71


In the Eighties Harrods was the shop of choice for the moneyed English; now it’s a tourist attraction


to get them from Harrods, that the process really got going. Money became international, and serious


money became global. The connection of money to class, and to nation, was broken. The old class/money weather system of the UK – hereditary wealth at the top, business wealth buying into that echelon and, be- cause of the aforementioned howling snob- bery, seeking not to be looked down on by buying the cultural signifiers of class – was somewhat blown away by a hurricane of dough. The time it really was a different kind of dough, too: created in a different way, wielded by different people and of a different order of magnitude. Here came the Chinese cadres, the Russian kleptocrats, the Gulf oil tycoons. Something similar happened to the public


schools, which had for centuries worked to cement the British class system intergenera-


tionally. Fiſty years ago the well-heeled up- per-middle classes could afford the fees. The cultural codes of those schools – their very Britishness – had a social purpose (though not, I repeat, necessarily a good one). But all that international dough, and the global cul- tural cachet of what those schools were sell- ing, meant the fees skyrocketed. They increasingly became the preserve of the nationless HNW class — the hedgies, the oligarchs. And yet their Britishness did not become less pronounced. Like the ‘top peo- ple’s store’, they became heritage objects: a phantom of the British class system, sold and consumed by the very forces that caused that class system to collapse. I’m not saying all this is a bad thing, mark


you. But it’s a curious thing. Everything that is solid melts into air. Harrods is a Las Vegas mirage of its former self, and so, I guess, is the country for which it stands as a metonym.


JAMIE CARING


ACE OF CLUBS


Edwin Smith


IF YOU’D ONLY glanced at the early press coverage of Lighthouse Social, the new pri- vate members’ club created as part of the redevelopment of Fulham Football Club’s Craven Cottage stadium, you might have formed the impression that it was ‘Jamie Caring’s Club’. It’s an easy mistake to make, Caring tells me, as we sit down for a bite to eat at the new establishment, where he has arranged a table next to the floor-to-ceiling


ALAMY


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