London used to have more mixed areas but many are now just full of bland and homogenous luxury homes

She’s talked to the Old People, too. The long- st anding, mainly Brit residents: residual toffs, middle-class professionals and c reatives, many moving out or thinking of it. And to the people who look after them, the wealth managers, posh estate agents, interior decorators: the couth “butlers” of this new world. The Old People don’t much l i ke t he ne i g hbours — pre s e nt o r absentees (they usually complain the c o m mu n i t y ’s go n e b e c au s e the newcomers aren’t interested).

Dr Glucksberg shows how the massive torrent of new overseas money going in at the top of London’s property market funnel is responsible for a ripple effect of price increases and gentrification that extends way outside prime land.

Whoever the New People are and whatever their motives — Dr Glucksberg d iv i d e s them i nt o f ive c a t e go r i e s ranging from “never-there” dodgy billionaires who buy as flight capital in case there’s a revolution at home, and then leave the place empty, to middleclass Chinese investors who buy-to-let flats in formerly more modest places like the massive Nine Elms development in Battersea. The net effect is the same, to push layers of locals one or two rungs down the ladder, create rapid, forced gentrification and make larger and larger swathes of London completely unaffordable.

London is especially unaffordable to key workers now — old central London used t o h av e p l a c e s for them in Peabody flats, council blocks and rentcontrolled pr ivate l e t s . May f a i r, B e l g r av i a and Chelsea all had unexploited corners and surprisingly mixed communities until well into the Nineties.

But when the developers — including the Great Estates themselves — started realising the potential of every last mews, former warehouse and disused pub to be made over as “luxury” (key word), the effect was to create bland, homogenous areas with no bolt holes for key workers, young people, artists or the genteel poor.

Some locals do all right. But it’s still a loss of control for people used to running the show. It all amounts to a loss of communit y for swathes of London.

Of course the toffs, pre-war, only stayed in their big London houses for The Season; they had other places to go to. London, as Peter Thorold showed in his marvellous book, The London Rich, has been ruthlessly churning and changing since the Great Fire of 1666: 350 years ago tomorrow. Fortunes came and went.

The difference now is the sheer scale, the brutal velocity and internationalism of the churn; you couldn’t buy a L o ndon pa l a c e wi t h a click f ro m Uzbekistan in 1666.