TaffScaff72
Active member
Picked up this story from the Telegraph yesterday, thought you might find it amusing...
Charles Saatchi has fallen out with his neighbours
Given some of the extraordinary things Charles Saatchi has inflicted on the public over the years in the name of art, you might think he wouldn’t object to his neighbours erecting scaffolding outside the window of his £10 million Eaton Square home.
Perhaps, you imagine, he could reassure himself that it was a clever, post-ironic commentary on modern urban living. Maybe he’d even open his chequebook and pay for the scaffolding to be transported – potentially with a shark in formaldehyde perched on the top – down the road to his gallery on the King’s Road.
Nigella Lawson’s husband took matters into his own hands. Frustrated that the Egyptian couple in the flat above had overrun a deadline to finish their renovation works, he sent in his own workmen to take down their scaffolding. In the process they allegedly caused £50,000 worth of damage by dumping the scaffolding bars on the neighbours’ Italian bathroom tiles. Ironically, the eye-wateringly expensive marble tiles are now going to have to be re-ordered, thereby prolonging the renovation process and the disruption.
To those of us without our own personal workmen on call, it is an intriguing insight into the petty pre-occupations of the wealthy. Saatchi’s other well-heeled neighbours have been broadly supportive. One told reporters that the “scaffolding saga” had gone on far too long in any case. Another let rip with a gloriously snobby broadside. “I don’t know how people get permission for knocking down walls in these heritage properties,” she said. “Some have even started putting swimming pools in. I mean, this is Belgravia, not Hollywood.”
Belgravia might still be a long way from Beverly Hills, but clashes between expansionist residents and their incalcitrant neighbours are far from rare. Last Saturday on Chester Row, a five-minute stroll from Eaton Square, police were called after a skip fell into a storage vault, leaving a 15ft hole in the middle of the street. The skip had been filled with soil excavated from a sub-basement which was supposed to be converted into an underground gym and cinema. A number of residents are set to launch a claim against Westminster Council, now that “one of the nicest streets in Belgravia” has been turned into a “bomb site”.
Victims of genuine bomb sites are unlikely to feel their heart strings pulled too tightly by such sob stories. But they are an interesting reminder that, however rich and powerful you are, it is almost impossible in overcrowded Britain to buy the Lebensraum – let alone the privacy – you desire. Indeed, the better known and better off you are, the more everyone else seems to object.
When Ricky Gervais tried to excavate beneath his Hampstead home in 2007 to build a swimming pool, a games room and a golf simulator, one of his neighbours complained: “I don’t know why he doesn’t just buy a place in Essex.”
Tony Blair, another late-developing property magnate, has achieved the unique double of annoying his neighbours in both London and Buckinghamshire (one can only imagine what his friends in Jerusalem make of him). When he bought his house in Connaught Square in Mayfair in 2004 residents circulated a petition opposing his move (although there have been recent reports that some of them now appreciate the added security of having armed police patrolling the square).
Earlier this year, villagers in Wotton Underwood in Buckinghamshire complained about excessive noise from the Blairs’ helicopter and their overdevelopment of the £6 million 17th-century home, including plans for a sports pavilion with a sauna and steam room.
Meanwhile, Sir Fred Goodwin, another popular figure, was back in the papers this week regarding a dispute over his 25ft leylandii hedge (allowing the headline writers to enjoy themselves with the pun: “No hedge fun for disgraced RBS chief”).
The truth, though, is that we all secretly enjoy these celebrity neighbourhood spats, not just for the vicious, vicarious snobbery, but also because their experiences are not so different from our own. Some 17,000 people in Britain are engaged in turf wars over their hedges at any one time, while a staggering 360,000 families move home every year because of disruptive neighbours.
It might go some way to explaining why Neighbours, widely viewed as saccharine nonsense in its native Australia, has always been such a popular escapist soap opera here. The idea of actually knowing your neighbours – let alone being “good friends” with them – is deliciously alien.
An Englishman’s home might be his castle, but his favourite part is still the drawbridge, preferably scaffold-free.
Charles Saatchi has fallen out with his neighbours
Given some of the extraordinary things Charles Saatchi has inflicted on the public over the years in the name of art, you might think he wouldn’t object to his neighbours erecting scaffolding outside the window of his £10 million Eaton Square home.
Perhaps, you imagine, he could reassure himself that it was a clever, post-ironic commentary on modern urban living. Maybe he’d even open his chequebook and pay for the scaffolding to be transported – potentially with a shark in formaldehyde perched on the top – down the road to his gallery on the King’s Road.
Nigella Lawson’s husband took matters into his own hands. Frustrated that the Egyptian couple in the flat above had overrun a deadline to finish their renovation works, he sent in his own workmen to take down their scaffolding. In the process they allegedly caused £50,000 worth of damage by dumping the scaffolding bars on the neighbours’ Italian bathroom tiles. Ironically, the eye-wateringly expensive marble tiles are now going to have to be re-ordered, thereby prolonging the renovation process and the disruption.
To those of us without our own personal workmen on call, it is an intriguing insight into the petty pre-occupations of the wealthy. Saatchi’s other well-heeled neighbours have been broadly supportive. One told reporters that the “scaffolding saga” had gone on far too long in any case. Another let rip with a gloriously snobby broadside. “I don’t know how people get permission for knocking down walls in these heritage properties,” she said. “Some have even started putting swimming pools in. I mean, this is Belgravia, not Hollywood.”
Belgravia might still be a long way from Beverly Hills, but clashes between expansionist residents and their incalcitrant neighbours are far from rare. Last Saturday on Chester Row, a five-minute stroll from Eaton Square, police were called after a skip fell into a storage vault, leaving a 15ft hole in the middle of the street. The skip had been filled with soil excavated from a sub-basement which was supposed to be converted into an underground gym and cinema. A number of residents are set to launch a claim against Westminster Council, now that “one of the nicest streets in Belgravia” has been turned into a “bomb site”.
Victims of genuine bomb sites are unlikely to feel their heart strings pulled too tightly by such sob stories. But they are an interesting reminder that, however rich and powerful you are, it is almost impossible in overcrowded Britain to buy the Lebensraum – let alone the privacy – you desire. Indeed, the better known and better off you are, the more everyone else seems to object.
When Ricky Gervais tried to excavate beneath his Hampstead home in 2007 to build a swimming pool, a games room and a golf simulator, one of his neighbours complained: “I don’t know why he doesn’t just buy a place in Essex.”
Tony Blair, another late-developing property magnate, has achieved the unique double of annoying his neighbours in both London and Buckinghamshire (one can only imagine what his friends in Jerusalem make of him). When he bought his house in Connaught Square in Mayfair in 2004 residents circulated a petition opposing his move (although there have been recent reports that some of them now appreciate the added security of having armed police patrolling the square).
Earlier this year, villagers in Wotton Underwood in Buckinghamshire complained about excessive noise from the Blairs’ helicopter and their overdevelopment of the £6 million 17th-century home, including plans for a sports pavilion with a sauna and steam room.
Meanwhile, Sir Fred Goodwin, another popular figure, was back in the papers this week regarding a dispute over his 25ft leylandii hedge (allowing the headline writers to enjoy themselves with the pun: “No hedge fun for disgraced RBS chief”).
The truth, though, is that we all secretly enjoy these celebrity neighbourhood spats, not just for the vicious, vicarious snobbery, but also because their experiences are not so different from our own. Some 17,000 people in Britain are engaged in turf wars over their hedges at any one time, while a staggering 360,000 families move home every year because of disruptive neighbours.
It might go some way to explaining why Neighbours, widely viewed as saccharine nonsense in its native Australia, has always been such a popular escapist soap opera here. The idea of actually knowing your neighbours – let alone being “good friends” with them – is deliciously alien.
An Englishman’s home might be his castle, but his favourite part is still the drawbridge, preferably scaffold-free.
