Going underground

May 13, 2018 6:32 AM

In London’s richest boroughs vast subterranean enclaves are being carved out over several floors to house cars, wine, saunas and private nightclubs. How did underground living become an investment scheme for the uber-wealthy? What lies beneath: the subterranean secrets of London's super-rich
posted by fearfulsymmetry (32 comments total)

This is a thing in some coastal Southern California cities, too... here's it's because there are rules about how high you can build so you don't block anyone's view of the ocean, among other things. $6 million for a teardown, jesus christ. According to that article, they've been doing this in Laguna Beach since the 80s...
posted by Huck500 at 7:34 AM on May 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

2018: Luthor's Lair becomes the new fashion statement for the elite.
posted by SPrintF at 7:34 AM on May 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

Make sure you get a decent builder / architect specializing in bond villain lairs as things can go wrong
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 7:50 AM on May 13, 2018 [7 favorites]

I was like picturing super rich mole people before I clicked the links.
posted by Grandysaur at 8:25 AM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

Obvious explanation is there's been an increase in the London vampire population. Is Peter Grant on the case?
posted by Wretch729 at 9:27 AM on May 13, 2018 [7 favorites]

Hey hey hey this is not what the Diggers meant
posted by grandiloquiet at 9:30 AM on May 13, 2018 [10 favorites]

Ah yes, basements. I've heard of those.
posted by stinkfoot at 9:33 AM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

This reassures me conceptually, I'd broached the idea to a neighbor involved with building and got no real response other than very expensive, but it seems to make sense in that it would happen more in incredibly dense high value areas. So perhaps it's just too expensive for anyone other than Russian oligarchs.
posted by sammyo at 9:36 AM on May 13, 2018

What's always funny to me about people with that kind of money is how it proves the adage that money can't buy class.
posted by Ickster at 10:09 AM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

So I’ve been helping grade papers and watching Grand Design on Netflix and I’ve noticed there are about three things Rich British people want in a house regardless of style, materials, locations, etc

1: a vast underground portion with lap pools and large showers and other “I want what I get at a spa” stuff

2: vast picture windows that fold up/away and look like an absolute pain to keep clean

3: an obsession with ending drafts leading me to belive the U.K. is much much colder then I remember or they have yet to discover sweaters.
posted by The Whelk at 10:28 AM on May 13, 2018 [5 favorites]

money can't buy class

When you're rich, class is simply a gatekeeping device to separate the old rich from the new rich. Money absolutely can and does buy class, it just takes a generation or two sometimes.

Our markers of "class" come from slave owners and colonialists. So maybe we should aspire to goodness, not to "class".
posted by splitpeasoup at 10:42 AM on May 13, 2018 [11 favorites]

There's definitely a previously, however I can't say if this might be a double
posted by infini at 10:53 AM on May 13, 2018

Huh. Alt-f found reference to neither Eloi nor Morlocks.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 11:50 AM on May 13, 2018 [5 favorites]

what saddens me most is that after all this mega-building is done, the house is rarely occupied. Mayfair feels weird now, when I visit.
posted by lemon_icing at 12:16 PM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

"an obsession with ending drafts leading me to belive the U.K. is much much colder then I remember or they have yet to discover sweaters."

UK & Ireland are confusingly cold, have now been through 6 Canadian winters yet always somehow colder when visiting parents. Might be old uninsulated housing stock or because it's always raining slightly.
posted by Damienmce at 1:30 PM on May 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

Damn you, Abehammerb Lincoln, I was all set to say "hey, you guys are supposed to evolve into the Eloi, not the Morlocks!"
posted by jamjam at 1:48 PM on May 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

the house is rarely occupied.
Who needs a stupid house over 18 glorious depth-metres of basement, extending under the garden. Just sell the surface crap and keep the right of passage.

I would not be surprised to learn of developers who buy an expensive property, develop the underground and sell the surface part to finance the build. If you managed to get a whole street, you could put in an underground race track. For horses, naturally.
posted by Laotic at 1:52 PM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

What's always funny to me about people with that kind of money is how it proves the adage that money can't buy class.

I'd trade in all the class I have (which is very little) in exchange for an underground lair.
posted by betweenthebars at 2:41 PM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

The data, collected by Newcastle University’s global urban research unit from planning applications, identified two basements with more than one pool, including one with an artificial beach.
Underneath the pavement, the beach!
posted by doctornemo at 2:52 PM on May 13, 2018 [5 favorites]

When I worked in Holland Park, my walk to work passed a few dozen houses undergoing sub-basement works: the front covered with hoardings, a conveyor belt rising over the footpath to a skip in the parking bay, and such. Of course, this was in oligarchical Kensington & Chelsea, ground zero of subbasements, where one hears about the ordinary multimillionaires griping about the noise as their new billionaire neighbours carve out a three-story vintage-car museum with climbing wall or something. The other councils, at the time, had put their foot down and were not allowing such works, keeping the subbasement mania quarantined in K&C. Now, it seems, it has started spreading to Camden and Islington. Presumably Hackney will be next, and the Porsche Cayennes surrounding London Fields will soon be joined by skips and conveyor belts.
posted by acb at 3:07 PM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

This reminded me of an awesome story from a few years ago. Apparently it became a thing to dig out the big new basements and then leave the digging equipment entombed:

https://www.newstatesman.com/business/2014/06/bizarre-secret-london-s-buried-diggers

A new solution emerged: simply bury the digger in its own hole. Given the exceptional profits of London property development, why bother with the expense and hassle of retrieving a used digger – worth only £5,000 or £6,000 – from the back of a house that would soon be sold for several million? The time and money expended on rescuing a digger were better spent moving on to the next big deal.
posted by cron at 4:39 PM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

Umm the article covers that, apparently an urban legend
posted by mbo at 6:45 PM on May 13, 2018

"what saddens me most is that after all this mega-building is done, the house is rarely occupied."

This is the problem with all the property development. More and more houses are simply too expensive for anyone who's not an oligarch to live in them. Imagine what might happen in future decades if the currents of capitalism change their flow and England is no longer the favored home for the international rich.
posted by Kevin Street at 2:05 AM on May 14, 2018

an obsession with ending drafts leading me to belive the U.K. is much much colder then I remember or they have yet to discover sweaters.

Hi, I live in Scotland. Yes, it is cold, and also almost always damp, neither of which I want in my house. And if you live in Aberdeen there's a biting wind off the sea that I definitely did not want coming in. Drafts are heat escaping! Heating is expensive! Showering in a cold bathroom is terrible! Fortunately I now live in a converted stone building that is so warm we don't turn the heating on in winter and I am now very smug.

Also I have no jumpers now because clothes moths ate holes in all my lovely warm woolen jumpers and I'm very angry about it but that's a whole separate thing.
posted by stillnocturnal at 2:51 AM on May 14, 2018 [6 favorites]

To be honest, I've never really understood what the problem is with these giant basements. I mean, it's a bother for neighbours, and I guess they might cause subsidence or interfere with archaeology? Maybe there's a risk of longer-term structural damage in historic areas? But only the first point, about disturbing neighbours, seems to get a mention.

I respect Emma Coade, but I couldn't see how the article as written can get to this:

“I have sympathy for people who need more space for an expanding family, but building a beach under your mansion when you’re hardly going to be there is something else entirely,” she said.

“While we have people sleeping on the streets we really have to look at what we’re doing in our borough because that is bad planning.”

I'd love to hear from any urban planners reading this thread, because I've always thought it's preferable to have these giant basements than to have new-build monster homes plonked into London, or buying a whole row of terraced houses and knocking them into one (and leaving them all empty for much of the year).
posted by tavegyl at 2:53 AM on May 14, 2018

Presumably Hackney will be next

Hackney excavations have somewhat lower budgets
posted by gravelshoes at 4:29 AM on May 14, 2018 [2 favorites]

“I have sympathy for people who need more space for an expanding family, but building a beach under your mansion when you’re hardly going to be there is something else entirely,” she said.

I wonder how much of all this is people who have more money to launder after buying the place for cash, and are paying double to the excavator and concrete companies ( traditional sinks in the launder money through construction game )
posted by mikelieman at 5:38 AM on May 14, 2018

I notice that at a lot of these are used for, in part, nanny/other staff accommodation - at least the old school servants quarters in the top of the house and their workplaces below street level used to access to natural light.

Also as the spread out to less affluent areas - like the number of sheds being shoved into the garden areas - they'll be used to general accommodation. Just a few hundred quid a month for your darkened prole cell!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:24 AM on May 14, 2018

From what I've seen on the internet, you'd very likely have to dig through a layer of plague skeletons to do a job like this.
posted by bonobothegreat at 9:51 AM on May 14, 2018

I wonder how much of all this is people who have more money to launder after buying the place for cash, and are paying double to the excavator and concrete companies ( traditional sinks in the launder money through construction game )

Not sure about in England, but in the US there are very stringent regulations about building upwards in dense residential zones, so downwards is the way people must go.

I mean look at this comment: "On its first floor is an underground garage, in which up to three cars can be parked via robotic platforms" Up to 3 cars? You can buy a suburban home across much of the US with a 3 car garage on the ground floor for about $500k. And an underground pool compared to a backyard one seems austere in comparison. These houses aren't even particularly expensive at $32m and $16m respectively. These guys are building to keep up, not really get ahead.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:27 PM on May 14, 2018

Imagine what might happen in future decades if the currents of capitalism change their flow and England is no longer the favored home for the international rich.

It probably won't take decades. Britain's economy is already bleeding from its self-inflicted Brexit wound. Shortly after we crash out and the barriers go up, the bleeding will turn to exsanguination.

Britain has been coasting on imperial nostalgia and second-hand Anglophilia (the whole Athens-to-America's/the Emirates'/Azerbaijan's/&c.-Rome thing, the prestige of having discreet, classically-educated Englishmen with plummy accents managing the workings of one's oil bounty, the opportunity for an ex-KGB thug who knows the look in a man's eyes when he knows his death will be slow to transmute himself into a genteel, pinstripe-clad English biznesmen, and so on). It has negligible natural resources, no empire whose bounty to channel to itself, and (despite what it believes) nowhere near the strategic geopolitical clout to profit from.

It has an opaque tax system that attracts investors of various degrees of shadiness and a privileged position allowing it to be a centre of financial services for a population of some half a billion. Oops, that should say had; that's all going to go away after Brexit, and the world's banks aren't going to set up shop in the City of London just to sell PPI insurance to 70 million locals. Britain also has science and technology, though that depends largely on being an inviting environment for talent from abroad (rather than any sort of innate British genius) and cooperation of the sort that's going to be axed, from Airbus to Euratom. Beyond that, we have the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, half a century of pop-cultural ephemera (once the Beatles' popularity wanes in the way Elvis' has, they can start Stone Roses walking tours of Manchester or something), and some nice old buildings, much as, say, Athens or Rome does. Oh, and our jam. Loads of jam. We'll be a jam-making powerhouse, by Jove!

More importantly, take away artificial phenomena (economic centrality, historical nostalgia, a love for all things British instilled by P.G. Wodehouse novels or Kinks singles or whatever), and Britain is a damp, rainy island off the coast of northern Europe. A bit like Denmark without the hygge. Or Ireland. Ireland, with its diaspora and poetic traditions, also has a lot of cultural clout, which it tried a while ago to leverage into selling the idea of having a home there to descendants of its diaspora worldwide. A few bought in, then realised that they just bought an old draughty house on a damp, rainy island (and a perfectly ordinary one, with more motorway lay-bys and industrial parks than leprechauns or whatever), and then either sold up or kept their homes largely unused. Of course, back then Ireland was more peripheral and sparsely populated; now, with institutions relocating across the Irish Sea to remain in the EU without everyone having to learn German and both cranes and rents going up all over Dublin and Cork, the places may soon be swapped. It may not be long until Dun Laoghaire harbour is heaving with super-yachts and the cobbled streets of Dalkey resound with more Russian and Arabic than English or Irish, whereas the oligarchical subbasements of Kensington lie empty or are used for low-value storage, and Old London Town attracts only the occasional semi-masochistic eccentric Anglophile, willing to negotiate the creaking economy, the threadbare civil society and the understandable incomprehension about why anybody would move there.
posted by acb at 4:50 PM on May 14, 2018 [6 favorites]

You capture the current context very well, acb. I'd only add that the reality around the over hyped CommonWealth is going to be a surprise as well, post Brexit.
posted by infini at 11:47 PM on May 14, 2018 [1 favorite]