“This,” announces Caroline Knowles, as we walk along a deserted road on the private Wentworth Estate in Virginia Water, “is where the trail runs cold. This is where money disappears from view.”
Knowles, a professor of sociology at Goldsmiths University, is interested in money, in wealth, how it is spent and how, as she puts it, it got “encrusted in the landscape of London”. That’s essentially the subject of her new book, Serious Money. Its subtitle is Walking Plutocratic London, and that’s exactly what she does in its pages, striding from Shoreditch and the City, through to St James’s, Mayfair, up to Regent’s Park, back down to Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Kensington, Notting Hill, Chelsea and out west to Richmond and finally Virginia Water.
