London's getting cheaper, as long as you're already rich
Plus pricey pints, spooky cemeteries and terrible Inferno's
Spare a thought for poor Adele. The singer (whose net worth was most recently calculated at somewhere in the region of £130 million) told Vogue magazine last week that one of the reasons she moved to America was because she couldn’t afford London’s property prices.
“The kind of house I have in LA I could never afford in London,” said the relatable cockney songstress who currently owns a “three-home compound” in LA, worth upwards of $30m.
As difficult as it might be to totally sympathise with Adele’s real estate struggles, she might have a point about London’s affordability. Bloomberg ran an article last week that starts off by admitting that a lot of the post-Covid “death of the city” claims were maybe a little pessimistic, a view point that we largely agree with:
However, the article goes on to point out that a lot of the ‘recovery’ we’re currently seeing is both dependent on, and favours, the wealthy.
Take the ‘Zoomocracy’, i.e. the kind of people who can move themselves out to the suburbs and commute into central London a couple of times a week (outside of rush hour of course), maybe staying overnight in a little pied-à-terre in the Square Mile. According to Bloomberg, these new behaviours result in “drivers commuting into town at ever more random times” causing traffic congestion to become “even worse than the comparable period in 2019.”
And rents in London are now right back to where they were pre-Covid. As the FT reported a couple of weeks ago, it looks like we are back to “the bad old days” of group viewings, bidding wars, and offers way above asking prices.
That’s not necessarily totally bad news. As Bloomberg says, “What mayor wouldn’t want a first-world problem like too much demand?” But that demand has to be offset by the ability to attract young, creative talent. London needs diversity as well as density.
If a city manages to price out the aspirational, it risks becoming becomes stagnant and increasingly unappealing. When that happens, fewer and fewer new people arrive, the city loses revenue, it stops being able to invest in those dreams of ‘15 minute cities’ and there’s a lack of workers, which creates supply-chain problems. Sound familiar?
Bloomberg’s advice to government on how to avoid all this is to “convert excess and relatively low-quality commercial real-estate into housing”, invest in “better and more extensive public transport links” and listen to communities who are telling them what really matters to them (e.g. the 41% of women in London who say they ‘feel unsafe after dark’).
Meanwhile, the six pound pint is becoming the norm
And while we’re talking about London’s affordability: last week the Times reported that, no matter what happens in today’s budget, the price of a pint of beer is going to “jump by 30 pence… as rising costs are passed on to consumers.”
According to the paper, a combination of factors like the shortage of hospitality staff returning after furlough, higher wages and energy and supply shortages means that “more than eight in 10 pubs have raised prices or plan to do so”.
There’s rumours that “English sparkling wine and kegs of beer” will benefit from rate cuts in today’s budget. But even if that comes to pass, it seems as though the six quid pint has arrived (of course the Mail are already sounding the alarm about the £7 London pint).
At least we’re still cheaper than Scandinavia
Fresh from analysing food hygiene ratings to find out which London Boroughs are the most and least hygienic, Maxima Kitchen Equipment have now examined the top cities in Europe to find out which are “the cheapest and most expensive places to eat out.”
The company analysed “the price of a meal at an inexpensive restaurant, the price of a meal at a mid-range restaurant, the cost of a lunchtime meal, the cost of a pub dinner and the price of a three-course meal at an Italian restaurant” to get to their league tables, so it’s a pretty thorough piece of research (as these things go).
Of the ten most expensive cities in Europe for eating out, London ranks fifth, with the cost of “a three-course meal at an Italian restaurant for two” averaging out at €87, and the “pub dinner for two” coming in at €46.
The rest of the top five cities are Helsinki, Bergen, Copenhagen and, right at the top, Oslo with its average dining out cost of €66.48 and average pub dinner of €55 (bear in mind that in Oslo, a pint can cost you 90Kr or about £7.60).
And the rest…
In another example of London becoming less welcoming to a diverse set of people, punks are claiming that they are “being banished from Camden Town”. Specifically it’s the small group of punks “who request £1 for a photo from tourists” on the Lock bridge. Anderson Garcia Rodrigues, aka Zombiepunk, told the Camden New Journal, “I don’t want to cause any harm and I just want to feel the authentic energy of the United Kingdom. I want to be part of it and build and make history. I want to rub it in the face of the world that the punks did not die.”
Sky News has been on a trip down the Thames with Black History Walks. Their tour from Temple Pier to Greenwich was a supposed to be a one-off, but after the first one sold out they’ve kept them running and there’s now three opportunities a year to get aboard their double-decker boat and take the six-mile round trip that includes “discussions about how London’s landmarks link to key parts of black British history, with special historical guests played by people in costume.”
Wallpaper has been to visit ‘Waste Age: What Can Design Do?’ at the Design Museum to see how “design visionaries and pioneers” are finding “new ways of repurposing and reinventing our relationship with waste.”
To mark the release of One Night in Soho, Kim Newman has produced a guide to 15 memorable movie locations in Soho and surrounds for the Guardian. Good to see David Naughton transforming into an (American) werewolf in the auditorium of “longtime Soho porn venue,” the Eros theatre, on the list.
Talking of spooky London spots, the London Metropolitan Archives are delving into the London Gothic this Wednesday via an online talk that promises to “venture into the darker side of London’s history”. Subjects include plague records, a century old tarot deck and “the story of the most unfortunately named ghost ‘scratching fanny of cock lane’”.
And if you really want to get Gothic this week, Conde Nast Traveller has produced a guide to London’s Magnificent Seven cemeteries (extra marks if you can name them all before clicking on the link).
From one type of terrifying location to another: Vice sent one of their reporters to Inferno’s in Clapham to eavesdrop on the punters at the “Iconic Disco Night”. Sample quote: “Why does it stink like that in here?”