Tucked away behind High Street Kensington is 18 Stafford Terrace, a sumptuously preserved Victorian townhouse. This was once the home of Edward Linley Sambourne, a cartoonist for the magazine Punch, and his wife Marian. Many of their possessions were sold after the death of their son in 1946, yet the house remains cluttered, even by Victorian standards.
I learned from our tour guide that the Sambournes bought around 200 chairs. Even though they had two children and a small collection of servants, this is very a high bum-to-chair ratio (especially given the servants weren’t encouraged to sit down). What on earth was going on?
Well, as a fashionable couple, the Sambournes liked to accumulate evidence of their status. The demanding schedule of “at homes”, where they received guests provided ample opportunities for showing off their newly acquired knick-knacks. Every time Linley received a cheque, he’d quickly nip out to the local furniture depot and exchange it for another piece of furniture. As I carefully made my way around the house, dodging the priceless pouffes, I imagined how much worse it would be if the Sambournes had access to Amazon Prime.
Although Sambourne was a successful artist and enjoyed a comfortable middle-class existence, he never felt as though he had enough money. He was always scratching about for the next commission and anxiously awaiting payment – only for it to instantly slip from his fingers.
The example of Sambourne tells us three things:
- Building wealth is not just about earning money, it’s also about holding on to it.
- If we use money to pursue status, we can never have enough of it.
- The Victorians’ reputation for prudery is misplaced – Sambourne created a large collection of what our Scottish tour guide called “nuddy pics”.
In her revelatory book Serious Money, Caroline Knowles traverses London, from the wealth-generating areas of the east, through to the capital’s most expensive residences in the west. She lingers in Stafford Terrace to interview “Lady”, the occupant of a small two-bedroomed flat on the fifth floor of a house just like the Sambournes’. Although Lady’s life has comprised a series of low-paid jobs, her voice (“just below Queen level”) indicates more elevated origins. Indeed, it transpires that an inheritance meant she originally owned the house outright. Hit by the stock market crash of 1987, Lady started gradually cannibalising her house, selling off a floor each time she ran out of money. Eventually, she ended up in her own attic, in what was once the quarters for her daughter’s nanny.
In the basement lives a Japanese family, who Lady suspects are bankers. It’s odd to think that a cartoonist could afford the entire house, while someone in a high-paying profession is now relegated to what would have been the kitchen. This is one of the strengths of Knowles’s book, as she exposes the hidden money generated through property speculation, big tech, and hedge funds. These industries (which don’t actually produce anything) generate vast wealth, allowing their leaders to colonise areas and displace the original inhabitants. Not long after the interview, Lady sells the remaining slice of her house and buys a home by the sea. Had she retained the entire house, it would’ve been worth £11m.
Sambourne House provides a glorious glimpse of middle-class life, but it’s also an important part of our economic history. Increasingly, people in well-paid professions are unable to buy a house, let alone 200 chairs to put in it. It’s impossible for most of us to keep up with the Victorians.