She comes back until the required witnesses can be persuaded to share a drink and a stroll, to confess in safety, under Chaucerian pseudonyms. She is our nominated surrogate in occupied territory. Like something out of place and menacing, sticking its head through the wall in an early Lucian Freud painting. ‘Walking exposes politics, like a sediment in the landscape.’ She finds herself window-grazing in South Audley Street, foregrounding the perverse surrealism of Mayfair country wear (Cameron Cotswold) at the point where it cohabits with a stuffed zebra on a wooden plinth. ‘Walking is how I make sense of the world,’ Knowles writes. Obliging witnesses Knowles is permitted, after clearance, to interrogate. But there is also the silence of the seriously rich who own London: royals, aristocrats, fossil-fuel beneficiaries, bagmen for dubious regimes. Knowles has already thrilled at the ‘lovely hush’ of Belgravia. This is the mysterious far edge of things, the immaculately pastiched dormitory suburb that completes an epic sequence of pedestrian quests. Silence repels unexplained outsiders who dare to trespass on the shaved carpet of a Surrey golf course. Private security operatives whisper into their fists while patrolling a zone of distrust. This silence is the defining quality of wealth. ‘In London, money rises in the East and sets in the West.’ Her book starts ‘with visits to the place where money is generated, around Shoreditch and the City … Continuing westwards through a vortex of wealth … Finally … to the sinister and silent streets of Virginia Water in suburban Surrey.’ There is always, as the spinners love to say, a direction of travel. Less good for the landlocked, the trapped and the disenfranchised. ‘A rising tide lifts all boats.’ A good proposition for yacht owners. ‘Wealth in London today,’ she says, ‘is concentrated in the hands of an international, globalised plutocracy.’ This situation has been accommodated by successive UK governments, which have claimed that a ripe crust of wealth in private hands makes for a rich country. I underplay the gravity of Knowles’s proposition. Our post-contemporary is steam on a funhouse mirror. Horrors, incubated over many years: the situation is grave, potentially terminal, but it’s not serious. This man changes the rules of the game if he is in danger of losing a piece. It’s here, or almost here, and then it’s gone: politics as a dance of blind men thrashing the air with white sticks, while failing to land a single blow on a Struwwelpeter clown-king bent on slow-puncture abdication by photo opportunity, a different costume or a different country every night. Entropy: GET IT DONE! We seem to have arrived at a bleak post-contemporary present where nothing has depth or traction or consequence. A resolution of that terrible inundation coming from all sides at once: our ultimate ecological, cultural, financial and moral collapse. I had the notion that somewhere behind and beyond the sharp-eyed sociological expeditions she undertakes was a General Theory of Everything. Knowles’s book acted on me like a goad, a stone in the shoe. An elite cadre of Noahs with pairs of butlers, cooks, cleaners, sailors and security operatives. When the ice has all melted and the animals have been drowned or burned, the great ghost fleet of oligarchs will rule the ocean. Yachts bigger than many tax-avoidance islands. And yachts with helipads and missile-launch systems. There is an unbridgeable chasm between Haves and Have-Yachts. She distinguishes the condition of those unfortunates for whom the world is a melancholy cage of privilege in which their every whim can be immediately satisfied from that of ordinary grafting millionaires and multi-millionaires. She has a special interest in, and admitted fetish for, the strategies, properties and appurtenances of the very rich. * The loudest crimes are hidden in plain sight. In Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, she describes the overweening spike of Renzo Piano’s Shard as ‘a glass and concrete arrangement of the Qatar sovereign wealth fund’. T he London architecture you are permitted to notice, Caroline Knowles reckons, is just money on display.
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