David Boyle - Broke - Who Killed the Middle Classes?

Fourth Estate

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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2013

Copyright © David Boyle 2013, 2014

David Boyle asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780007491056

Ebook Edition © April 2013 ISBN: 9780007491049

Version: 2017-10-31

For William

Contents

Title Page Broke Who Killed the Middle Classes? DAVID BOYLE

Copyright

Dedication Dedication Dedication Prologue 1. The scene of the crime 2. The first clue: the staggering house-price escalator 3. The second clue: the strange case of the disappearing banks 4. The third clue: the corrosive explosion of finance 5. The fourth clue: the dog that didn’t bark 6. The fifth clue: the great education panic 7. The sixth clue: the strange case of the disappearing professionals 8. Following the clues, unmasking the villains Afterword to the Paperback Edition – The Year Everything Changed: 2013 Keep Reading Notes Acknowledgements About the Author By the Same Author About the Publisher For William

Prologue

1. The scene of the crime

2. The first clue: the staggering house-price escalator

3. The second clue: the strange case of the disappearing banks

4. The third clue: the corrosive explosion of finance

5. The fourth clue: the dog that didn’t bark

6. The fifth clue: the great education panic

7. The sixth clue: the strange case of the disappearing professionals

8. Following the clues, unmasking the villains

Afterword to the Paperback Edition – The Year Everything Changed: 2013

Keep Reading

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

‘By the people, I mean the middle classes, the wealth and intelligence of the country, the glory of the British name.’

Henry, Lord Brougham, 1831

I was born in a corner of central London that wraps itself around a great grey-green greasy stretch of water called the Regent’s Canal. It was and is known as Little Venice.

As anyone familiar with Little Venice will know, this defines me inescapably as middle-class. Not just slightly middle-class, but staggeringly, swelteringly, stratospherically middle-class, as middle as you can get. And not just by the broad American definition (average income) either, but by the specific British definitions which are harder to pin down, but which seem to be about attitudes and upbringing, culture and prejudices.

But there are many kinds of middle class, even in the UK, and I hope this book will strike a chord with all of them. From the first-generation middle classes who followed the entrepreneurial path set out by Margaret Thatcher right through to the crustiest scion of the landed gentry. From the brand-new estate outside Bishop’s Stortford to the tumbledown off-grid eco-cottage outside Totnes. I mention Little Venice because anyone reading this book deserves to know about the niche in the class system I am writing from, but I am only too aware that there is more than one way of being middle-class.

In my case, I am also middle-class because my parents are. Both my grandfathers were in the services, one rising to be a colonel in the army and the other to be a captain in the navy. Their service pensions and various modest pots of inherited money and property gave them relatively comfortable retirements. I owe my grandparents a great deal for their resources of love and care, but also perhaps for placing me so unambiguously in such a recognizable spot in the class system.

Neither set of grandparents approved very much when my newly married parents moved into a run-down rented flat in Little Venice, which was not in those days quite what it has become. The canal stank of drowned cats, and was divided from the road by a tall brick wall, like a scene from Love on the Dole . All those coloured barges sheltering artists and musicians (and later Richard Branson) were still a decade away.

The flat was in the least respectable half of Randolph Avenue, bending down towards the canal, with peeling white stucco columns and flaking black front doors which looked like the portals of some medieval fortress. But the family disapproval also touched the street’s reputation. Only ten years before, this end of the thoroughfare had sported the name ‘Portland Road’, which had been such a notorious red-light district that the council decided to change it.

Downstairs from our flat was a fearsome Alf Garnett figure, string-vested and with a fluent and foul-mouthed command of the language, who would hammer on the ceiling at the slightest provocation. My uncle had a heavier tread than most (submariners tend to be larger than the rest of us), and he could set off the hammering and oaths just by walking across the room.

We moved closer to the canal, to another rented flat, when I was only about three, and we left Randolph Avenue behind. I never lived there again, though I have wandered down the street many times, and watched the slow transformation of the red-light district, first into respectability, and then into luxury. I ran into a couple at a dinner party a few years ago who lived in a tiny flat at the very top of the very building where I started out. They told me that our flat – which had so shocked my grandparents’ families – was now inhabited by the head of Benetton Europe. It had become, through the strange metamorphosis of gentrification, a fitting home for the new class of ultra-rich.