Super-rich once again dig down into the dark heart of London
Basement mining is back in fashion amid falling house prices and higher stamp duty
London might once have been an industrial city but now it relies on natural resources. Mining, mostly. At least that’s the impression a visitor would get wandering the city’s most affluent streets. A common sight is the hoarding around a ground floor with a boxed-in conveyor belt sticking out at an awkward upward angle, spouting earth into a skip in the road. This is the sign of the space-mine, the conjuring of domestic square footage from underground as the capital’s prime natural resource.
The issue of mega-basements has been back in the news recently with coverage of the feud between Holland Park neighbours Jimmy Page and Robbie Williams. The one-time Led Zeppelin guitarist is an architecture aficionado who lives in the remarkable Victorian Tower House, designed by the eccentric architect William Burges. He has argued that Mr Williams’ proposed dig would adversely affect the structural integrity of the Grade I-listed house. Mr Williams, who is planning to add to his 46-room house the usual subterranean gym and swimming pool, argues the disruption would be no worse than a passing car. Musos who might once have been throwing TVs out of their windows are now arguing about the finer points of Pre-Raphaelite interiors.
The basement boom started not in prime postcodes but among the merely-prosperous middle classes of Fulham and Wandsworth, with families expanding their cellars to accommodate relatively modest playrooms and dens. But both developers and the super-rich spotted an opportunity. Big basements had always been too expensive to be worthwhile, until London’s increasingly insane property prices flipped everything.
The prime property mining frenzy reached its apogee in 2016, when Foxtons’ founder Jon Hunt proposed a glass-bottomed pool for the garden of his Kensington home. It would have given views down to a three-storey basement with tennis court and car carousels for a revolving display of the estate agent’s Ferrari collection. The plans were subsequently scaled back (after his diplomatic neighbours, including the French ambassador, threatened to invoke the Geneva Convention to stop him).
Since that golden age of excavation, the boroughs of Westminster and Kensington & Chelsea, which had always been the sites of the most furious digging, have imposed a limit of a single subterranean storey. However, an exception is being made for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who have applied to excavate a two-storey basement beneath the Orangery of the Grade I-listed Kensington Palace, an extension which will give them 22 rooms.
Despite stricter rules and the advent of unexplained wealth orders, the “iceberg” basement is back in fashion thanks to a combination of tumbling super-prime property prices in London and increased stamp duty costs, which make it extremely expensive to move. Over the past decade designs for nearly 5,000 basements had been given the go-ahead by local authorities in London, with some proposals being bigger than the houses that sit above them. Mostly these vast caverns appear to contain pools, saunas, gyms, home cinemas, virtual reality golf courses and playrooms.
The suspicion is that these projects are more about vanity than function. Most of the houses are owned by individuals or couples and it is difficult to imagine those subterranean multimedia rooms or saunas being heavily used. Who really needs 50 rooms?
Many of the newer applications include accommodation for staff, nannies and au pairs, a miserably literal translation of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis in which the elite live a care-free life in skyscrapers and roof gardens while the poor are confined to dark underground caverns. Which is how it once was. The underworld was not only a metaphor but a literal description of the fetid cellars in which the poorest Londoners lived. In the 19th century, Friedrich Engels commented on how the most impoverished industrial workers were pushed underground, which had the effect of making them invisible to the middle classes.
The interconnecting cellars of rookeries such as London’s St Giles were built beside the muddy banks of rivers and drainage ditches so there would be less excavation work and cellars frequently flooded with liquids worse than water. As housing improved cellars were reserved for coal storage, boxes of unwanted wedding gifts and gas meters, and then became bomb shelters during the Blitz. Now even the underground is being appropriated by the super-rich.
London’s growth has long been predicated on financial speculation and burgeoning property prices. The carving out of its earth seems to somehow exemplify a perverse economy in which a huge, dark void has become the ultimate symbol of status and wealth.