Going down! Rich dig 4,650 new basements across London
‘Sheer opulence is jaw-dropping’
WITH space for home extensions increasingly hard to come by, it seems the superrich have solved the problem by digging down... and down, and down.
For the extraordinary scale of London’s basement craze has been revealed in a study that found 4,650 had been approved in a decade.
Around 1,000 gyms, 380 pools and 120 staff rooms have been uncovered in plans for huge basements built between 2008 and 2017. In total 112 ‘mega basements’ with three or more storeys had been approved, and 785 ‘large’ basements with two or more storeys.
One particularly opulent threestorey basement in Holland Park, west London, has a swimming pool, plunge pool, beach, sauna and steam room, hot tub, media room, gym and staff quarters, according to the Newcastle University study.
A two-level basement in Notting Hill, which cost £4million, includes a 70ft swimming pool that turns into a dance floor at the touch of a button.
Researchers also found 550 media and cinema rooms, 340 games rooms, 380 wine stores, 240 saunas or steam rooms and 60 underground garages and parking facilities.
The combined depth of all the basements built over the period is 50,160ft – 140 times higher than St Paul’s Cathedral.
The study concluded the sharp rise in basements’ popularity is ‘emblematic of the profound plutocratisation of London’, as international investors and the super-rich move in – pushing the professional classes into other areas.
Some of the largest basements were seen in so-called ‘iceberg homes’ where the space underground is bigger than that above, with basements up to 59ft deep.
Their lengthy construction times can cause misery for neighbours who have to endure years of noise and works traffic.
The researchers from Newcastle’s global urban research unit, led by professor of cities Roger Burrows, said: ‘The global excesses of wealth, focused upon such a small fragment of the global population, now find spatial expression in many of the neighbourhoods of central London.
‘At a time when so many households face a crisis in their housing circumstances, the new subterranean geography of London is deeply symbolic of the realities of the intensification of global inequalities.’
The study looked at seven of the capital’s wealthiest boroughs: Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Hammersmith and Fulham, Haringey, Camden, Islington and Wandsworth. It only covered houses already standing when the basement was built, meaning many more new builds remain under the radar.
In the last ten years 67 mega-basements were built in Kensington and Chelsea and 34 in Westminster. Underground developments in those boroughs were the most opulent and the most likely to have pools, according to the report, which was undertaken for The Guardian.
Karen Buck, Labour MP for Westminster North, said: ‘The sheer opulence of many of the larger basement excavations caused jaws to drop even in fairly affluent neighbourhoods like St John’s Wood and Bayswater, where neighbours have sometimes found themselves under siege from these developments.’ Becky Fatemi, of London’s Rokstone estate agents, told the Guardian that 34 per cent of the 140 properties it sold in the last five years had basements.
She added many buyers said they needed extra space for nannies and staff.