This is Queen’s Freddie Mercury, on September 19, 1980.
And next to him is lead guitarist, Brian May,
who in July 2021 returned to find his Kensington, London home flooded.
He blamed “the basement building that has been plaguing this area for the past 10 years.”
From 2008 to 2019, 7,328 basements were added to homes in London.
Basements not just for the rich.
But the superrich.
All of these dots represent private, underground swimming pools...
and cinemas...
and wine cellars.
Click to London’s top luxury realtors,
sort by price,
and you’ll find underwater playgrounds, and theatres.
Homes like this 25 million pound one with two basement levels,
including a bar...
and spa.
London's elite are building underground lairs.
So it's an interesting kind of conflict between these different
very, very wealthy people.
Or as we said, I think in one paper, we say
it's a conflict between the haves and the have yachts.
I'm professor Roger Burrows and I'm professor of cities
in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape at Newcastle University.
But I'm not an architect, nor am I a planner.
I'm essentially a sociologist and a statistician.
Do you remember how y'all got the idea though?
Was it literally just, you're walking down the street,
you see a ton of construction trucks all the time,
and you wonder "Why is there always construction on this street?"
And then you say,
"Oh, I bet they're making a basement."
Exactly.
We were doing a case study of four or five different neighborhoods in London
and we were interviewing residents about what was happening in the neighborhood.
We would notice as we were doing this,
the streets with five or six of these excavations going on at the same time
with lorries moving up and down.
And indeed the people that we're interviewing really just wanted to talk about it
because they felt that their neighborhood was being ruined.
Each borough in London has a planning commission where people have to submit renovation plans.
Burrows and his coauthors searched every application and found all the basements.
And then mapped them.
Mostly it's concentrated around the great parks around Hyde Park, Kensington, Chelsea
and Hammersmith and Fulham.
Brian May’s house, in Kensington, had an original half-underground floor.
Suddenly, his neighbors were all building basements of an entirely different scale.
A well-off neighborhood became extremely well-off.
Transnational elites were literally burying millions and millions of dollars in the ground.
So, this isn't as much of a thing in America.
Do you have a sense why that is?
Is it the historic codes in London?
You can't really change the outside appearance of a property.
You can't build a loft and you can't extend at the back.
But because of the freehold laws, you own all of the land under the property,
so you can burrow down.
A lot of it is also geological.
New York is another kind of world city where you might expect these things to be occurring.
That happened a little bit in Brooklyn, but you're literally trying to mine a rock.
The great thing about London is, of course, it's clay.
So it's very easy to dig down and generate these spaces.
Burrows and his coauthors mapped standard,
large,
and mega-basements.
What we call mega basements are three stories or more.
Or, two stories, but which extend beyond the envelope.
We find 118 of those and they're on a ginormous scale.
This map shows their concentration in wealthy neighborhoods.
The combination of incredible wealth and inflexible exteriors
led to massive basement builds.
Wine cellars, gyms, art galleries,
ballrooms, panic rooms, gun stores.
In the late 1800s, a ship owner named Charles Booth
started tracking inequality in London,
a gradient that he mapped, from wealth to poverty,
compiled through extensive surveys.
There is now a clear, what we call, basement belt in London
concentrated within particular neighborhoods in particular streets.
So I think it is a physical manifestation of gross wealth inequality.
In the mid 2010s, London boroughs began to curb permits for multilevel basements
because of resident concerns, like those of Queen's Brian May’s.
The consequences are more than just flooding.
Deep digging can cause structural collapses.
But basement construction hasn't stopped completely.
Gianluca Vialli was one of the best Italian strikers in the 1980s and 90s.
When he moved to London in 1996, his legend only grew as he moved into management.
He helped lead Italy to win the Euro 2020 final.
In 2020, he appeared in the lower right corner of a video conference stream
begging the Kensington and Chelsea Applications committee
not to let his neighbors expand their basements,
after he’d lived through earlier construction.
Today, his neighbor's house is for sale.
It's lavish. There's also one major selling point:
the planning board has granted permission for a basement excavation.