As a child, I always found it a source of great excitement when we drove up The Bishops Avenue on the way to school in north London. There was one particular house, nicknamed “Biggie”, that astonished my eight-year-old self: I couldn’t compute anyone living in something that size.
This week I found myself walking along the street for the first time in years. Now that we’re all suddenly very concerned about London’s stolen wealth, I thought I’d check in on Biggie and friends.
God, it’s miserable along there. At some point in the early 1990s it went from being a place where wealthy people actually lived to “Billionaires’ Row”, a place where plutocrats deposited their dubious savings in the form of hideous McMansions. Saudi royals staked a claim alongside Kazakh dictators and Justin Bieber (although he was only renting). The architecture went downhill as quickly as the clientele.
Hardly anyone lives on The Bishops Avenue any more, and it is punctuated by long stretches of desolation. As for poor old Biggie, it was one of ten houses on the road bought by Saudis in 1989. They never bothered living in it: they just sat on it as the land value went up, so now it is rotting, a crash pad for squatters and mice. A soiled white towel sits on the gate.
These tumbleweed palaces tell the entire sordid story of how the capital became a safety deposit box for kleptocrats. We’re all fixated on Russians right now but the rot is far deeper than just Putin’s people. As one acquaintance who works in PR put it to me the other day: losing Russian money is a blow, but there’s plenty of other dodgy cash out there.
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● Rest assured we still do some things rather well, when we aren’t playing butler to the 0.01 per cent. We can even still build beautiful things, as I discovered on a recent trip to Tintagel Castle. I’d always wanted to visit Tintagel, on the north coast of Cornwall, primarily because of its mythical status as the birthplace of King Arthur. It’s a deeply evocative spot, with the waves of the Celtic Sea crashing against the rugged island on which half the castle was once situated.
Not much of the original fortress remains, but two new structures give the ruins fresh meaning and beauty. One is a gorgeous, gravity-defying cantilever bridge that links the island to the mainland, replacing the bridge lost about 500 years ago. The other is an 8ft bronze sculpture of Arthur himself. Wraithlike and commanding, Arthur seems suspended between legend and reality, standing guard over the cliffs of England, ready to rally to the nation’s defence in our moment of direst need.
Rousing stuff. They should put English Heritage to work on The Bishops Avenue next.
Newman’s view
Devon knows you can’t be too careful about Covid
People are endlessly strange. During my trip to the West Country, I stopped in Tavistock, in Devon, one of my favourite small towns in England and home to the first-rate Pannier Market. Waiting patiently in line at the brownie and teapot stall, I couldn’t help but eavesdrop on the conversation between the chap in front of me and the stallholder.
He was explaining how he’d been hit hard by Covid recently and even spent a few days in intensive care. The problem was, he hadn’t had his vaccine when the virus struck. “I’m not one of those conspiracy types; just hadn’t got round to it, you know?” he explained.
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The stall owner nodded politely. Then she stopped for a moment. “Did you get your jabs in the end?” she inquired tentatively.
“Oh yes,” he enthused. “I’ve had my jab, all right. Not going to make that mistake again.”
“Mmm. Just the one jab, was it?” the stallholder wondered.
“Yup. Should do the trick.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him.
Stop chasing me, Nanny
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So Covid isn’t over. In fact we’re quietly having another wave, which I finally succumbed to. But it would be nice if companies could stop using the pandemic as an excuse to behave like overmighty social workers. Signs everywhere still tell us to be nice, wash our hands, keep our distance. While urging me to sanitise my hands (which we’ve long known is fairly ineffectual against Covid), London Underground recently delivered this abomination: “The little things we do help protect the little things we love.”
We should reboot John Major’s cones hotline to report all this wasted taxpayer’s money.