‘Gumtree for the posh’: why Sloanes have embraced Radio H-P

In 1983 Cambridge academic W.G. Runciman, reviewing Peter York and Ann Barr’s The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, described the work as an ‘anthropological survey’ in the mould of such distinguished scholars as Malinowski and Veblen. Veblen’s late-nineteenth century The Theory of the Leisure Class was, Runciman explains, an ‘earnest social-Darwinian exercise in the analysis and survival of certain archaic behavioural traits’. By attempting to define the Sloane ranger, York and Barr were Veblen’s disciples he concluded, albeit unintentional ones. 

Nearly forty years later, eons from the Harpers & Queen heyday of the Sloanie, driven by Princess Diana and Fergie, we must ask ourselves this: where have they all gone?

The explanation for the disappearance of the Sloane usually runs along the following lines: once the rightful inhabitants of the SW3, 1, 7, 10, 6 and 5 canyons (correctly listed in order), Sloanes have been pushed out of their natural habitats by the rise of international ‘new money’, the decline of the City and its merchant banks, and the Lloyds crisis.