Fulham basements

Digging deeper into the luxury basements of London’s super rich.

In 2008 there were estimated to be 8.6 million “high net worth individuals”, people with $1m (£761,000) or more of investable assets, in the world, but by 2016 this had increased by 92 per cent to 16.5 million, according to the World Wealth Report.

The geographical distribution of this population is highly concentrated: 4.795 million in the USA. 2.891 million in Japan. 1.280 million in Germany. 1,129,000 in China. 579,000 in France and 568,000 in the UK (compared to 362,000 in 2008). Some half a million of these people live in and around London, in a set of tightly circumscribed neighbourhoods.

All of this wealth sloshing around London has had myriad consequences for the built environment. Perhaps the most evident has been the appearance of a large number of “super-high”, “super-prime” residential towers, vertical urban housing that has become something of a preserve for the very wealthy.

But the wealth that has not found its way into the changing skylines of the city has still had major impacts on the existing built environment. Many high-end properties have been transformed as super-affluent newcomers commission often brutal structural conversions of older properties into modern living spaces. Maximising the size of all interior spaces and infusing them with exterior light has now become de rigueur, as have various design and technological “solutions” to matters of privacy and security.

But, in many areas of “super-prime” London attractive to “super-rich” buyers, the nature of the original architecture combined with planning restrictions often makes it very difficult to extend properties laterally, or to add additional floors on the top of properties. And so, for some, the only “solution” has been to go down.

Consequently, residential basement developments in the wealthiest parts of London have increased markedly in recent years. The construction of this new subterranean London for the super-rich has been the subject of much comment but, until recently, little systematic investigation.

Research into the planning records suggests that such developments are emblematic of how London is changing. Along with residential highrise luxury towers (“luxified skies”) sprouting up across the city, there is also a steady spread of what the researchers call luxified troglodytism, wealthy households extending downwards instead of outwards.

Digging down

The study pulled data from the planning portals of seven London boroughs. Camden, Hammersmith and Fulham, Haringey, Islington, Kensington and Chelsea, Wandsworth and Westminster all cover core super prime London. Between 2008 and the end of 2017 those boroughs granted planning permission for 4,650 basement developments.

Hammersmith and Fulham has the greatest number, 1,147 over the decade, followed by Kensington and Chelsea with 1,022 and Westminster with 678. The great majority, 80.7 per cent, were standard single storey excavations. Another 16.9 per cent, 785 of them, were two storeys or the equivalent in volume. A further 2.4 per cent, 112 of them, went three storeys or deeper.

The 785 large and 112 deepest basements are the ones worth looking at. Those nine hundred or so excavations sit on a different scale to the rest. Between them they hold 367 swimming pools, 358 gyms, 178 cinemas and 63 staff spaces. The records also list 14 car lifts, seven art galleries, two gun stores and one panic room.

Some of these basements can take many years of disruptive construction to complete and concerns have been raised about their environmental impact.

The deepest of them was granted planning permission in Holland Park in 2013, under a large semi detached house. It consisted of a new three-storey basement under the entire property and part of the rear garden. It includes a staff kitchen, staff bedroom, six WCs, a gym, a media room, a family room, a family kitchen, a guest bedroom, a guest kitchen, a laundry room, a drying room, a sauna, a steam room, two shower rooms, a jacuzzi, a plunge pool, a pantry, a full-sized swimming pool and a beach. Yes, a beach.

In this particular basement development the “water-related” features were of a roughly equivalent volume to an average new-build property in England. Some of the super-rich swim, bathe and steam subterraneously in spaces equivalent to what the rest of us might consider adequate to undertake all of our domestic activities in.

All this shows that there has been a significant increase in the number of larger basement excavations in the past 10 years. Such widespread development of subterranean London is an important component of broader changes in the built environment that have occurred since the 2008 financial crash. The “luxified skies” that Londoners are more used to are highly visible reminders of great wealth, but these deluxe basements which, in aggregate, are equivalent in depth to 50 Shards, are also an important aspect of the type of city that London has become.

The super-rich continue to have a significant impact on London, it is simply not so noticeable any longer. Wealth is burrowing underground, rather than just reaching for the skies.

NU Projects builds basements across west London.

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