Wealth, as we have seen, can be an isolating force. While the alpha city appears to offer an open, natural setting for the rich, it is also their soft prison, a luxurious zone of insulated bunkers, fortress homes and gated communities. The city’s wonderful spaces sustain but also confine the super-rich. Their captivity is driven by a contradiction that lies at the heart of the alpha lifestyle – with massive wealth comes irresolvable anxiety.
Anxiety and fear are key elements of the broader social fabric within which ordinary people are wrapped. The idea of a culture fixated on potential risks, uncertain futures and a deepening sense of precariousness is ubiquitous. Where the rich differ from the rest of us, however, is in the way they respond to everyday fears with enormously elaborate and sometimes disproportionate strategies to achieve a sense of total control. In the end this creates an increasingly exclusive environment that is even more anxiety-producing.
Studies of the lifestyles of the super-rich reveal that their worry is driven by multiple fears – of intrusion, breaches of privacy, domestic invasion, the loss of property, fraud and impersonation, embezzlement, and even the possible loss of life. As we saw in the last chapter, the rich are particularly able to use certain strategies and technologies of movement that engrain this kind of evade/connect pattern of engagement. So while there are recognisable aspects of these patterns that overlap with those found in more everyday lives, the intensity with which risk is mitigated operates at a much broader level. Massive personal wealth generates the feeling that one is different or a potential target. This can result in the kind of confinements that we have already seen, with a concerted effort to secure property, bodies, minds, homes, staff and also, of course, money.
If you drop in to the Banham security shop on Kensington High Street you’ll get a sense of the attention to detail and security in London’s alphahoods. Here you’ll find a busy scene in which wealthy owners jostle with the servants of other owners for the attention of staff, amid comforting displays of steel-braced doors, safes and gun cabinets. Many such devices are sold to create the illusion of an everyday home while concealing the use of bolstered doors and shatter-proof windows in a domestic space designed to turn into a trap for the soon-to-be-confounded burglar.
But subtlety is not always the name of the game; many owners seek features that shout at ne’er-do-wells not to chance their arm. Such measures include the use of overt cameras, video entry phones, steel grills, and signs warning of rapid response units should the trap be sprung. Such are the common trappings of the alpha fortresses in many of the streets in these districts. One walks out of the shop with the mind’s eye focused on a cast of innovative burglars and tooled-up intruders who might take advantage of any home less than medievally fortified.
London promises, particularly for nationals from riskier countries, a low-risk environment, or at least one where external risks can be mollified. The rule of law and the low risk of crime are reassuring qualities, teaching the rich that wandering through open public spaces is possible. Yet despite the feeling that this place offers a site of shelter and safe harbour, the idea of not planning for and strategising against risks is seen as foolhardy. As the old joke goes: a man sprinkling powder on the ground is asked what he is doing; he explains that the powder is elephant-repellent dust. The questioner, thinking him mad, points out that there are no wild elephants for thousands of miles. With a smile the man says, yes, effective isn’t it?
The array of visible and less obvious security arrangements in the alphahoods gives the impression that paranoia and fear are never far from the imaginations of the rich, a concern with possibilities never likely to eventuate. But it would be a mistake to think that they sit trembling in these fine cocoons. Security is generally a delegated matter, something for someone else to install and manage. Seamless transitions between places, spaces and vehicles, the employment of drivers and other staff, enable a sense of ease rather than fear, but there is nevertheless a sense of lurking danger that undergirds these complex arrangements and infrastructures. There are always enough stories of domestic burglaries, hotel hold-ups, jewel heists and violent robberies to make precautionary measures appear necessary. To stop worrying might invite disaster.
Protecting one’s house with locks is sensible, but for the rich this is a minimal approach to home defence. Their security regimes involve personal guards, panic rooms, motion-sensing cameras and bio-print door entry systems, among an array of other expensive extras, staff and bespoke products. These muscular responses to risk have a wider impact – the domestic security arrangements of the wealthy do not stop at their front doors or garden walls. The security labour and infrastructure that protect the rich and assuage their anxieties generate a more pervasive aesthetic and atmosphere that now inflects the life of the city more broadly. These efforts have changed the feel of traditionally open streetscapes and of homes designed with total security in mind. In many cases it is no longer even possible to reach the front door of such homes.
A number of quite visible symbols index the deeper play of negative emotions and fears that seem everywhere in evidence across the alphahoods. These include CCTV cameras, guards behind shop doors, blacked-out car windows, the large electronic gates of many homes, the employment of large numbers of household staff, booms across roads and signs denoting private roads. Yet such efforts are also designed not to impede on the lives of the wealthy or to generate unnecessary concern. The result is an aesthetic that seems to combine special ops with Italian tailoring. Security details in hotels or shops, often fronted by athletic young men in black suits and earpieces, are part of a chain of potentially escalating responses to threats. An initial impression of openness can quickly change depending on the nature of a threat, whether it be from those inappropriately dressed (diverted to another, more suitable venue), rowdy behaviour (quickly calmed or challenged), or an attempt at robbery. Rows of fine townhouses can quickly be shut down by domestic security systems or swarmed by rapid response units from the police or private security personnel.
One of the fundamental challenges of being very rich is knowing who can be trusted. But the process really begins with another question – who can be trusted to tell who can be trusted? Wealth arrives with risks lurking in tow. Being a member of the city’s wealthy elite makes one a potential target of burglars, fraudsters, cyber-criminals or the very real prospect of potentially untrustworthy personal staff, money managers and accountants. Myths and stories are traded among the rich about whom to avoid or to engage. Trust itself is a hard-won thing when the gap between personal staff, the general population and one’s own wealth is so immense.
The possibility of being duped is thus a constant worry and a frequent source of potential embarrassment. In an acquisitive, materialistic and media-saturated culture of display, excess and the flaunting of symbols of achievement, the position of the wealthy is coveted. The rich themselves know this and act accordingly. An awareness of envy and possible ill intentions behind the broad smiles motivates the use of well-paid and long-term staff wherever possible. These may include a family office of wealth and personal advisers, trusted butlers, and, less often, bodyguards and security personnel. Among the wealthiest, entire household retinues can be found, many of them retained during the owners’ absences to ensure both continuity as well as the maintenance and security of a home. But the gnawing possibility of employing someone on the take, or with risky connections or just a lax approach to security, demands that one keep a close eye on who gets access to the home, to the children and of course to one’s wealth.
Safety is not just a matter of how one gets about or the security features of one’s home, it involves a much more encompassing set of strategies for ensuring a safe place to invest, to educate one’s children, to live and to socialise. The principle of staying safe is extended and expressed in the desire for seamless movement between the eyrie-like spaces of fortified homes and the protected and cocooned spaces of private clubs, galleries, schools and exclusive shopping destinations. The desire for safety also relates to the wealth accumulation strategies that use financial instruments devised in the City, connections to offshore and secrecy jurisdictions, and the role of land and property in offering a safe investment in a world of economic turmoil.
The net effect of this operating principle is to unify diverse aspects of the city around the need for protection and security – the absolute core of how the rich relate to a city that remains in their imaginations a place of safety, democracy and rule of law that allows the unperturbed use of public space. For a group that may feel some anxiety at their lofty position, these are immensely valuable aspects of alpha city urbanism.
For the city’s rich, however, everyday life is limited to safe zones and uplifting spaces; it is lived in an urban setting akin to a spectacularly comfortable open prison. The resulting impression is one of a privileged group in a distinctive and highly manicured habitat – one in which the wealthy can roam, but ultimately with strict restrictions on the boundaries of this space. Like a large gated community, the city’s alpha quarters offer the illusion of having everything that one needs, belying the reality of a bounded space disconnected from the threats and irritations that might exist outside its limits.
At first glance this will seem a bold assertion given the immense resources and hyper-mobility of the rich that we have already witnessed. Yet in reality the daily pathways and tracks laid down by and for the super-rich are repeatedly travelled in quite fixed ways – from one secure node or safe space to another. The idea that privilege brings with it a gilded cage is no doubt one that many among the wealthy would vigorously deny, yet it is clear that like-with-like association among them is the driving feature of many of these everyday social circuits. Despite their magnificence and opulence, it is the same clubs, communities, leisure spaces and homes that are the recurring stamping grounds of the elite.
The alpha securityscape
A subtly securitised look and atmosphere permeates the city’s alphahoods, varying according to their location and the composition of their households. The range of their defensive strategies is split particularly between old and new residents and between suburban and central city locations. Another key factor at work is both the extent of the wealth and the national background of the rich themselves; notable groups like the Russians tend to be more security conscious, Europeans and established Britons generally less so. Yet new money brings with it the sense that status is also about defence, and in this sense the alphahoods form a series of micro-territories, bubbles of security over which control can be exerted and threats repelled or expelled as and when the need arises.
For some years London has increasingly securitised its streets, privatised public spaces and installed an almost total surveillance system in its centre. Much of this effort stems from the city’s experience of domestic terrorism and a series of bombings in the 1970s and ’80s, leading to the massive deployment of advanced surveillance technologies, particularly CCTV. These provisions have since been directed at unruly citizens or used to guard against the kind of spectacular shocks that terror has brought to the city more recently. These broader changes in the look and atmosphere of the city compound the sense that anxiety is the key organising principle of an alpha urban order, born of massive inequalities, techno-responses to risk and an emphatic intolerance towards any form of disorder.
London’s capture by the rich is in part expressed through this almost wholesale transformation of many areas organised around the principle of security. There can never be too much of it. Its unwritten diktat states that this logic will extend to include any homes and environments not currently attached to it, for to fail to do so is make oneself or one’s home a more vulnerable target. Ever-expanding security systems take in affluent homes, peri-urban communities, city neighbourhoods, villages and even towns that have become integrated in line with these principles of protection.
The precautionary principles and dedicated planning for security that underscores the life of the alphahoods produces territories; spaces that can be defended. The potential for aggressive countermeasures surrounds notable homes, gated communities and key streets protected by private security outfits and surveillance systems. Walking the environs of key alpha developments, such as Belgravia’s squares or Chelsea’s quaint townhouses, or suburban areas like Cobham or Gerrards Cross, one will feel like a trespasser simply for not being a resident. Being challenged feels like a constant possibility, and indeed will come swiftly after entering a private road or even passing close to the gates of some residences and secure compounds.
In many such areas one of the standout features is the number of service staff running the homes, cleaning the streets, patrolling the boundaries. When the urbanist Jane Jacobs talked of the desirability of having eyes on the street to help communities to be safer, she did not have in mind this super-secured landscape of wealthy neighbourhoods and armies of suspicious helpers. These numerous staff now represent paid ‘eyes’ undertaking surveillance and security on behalf of the rich, rather than members of the community looking out for each other. The overall impression is one of a search for safety in the absence of community or indeed, in some places, of residents.
In the central London alphahoods aggressive and strategic planning is translated into a corresponding physical form. The trick here is to ensure that antagonism towards potential threats is as subtle as possible. The miniaturisation of cameras means that surveillance often feels unobtrusive, but in many of the new developments security guards sit inside the reception area examining a bank of screens. In The Bishops Avenue in Highgate there are homes with guard boxes at the front gates, while others have gates and walls that cannot be seen over.
Until the late nineteenth century, London’s West End had around 150 private barriers, used to prevent noise and traffic as well as access by the general hoi polloi. In some cases these were open during the day, but at the Bedford Estate tickets were required to gain even daytime access. The inconvenience and anti-democratic nature of these gates generated massive public resentment and then agitation, which finally resulted in the London Streets (Removal of Gates) Acts of 1890 and 1893.1 A little later, the London Building Act of 1894 also prohibited any post, rail, fence or bar across a street. During this period the threat of occasional riots rarely touched the West End, but nevertheless provoked the formation of associations to protect property. Today, once again, a perceived deficit in control over space and property drives private residents or entire neighbourhoods to use their combined resources to purchase additional layers of security. In these areas the perception that state-run policing and security are not enough is rife.
In many ways the central London alphahoods manage to combine the need for security with a vibrant street life, particularly on larger roads. But this geography of security and residence is complex and changes quickly. In an area like Knightsbridge one finds a kind of ‘shells and yolks’ patchwork in which softer, interior streets feel cosy and protected. Here an almost village atmosphere can be found, with small pubs and shops sitting alongside modest mews houses (often belying their quite staggering cost). These relatively inviting spaces are juxtaposed against areas where embassies, ambassadorial residences and the mansions of the super-rich create a more intimidating, harder-edged atmosphere. Here one may bump into security guards walking Alsatians in the streets or encounter guards in pillboxes manning the gated entrances to some streets. In nearby Kensington Palace Gardens there are are patrols of armed guards and police, and the street’s gates can be closed if security is at high alert. Signs dotted along the Gardens prohibit the taking of pictures, though, curiously, it is possible to park one’s car using one of the meters along this wide street.
These observations underline an important point in relation to the contemporary look and feel of the West End. Here the many and varied spaces of the wealthy and super-rich, hyper-secure nodes of homes, hotels, mansions, apartment blocks, stores and banks are almost lifted out of the city by their technologies and security apparatuses. These infrastructures enable the control and coordination of residential life, filtering out non-residents or unwanted individuals at one location while including them at others. Yet immediately alongside these zones one can find an unrestricted and open street life as one moves from areas of lockdown and suspicion to others of everyday encounter and porosity.
For some among the newly arrived rich, a highly desirable attribute is the provision of safe houses from which excursions can be made to equally pleasant and secure homes, venues, clubs, restaurants, and sports and cultural events. At the former Lever mansion in Hampstead, which has been subdivided into a luxury enclave apartment block, guards with dogs patrol the gardens. Non-residents at the gates are asked their business via a videophone entry system, and all around are signs warning of the guard dogs. These new developments continue a longer history of urban fortification that includes streets with barriers across them and guards to prevent casual entry.
The construction of new alpha developments, like The Lancasters, One Hyde Park or St George Wharf, enables key security features to be more easily embedded into the infrastructure of the building from the outset. A strong case in point is the hyper-secure development at Embassy Gardens, which overlooks the new American Embassy. Well-heeled but casual coffee drinkers are checked-over by plain clothes officers. Baristas, receiving dollars and euros in their tip jar, are briefed on what to do in the event of an attack. Here, even the wealthy are brought into the orbit of an even more powerful security regime, and almost every piece of street furniture looks like it might have a camera embedded in it. At One Hyde Park, external glass walls offer the impression of openness while belying their use to divide non-residents from residents; cars are accepted or rejected at ground level, and all post is X-rayed before final delivery.
In many alphahoods, security systems are also embedded in the shopping and commercial infrastructure. Jewellers and prestigious hotels have been the sites of robberies and attacks. In 2014 a single scooter gang made a series of attacks around the West End, smashing cabinets and stealing jewellery from cases in the lobbies of the Dorchester (which saw two attacks in the same year), the Jumeirah Carlton and another two jewellers before being caught. Notable robberies have also occurred at Boodles, Yves Saint Laurent, Selfridges and Tiffany’s on Sloane Square in recent years. In 2018, in the space of only three months, watches worth more than a million pounds were stolen in central London. All this talk of crime, the risk of robbery and the audacity of criminals of course reinforces the setting of priorities around continued security and perhaps also the feeling that with wealth comes the lurking possibility of moments of lawlessness and violence.
At the flagship stores the subtle filtering of unwanted social elements is achieved by the symbolically intimidating presence of luxury as well as guards on the doors. Where security is needed in abundance, at jewellers and banks, it is not uncommon for the doors to be locked until prospective customers have been vetted, or for double-doors to be used that enable customers to be placed in a kind of very temporary off-street isolation. The tension is thus that between a desire to appear open to all, enabling a feeling of seamless transition for ‘legitimate’ users, and ensuring a tight protection of assets.
If we move out of the city back to the suburban exclaves, we find an even more secure alpha zone, a place that elite property agents will often direct wealthy buyers to if they want total control over their property. Here space gives greater latitude for installing more extensive systems and controlling domestic borders. London’s adjacent counties have seen significant expansions in the number of executive mega-homes and both large and small gated enclaves. These areas have an increasingly urbanised and highly securitised feel that is somewhat alien to a region once tied to agricultural and feudal relations. This apparent leap out of rurality is also accompanied in many cases by the impression of a curtailment of freedoms – blocked paths and highways appear everywhere, and historical rights of access on public footpaths are set in conflict with the desire of new owners to maintain total privacy.
London’s outer alphahoods have the feel of a pseudo-rural space – a place of security guard boxes rather than chocolate box cottages. This is an often conspicuously enclosed, electronically eyed and, in many cases, unfriendly landscape. From one enclave to another, guards patrol in their vans and service staff are buzzed through the gates of large homes as powerful cars fly past. In some cases the trappings of security are purely symbolic: wait a short while and the gates of some roads will slowly open; but the intent is clear – you don’t live here or belong here. The only sound of life in many of these areas comes from the wind, the traffic and the slow whine of airliners appearing almost suspended above as they glide into Heathrow.
Economics has long operated as an important means of maintaining the social prestige of wealthy areas, resisting the construction of public and affordable housing that would diversify such communities. Affluent neighbourhoods create hermetically sealed spaces that keep out the poor through high house prices and rents. The changes in these areas have a longer history, and again we can find continuities as well as intensifications of the trajectory towards greater privatism and the retreat of the wealthy elite behind walls and gates. In many picturesque villages farm-worker cottages have been gentrified, while nearby gated lanes open onto new housing developments tightly integrated into established woodland – an attempt at ensuring privacy as well as concealing the scale of development and indeed the massive size of many of these homes. It is possible to pass through many places with little awareness of their extensive security arrangements or any real knowledge of the extent of this new and exclusive scene. The weaving of new boundaries, cables, infrastructures, lanes and homes gives the impression of a kind of synthetic rurality tinged with a semi-urban feel that brings to mind Stepford lives.
Private security details, powerful cars and secure enclaves mark the new residential landscape of the city, while bunkers and complex surveillance systems appear to further the sense of paranoia among those who have ‘made it’. These zones of gun-toting security personnel in the grounds of mansions, control rooms and dorms provided for security staff, and panic rooms in hotels for super-affluent visitors, mark out a highly suspicious, twitching residential landscape of curtains, cameras and guards. As we will see, all of this generates the impression of a self-governing zone which administers its own rules and boundaries.
The fortress home
For the rich the key defensive position, the place from which all other bets and adventures are hedged, is the private home. If we were to build a composite archetype of an alpha city home it would be a large townhouse, with perhaps six bedrooms, in the patrician heartlands of Knightsbridge or Mayfair. One would be greeted by the regular signatures of sturdy locks and a video entry phone, sometimes with pin code entry. This is a kind of buffer zone in which traditional connections between home and street are made fuzzier, the intention being to create a higher degree of control. Above the door will likely sit a small CCTV camera, operating in infrared to enable night vision, relaying a live feed to a screen inside the house or to the owner’s phone so that visitors can be vetted remotely. Reinforced glass windows will be installed at ground level, and when residents are away for extended periods some homes may display security grille shutters that prevent access even if a window is somehow broken (unlikely when many are treated with tough polymer to prevent breakage). The front door will have two steel deadlocks and, while seeming to be made of solid wood, will often be reinforced with steel (or made bespoke to an even higher specification). Doors made of hardened wood that will flex under impact to prevent fracturing are one of the more or less standard features of homes that feel increasingly fortified.
The typical home of London’s super-rich is a high-tech security apparatus, threaded with layers and cables of infrastructure. It has been estimated that the average cost of securing a central London mansion is around £50,000 a year. At the top end numerous additional security features can be added to homes, and the results are in some cases spectacular. Verging on paranoia, the list of extras begins to sound like a Bond villain’s wish list for securing their bunker. They may include the installation of collapsible steel gates on the inside of windows, gun cabinets (subject of course to applications for firearms licences), the use of DNA ‘water’ systems that spray burglars for later detection, as well as ingenious ‘fogging’ systems that flood rooms with a high density mist making it impossible to see what might be stolen.
With significant resources one can install rapid automatic shutters to block key rooms after an intruder alert has been triggered. A related system uses electromagnetically sealed doors which can be remotely shut to trap intruders. Sensors can be employed to monitor various aspects of the life of the home. It is now possible, for example, to fit vibration, temperature (to prevent damage to artworks) and even weight detectors (to establish that it is the owner who is at home). Even further layers of detection can be installed using, for example, acoustic detectors to pick up on the sound of breaking glass. Infra-red beams are the standard fare of burglar alarms, but multi-layered intrusion detection beams can also be used to ensure that a cat burglar doesn’t gain entry by hopping over or avoiding beams.
The list of security devices is long, and numerous providers are engaged in the profitable business of offering advice, support and installation. Fingerprint locks are now beginning to make an entrance onto the market, while safes can be used to trigger intruder alerts, with one code used for normal access and another to alert that it is being opened under duress. Panic buttons are of course linked to the rapid response unit of the security system provider, and portable versions, a bit like a small walkie-talkie, can be carried around the house. Various companies will offer a key-holder service with rapid delivery by motorbike if one is lost, giving the impression of a web of supporting services and personnel who are there on a just-in-time basis.
In many cases, owner absence means that it is staff who are left to keep properties secure (in gated communities this is less of a concern). This again highlights the importance of high-trust relationships developed over time and of employing staff on recommendation. Staff will maintain and secure the house, but also to check on the often numerous companies offering services when the owner is away. This also means that homes will still appear to be in use because of the presence of staff.
In alpha apartment blocks and large homes key cards can be used to allow timed and restricted access to parts of the home by servants (such as preventing bedroom access at night, or the wine cellar in general), with only owners or the ‘master’ of the house being given access to all areas. This ability to restrict staff access increases the sense of a stratified and untrusting domestic realm. The possibility of monitoring both staff and potential intruders is built in to devices like smoke detectors and thermostats which can be provided with cameras installed – making it possible to watch a nanny with a child while away from the home, for example. In some cases the demand for security has driven planning applications to extend already large homes in order to accommodate domestic staff and even personal bodyguard units. While London is not rife with bodyguards, particular groups of nationals and others with specific concerns do of course use them. More common is that the simple accompaniment and chaperoning of a driver, who may have some basic combat training, doubles as a source of protection.
In many of the key housing developments even more advanced systems are installed. At One Hyde Park they include iris-scanning security access and bomb-proof glass in the apartments. Guarding the front doors of the development are reportedly special services trained staff. If one really wants to add style to security the possibility of installing the Elite Crown Jewel doorbell might seem appealing. For only £72,000 this 18-carat gold entry system includes diamonds, sapphires and a 1080P motion-sensing video camera. One might even feel better at the prospect that Elite will make a donation to support schemes that help reformed criminals to re-enter society.
The Crown Jewel is a bling form of security, a strangely stand-out device in a terrain largely governed more by subtlety and inconspicuousness. But it is possible to find other high-tech examples that offer an insight into where these markets and technologies are moving, with the development of cameras capable of learning and distinguishing between the faces of residents, known visitors and new ‘unknowns’, whose images are then sent to the phones of owners. The camera systems deployed at some of the larger and most expensive gated communities are additionally connected either to a private security firm or, in limited cases, to the police, such as at the nineteen entrances of the Wentworth estate in Surrey which operate live police cameras and number-plate recognition systems.
Monitoring can be provided for intruder and fire alarms, but also to deal with the failure of freezers, or checking for changes in the ambient temperature of the home to protect artworks that might be damaged. These highlight more domestic concerns perhaps, but they add to the ability of owners to leave their homes unoccupied for lengthy periods of time. All of this brings with it a sense of reassurance, and few of these systems have any real impact on comfort – one can live in luxury surrounded by devices that are hidden or require little preparation or maintenance.
The risk of burglary is not by any means an unthinkable possibility. Rates of burglary are lower in the very wealthiest neighbourhoods, as heavy use of security makes entry more difficult, but the general impression is that the risks are out there at all times and must be prepared for. A domestic security arms race has led to innovation on the part of burglars, who use contemporary tools of the trade such as Google Street View or photos in online property profiles – the latter often include ground plans which can be used to plan entry and escape routes. In response to these strategies elite property agents now specialise in listings without using the internet, passing paper details direct to clients who are vetted as genuine buyers first.
In some cases the celebrity or wealthy owners of significant homes have taken steps to have themselves taken off the map. Some owners seeking anonymity or celebrities who may feel at risk from stalkers have been known to use shell companies to buy homes to prevent themselves from being identified. Other efforts at retaining anonymity involve requests to avoid online mapping – areas like St George’s Hill, to take one very obvious example, cannot be explored using Google Street, having prevented access to Google’s camera cars. More recent concerns include the use of drones to scout properties, and burglars using prestige cars to gain access to expensive streets or gated communities without raising the suspicions of guards or residents.
Perimeter security is a particular concern in suburban locations. Here it is possible to find staff with dogs patrolling larger areas. More common are passive measures including high fences and remote-controlled gate systems. A simple but effective strategy for concealment and privacy, as well as security, is of course the use of gates, commonly at a height of 8 to 10ft – sufficiently tall to obscure views. These have become de rigueur in such locations and are easier to deploy in suburban environments. Here the tricks and traps are more evident as a means of putting off potential intruders, including pole-mounted CCTV cameras and ‘trip wire’ infrared systems across driveways. Buyers with sufficient resources will also select homes that are not located next to public footpaths, choosing secure estates like Wentworth, St George’s Hill, Burwood Park or a property on one of the private streets in the city that have guards and barriers, as at Courtney Avenue in Highgate.
The beating heart of the most fortified homes is the so-called panic room. This can range from being a fairly simple box room to a much larger interior space, often concealed by false walls or a bookcase. Panic rooms come with a wide array of options, but essentially they are a super-secure space in which to hide in the event of a home invasion. At the top end, they come with bulletproof doors and can be fitted to provide light and air-conditioning with a backup power supply if the main power source is cut. Panic rooms have also been installed in the most prestigious hotels.
Reports suggest that nationals from less secure contexts, notably Russians and Eastern Europeans, tend to favour the use of perimeter security and armoured cars. Officers with dogs can also be hired to escort worried citizens back to their homes. Of course architecture and design can be used to help promote the sense of concealment and relative invisibility. It has become popular to use tall fences to conceal homes or to ‘submerge’ them via basements, rather like icebergs, so that the full extent of a luxury home is barely on display – what has become known as stealth architecture. The general message is that wealth should be hidden rather than flaunted.
Physical intrusion is only one anxiety for the super-rich. One increasing concern is with cyber-criminals who may target affluent individuals, monitoring emails over months, and collecting important information that might then be used to access accounts. High-tech approaches extend to the use of GPS jammers in cars to prevent them from being followed, the fear of abduction or assassination being a not entirely unjustified concern for some of London’s wealthiest citizens. An encrypted mobile phone is essential to prevent conversations being intercepted, while tracking devices are used in case of kidnapping. All of this suggests that no security can be seen as superfluous, and that, in many cases, the more visible security practices and infrastructures are sported almost as a kind of status symbol.
Going Down
The fortress city
Many of the alpha city’s homes have taken on the look and feel of personal fortresses, a trend that is only amplified by the increasing use of gating and boundaries around entire neighbourhoods and small enclaves. There are now well over a thousand such gated communities in England, but the bulk of them are in and around London. In the city itself there are hundreds of small estates and developments that use gates to control access at street level, and many thousands of homes also have underground parking, remote-control electronic gates and CCTV systems.
In Surrey alone there are around a hundred gated ‘communities’. Often very small developments involving a handful of homes, they create a sense of privilege as well as insulation from potential risks. Appearing in many commuter-belt towns, gated communities represent a radical break in the British planning tradition, overturning what were, even in the most affluent neighbourhoods, largely porous spaces open to the public. There is something particularly affronting to the British sensibility about these spaces premised on the ability to pay for heightened security.
As we have seen, the earlier attempt at gating the West End in the nineteenth century provoked a popular reaction that resulted in the barriers being removed. In many ways this was both a practical as well as a class-based antagonism, since the denial of access to certain squares and streets increased journey times for the general public. The triumphs of well over a hundred years ago have, however, simply been displaced by a series of contemporary gated suburbs. These new elite neighbourhoods have become the means by which a cocooned and faint presence in and beyond the city is maintained by many of the wealthy. Gated communities also offer the opportunity to bring the resources of affluent households together, producing a securityscape and leisure space that rivals the provisions of the world outside. The larger of these developments have almost sufficient facilities to secede – sports facilities, shops, health centres, restaurants and bars.
Gated communities have become more ordinary and everyday aspects of a city that has historically prized its openness and social diversity. There are of course many gated developments and private streets in Knightsbridge and South Kensington, but other examples can be found, such as the conversion of the former Tate mansion, built on sugar money in 1874, next to Streatham Common. Some of these changes are driven by a fear of crime or plans to design it out. But gating is also born of a desire to protect second homes or residences from which owners may often be away. These patterns fit with what many observers identify as the desire for displays of prestige emblazoned onto the residential landscape – a lord of the manor syndrome, rescaled to fit the executive home developments in many of the rural-urban fringes of the city. Thus gating fits into a broader pattern of residential development in which buyers work hard to achieve a sense of privacy while outwardly displaying their inaccessibility. Of course, in many cases these efforts only succeed in generating further interest in who is resident, how to get in and what riches might be available if entry could be gained.
Why are these kinds of developments appearing in a city with one of the lowest crime rates globally for a city of its size? Much of what is at work here connects with the desire to present a public-oriented facade of the kind that Deyan Sudjic has called ‘the Edifice Complex’, whereby the self projects to the outside world an image of prestige and inaccessibility.2 Also at work are deeply engrained fears that, while the city itself may be safe, burglary remains a real possibility, as well as, for some individuals, the threat of organised criminal activity. Where security is seen as paramount, the retreat is both to the home and to largely hidden suburbs which offer a firebreak from contact with crime and social difference. Streets that were open, over time seeing again the installation of booms, then metal gates and cameras.
The resulting impression is of armed staff in fortified homes, within gated neighbourhoods – a kind of Matryoshka doll of nested security arrangements devised in order to maintain a significant distance from and control over contact with the outside world. In some of the larger gated estates there are even subdivisions with further gated communities within them. The days of rock stars buying a pad in St Georges Hill are long gone, replaced by a more private, status-conscious and often fearful class occupying a paranoid landscape. Today it is the rich who build the barricades.
By 2018 the dream of endless capital investment in the city had soured. The turmoil generated by the agonies of the Brexit deliberations was one factor, but another was the series of stories about money laundering and the attempted assassinations of former KGB staff by foreign agents. For a time there was fresh momentum for action against laundering as concerns about criminality became entwined with a wider geopolitical angst. The Litvinenko assassination (a dose of poison administered via a cup of tea in the Millennium Hotel on Grosvenor Square) and the Skripal case in Salisbury are only the most well-known of a string of cases of overt or suspected murder by the Russian state on British soil. It has been estimated that the Skripal attack was likely the fourteenth of its kind, most of which have occurred in London (a further nine high-profile cases have been recorded around the world since 2016). The attack soon led to a Foreign Affairs Committee hearing at which a string of investigative journalists laid bare the feudal workings of Russia’s oligarchy, the sloshing of illicit wealth in the London property market, and the so far futile attempts at dealing with these issues.
Litvinenko’s billionaire friend Boris Berezovsky apparently committed suicide in a small estate near Ascot, but his friends believed assassination was the more plausible explanation. Berezovsky himself had occupied a Surrey mansion fitted with security cameras, bullet-proof windows and reinforced steel doors. Associates of some oligarchs have also been victims of suspected assassinations, notable examples including that of the property developer Scot Young, who may have been thrown onto the railings below his Montagu Square apartment, and deal-broker Stephen Curtis, whose helicopter crashed on its way to his castle near Dorchester.
Where did the Skripal case take us? Perhaps most of all to a very dark and unsettling world in which assassinations across national boundaries were continuing, in which an impression of living of a safe life could be easily overturned. Perhaps also to the impression that life at the top is sometimes lived in a more or less lawless state. The stories of attacks on Russians in London go beyond the protagonists, yielding the sense of an anarchic space in which key actors use private security in lieu of the general inadequacies of British security. The message seems to be, we need to look after ourselves. Traction on laundering in general and Russian money in particular proved to be a short-lived thing, and the destabilising impact of criminal capital on the city has largely continued.
The effect of Russian nationals on the ambience of some neighbourhoods has been notable. Longer-term residents in some of the alphahoods now complain that new residents who bring guards or security details have minimal interaction with their neighbours. But they also raise concerns that the overt security measures might bring possible risks. The Russian cases highlight the fact that the rich can be a vulnerable group, as their wealth brings unwanted attention. What some see as paranoia others see as essential and necessary preparedness.
The Litvinenko and Berezovsky cases feed both myths and real fears among ex-patriot communities, who note the reach of foreign agents and the inability of local police forces to resolve matters relating to key trading partners and international bullies. More broadly, the impression of an overlapping of underworld and upperworld periodically arises, often through court cases as well as newspaper reports. When the Candy brothers were recently involved in a court hearing, one of the things revealed was their fear of falling victim to the schemes of kidnappers. One of their associates, an accountant, had suffered serious injuries when armed men broke into his property; he jumped out of a first floor window and fell down a ravine outside, breaking his spine.
The principle by which more layers of security and technology must be added only brings more and more areas into this defensive landscape. Money appears to drive the construction of a hostile, uncanny and, in many cases, unnecessarily protected streetscape. Beyond the entrance halls with timed releases of subtle perfumes, the dining rooms with ambient lighting, the personal cinemas and cigar rooms there is the sense that this excess is built on unfair gains and, in some cases, on criminal enterprises. The world of finance from which so much wealth has been generated is frequently revealed as a world of malpractice in which the system is gamed by clever financiers, a world built on the use of offshore funds to evade or avoid local taxes. It takes a degree of psychic armouring to deflect the kind of public anger now being directed at the rich, anger which is regularly given new vigour by newly leaked papers or investigative journalism. All of this may give us the sense that the security arrangements of the super-rich are connected, to varying degrees, to a shadowy world of intermediaries, threatening agents and illegal practices.
Money power has transformed many parts of the city according to a more or less sterile vision of sociability, security and partial residence. Yet this panorama is also strangely cloaked – few have cause to visit these districts and even fewer to build connections with their residents. Nevertheless, their effect is to create an unsettling and often hostile ambience while generating the loss of porosity and walkability. Many longer-term residents decry the extent and speed of these changes and lament the loss of a more comfortable, open and cohesive form of community that now appears eclipsed by far the more privatised modes of living of the American, Russian and other foreign nationals who buy many of the larger and more secured homes in these areas. Here the kind of urban planning once used to create fine districts while undermining the working class’s capacity for revolt is put into reverse in a new anti-urbanism. Instead we find an invisible revolt of the elites – a kind of insurrection physically expressed through the barricades erected in defence of the anti-urban zones of the super-affluent.
The alphahoods of the city have been secured to meet the uncompromising demands of the wealthy. But we have also seen how their paranoia is in many ways a latent aspect of alpha life, a fear of something that in the vast majority of cases does not and will not happen. This fear is a variegated thing, particularly in relation to the different national groups, but the effect nevertheless is a super-securitised landscape in which the gains to the few give rise to feelings of envy and anger on the part of the many. The paradox of alphahood security is that despite its regressive impacts on the city, it still continues to offer the appearance of a more or less open, cosmopolitan and safe city. These qualities, as we have seen, form the basis of London’s long-standing attraction for those originating from the globe’s more insecure and damaged regions.
But we can also understand security as an essential requirement of those involved in or vulnerable to criminal and para-criminal activity, who are by necessity determined to protect themselves from state and regulatory agencies as well as competing criminal actors. Some of the most unsettling aspects of the landscape we have surveyed in this chapter relate to Russian and related networks as they have sought to protect themselves. The notable cases have thrown a spotlight on murky activities and generated the sense that little can be done to counter determined efforts to attack targeted individuals. But these cases and the defensive repertoires employed do have a deeper and wider effect on the feel and operation of the city.
The use of overt security measures including street-level guards and security details creates the impression of a simultaneously securitised but also vulnerable zone within which wealthy individuals feel the need to bunker themselves. This is not a cityscape of open pathways, cohesive neighbourhoods or happy communities. As one architectural critic once said, form follows fear, and this is certainly true of the residential landscape that has developed in the alpha city in recent years.