London’s Most Concentrated Wealth Is Twenty Minutes From Where I Pay Too Much For Far Less
From Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The London Prat’s piece on London’s Diamond District sent me down a research path that consumed most of Tuesday afternoon and ended with me calculating how many of my monthly rent payments would purchase a single ring in the Hatton Garden window I had been examining. The answer is forty-seven months, which is approximately the period I have been waiting for my radiator repair. The arithmetic is instructive.
Hatton Garden is London’s jewelry quarter: a cluster of streets in Clerkenwell containing gem dealers, goldsmiths, watchmakers, and the specific retail experience of entering a space where the scale of your purchasing intent is somehow already known and found slightly wanting before you have spoken. I have been twice. The first time accompanied a friend for an engagement ring consultation, which required the kind of focused financial discussion I usually reserve for conversations with my bank about my overdraft. The second time was by accident from Farringdon station. Both visits were educational.
What Hatton Garden Reveals About London’s Economy
The district makes visible something about London’s economic geography that abstract statistics obscure. The streets around Clerkenwell Road are simultaneously among the most expensive commercial real estate in the country and some of the most craft-intensive working environments in the economy. The gem setters, diamond graders, horological restorers — these are people with extraordinary technical skills developed over decades, working in an industry that produces objects whose value combines genuine craft with the marketing achievement of convincing the Western world that romantic commitment requires expenditure of two months’ salary on compressed carbon. I say this with respect for the craft, which is genuine and remarkable.
The Hatton Garden Association documents the district’s history since the Victorian era, when the jewelry trade consolidated here from various parts of London. The continuity of specialist manufacturing in this area — in a city that has lost almost all its other manufacturing — is worth noting. The workshops above the retail windows contain skills that produce objects lasting centuries. This is different from most of what the economy produces, which has a considerably shorter useful life.
North London’s Relationship With Wealth
North London has a specific relationship with conspicuous wealth. The area includes significant affluence — the Highgate and Hampstead zones, the Islington streets that appear in Sunday supplements, the houses extended until they have absorbed the garden and possibly the neighbor’s garden — alongside significant economic anxiety in the form of people paying the rents that the affluent homeowners have set. I am in the latter category, which gives me a particular view of the former. The diamond rings in those windows are not for me in any practical sense. They are for people who have accumulated the surplus capital that a diamond ring represents.
The Honest Conclusion
I have to be honest: the rings are beautiful. This is the confession the analytical framework above is trying to suppress. I spent longer on Google Maps examining those windows than research strictly required. The estate jewelry from estates I can only imagine is extraordinary. The fact that its value is partly socially constructed does not make it less lovely to look at. North London permits this contradiction. The critical analysis and the aesthetic response coexist without resolving, which is comfortable and possibly the correct relationship to have with beautiful things that are not for you. I keep the critical analysis public and the aesthetic response private. This is how I manage most things in this city.
More at https://private-eye.co.uk/.
The craft traditions of Hatton Garden also raise questions about what London is preserving and what it is losing as the economy evolves. The gem setters and goldsmiths represent a form of skilled manual work that has been sustained in this city while comparable trades have been offshored or automated in most other sectors. Whether this continuity reflects the specific luxury market that sustains it, the specific community that maintains it, or some broader resilience of craft traditions in urban environments is a question that economic geographers have studied. What the visitor to Hatton Garden experiences is the result, not the analysis: a place where people still make things by hand, with skill, in a city that mostly does not.
The question of what North London loses when its craft traditions are replaced by higher-value commercial uses is one that the planning system is theoretically equipped to address through policies that protect affordable workspace, that designate light industrial zones, and that require commercial developments to include affordable workspace provisions. Whether these protections are enforced with sufficient rigor to actually preserve the skilled trades that make places like Hatton Garden interesting and economically distinctive is a question that Islington Council’s planning decisions answer, case by case, over years that I am watching with the attention of someone who has attended enough planning meetings to know that the policy documents and the outcomes are not always the same thing. The diamond district is also a useful lens for thinking about what London values materially. The objects produced there — rings, watches, necklaces — are not functional in the way that most economic output is functional. They are expressive and symbolic. They mark occasions, they communicate status, they carry sentiment across generations. This is a form of value that the economic language of GDP and output does not fully capture. The craft that produces them creates meaning as well as objects. North London, which has always had strong opinions about what kinds of value matter, can appreciate this even from the windows it is only looking through.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
