TOWER OF GREED
Bought up by foreign plutocrats for up to £51m a flat, skyscraper that’s a symbol of how Britain’s sold its soul to the super-rich
‘It’s a tower block that’s just for the toffs’
STANDING nearly 600ft high and boasting 50 storeys, it is hard to miss 1 St George Wharf. There are only eight buildings taller in the whole of Britain. It’s the country’s tallest residential skyscraper.
Known also as the Vauxhall Tower and the St George Wharf Tower, this vast and unlovely block — variously likened to a nasal hair clipper or the Tower of Sauron from the Lord Of The Rings — dominates the London skyline, looming over the comparatively modest Houses of Parliament, which lie less than a mile down the Thames.
And while no one seems quite sure what to call it, there can be no doubt this huge cylindrical edifice is a symbol of how Britain is changing — and, in particular, how successive governments have been far keener to embrace foreign millions than to worry about the interests of their own citizens.
Although it had been long suspected, yesterday it was reported in the Guardian newspaper that almost two-thirds of the tower’s 214 apartments are owned by foreigners, and furthermore, by foreigners who seldom bother to live in them. Indeed, these apartments, which have been sold from £600,000 to a staggering £51million, cannot really be considered homes.
They are, above all, investment opportunities for the world’s super-rich, towering over a city which has a notorious shortage of affordable housing. And — surprise, surprise — what also emerged yesterday is that a quarter of the apartments have been bought by companies registered in offshore tax havens.
While many on average wages are forced to live on the very edges of the capital, or indeed make new lives entirely outside it, much of the city’s centre has become little more than a property bank for Kurdish oil magnates, vodka tycoons from Kyrgyzstan and Russian oligarchs.
And one hardly needs to be a bleeding-heart liberal to feel there’s something scandalous about the way these immensely wealthy men have effectively been able to invade whole quarters of the city, expel the residents, and then leave behind uninhabited vertical wastelands of steel, glass and thumb-twiddling concierges.
For St George Wharf, the statistics are damning. No fewer than 62 per cent of the 210 apartments where the title deeds are available are believed to be in foreign ownership. Out of a total of 214, no one is registered to vote in the UK in 184 of them.
The five-storey penthouse at the top — costing £51million, and 24 times the size of the average new three-bedroom home in Britain — is owned by a firm believed to be run by Russian oligarch Andrei Guriev, whose family already own Witanhurst in Highgate, North London, the biggest mansion in London after Buckingham Palace.
Another apartment went for a mere £2.7 million to a former minister in the Nigerian government. With prices rising up to £2,100 for a single square foot of floor space, their money buys almost unimaginable luxury.
From the bowler-hatted doormen in the lobby, with its black velvet sofas and crystal chandeliers, to the fingerprint recognition locks on the £15million apartment occupying the entire 45th floor, everything is calibrated to feel like one of the world’s most exclusive hotels. All the apartments feature so-called ‘sky gardens’ — glazed balconies fitted with a special glass that frosts over when you look at it from certain angles, protecting the privacy of the apartment next door.
Using an iPad that comes with each flat, you can adjust the lighting or raise the blinds from anywhere in the world. Naturally, there’s a spa with manicure and massage rooms.
Before the tower was even built, one of the Tory Party’s most respected figures warned that it would be a symbol of the growing social division in our capital.
Lord Baker, the former Education Secretary, said the project reminded him of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, in which so-called ‘alphas’ — the rich and powerful — enjoy luxuries unknown to the lower classes, dismissively branded the gammas, deltas and epsilons.
‘That is how the development is to be done,’ warned Baker. ‘In that great tower, there will be no social affordable housing. It is all for the alphas. It is all for the toffs.’
And who gave the scheme the goahead? Step forward well-known socialist and champion of the working man, John Prescott.
For it was he, while Deputy Prime Minister, who granted planning permission in 2005. The decision flew in the face of the local authority, Lambeth Council, which had refused permission for ten reasons, including the failure to provide reasonably priced homes and ‘the detrimental impact on London’s riverscape and locally important views’.
But despite those cogent and prescient arguments, Prescott overrode not only Lambeth Council, but also the planning inspector.
No wonder Lord Baker mocked him in the House of Lords for approving ‘a tower for the toffs’ that made even Tories feel deeply uneasy.
What both Lords Prescott and Baker failed to predict was that the skyscraper was barely going to be lived in by anybody at all, toffs or alphas or not.
If you pass it at night, many of the apartments are dark. There are no lights on, not because no one is at home — but because they have never been homes.
And what makes it worse is that St George Wharf Tower will soon not be standing alone.
At present, there are no fewer than 14 apartment blocks more than 350ft tall that are either being constructed or have planning approval in Vauxhall alone.
It is not for nothing that the area is now known as ‘Dubai-on-Thames’ — and it is an epithet that is most definitely unflattering.
Sadder still, these repositories of money masquerading as homes are being inflicted all over London and the idea of potential homes as pure investment is well-established.
Lord Prescott must feel so proud.
At night, most of the apartments are in darkness