/en/super-prime-london-report-autumn-2020-7511.pdf (accessed October 19, 2021).

11. See e.g. Sophie McBain, “The Maid Slaves: How Wealthy Visitors to Britain Trap Servants in Their Homes,” The New Statesman, February 14, 2017.

12. Virginia Mantouvalou, “‘Am I Free Now?’ Overseas Domestic Workers in Slavery,” Journal of Law and Society 42, no. 3 (2015): 347; William Davies, “Elites Without Hierarchies: Intermediaries, ‘Agency’ and the Super-Rich,” in Cities and the Super-Rich: Real Estate, Elite Practices, and Urban Political Economies, ed. Ray Forrest, Sin Yee Koh, and Bart Wissink (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 34–35.

13. See Kalayaan’s website, http://www.kalayaan.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/ (accessed 20 May 2022).

14. Hermione Hobhouse, Thomas Cubitt: Master Builder (London: Macmillan, 1971), 141; Atkinson, Alpha City, 68; HM Land Registry, Price Paid Dataset, 2019

15. Sophie Baldwin, Elizabeth Holroyd and Roger Burrows, “Luxified Troglodytism? Mapping the Subterranean Geographies of Plutocratic London,” arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 23, no. 3 (2019).

16. See e.g. Nick Fagge and Jake Simon Wallis, “Abandoned Mansions on Grenfell Tower’s Doorstep,” The Daily Mail, June 17, 2017.

17. Rowland Atkinson, “Necrotecture: Lifeless Dwellings and London’s Super-Rich,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 43, no. 1 (2018): 10.

18. Luna Glucksberg, “A View from the Top: Unpacking Capital Flows and Foreign Investment in Prime London,” City 20, no. 2 (2016): 249.

19. Here, and later, “n=” refers to the total number of individuals who responded to each question. Though the statistics throughout refer to the same time period (and individuals), this number varies since not every individual answered every question.

20. Interview with Kalayaan, July 18, 2019.

21. Bourdieu, Pierre, “The Berber House or the World Reversed,” Social Science Information 9, no. 2 (1970): 179.

22. Cox, Rosie, The Servant Problem: Domestic Employment in a Global Economy (London: I.B. Taurus, 2006), 78.

23. Knight Frank, “20 Eaton Square,” https://media.onthemarket.com/properties/3843665/doc_0_0.pdf (accessed October 26, 2021).

24. Livia Barbosa, “Domestic Workers and Pollution in Brazil,” in Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination, ed. Ben Campkin and Rosie Cox (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 25–33.

25. Virginia Mantouvalou, “Legal Construction of Structures of Exploitation,” in Philosophical Foundations of Labour Law, ed. Hugh Collins et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 200.

26. Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages,” in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, ed. Pamela Johnston (London: Architectural Association Publications, 1996), 55–91; Robert Kerr, The Gentleman’s House; Or, How to Plan English Residences, from the Parsonage to the Palace (London: John Murray, 1865), 68.

27. Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London (London: Macmillan and Co., 1896) Vol. 8, 228.

28. 95 Eaton Square SW1, 1911 (London: City of Westminster Archives, WDP2/0586/02); Basement floor plan of Flat P, 95 Eaton Square, 2013 (London: Westminster City Council).

29. Interview with planning intermediary, July 1, 2019.

30. UK Home Office, Immigration Statistics year ending September 2020, Entry Clearance Visas – Applications and Outcomes, 2020; Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization.

31. Interviews with planning intermediaries, June 16 and July 11, 2019; Ramidus Consulting Limited, “The Prime Residential Market in Westminster,” https://www.westminster.gov.uk/media/document/ev-h-012–-prime-residential-market-in-westminster (accessed October 23, 2021).

32. Interview with planning intermediary, July 11, 2019.

33. Dwelling in London N2, Re Valuation Tribunal (2015) R.V.R. 157.

34. Sotheby’s, “7 bedrooms House for Sale – Eaton Square, Belgravia, London SW1W,” https://www.sothebysrealty.co.uk/enb/sales/detail/204-l-82888-lon180021/en-sw1w (accessed July 25, 2019).

35. Candy & Candy, “Million Dollar Homes – London Luxury to Buy,” https://www.slideshare.net/MercyHomesUK/candy-nov (accessed July 25, 2019).

36. Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, “One Hyde Park,” https://www.rsh-p.com/projects/one-hyde-park/ (accessed January 10, 2021); David B. Brownlee, Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993), 102.

37. Interview with planning intermediary, July 3, 2019.

38. 23A Eaton Square SW1, 1937 (London: City of Westminster Archives, WDP2/0582/11).

39. UK Home Office, Immigration Rules, Appendix 7: Overseas Workers in Private Households, 2019.

40. Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1985), 207–232.

41. Bridget Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (London: Zed Books, 2000).

42. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Penguin, 1971), 109–140.

43. Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and the Genesis of Appropriated Physical Space,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 42, no. 1 (2018): 111.

44. Interview with Kalayaan, July 18, 2019.

45. Atkinson, “Necrotecture: Lifeless Dwellings and London’s Super-Rich.”

46. Christina V. Butler, Domestic Service: An Enquiry by the Women’s Industrial Council (London: E. Bell and Sons., 1916), 45; Einat Albin and Virginia Mantouvalou, “The ILO Convention on Domestic Workers: From the Shadows to the Light,” Industrial Law Journal 41, no. 1 (2012): 77.

47. Incorporated into British law via UK Legislation. Human Rights Act 1998.

48. Rowland Atkinson and Sarah Blandy, Domestic Fortress: Fear and the New Home Front (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

49. Natalie Sedacca, “Migrant Domestic Workers and the Right to a Private and Family Life,” Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 37, no. 4 (2019); Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour.

50. Lorna Fox, “The Idea of Home in Law,” Home Cultures 2, no. 1 (2005).

51. Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, “What Is a Bedroom?” https://www.ricsfirms.com/glossary/what-is-a-bedroom/ (accessed January 10, 2021).

52. Corkish (LO) v. Wright and Hart (2014) England & Wales High Court 237, cited in: Dwelling in London N2, Re Valuation Tribunal (2015) R.V.R. 157.

53. Sarah Schindler, “Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment,” The Yale Law Journal 124, no. 6 (2015): 2024, 1934.

54. Butler, Domestic Service, 44.

55. Schindler, “Architectural Exclusion,” 1934.

56. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century; Brian Masters, The Dukes: The Origins, Ennoblement and History of 26 Families (London: Pimlico, 2001), 317.

57. Interview with planning intermediary, June 16, 2019.

58. Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and the Genesis of Appropriated Physical Space,” 109.

59. Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages,” 88–90.

60. Ann Oakley, Housewife (London: Penguin Books, 1976); Silvia Federici, Wages against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975).

61. Kerr, The Gentleman’s House, 68.

62. Leslie Sklair, The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities, and Capitalist Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 220–224.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matt Reynolds

Matt Reynolds is a research student at the London School of Economics and Political Science within the Department of Sociology and a volunteer for Kalayaan, the domestic worker charity. His thesis in progress is focusing on cleaning, security, and the moral ordering of space in twenty-first-century Britain.