Young Italians flock to London – for just the same reasons it scares me

Although I live in the country in Northamptonshire, I go to London often — almost once a week — and I find it more and more intimidating. This isn’t just because of the skyscrapers that spring up boastfully everywhere, parading one’s own insignificance, but also because of the aura of terrifying wealth that pervades its central area and now even its inner suburbs. Fifty years ago, when I got married, my wife and I bought our first London house in Kensington Park Road, Notting Hill, for £9,500. I wonder how many millions it is worth now. My parents, who were quite well off if not exactly rich, lived in Knightsbridge to be near my father’s office in Bowater House, an ugly modern glass block that straddled the entrance to Hyde Park opposite the end of Sloane Street. Bowater House has since been replaced by No. 1 Hyde Park, a Richard Rogers group of apartment buildings described on its website as ‘the most exclusive address in the world; a residential scheme whose beauty, luxury and service place it in a class of its own on a global scale’.