A Tale of Two Londons | Hacker News Reader

A Tale of Two Londons

vanityfair.com

98 pointsqb33 comments

My 8x great grandmother was actually born in 18thC Knightsbridge. She stole some clothes and a spoon (which she tried to dispose of in her "privvy") and was sent as a convict to Australia on the First Fleet in 1788.

Ultimately, she would bear children to 3 men across 3 convict colonies - one of the guards on the ship en route to New South Wales, my 8x great grandfather who would become the first hangman of Norfolk Island, and a freed convict in Tasmania.

In modern London, as opposed to the London she left, that would probably earn her a reality tv show.

Just curious, how did you manage to recover her story?

Australian governments, from the first fleet until today, have kept records of births, deaths and marriages.

In my case, I was lucky enough to connect with a distant relative who had done a lot of the research, and then confirm parts of it (I was at uni at the time - love a large library and databases!).

Her being a convict helped with the record keeping, of course - court records, ship records, habitation records on the ground. And even by the time she was freed, these were all tiny colonies* so recording everyone was pretty easy.

*How tiny? Well they evacuated the ENTIRE colony of Norfolk Island in about 1807, shipping them all to Hobart which was in need of a larger population. Even then, her daughter (my 7x great grandmother) was something like the 143rd wedding in the colony (now state of Tasmania). Compare that the USA circa 1807 which had 17 states in the union and a population of about 6 million.

The USA was settled much earlier and has turned out to be a much richer ground for british institutions -- particularly agriculture -- to flourish in.

The First Fleeters have been well researched and documented, as these people became the founding fathers (to borrow a phrase) of Australia.

I'm descended from this fellow:

http://www.fellowshipfirstfleeters.org.au/john-herbert.htm

who similarly spent time on Norfolk Island and then Tasmania. I expect his path probably crossed with the above great great [...] grandmother at some point.

The transcript of the court trial that sent him to Australia is available online. It looks like the whole trial lasted about 90 seconds. Reading the transcript, I learned that one of my commutes in London had me walking over the spot where he was arrested twice a day.

For Australian history from 1788 onwards, The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes is an excellent read. It also gives a good insight to British attitudes to criminality, of which traces can still be seen today in government policy, etc.

The article link points to the print page, which only displays 1 out of the 5 total pages. (I think qb was trying to spare of us popup & advertising hell which I appreciate, but it looks like it didn't work quite perfectly this time)

Here's the default page: http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2013/04/mysterious-residen...

(btw this pagination system -- while nice that it doesn't reload pages -- is driving me and my eyes insane!)

The property prices, and thus rents, are why Silicon Roundabout will have a very hard time building a true startup ecosystem in London. Young people just starting out are paying most of their monthly income on rent. How can they be encouraged to take a financial risk when they have such crazy outgoings? How can people from the regions be attracted to London to build businesses when they can't get digs within easy reach of the hacker spaces?

The City is a whole separate problem - they pay very very well for good IT talent, siphoning a lot of good people who would otherwise be ideal for the startup market. You could go into finance for a few years, build up some security before starting your business, but who will you be able to hire when you do?

Which is why we need to band together and hire talented individuals who are passionate.

We need to compete with The City and seduce people on the romance of building product.

Grad recruitment fairs have no representation from start-ups. We have no relationship with tutors and careers officers. People who influence kids on their work aspirations need to be influenced by us.

Business is about people. If we pretend to be entrepreneurs in London, we should start by cultivating the right relationships, before we build product that will take years to get right and find a market fit.

If I plan to live in London I will contact you. :)

All of the above is also true regarding Silicon Alley in New York. Just visit expatistan.com and do a comparison. Housing is actually slightly more expensive in New York. As for your point two, Wall Street pay is not what it used to be while software engineering salaries outside of banks have been increasing steadily for a couple of years. Nobody doubts NYC status as a startup hub anymore.

Point one is also increasingly true for the SFBay area itself, but there are not enough banks there for them to be a problem for startup recruiting. You could also do a comparison on expatistan.com and see that housing is only 7% less expensive in SF than in London. However, IT salaries there are probably the highest in the World.

If current trends in London continue: startups start to pay more and banks keep laying off people. This is probably a good thing.

>Point one is also increasingly true for the SFBay area itself

This might be one reason why Seattle continues to thrive: its rent, although rising for the usual reasons related to land regulation, is still far lower than SF or NYC, it already has two very large tech companies there, it has no income tax, and it's a fun place to live.

Google and Facebook are both steadily expanding their Seattle-area offices for reasons that make sense to me: moving from the SF area to Seattle means a de facto 15 - 25% pay raise for people making $100,000 or more a year.

This is what happens in democracies. The local councils and city governments open their doors and drool over anyone willing to buy property. Property price rises and thus increases the revenues they can bring in any play with. There is almost no incentive for a government to keep housing affordable. Then we end up with disenfranchisement on the scale of London's: Londoners and actual British citizens and residents are told kindly to screw off while the billionaires build their playground and stash away their dirty money. You see this in Vancouver, Sydney, Hong Kong, New York; the list goes on.

Well Tory boroughs sold off a lot of the social housing stock and in at least one case where caught trying to use it to gerrymander - there are senior torys hiding out in countries with now extradition to the UK to this day.

Ironically one of the recipients of this council housing sell off in Westminster I worked with was a very left wing lesbian - She had great fun at election times with the Tory election canvassers.

They sold the housing stock off to the people that were actually renting the council houses, increasing home ownership and enriching a generation of working class people.

who then sold them to private landlords or their wealthy children who inherited their council house did so - One of my sisters friends is one of the few who did the right thing actually gave up her right to buy her deceased mums council flat (at a 30% discount)

Which is all well and good if the council replenishes their stock of council housing. I.e. if they use the sale money to buy or build more, so having it be a permanent mechanism to help people lift themselves out of poverty.

But they didn't. What they did instead was sell them off without getting any more, and used the money to cut taxes. Which is fine for the generation who benefited from that round, but means the safety net is no longer there for future generations.

Well, steps are being taken to free up council houeses now - EG fixed duration tenancies (rather than council houses for life), kicking out union Fat Cats like Bob Crow [1] and other people that could afford to live in private accommodation.

[1] http://metro.co.uk/2011/04/03/bob-crow-gets-taxpayers-help-w...

They sold them off partly because they had been poorly built and maintained. They were essentially outsourcing the maintenance costs to the residents and making them pay for the privelege. The units are mostly valued well below the surrounding stock, so unless they pay exhorbitant rents or move to the country they were no better off.

And for every person who made a bit of money from it, there was another who ended up having to sell back to the council for a reduced amount when they started knocking these things down in the 2000's.

As an aside, the article points out how the City of London is a separate entity from greater London, but doesn't go into a lot of detail about it. This video does an effective job in explaining how things work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?internalcountrycode=NL&v=Lr...

That's interesting, but it doesn't address to what extent someone in the City of London could skirt British laws or taxes as the article implies. In 1771, the aldermen of the City of London were able to bar Parliament from entering the City of London to arrest a newspaper publisher who had broken the law by publishing transcripts of Parliamentary debates. Does the City of London still have that kind of autonomy?

If they are non domiciled for tax is the normal way they do this.

No. It has a separate police force, but I don't think the boundaries are as strict as they are for, say, state boundaries in the US. Pretty sure a Met Police Car wouldn't stop a pursuit because it entered the city.

//edit//Although in Victorian times I believe it did inhibit attempts to capture Jack the Ripper.

Indeed, all Police Officers in the country have their powers throughout the whole country, regardless of which Force they belong to. There are courtesy’s that are usually observed when crossing into another force area in pursuit of a criminal, the control room of the other force is informed (and usually asked for help), and local officers will often take over or lead the pursuit if they are available, though this is more because they know the area better. Upon arrest, the criminal will usually be "booked in" at the local police station but then transported back to one of the original force's police stations for processing. Criminal law is the same across the country, so there is no sense of different jurisdictions. There are some more formalities going into Scotland, which has slightly different criminal laws, but nothing that stops a good chase! Theres no benefit to the criminal of "getting across" internal borders (akin to state lines in the US). Getting across a border externally means crossing the sea, and even then co-operation between European forces is getting better.

I remember being utterly perplexed when I found out that there is a "Mayor of London" and a "Lord Mayor of London". :P

I've always wondered how much of this is paid for by oil money. How much of it is the result of middle eastern sheiks needing to find a place to store the oil wealth they've plundered from their countries?

"Perhaps the most striking fact about One Hyde Park and the London super-prime property market is what it tells us about who the world’s richest people are. Many people think the greatest winners of globalization today are financiers. A decade or so ago, that may have been true. But today another class sits above even them—the global commodity plutocrats: owners of mineral rights, or dominant players in mineral-rich countries in sectors such as construction and finance that benefit from commodity booms. Hollingsworth notes in Londongrad that the oligarchs he studies became rich “not by creating new wealth but rather by insider political intrigue and exploiting the weakness of the rule of law.” Arkady Gaydamak, a Russian-Israeli oilman and financier, explained his elite view of accumulating wealth to me in 2005. “With all the regulations, the taxation, the legislation about working conditions, there is no way to make money,” he said. “It is only in countries like Russia, during the period of redistribution of wealth—and it is not yet finished—when you can get a result. . . . How can you make $50 million in France today? How?”

Russia’s former privatization czar Anatoly Chubais put it less delicately: “They steal and steal. They are stealing absolutely everything.”

London real-estate agents confirm that these commodity plutocrats dethroned the financiers some time before the financial crisis hit. “I can’t remember the last time I sold a property to a banker,” says Stephen Lindsay, of the real-estate agency Savills. “It’s been hard for anyone to compete with the Russians, the Kazakhs. They are all in oil, gas—that is what they do. Construction—all that kind of stuff.”

Even the Arab money has taken a backseat to the new buyers, says Hersham. “The wealth of the ex-Soviets is incredible,” he says. “Unless you are talking about [Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Lloyd] Blankfein or [Stephen Schwarzman], the head of Blackstone, or the head of one of the very big banks, there is no driver from the City of London at these levels anymore.”

The ironic thing is that with the "exclusivity" of neighbours like that, you'd have to pay me to live there.

It's disappointing how little interest the government has taken in taxing the ridiculous capital gains resulting from the high-end London property bubble; these "investors" probably contribute less to the British economy per pound earned from their speculation than anyone else, and in many cases it's a similar story in their homelands

Reading this makes me glad that South Africa retains exchange controls for larger sums of money. The cash may be plundered but it doesn't get siphoned offshore, so there is a realistic chance of it being recovered when the political wheel turns, and the next faction takes power.

And they bury that on the last page! Furthermore, it's striking how the City was almost set up to help dictators plunder their country and save the plunder for when they get overthrown. Nasty, and my naive, trusting bourgeois British eyes open further.

Take a drive past Harrods one day when the in-town princes have their UAE registered Bugatti Veyrons on display. That's right, they fly their million-quid cars into London so they can show off. And there is much more than just one or two of these guys.

This article is good, but its structure keeps the meat until the end. It's not well-thought out in that respect. The payoff, that it's not the bankers who have the money, but the oligarchs and privatisation thieves and bandits from Russia is surprising. I want more data, more analysis, more stories, more evidence than this, about what ahnd how, and what geosocially this means for the next 30 years. A laundry list of who might actually live in one expensive building is no good unless you tell us who they are and then do some numbers on it, using these statistics to inform us the more. Poor outcome to this article and it missed several tricks, even while mostly still engaging us in the ownership envy that this piece really represents.

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