Like stages of grief, the London housing market has come through denial and bargaining and has moved into the sixth stage: “Armando Iannucci sketch”. The new £15bn housing project in Battersea, where flats start at £602,000, has planning permission for a 25-metre swimming pool that literally looks down on the rest of London. The “sky pool” will be suspended between two tower blocks 10 storeys high, and will have a transparent floor, and will be the most expensive metaphor since that skyscraper melted a parked-up Jag.
Something has changed in the housing crisis. The goalposts have not moved so much as exploded in small bombs of glitter. There’s no point now in pointing out the disparities and the unfairnesses. The gap between us and them is so wide that the people paying cash unseen for new builds are in a different time zone, a gap so deep that it makes the Manchester sinkhole look like a pockmark.
Instead of crying, the time has come to laugh. To light long fags on the embers of our burning cities and clink tea mugs, chuckling at the madness and obscenity we see from our window. To sit on the top deck of the bus and to look over first to the east, where Hackney council has been considering an order that would allow police to issue on-the-spot fines for rough sleepers, and then to the west and see a horizon, forming in spikes and towers, of apartment blocks being built solely from foie gras and glass.
Last month London’s first “fashion-branded” skyscraper went on sale in Vauxhall, studios from £711,000. Buyers of property in the Aykon Tower will, the literature promises, “live the complete Versace lifestyle, a fantasy turned into reality”. On the 23rd floor buyers will find a pool and spa, as well as a private cinema. Parking spaces are £50,000.
That sky pool, though. Could they have been any clearer with their message of “screw you, peasants”? Perhaps. Perhaps there are plans, yet to be revealed, of trained wolves for residents to ride along the river in rush hour in their own special wolf lane. Perhaps the lobby of the new flats creeping up in King’s Cross will be paved with laminated P45s. Perhaps the poor doors – the entrances these new developments build to fulfil their obligation to serve a garnish of social housing with their champagne apartments – will be three-quarter height so residents are forced to bow. Perhaps the penthouse toilets will eject waste directly on to the pavement outside Greggs.
There are no attempts, now, to hide the fact that these buildings are no longer being built as homes, that these blocks of flats are anything more than simple and raw grasps for tax breaks and magazine luxury rather than flats for people to live in. New developments aimed at investors in Hong Kong boast in ads about their lack of social housing. Which would be vile, were it not sort of refreshing.
Better to build the sky pool with its glass ceiling replacing local sky, better to advertise their lack of mercy, than to creep around with half-hearted head pats and assertions of charity. Sure, take our old children’s hospitals, our nightclubs and parks, and replace them with mile-high tributes to the magic of steel, but don’t pretend that this is anything more than a Hunger Games takeover. Don’t pretend our lives have anything in common.
There’s a story Rupert Everett tells about travelling with Julia Roberts. He picked her up in her hotel, where she greeted him barefoot in a towelling robe. They padded across the carpeted floor to the lift, then down to the carpark, where she stepped directly into the limo and drove to the airport. From the limo, she stepped on to the carpeted plane. It was only when they eventually pulled up at her house that an assistant appeared with a pair of slippers for her to take the four steps to the front door.
This is the world being built above London – where the rich will swim like birds above us, where they will never have to touch the ground.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk
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