Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London

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The reader is left in doubt as to whether they ever truly find it, but then that’s in the nature of their predicament. To cross the class and economic divides that mark, or scar, London is not a journey many are able to make successfully. At least in Notting Hill there is still a sense of the cheek-by-jowl poles of wealth and poverty that have long distinguished London from other European cities, in which the poor are often safely kept away from the rich.

As so many struggle to survive the cost of living crisis, billionaires enjoy a hoard of wealth which grew more during COVID-19 than the previous fourteen years combined. Caroline Knowles’s Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London could not have been published at a more critical time. Additionally, Knowles could have built upon Veblen’s less famous theory of ‘conspicuous leisure’ when looking at the wealthy’s use of paid domestic service. Serious Money is littered with references to ‘servants’, but they are given the most focus in the chapter where Knowles talks to ‘Butler’, a loyal household manager for Middle-Eastern royals for the previous seventeen years. Though he is subordinate to his employers, he is still a manager and quite patronising towards those working below him: ‘The first thing you do, you get on the right side of the Filipinos […] They’re very nice people. They’re very hardworking […] If they go against you, they’re going to make your life hell’ (187-88). From the closed-off streets surrounding Wentworth Golf Club through Richmond, Kew, Chelsea and Knightsbridge and onto South Kensington, Mayfair and London’s financial district, through the Serious Money walk Professor Knowles will photograph, map and record the impact of the elite on the worlds they inhabit. We meet two wealthy neighbours from Notting Hill, ‘Palace’ and ‘Desk’, who volunteered to support the victims of the disaster. This included handing out clothes to the affected families, but Palace’s charity was met with resentment when she donated second-hand designer clothes: ‘There is only so much a large lady of Muslim origin can do with a tiny Gucci handbag […] One woman said to me in disgust “I don’t want someone else’s clothes”’ (122). Desk is also nervous, simultaneously pitying those affected while defending her councillor friends who worked for the council found liable for a number of the deaths. Knowles masterfully captures the unease of plutocrats wrestling with the fact that they are the cause of inequality and not its solution. A run of Serious Money was put on by students of Bristol Old Vic Theatre School at Circomedia, Portland Square from 7 November 2013 until 16 November 2013.

Serious Money

What about if you could buy stuff mega cheap in the first place? This would give you more chance of selling for a decent profit.

It’s largely new money,” says Knowles about Wentworth’s super primes, “or people who want to remain hidden.” Virginia Water, Surrey: a prime location for multimillion-pound homes. Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy Exactly howSerious Money lives always attracts press speculation but little methodical investigation," Professor Knowles explains.Paul is a member of the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) who are an innovative association that share the value of great advice for more Australians. We need to press ahead with redistributing some of the enormous wealth that sits in London, and which sits in Mediterranean harbours in yachts, not even being used by the rich themselves,” she says, and then concludes with her own question, of the kind that never quite receives a proper answer: “Why is all that dead money not being used to make things happen?” Knowles only mentions Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of The Leisure Class once in passing, presenting ‘conspicuous consumption’ as an underdeveloped precursor to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of distinction. This is a shame since both authors share a similarly enjoyable vicious tone and there are obvious parallels between the original and current ‘Gilded Age’.