36. Street Owning Man

Street Owning Man

Rupert’s peerage celebration dinner was in ful swing.

‘How’s Webb Street going then, Jimmy?’ Robbo asked, his mouth ful of chocolate soufflé and Sauternes. ‘Have those bloody Poles worked out which way round we have the taps in England yet?’

‘Don’t talk about Webb Street, please,’ Monica begged. ‘I’m embarrassed.’

Webb Street had just become a massive part of Jimmy and Monica’s lives and Monica in particular was stil not quite sure how she felt about the whole thing. It was in Hackney, an unremarkable nineteenth-century thoroughfare which had escaped Hitler’s bombs and been pretty much left to rot ever since.

Such had been its dilapidation that even during the eighties, when almost everything else in Hackney had been gentri ed, Webb Street had been left to the roaches and the crack dealers. But the noughties were not the eighties and in the heady joy of a new mil ennium Webb Street, untouched, unloved, owned by absentee landlords who were not al owed to raise their rents or evict sitting tenants, was, as Rupert had put it when he suggested the idea to Jimmy,

‘a granny waiting to be mugged’.

‘It’s simple, mate,’ Rupert had said. ‘You work your way up the street, house by house, offering over-the-odds prices to landlords and fat inducements to tenants to bugger off. en once you’ve bagged the lot you can develop a whole lifestyle community. e problem with lots of good houses in London is that they’re next door to shitty ones ful of shitty awful people. If you’re developing a whole street that problem goes away.’

Jimmy had enquired at the time where Rupert supposed he was going to get the money for the over-the-odds prices and fat inducements with which he would gain control of al these homes.

‘You’re living in it, mate!’ Rupert replied. ‘One of the ten best houses in Notting Hil ! Ful y developed. Jacuzzi, gym, underground car park and ready to rock. You could raise ve to seven mil ion on that. We’d give it you tomorrow. You’re sound as a pound. You earn easily enough to cover the interest payments. God knows, your bonus last year alone would have done more than that.’

And Rupert was right. Fired up by the enormity of the scheme, Jimmy had found it absurdly easy to borrow six mil ion pounds from the Royal Lancashire using his home as col ateral. at, plus some share options and two mil ion borrowed against his elephantine pension pot, had been sufficient for him to purchase the twenty-four houses in Webb Street.

Quite suddenly and in a urry of excitement, Jimmy and Monica had become major property speculators.

‘I stil can’t quite believe that we actual y own a street,’ Jimmy said, digging into his foie gras and pul ing a face that asked, should I feel a bit guilty about it, do you think?

Monica de nitely did feel guilty. Or at least embarrassed. She admitted that she wasn’t sure which it was herself.

‘Don’t put it like that, darling, please,’ she said. ‘We don’t own al of it.’

‘We do, babes,’ Jimmy assured her, reaching for the wine with further expressions of mock tortured self-doubt. ‘It’s mad, I know. Bloody tonto.’

‘We do not own al of it,’ Monica protested. ‘e end bit isn’t ours. e bit behind the pub.’

‘at’s Webb Mews,’ Jimmy said, ‘and you’re right, we don’t own that. but we do own Webb Street. Al of it.’

‘And we’re talking to Webb Mews,’ David chipped in, ‘because if we can get it plus the required planning permission then Webb Street wil have its own private health club. Exclusive to one street, imagine that! God, Jimmy, I can remember you at university in your torn jeans, pinching food from the union shop. You were virtual y a bloody punk! Now look at you – from Street Fighting Man to Street Owning Man, eh? Let’s face it, the Stones went the same way.’

‘e Stones were always middle bloody class,’ Robbo said. ‘Or at least Mick and Keef were.’

‘We don’t own it,’ Monica insisted once more. ‘For a start, Rupert owns most of it, or at least his bank does.’

‘Monica,’ Henry said soothingly, ‘don’t beat yourself up about it. Real y.

What you and Jimmy are involved in is wealth creation, which is a very good thing. ere is absolutely nothing to feel embarrassed about.’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Rupert. ‘Wel said, Henry!’

‘My God!’ Lizzie exclaimed. ‘Rupert and Henry actual y agree on something. Let’s have a party!’

‘We are having a party,’ Amanda pointed out.

‘More wine then!’ Robbo announced. ‘We must drink to Rupert and Henry seeing eye to eye for the rst time since they agreed that they fancied you, Liz.’

‘Shut up, Robbo!’ Lizzie said, reddening. ‘I mean it.’

‘Joking aside, Monica,’ Henry said, ‘you and Jim should take pride in what you’re doing. It’s exactly the type of project that we in government have been trying to encourage.’

‘What, me getting hugely richer?’ Jimmy laughed. ‘Blimey, was it in the manifesto?’

‘I’m serious. A project like Webb Street is an engine of growth and prosperity in this city. As a Labour MP I’m thinking about what this kind of pro t generation means in terms of employment, consumer spending and a spur to further inward investment.’

‘ere, you see, Jimmy?’ Rupert shouted, pouring more wine and thus recklessly reducing the value of his investment even further. ‘Webb Street is a job-creation scheme! You and Monica are philanthropists. Bloody social workers.’

‘Prosperity and equality are not mutual y exclusive,’ Henry said pompously.

‘Tony has always made it clear that Labour is the party of business as wel as the party of the people. After al , who is it that does business but people?’

After that, the evening degenerated into a discussion about the Congestion Charge, a subject on which everyone could agree.

ey al loathed it.

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