About the Book
A sociologist uncovers the secret lives of London's wealthiest residents - and how their money shapes the city for the rest of us
London is a plutocrat's paradise, with more resident billionaires than New York, Hong Kong or Moscow. Far from trickling down, their wealth is burning up the environment and swallowing up the city. But what do we really know about London's super-rich, and the lives they lead?
To find out more, sociologist Caroline Knowles walks the streets of London from the City to suburban Surrey, via Kensington, Mayfair and elsewhere. Her walks reveal how the wealthy shape the capital in their image, creating a world of gated communities and luxury developments. A move behind closed doors takes us further into the dark heart of the plutocratic city, from multi-million-pound mansions to gentlemen's clubs. Along the way we meet a wide and wickedly entertaining cast of millionaires, billionaires and those who serve them- bankers, aristocrats, tech tycoons, Conservative Party donors, butlers, divorce lawyers and many more.
By turns jaw-dropping, enraging and enlightening, Serious Money explodes the fiction that wealth is a condition to aspire to, revealing the isolation and paranoia which accompany it when the plutocrat's recompense - a life of endless luxury - ultimately proves hollow. Yet it is not just the super-rich who get to make the city- we make it too, and could demand something different. Because serious money is good for no one - not even the rich.
About the Author :
Caroline Knowles is a professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Currently the Director of the British Academy's Cities and Infrastructure programme, she has carried out research in London, Hong Kong, Beijing, Fuzhou, Addis Ababa, Kuwait City and Seoul. Knowles is the author of Flip-Flop- A Journey through Globalisation's Backroads, and co-author of Hong Kong- Migrant Lives, Landscapes and Journeys.
Review :
Part guide, part indictment of a yawning wealth gap, Caroline Knowles's eye-opening book reveals how the capital has changed over the decades ... the author's gentle, yet shrewd observations quickly accumulate when seeking out a wide variety of individuals to reveal the quotidian culture of plutocracy.
Knowles' book helps readers to see [London's super-rich] as less secretive, more troubling and a great deal sadder ... Serious Money has a serious mission. These vast fortunes, Knowles argues, do not just make people miserable. They are rotting the ties that hold our society together.
Knowles's book acted on me like a goad, a stone in the shoe ... The questing sociologist has an agenda. She is our nominated surrogate in occupied territory. And she is persistent ... Among the freakishly perverse bankers and investors, she behaves like Orwell in Wigan.
Again and again, Knowles's stories attest to a money machine devoted to nothing but its own perpetuation ... In the tradition of the great literary walkers, from Walter Benjamin to Will Self, her insistence on crossing the city on foot is, in an important sense, an act of resistance, an embrace of urban realities in defiance of the sad confinement of extreme wealth, its smoked-glass segregation.
A fascinating investigation of plutocratic London ... as gripping as a pulp detective novel in which we glimpse the slimy, far from slummy lives of the morally corrupt. She patrols London's elite enclaves with a sharp eye for telling social and architectural details ... Knowles combines cunning and charm.
An eye-opening, deeply disturbing, fast-moving journey through the lives, homes and affairs of the filthy rich of London.
Fascinating, punchy, thought-provoking. Serious Money exposes the corrosive impact of London's super rich on our economy, society and politics, and comprehensively busts the myth that their wealth trickles down to the rest of us.
A wonderful and vital account of a city ruled by, and for, extreme wealth.
Startling, spirited ... Knowles is alert to arresting details ... a wry primer to the extravagances of the super rich.
Years of footwork through the streets of central London have gone into producing this magnificent but disturbing book on the lives and influence of the super-rich. Knowles writes with enviable lightness and pace about how money, property, birth, breeding, contacts, secrecy, parasites and servants have created a class that owns and milks London, a world away from the city's ordinary citizens. A powerful ethnography of plutocratic power.
An innovative and disturbingly entertaining travelogue covering one of the most important issues of our time ... could not have been published at a more critical time.
Sociologist Caroline Knowles takes you through the neighborhoods of the capital city telling stories of how the ultra-wealthy live and work; how they spend their money, marry and divorce; and why London is one of the best places for those with nefarious intentions to hide money from authorities.
A guided tour of the spaces and lifestyles of London's super-rich. Written in an engaging and accessible manner that draws the reader into spaces and conversations otherwise out of bounds, Knowles subtly exposes the paradoxes inherent within the life and politics of the super-rich in London.
