Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner...

Woohoo—break out the bargain Prosecco: It is ten years since I left London with my two year old son and his father for a new life by the sea in East Sussex. Since then, a great deal has changed — not least the fact that the four bedroom garden flat in a fashionable bit of west London that we sold for £595,000 in 2005 is now ‘worth’ about £1.5million.
But all’s well that ends well, eh?
Well, ish. When we split up, in 2007, after the birth of our second son, the father of my children stayed in our Victorian seaside villa while I moved less than half a mile up the hill. Nonetheless, despite having spent an entire decade in this town and despite the fact that my nearly nine year-old is a local boy born-and-bred, I do not anticipate feeling at home here any time soon; like, say, in this lifetime.
For a start other than my children and a couple of friends, almost all of the people and things that matter most to me are elsewhere. And of those people and things the majority are still in London. And while I spent forty years of my life in London each time I visit (the gaps used to be counted in days, now it can be months) I recognise 'my' city a little less. Sometimes I literally don’t recognise it at all — as when old buildings are replaced by big new shiny Crossrail-y ones while I was looking the other way for just a year or two — at other times I just don’t recognise London's vibe.
A confession: I no longer feel comfortable in the capital and each time I visit I feel more like a poor, old (wrong shoes, too fat…) provincial day-tripper than I ever imagined it could be possible for me to feel. And yet I’ve decided (all together now…) Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner/That I hate London so…
During February half-term, while my 12 year-old was on a school trip, I took my nearly nine-year-old up to see his grandpa in Notting Hill. We had carbonara at Valentina and then wandered through the mid-afternoon sun to the (predictably heaving) Princess Diana playground, in Kensington Gardens. As a toddler in Maida Vale my eldest son had been a regular, however this was No2 son’s debut (he loved it). Afterwards, on a tight half-term budget (that is a Catch 22 of a single, freelance not-earning-this-week-but-have-no-childcare budget), I decided that if we wanted to see Big Hero Six at the IMAX in Leicester Square (and we really really did) then we would have to cut a few corners. Literally.
So we strode hand-in-hand from Notting Hill to Leicester Square, diagonally across the Park with the sun setting behind us. As we walked and talked (he’s such great company) I recalled that the last time I’d navigated the whole of Hyde Park in one go had been when I’d, ahem, ‘Run the World’ for Live Aid. Was it really possible that thirty years had passed since I’d crossed my hometown park on foot? Apparently it was.
‘It’s only because you’re really old, Mummy!’ No2 son told me kindly, consolingly, squeezing my hand.
‘Yes, you’re absolutely right!’ I squeezed back. By the time we got to the cinema, I had blisters — though fortunately not on my hand.
That day I managed to avoid feeling too much like a tourist simply because we saw so many people who actually were, wobbling through the park on their Boris bikes, stopping for selfies and speaking every language under the setting sun that wasn’t English.
And then just last week I was up in town again—celebrating another tenth anniversary (funnily enough my friend Jane Bruton’s brilliantly shiny ten year editorship of Grazia has coincided almost exactly with the least glossy decade of my life) and, before that, meeting my dad to view a flat he is in the process of buying.
This flat is a stone’s throw from the bachelorette ‘penthouse’ flat I rented twenty years ago in Chepstow Crescent. A glance at Mouseprice tells me that that modest little flat (really: it was light & airy and the size of a commensurately light & airy shoebox) is now worth £850-900K and would rent at around £500-575 a week. I don't currently earn much more than £500 a week, so if further proof were needed that a) I’m living my life in reverse, like some sort of sad Benjamina Button (partly true), or that, b) bits of London I naively thought were ‘mine’ now belong only to very rich people, then c) I think this moment was it.
And in case you think I was previously a Child of Enormous Privilege, I am not being disingeneous about that Chepstow Crescent flat. After getting married, I moved out in early 1996 simply because there wasn’t room for my then husband’s collection of terrible albums by ‘Yes', much less his cargo pants and Birkenstocks (it was the mid-1990s — though that doesn’t excuse the ‘Yes’ LPs, obviously). In fact there wasn’t really any room in the flat for my husband — which is exactly what I should have concluded at the time, however hindsight is a wonderful thing.
And I digress.
This, however, was the context in which I went to view the flat my father is looking to buy, chiefly in order to allay his fears about its diminutive proportions. And it is diminutive — however if you want to live in this delightful spot in London W11/W2 borders and have less than three quarters of a million to spend, diminutive is now the default. On the upside, the flat has been cleverly done, is quiet and light and bright and airy.
‘It’s very nice,’ I told my dad, honestly, ‘really, you’d be mad not to buy it.’ What I didn’t want to say was that if he doesn’t buy it I think he will never be able to buy anything else in the area of London that he loves. While he’s hardly down-and-out-in-Notting Hill he doesn’t run a hedge fund and he’s eighty this year, so… fingers crossed.
I, on the other hand, can clearly never afford to live in any bit of London I’d want to live in ever again. Except that I’m not even sure the bits of London I’d always assumed I’d want to live in would be places in which I’d now feel remotely At Home.
Last week, as I walked down Pembridge Road and Pembridge Villas it was the end of the school day and I could barely navigate the pavement for Filipina nannies/housekeepers doing the pick-up from Wetherby (pre-Prep, boys only, £6,170 a term, alumni include Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Hugh Grant, Princes William and Harry). Back in the day, even Princess Diana would do the pick-up. Back in the day, too, this bit of west London was full of different kinds/colours/classes of people living cheek-by-jowl, not Another Country. And I don’t mean that in a ghastly UKIP-y kind of way, obviously—I just mean that I now feel as much a stranger among the rich as I do among the staff of the rich; their shared ‘hood is not my old ‘hood. In short, I may know my way around these west London streets as well as any cabbie but, just like a cabbie, there’s no longer much point in lingering.
When I lived in Chepstow Crescent it was still on the cusp of Cashed-Up v The Creatives. There were already plenty of cashed-up creatives and while the bankers may have been moving in they were the kind of bankers you didn’t mind bumping into in The Walmer Castle or Tom’s. You could pop out to a newsagents or to collect a takeaway curry in your flip-flops and trackies and not be made to feel like something on the bottom of a Hedgie's shoe.
On the subject of which, last week I also noted (for the record) that (apparently) it’s only out-of-town middle-aged Mums-on-the-Run and nannies who wear Uggs in public, in daylight, in March, on the streets of Notting Hill. You’re welcome...