Much has been written about the “luxified skies” – “high-rise”, “super-prime” housing for the super-rich – that has been sprouting up across London. Thus far, less attention has been paid to what has been happening to the subterranean city. The “luxified skies” are highly visible reminders of elite “verticality” but, what we might term, “luxified troglodytism” is also an important aspect of London’s changing geometries of wealth, power and architecture. In this talk Roger Burrows will map out in detail the emerging subterranean geography of residential basement development across London since 2008. The very wealthy, it turns out, have been “bunkering down” across certain parts of London, to an extent hitherto little understood.
The advent of Covid and lockdown measures have both intensified and complicated this trend. Roger will consider its likely long term impact in post pandemic London and the possibilities of challenging its negative impact on the city’s future development.
Roger will be joined by Caroline Knowles and Anna Minton as discussants.
Roger Burrows is currently Professor of Global Inequalities at Bristol University and before that was Professor of Cities at Newcastle. He is committed to interdisciplinary working across the arts, humanities and the social sciences but also has a keen interest in creative and social technologies. He has written many books in the field of urban social policy, and recently co-authored The Predictive Postcode: The Geodemographics Classification of British Society (Sage, 2018).
Caroline Knowles is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmith's who has researched and written about cities and globalisation from an ethnographic perspective. She is the author of Flip-Flop: a journey through globalisation’s backroads (2014) and Serious Money: Walking Through Plutocratic London to be published this year.
Anna Minton is Reader in Architecture at the University of East London. She writes regularly for the Guardian and is the author of Big Capital: Who is London for? (2017) and Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City (2009).
[Image adapted from Luxified Troglodytism? Mapping the Subterranean Geographies of Plutocratic London. Sophie Baldwin, Beth Holroyd & Professor Roger Burrows. https://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/262314 ]