Simply Capital
Reflections on the privileges of life as a part-time Londoner
This stern old brute, with his Johnsonesque jowls and periwig, one day paid his ploughman to mark out 10 acres of open meadowland for a sports field - and inadvertently created one of London's least-known, but most conveniently-located urban villages.
Sheltering behind the choked thoroughfares of Victoria Street, Vauxhall Bridge Road and Millbank, those fields, with a cricket pavilion, rugby pitches and a woodland jogging track, now form Vincent Square which Dean William Vincent (whose stony face gazes down from the walls of a nearby block of posh flats) fenced off as playing fields for the boys of Westminster School, of which he was Head in the late 1700s.
Fencing in Tothill Fields may have simply been an exercise in giving the privileged pupils, of what was already a prestigious 400 year old school, some guaranteed access to healthy sports, but it has proved an enormous stroke of luck for this inner-City district.
Pedants would say these streets are part of Pimlico, but the random street pattern and the largely red-brick buildings bear no resemblance to Thomas Cubitt’s stucco’d mansions and pad-locked gardens, which stand in a rigid grid-pattern on the other side of the hectic A202 Vauxhall Bridge Road. Around Vincent’s playing fields sprang up some delightful and attractive houses for London's growing middle-classes when Pimlico was still unhealthy swamp-land. And the patch-work development has continued through 250 years, giving the Square and its surrounding streets, a rich mixture of architecture but also the open and airy environment which can only be achieved in a city setting by plonking 13 acres of grass and trees right in its heart and resisting all subsequent attempts to build on them.
So good for you, Dean Vincent!
I have a particular affection for Vincent Square and its surrounding streets - for one of them has been our “London address” these last 20 years. The buildings are mostly of a human scale, offering homes for every pocket, from immigrant families in the distinctive chess-board patterned Peabody buildings, to Peers, Cabinet Ministers and the wealthy, whose mansion flats are just yards away. The Edwardian tenements between the Square and Tate Britain are still sought-after homes in 2024, just as they were when built for the servant-classes in 1910. I can even dredge up a bit of affection for the stark, concrete 23-storey tower block which was plonked on a garden nursery right behind the Square in the 1960s. It was London’s tallest residential building when it was finished and what I like most about it is that the City fathers - clearly strangers to irony - named it Hide Tower.
While we have moved our family home three times in the last two decades - working our way down the country from Yorkshire to the Cotswolds - the little London flat which sustained the business side of our lives has been a stable base and has greatly enhanced my life. Sarah and I were spending so many of our working days in London 20 years ago - and enormous sums on hotels and train tickets back and forth from Yorkshire - that we calculated we'd be better off buying a modest base and becoming part-time Londoners.
We borrowed a flat, just off Vincent Square, from my sister to experiment with pied-a-terre living. She was living in rather grander style in Brussels, but we quickly discovered her flat was perfectly situated, as the Estate Agents might say. From her balcony we spotted developers throwing up new flats on a vacant lot, which had previously been occupied by the storage tanks of Westminster gasworks. After a quick viewing and a rather liquid lunch at the lovely Whistler restaurant round the corner in the Tate Gallery, we were sold on the idea. We chucked away the file of Estate Agent brochures we had for flats we had yet to visit over a large area of North and South London in the realisation that we had already found the most convenient spot imaginable. Swiftly we were the owners of 5% of a cute 2-bedder with (miraculously!) its own underground garage, gym access and private gardens, for a price which was unattainable in London’s trendier spots. The bank, of course, owned the other 95%.
As colleagues race home to far-flung families and the domestic retribution of missed dinners……. I have not a commuting care in the world.
I have never once regretted becoming a part-time Londoner, nor our choice of this little-known district, where we can literally hear Big Ben chime if we throw open the windows. As colleagues race home to far-flung families and the domestic retribution of missed dinners, or arrive red-faced, harassed and inevitably embarrassingly late for early morning meetings, I have not a commuting care in the world.
In two decades I have been involved in a variety of businesses, and by great good fortune, most of them have their offices not more than a few tube stops or even a brisk walk from our London perch. Blackfriars, Mayfair, Tower Hill, Finchley Road, Whitehall and even grimy Borough - all have summoned me over the years and were all in easy reach. Tube trains run from three stations within a short walk, but London buses are my special friends…the 88, the 87, the 2, the C10… although our acquaintance is brief and friendly compared with angry and frustrated passengers who have struggled in for hours and for whom a bus ride from their station is their final torture.
It's not just my work life which is made so gloriously simple. Much of Theatreland is only a brisk walk away - no need to mix it with the melee searching for the few taxis with a yellow light. Or it was until my knees gave out.
And talking of taxis - how many London districts do you know where you can reliably hail a cab within 50 yards of your door? Unknown to us when we bought the place, our street possesses one of London’s last cabman’s toilets. Don’t know of these? Neither did I until I first gave a driver my address and started to explain where it was. He interrupted: “Of course I know it - right by the Iron Lung”.
The what?
“The Iron Lung - the cabbie’s Khazi”
Why do they call it the Iron Lung?
“Cos you need Iron Lungs to go in there…..”
Urgh. Delightful. A favourite joke of cabbies. Right next to the fabled Khazi is an Italian cafe which serves great wodges of lasagna. These two facilities make our street catnip to a cabbie. And I am very happy to be a beneficiary - long may the lines of vacant taxis remain.
There is plenty of fresher air in the neighbourhood. Besides the playing fields this pocket district has several patches of green space - St John’s Gardens, where the old Westminster Hospital stood, and the grounds of Tate Britain are just two. Our dog Ollie - who also has a split-personality, enjoying the city streets as much as our Cotswolds fields - has a preference for Millbank Gardens where he can menace the pigeons and sometimes find a chicken leg dropped by the lunch-timers who escape the Government offices for half an hour in the sun.
Nothing stays the same, of course, and London is usually the better for it. This neighbourhood has changed, during our time, possibly more quickly than during the previous two centuries. At weekends and some evenings the area would be deserted because it had few decent eating places, except for the legendary Shepherd’s on the ground floor of a block of mansion flats in Marsham Street. Once owned by Michael Caine this clubby diner was the favourite of politicos - especially since it had a House of Commons division bell and MPs could idle away their evenings there for hours and still be in the Division Lobby whenever a vote was called.
Now Shepherd’s has closed - a victim of covid - but there is plenty of other choice at all times of the day. Maybe that’s why our most famous catering landmark is up for sale. Even if you have never been down our way, you may recognise the Regency Cafe. Its distinctive black and white exterior and Formica furniture has featured in several films and - since Channel 4 opened its HQ round the corner in Horseferry Road - in TV dramas too.
I preferred the Regency before it became a stop on Japanese tours of London but I still eat there from time to time. They remember me because Sarah and I, when we decided to get married in a posh St James’ venue, went there first for brunch, before the ceremony, with her three children. It was a Saturday and therefore quieter than usual and I don’t think the owners have many pre-wedding parties mixing with the cabbies, cleaners and drivers from the bin-lorry depot.
London has been my focus - maybe even my obsession - for decades, triggered when I became part of the capital’s commerce by buying a chain of local newspapers which served London’s Inner Boroughs such as Fulham, Marylebone and Kensington for a century or more. This was in those easy-money days of the 80s when it seemed any hungry young entrepreneur could march into one of those sparkling City blocks housing the new “venture capital” breed of bankers, slap down the output of his VisiCalc spreadsheet and march out with a silly grin and a large dollop of OPM - Other People’s Money.
They were glorious days for me. As Dr Johnson might have said - any man who is tired of London hasn’t met a Venture Capitalist with a large Fund and no idea how to spend it. I was successful enough to make the backers a lot of money. There was a much more modest pot for myself, but that triggered a flow of increasingly large investments in which I have been involved ever since.
Even in those newspaper publishing days, though, I travelled in and out of London, escaping to a Thameside village in Berkshire. I was never an overnight resident. Never truly enjoyed the culture, the convenience and the sheer thrill of living right in the heart of the capital. My parents had lived for years in Pinner - though they moved there after I had left home - so I had seen Suburbia at close quarters when visiting them. Dad trudged and tubed his way back and forth for the last 15 years of his working life, never actually enjoying London and never really living in the countryside. John Betjeman waxed lyrical about the Middlesex suburbs, implying that the home-bound commuters were heading “back to a simple life” - but the crafty old rhymer never took those rattling Metropolitan Line trains himself. He lived in Georgian elegance in Cloth Fair, in the shadow of St Bartholomew the Great, London’s oldest Parish church, just behind Smithfield.
He got it right - and so did we.
It’s a benefit we have been able to pass on to our various children. Sarah’s have all lived there from time to time, when it was a useful first step on their various carer ladders. My daughter brings my grandsons up to town regularly and they have become keen theatre and museum goers as a result. I know we’re privileged - don’t think it doesn’t embarrass me a bit when I consider the general cost and chaos of London housing.
The fluke of finding that flat means that alternatives further from the centre hold no attraction - no matter how trendy. Richmond or Kew or Greenwich or Epsom make no sense to me. If you have to work in London LIVE in London - that’s my advice.