Letters: James Whitaker’s widow answers Toby Young

Absent friends

Sir: Alec Marsh (‘Welcome to Big Venice’, 10 August) accurately observes that Londoners are priced out of central London by largely foreign buyers of second homes. Wealthy foreigners not only buy, they also rent, often living in London for a few years, during which they frequently return to their first home for weeks or months at a time. In Marylebone, where I have lived for 43 years, an average earner can neither buy nor rent. Moreover, rentals are only short hold. This contributes to the death of communities: it is not their foreignness which makes the new residents bad neighbours, nor their love of the convenient transport and vastly expensive shops and restaurants, but their transience and consequent lack of interest in local people, history and customs. You cannot entrust your keys, nor call for help in emergency, nor appeal for support to save a beautiful endangered building, to people who are semi-absent.