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Walking plutocratic London:

Exploring erotic, phantasmagoric Mayfair

Caroline Knowles

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 [1], 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

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Mayfair – early evening: I tune in to the conversations around me in the Club at the Café Royal.
Two women over a glass of wine are discussing a charity they are promoting. Two men of
similar age (30s) are discussing a new TV show on fashion: they are concerned about “making
the right introductions.” A (woman) TV producer joins them, kissing the turbaned waiter on both
cheeks: members and their serving class share modern forms of conviviality, the social
observances of traditional gentlemen’s clubs are reconfigured by codes which seem more
democratic, less structured by social distances, although this could just be a new way of being a
plutocrat. A backpack and a cycle helmet pass me on the way to the bar. I learn later that that the
man sitting next to me in jeans sold his multi-media production company for millions. These are
thoroughly modern plutocrats relaxing in Mayfair’s club land.
The Café Royal is one of the stopping points in a night walk through London’s elite
western neighbourhood of Mayfair, renown for its private members clubs and upscale hotels.
Walking, inspired by Benjamin’s problematic and gendered concept of the flaneur (Wolff, 1985),
is an epistemology and a methodology, a way of conceptualising and investigating the city from
the ground, in motion, navigating through it (Ingold, 2000). Walking brings a landscape together
(Arnason et al., 2012) exposing its possibilities and encounters, on the streets, the “dwelling
places of the collective” (Benjamin, 2000:432) and its hidden places too.
The arc of a night walk imposes a narrative simplicity that conceals a more complex
research process. This involved more than a dozen walks around Mayfair during the day and at
night in 2016. Most involved taking photographs of streets, shop windows, and entrances of
hotels and private members clubs: a modest archive revealing a fragment of plutocratic London.
Walking is also about encounters, about stopping, watching and listening. I interviewed two
doormen, several barmen, and two club/hotel managers. I visited three private members clubs
and four top hotels where I spent many hours observing and listening. I draw on background
material including geodemographic analysis, and interviews with Luxury Asset Managers and
members of the Mayfair Residents Group from an ESRC project, Life in the Alpha Territory (see
endnote 1). My approach is the investigation and analysis of micro-urban spaces and the
biographies of those who work in and pass through them (Knowles 2003, 2013, 2014a, 2014b).
The small-scale qualitative methodology of this paper is underpinned by
geodemographic classifications (Mosaic) that clusters 400 spatially referenced pieces of data
from commercial and official sources to residential addresses, to reveal the neighbourhoods
referred to as the Alpha Territories, where plutocrats live, showing concentrations of wealth in
London and the SE. High Net Worth and Ultra High Net Worth Individuals (over half a million
people in the UK) with more than $1 Million (HNI) or $20 Million (UHNI) in investable assets
(Atkinson et al., 2016; Capgemini and RBC, 2016) are nested within these neighbourhoods. Local
and globally dispersed plutocrats live in, or visit, Mayfair – a plutocrat playground.
 74

Plutocrats and urban space: Mayfair

Plutocrats are referred to in classic and contemporary studies as “elites” (Veblen, [1899]1994;
Bourdieu, 1984; Simmel, 1957; Elias, [1939]2000; Wright-Mills, 1956; Savage and Williams,
2008; Birtchnell and Caletrio, 2014; Daloz, 2010; Atkinsonet al., 2016; Scott, 2008), often
categorised by the sources of their wealth (Beaverstock and Faulconbridge, 2014) or styles of
consumption (Featherstone, 2014; Thurlow and Jaworski, 2014). Studies concerned with
geographic and economic impacts of concentrations of wealth (Piketty, 2014; Dorling, 2016,
2015) generally use the term plutocrat-wealthy. Responding to what Toscano and Kinkle (2015)
call the problem of visualising capitalism, particularly its intensification (Piketty, 2014), and
with an orientation towards unfolding its spatial configuration in urban contexts, I use the term
plutocrat.
Cities and neighbourhoods, assemblages of things, materials, objects and people in
motion are emergent (McFarlane, 2012), dialogic (Bakhtin, 1981; Kristeva and Moi, 1991)
crystallisations of everyday activities between people and built and commercial environments.
To operate in a neighbourhood is to build it (Ingold, 2011:47). Cities wrap themselves around
those who live them – and those who enact them wrap cities around themselves. But cities
express some lives more readily than others. And so it is with plutocrats and Mayfair.
Mayfair, a tightly circumscribed neighbourhood of West London, is in the borough of
Westminster. Large parts of it belong to the Grosvenor Estate, to the Duke of Westminster and to
earlier versions of plutocratic life. Today it is a loose matrix of commercial interests -
developers, estate agents, retailers, the operatives of financial institutions, art gallery owners,
those who operate its clubs and hotels – who collaborate over matters of mutual interest as
circumstances arise. The Mayfair Residents Group conceptualises Mayfair as a living space – the
more commonly accepted use of the term neighbourhood. A layered landscape, Mayfair operates
at the confluence of several imaginaries and space-making practices. Four are particularly
crucial in making it a plutocratic landscape.
Mayfair expands wealth though its hedge fund and private equity offices, hidden in
unmarked period properties. Private equity offices raise money from individuals and
institutions and invest it in companies, then pull out with the profits, having steered
acquisitions, mergers, IPOs or liquidation. [2] Hedge funds too are high return investments using
pooled funds. They are aggressively managed and trade in derivatives of underlying assets such
as stocks, bonds and currencies. [3] Both private equity and hedge funds have vampiric
qualities; they pray on capital’s vulnerabilities and collateral damage, it’s road-kill. They co-
compose the Mayfair landscape, labour force and residents.
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Mayfair (secondly) houses a concentration of Family Offices which sustain dynastic

wealth by managing investments, art collections, pre-nuptial agreements, trust and tax planning,
ensuring that wealth is passed to future generations. [4]
Thirdly, Mayfair is London’s most fluid and exotic neighbourhood. Its labour force
overwhelms its 5100 permanent residents, drawn from 42 nationalities, as 85,000 workers
converge daily upon its businesses. [5] Its transience refracts through its properties -
apartments rather than houses - half of them privately rented. Its estimated four thousand
luxury five star hotel rooms bring other kinds of transients - wealthy tourists and temporary
residents - to the neighbourhood. Its restaurants and private members clubs bring people for
long lunches, conversations with far reaching consequences, and nights out.
The fourth pillar in the social architectures of Mayfair’s plutocratic landscape and the
Mayfair of this paper is the Mayfair of leisured influence and erotic pleasure, where “high life”
and “low life” have long coincided, as one penetrates the other, fraying the usual social
boundaries. Hotels and private members clubs are its key hubs. Erotic pleasure, as Frank Mort
(2010) points out, has always operated through wider networks of sensuous delight, in dining,
drinking and entertainment, rather than through purely sexual activities. Benjamin’s (2000:
490-493) observations on gambling, prostitution and other erotic possibilities, link it with the
arcades, the city’s displays of refinement, consumption, comfort, consolation and luxury,
showcased in the department stores (Benjamin, 2000: 225, 158-160). These collectively
constitute the city’s phantasmagorical elements – its surreal dream-like and spectacle qualities –
of awe and wonder that make cities exciting. An intensity of these are crystallised into Mayfair’s
built, commercial and human fabrics. Mayfair is about gendered wealth at play, about display
and concealment, seeing and being seen - in the right places - seeing and not seeing, luxury and
erotic possibility: at night especially it is Benjamin’s fabulous phantasmagoria, the ultimate peep
show.

Clubland
My walk begins in the early evening: I meander along Pall Mall past traditional private members
clubs that once called themselves “Gentlemen’s Clubs” but don’t now, although many of them
are. The Traveller’s Club excludes women as members and from certain areas like the library.
Degan and Wainwright (2010:156) argue that in analysis of cities we don’t think about how
gender informs constructions of place: in Mayfair it is particularly marked. The Travellers
inscribes plutocratic masculinity and I feel, as I am intended to, out of place. The Athenaeum
allows women members but also feels like a male space. The RAF Club, The Army and Navy and
the In and Out Club, attract high-ranking military personnel and operate strict codes of dress and
behaviour. Whites excludes women; Marks is also an old school gentlemen’s club too, ex-UK PM
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Cameron is a member. Annabel’s, the nightclub, is equally traditional and exclusive, but draws a
younger crowd. In George, Cameron met with media mogul James Murdoch in 2009 just ahead of
the 2010 election that brought his party back to power. Important conversations with far
reaching consequences, for cities, nations and global politics, take place in these quiet, opaque,
and socially sifted, gendered, city spaces that filter access, and create a micro-politics of seeing.
Clubs are in elegant listed period buildings with brass number plates, chandeliers,
oversized antique furniture and marble floors: material manifestations of plutocracy’s solidity,
endurance and quality. Semi-private spaces, guarded by conventions of membership, clubs are
not defined by their exclusivity and restrictions on membership – they are one of the ways in
which it is spatially produced. They sort different kinds of plutocrats too.
Clubs offer seclusion from public view, combined with the right kinds of social exposure:
a difficult balance to strike, this desire to be both seen and unseen – to be seen by some but not
by others. Morton’s, for example declares that it is ‘a place to see and be seen by some of the most
important individuals in the capital, with an impressive – if discreet – membership base.’ Morton’s
provides access to important and like-minded people, in spaces cloistered from public scrutiny.
The social exclusion they generate is not just about wealth. They cost £1,000-£2,000 a year in
membership fees, are grandly shabby, reference older conceptions of luxury, and often serve
poor quality food. Complex nomination processes defend established conceptions of social
exclusivity, appropriate conceptions of luxury and club activities.
But things are changing in club-land and these changes reflect and enact the dynamism
and transformation of Mayfair’s human fabrics and the underlying logics of plutocratic wealth
generation. The best place to get a sense of this is at The Club at the Café Royal, a private
members club nested within a five star hotel, expresses a luxury that echoes other exclusive
Mayfair hotels instead of the fading splendour of the gentlemen’s clubs.
I rotate through its front door and meet Manager, a pro in the high-end hospitality
business who gave up a promising career in architecture to run clubs and restaurants. One of the
things plutocrats do to cities is reshape its labour market. Manager is in the vanguard of club-
land’s modernisation: “the world we live in now, old money haven’t got much money, they’ve had
to open up to new money…. They’ve had to open up all these exclusive places … to become
accessible to everyone. With money you can almost get everything… .” He echoes broader
realignment among London’s wealthy, generating struggles over neighbourhood and street; over
basement digs and large-scale refurbishment, annoying and displacing the traditionally entitled,
overwhelmed by the volume of wealth wielded by the very wealthiest sections of the plutocratic
class (Burrows and Webber, 2015). Like London neighbourhoods, private members clubs are
being reshaped by different kinds of influence and sources of money from those circulating in
the old gentlemen’s clubs. These are further ways in which plutocrats reconfigure the city.
 77

There is a surge in demand for new kinds of club-luxury developed around the more
straightforward logics of business. These clubs are open to “women, business and the moneyed
global elite that increasingly make London their home.”[6] Membership application is more
straightforward and less exclusionary; they increasingly employ top chefs and provide gyms and
pools; they are differentiated by their “brands.” The Club at the Café Royal brands itself through
“creativity” and “multi-culturalism.” Manager curates art exhibitions, organises theatre and
music sessions, talks by famous authors, wine tastings and male grooming advice, in addition to
networking breakfasts. It has a relaxed dress code and reasonable fees (£1,000 a year). The new
clubs are thoroughly modern businesses.
Manager commiserates on my failure to access one of the most exclusive clubs, Hartford
Street. My request to visit was immediately dismissed: members are important public figures
whom the club must protect from investigation by researchers. But Manager insists: “That class
system is breaking down … There are elements of that behind closed doors… Hertford Street still
has an element of that public school, old boy network… if you didn’t go to the right school you are
never going to join that club…. money cannot get you into that club.” Hertford Street was set up to
re-secure the social exclusivity that was lost when its owner sold Annabel’s to a retail
businessman – new money – to an outcry from its membership. Exclusivity is salvaged and
restored in the face of modernising moves that extend bits of luxury to broader sections of the
population. Hertford Street meanwhile reports a waiting list of thousands, including a duke and a
steel magnate. Clubs reveal the lives of local plutocrats. Hotels reveal these too along with the
lives of temporary visitors. I walk on to my second junction in the possibilities of the Mayfair
night.

Mayfair hotels
Hotels are part of the same pleasure-matrix as private members clubs. The people who circulate
them as well as Mayfair’s bars and restaurants draw these. It’s dark as I make my way past the
brightly lit windows of art galleries and carpet shops, towards the Mayfair Hotel. I pass a body
bundled in a blue sleeping bag set on cardboard for insulation, a reminder of Mayfair’s less
fortunate residents. Passing through two forms of hotel security, the uniformed doorman
flanked by a security guard on the front line, and the receptionists on the front desk, I find the
Night Manager.
Night Manager understands how hotels operate in Mayfair’s tourist and temporary
residence ecology and its matrix of pleasure, because in being good at his job, he studies his
guests’ desires. These lean towards:
 78

Lulu's or Annabel’s. Those are the ones that are known to the public and the royals go
there or whatever. There are several others … gentlemen's clubs … my friend who was at
Annabel’s has just started at the Caviar House in the Ritz … you've got the Playboy Club,
The Palm Beach … all the (casinos) down Farm Street ... the Ritz club, 150 Piccadilly…
Aspinalls… also a casino… and an international gaming environment … it's very discreet.

Add upscale restaurants, and the invisible components of the phantasmagoria composing the
Mayfair playground – in the sensuous experiences of eating, drinking and gambling – are drawn
into a loose matrix around the hotel.
I walk on to The Dorchester, one of Mayfair’s most famous hotels. As I wander through
the night, pubs like The Footman are still heaving with suits - hedge fund and private equity
workers, perhaps, mostly men. Some stand outside to smoke, or make phone calls. Are they
calling home to make excuses or making new arrangements? Aspinalls – the casino - has a
security guard posted outside. So do the Saudi and Egyptian embassies. Adding to the routine
surveillance of the CCTV cameras on the streets, Mayfair, it seems, is more highly securitised
than other parts of the city. I linger on corner to examine the windows of Harrods Estate Agents.
Prices in Mayfair and Dubai range from £3 million to £34 million, and this suggests something
else that is barely visible: that in Mayfair I am walking through Middle Eastern London. Mayfair,
as I learn later, is a significant Middle Eastern playground; Mayfair makes Middle Eastern life
beyond the gaze of family possible for visiting plutocrats.
I arrive at the Dorchester – another fragment of Middle Eastern London - owned by a
consortium headed by the Sultan of Brunei. Cars are still speeding along Park Lane. I stop to
examine a small open-topped car, possibly a KTM X-Bow, a toy with a Kuwaiti number plate,
parked on the forecourt. [7] I chat to the night doorman who wears a dark green tailcoat and top
hat with a gold band around it. He opens car doors, takes shopping bags, and offers friendly
greetings. Two security men in black suits with earpieces stand by the door. I spin into the lobby
through the deco revolving door and the security system to face still more security and several
receptionists. Deferential greetings, which fail to quell my anxieties, follow: “can I help you
madam?” From my earlier discussion with Manager, who once worked at Bulgari, London’s most
expensive and exclusive hotel, I know that “you can’t do anything in a hotel … they train staff in a
challenge culture… If you don’t know who someone is … you find out.” I know that “can I help you
madam” actually means, “who are you and what are you doing here?” Mayfair’s interior spaces
are securitised too.
Straight ahead is the Promenade Bar. Adorned with potted palms, light pink marble
pillars, enormous flower arrangements in Grecian urns and cosy armchairs and sofas around
tables with teapots and china teacups – an elaborately recreated (phantasmagorical) Edwardian
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drawing room pastiche - Middle Eastern men are talking in small groups. I learn later that their
soft drinks may contain spirits, poured, unseen, in the kitchen in order to maintain a façade of
Islamic protocol. Night Manager knows about the Dorchester because he used to work there:

The thing about the Middle Eastern market, there's masculine and feminine… because they
don't stay together necessarily with their spouses or the kids and nannies and all that, they
separate. The men will stay at the Dorchester … their toys on the forecourt… And then the
women, Claridges … because it's more feminine… the Mandarin the same. And then … the
family and staff will go to the Park Lane Hilton...

After spending some time in the Edwardian phantasmagoria of the Promenade Bar, and unable
to tune in to its conversations because I don’t understand Arabic, I head for the bar off the lobby
and order a drink from the young Parisian waiter who materialises at my table. Along with his
Italian boss – the bar manager - he checks in with me regularly, gathering information about
who I am and what I am doing. I am writing in my notebook. He thinks I am a hotel critic. I feel
awkward, scrutinised.
I later learn that if security wanted to check what I was writing they could read it on
CCTV. I am entangled in what is seen and unseen too, in what I can see and what I can’t: in who
sees me without me seeing them. I am not, as I imagined, an observer in the Mayfair plutocratic
peepshow, I have entered it. There is CCTV all over the lobby and the bar as well as the
storeroom, as a check on the honesty of staff. Security guards the hotel against what goes down
on the street: thefts, scams of various kinds, and now, increasingly, the prospect of terrorist
attack. In the phantasmagoria of the Dorchester the peepshow participants are not just
watching, they are also being watched, as hotels replicate the panoptic securities of the streets.
The Dorchester bar is small, intimate and dark; its sound track is piped music. I settle
into a simulacrum of the 1970s and to the conversations on either side of me. On one is a man in
his late 40s stroking the hand of a beautiful woman in her twenties wearing a diaphanous white
dress and gold sandals. The gap between them narrows - as he moves in to kiss her neck - until
he settles their bill and they leave together in a conspiratorial huddle. On the other side three
glamorous Nigerian women wearing expensive jewellery have parked their designer handbags
on the table and are drinking strawberry Margaritas, while they discuss men: “I am going to say
to him, do you want someone else to keep you happy? I don’t want a central control system
(laughter) … my father’s property… he has quite a lot of it actually, but don’t make a noise about
it… .” They are sassy and confident. I feel less out of place. It is after midnight.
The Dorchester bar is emptying when two young women dressed to attract attention,
arrive. They succeed – we all look at them. One is wearing an expensive white trouser suit and
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glittery high heels; the other a short dress and thong-sandal-boots that reach the knee. Erotic
possibility is signalled through their bodies and dress. Enter one of the most important elements
of the phantasmagoria of the Mayfair night – sex. Manager, drawing on his experience at the
Bulgari, had told me about the prospectors who work the sexual economies of high-end hotel
bars. “No bar wants them coming in looking for business… .” They are edged discreetly through
the revolving doors.
Hotels, Manager says, prefer more discreet agency bookings. Upscale hotels offer the
highest levels of customer satisfaction. Claridges, which charges £5,500 a night for a suite, will
redecorate the room if a visitor doesn’t like it, and recently turned an entire floor into a
temporary palace for a Saudi Princess. [8] Manager continues,

if someone is paying ten grand a night no hotel is going to tell them what they can and
can’t do, and let’s be honest if a guy want’s to have three friends in the room for the
evening no hotel … providing he’s discreet and not disturbing other guests … will say no. So
there’s an unwritten rule [that the hotel] turns a blind eye. You don’t talk about it ….

Upscale prostitutes and escorts – male and female - booked through agencies are young,
beautiful, expensively dressed, often from Eastern Europe, and command rates in line with those
charged their guests by exclusive five star hotels, rates in the region of £12,000 a night. [9]
Night Manager and I had discussed hotel sex earlier.

With some of the Arabs, London's a bit Vegas (the ultimate phantasmagoria), what
happens in Vegas stays in Vegas… All the boys will get together in a suite and hire ten
prostitutes or whatever just to have sex in front of them. They won't get involved they just
sit there like an audience with a live show. Everything's at their disposal, I think they're all
bored. In Mayfair you see a lot of boredom, a lot of really lonely people you know… and
during the summer months when they were all here, people were booking tables, thousand
of pounds a table and flying over only when they can get tables…It all revolves around
Ramadan...

What he describes is a full-scale peepshow. Night Manager understands how this particular
cocktail of religious discipline and excess, with its own alchemy of being seen and not seen, of
women seeing and not seeing what men do, operates in the secluded spaces of hotels. He thinks
that the men find erotic playgrounds, where everything is possible, ultimately boring; that the
spectacle of eroticism is ultimately empty, mechanistic, uninteresting, bought like everything
else.
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Manager points out that these spectacles are about men in general: they are only seen as
Middle Eastern because of who stays at the Dorchester:

… at 2 o’clock in the morning the world over men are men, they want exactly the same
thing. It doesn’t matter whether you are with the Government of Qatar or a builder from
Braintree, men are the same …and you are paying for discretion ….The most shocking thing
… is who isn’t at it? You speak to a concierge of a hotel – how often do they get asked to go
out and buy condoms … The billionaire who goes to the concierge, “here’s fifty quid thanks
for the restaurant booking and can you go get 300 condoms”. He isn’t going to say no is he?

I decide not to ask about the 300 condoms.

I spin back through the Dorchester’s doors. The streets of Mayfair are much quieter and
the empty streets make me feel nervous. Should I have taken a friend or borrowed a dog? I walk
along Grosvenor Square past the Qatar National Bank and the Mayfair Post Office; it looks
surreal in the streetlight in the early hours of the morning. I pass several clothing shops
displaying vivid and impractical clothes for women that speak to a life of elaborate social
engagements. I pass shops that sell hunting gear and iconic English tweeds, shooting clobber and
jodhpurs, assembled on faceless models, a stuffed dog in the corner; an antique accessories shop
with a stuffed zebra in the window: phantasmagoria, highly-lit urban curiosity cabinets,
displaying the imagined lives of plutocrats calibrated as arrangements of objects: ironic
commentaries on excess, Middle Eastern fantasies of Mayfair, or both? I feel the excitement of
the bright lights, the city’s delights, the thrill of the gaudy funfair, traces of plutocratic lives
embossed in the city’s commercial fabrics.

Endings
Excess, masculinity, bright baubles; pleasure and erotic delight are the dominant impressions
the Mayfair phantasm makes on my understanding of the neighbourhood and its long and short
term residents and revellers. The abundance of objects, experiences and possibilities that
Mayfair displays are commercial manifestations of plutocratic wealth; they co-compose its
public, private and semi-private spaces, making the city in the plutocrat’s image. Plutocrats –
and those who research them – are entangled in the phantasmagoria; and its complex politics of
vision, by desire, and by excitement of being both seen and not seen, of seeing the peepshow
without being seen. Mayfair extrudes a confident, wealthy, global sense of place: tinged with the
fragments of elsewhere, of the Middle East, of Moscow, and other places too. It is highly
securitised, safeguarding plutocrats’ wealth against threats from the streets. It is a gendered
landscape in which women function as ornaments, as providers of sexual services, as unseeing
 82

and unseen wives who perpetuate the hetero-normative fictions of conventional living, and, in
my case, as slightly uneasy night walkers. Not many women are plutocrats in their own right;
wealth is skewed into male hands, and Mayfair shows that wealth is overwhelmingly focussed
on male desire, crystallised into this landscape, as my walk and my attempt to surface gender as
a dimension of urban analysis shows.
3am and tired of walking the streets that co-compose plutocratic lives, I catch a taxi
going East and home, to where people are poorer, where social housing tenants and trendy
hipsters co-compose the city’s built and social fabrics. Having tramped a landscape made by
spectacles of wealth, I am feeling poorer than I usually do in East London. And I am resentful of
plutocrats’ gendered imprint on the city in which I live, of the ways in which it is more their city
than mine.

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.

Notes

1. See Mike Savage, blog 1st July 2015 LSE website

2. 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
3. On hedge funds:
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hedgefund.asp
4. On Family Offices and dynastic wealth:
https://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 (Burrows and Glucksberg
2016). They manage more than £700 billions in assets (David Batty, Guardian 12 March
2016)
5. Source: Who Lives in Mayfair 2015
http://wetherell.co.uk/market-reports/2015/lives-mayfair-2015/
6. For more about London’s current club economy:
 83

http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21665062-having-become-more-open-
clubland-thriving-home-home
7. Thanks to James Weitz for identifying this car.
8. Source: Inside Claridges, BBC Two documentary (2016)
9. This is difficult to establish, but Hollingsworth & Lansley (2010) suggest this rate.

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