son and heir #1: white stucco
In the National Gallery there are very large portraits of men in wigs holding maps of the colonies that have provided the wealth they're using to commission the portrait. These were the men — or their sons were the men, maybe — who bought those white stucco Georgians when they were new. Now the descendants of those men live in Clapham, Putney, Islington, Hampstead, whatever, and the houses in which the Season was once conducted belong to publicity-shy billionaires whose interest in the location is mostly a literal financial interest. In Tatler they say: X is the new Belgravia, X is the new Chelsea, south of the river is the new north of the river. The Sloanes have left their square, like birds driven from their natural habitat by aggressive deforestation. Well, five hundred years ago it was farmland. Two thousand years ago it was Roman farmland. Five hundred thousand years ago, Britain was not even an island. It was connected physically to France.
Writing Henry Henry, I imagined the Lancasters as fourteenth-century aristocrats who had, through some horrible accident of history, been born as exactly themselves, but in the twentieth century. I wanted the sense that they were trying to catch up to images of themselves they don’t realize are already outmoded. Henry has the house in Belgravia, but that’s only because his father, a younger son, bought it for himself out of spite. It was folly in the same way as John of Gaunt insisting on being the King of Castile. They have the agricultural land in southeast Wales, but they’re only making money off it through EU farm subsidies (who knows what will happen to them once Brexit hits). They are like the unpopular child who has been given the wrong time for the party. They show up and say, wait, where’s everybody gone? And Hal has to walk a mile to an off-licence for cigarettes.
Last week I went to that awful place to take pictures. I was only in London for a few days, and it was mostly cloudy, chilly enough for layers. Everything looked shabby, sad and dead. The only people on the streets were those who worked for the very wealthy people who own the property. A chef in his double-breasted jacket sitting on the pavement and smoking; two drivers of two gleaming black cars parked on either side of the road. Vans with Grosvenor Group logos patrolling the cobbled mews marked by identical logos, with plaques warning: PRIVATE MEWS. That’s what Percy means when he talks about the noises Hal makes when he fucks him. Ha ha. Flags identifying embassies located behind otherwise indistinguishable facades. A place that could be beautiful, in the right light. But the right light comes so rarely.
The Dukes of Westminster, by the way — the Grosvenors of the Grosvenor Group — are the only aristocrats lucky enough to have had as their inheritance a selection of property that appreciated enough to make them as rich as their ancestors used to be. This, ironically, has made them class traitors: skint toffs complain, ‘They are ruining our London!’ Well, they are landowners. They are doing the thing they exist to do, which is to extract wealth from their land. The people who complain are the type who lose their country houses because they can't bear to do the only thing that will make the place profitable, which is to convert it into a hotel/spa/conference center. 'It's a family home!' they wail. So? Have you ever met a family? Horrible people really, aren't they?
Here are some 35mm snaps of Hal’s London, shot haphazardly between other appointments. I’d like to go back and devote time just to taking photos of the places where the novel is set. Of course the novel is set in 2014-2015 and those places are already gone.
