The plastic water bottle lies in a small patch of grass by the kerb. Next to it, a sodden tissue and stained paper coffee cup surround a pool of dark, unidentifiable liquid. A few feet back, a house is now a building site, its frontage obscured by construction hoarding.
The cognitive dissonance is striking. The scene could be an impoverished city in eastern Ukraine. But it’s not. I am in fact standing on The Bishops Avenue, which runs from Hampstead Heath to East Finchley in north London.
Nicknamed Billionaires’ Row, it is one of the most expensive streets in the capital, therefore the world. There are 66 properties here, each of which sits on at least a two to three-acre plot, and which command asking prices of up to £65million.
The mess I see on the avenue is, sadly, nothing new. Eleven years ago, a row of ten mansions here, collectively valued at £73million, had remained largely abandoned since they were purchased between 1989 and 1993, reportedly on behalf of members of the Saudi royal family.
Their condition was shocking. Water dripped down the walls of once-grand ballrooms. Pigeon remains lay scattered across half-rotted carpets.
I remember seeing the pictures and reflecting on the philistinism and waste. It made me sad because The Bishops Avenue, specifically one of its cul-de-sacs White Lodge Close, is where I began my life.
Now I am back, to understand what has happened to the street I grew up on, and why. I want to see if this is still a place where a young Londoner – my equivalent today – might be as happy as I once was here. For me, this road tells several stories: of my maternal family, of changing immigrant aspirations in a time of more controlled migration; and finally, of London itself.
This has always been an unusual place to live. I remember driving in to the street one day in the mid-1980s and seeing it filled with security. They were here, my mother told me, in a whisper, because the King of Saudi Arabia was visiting his house, which, she added, ‘happens about once every seven years, darling’.
David Patrikarakos’s old house on The Bishops Avenue in north London, nicknamed Billionaires’ Row which is one of the most expensive streets in the capital
Others who’ve had houses here include Justin Bieber and steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal. And around the time I lived here in the early 1980s Princess Diana could be seen occasionally motoring down the street to visit her friend Constantine II, former king of Greece, the country’s last.
I am posing as a prospective buyer to look around my old house in White Lodge Close, on the market for just under £8million.
Online it looks bright and what estate agents call ‘well appointed’ (if not exactly understated). Its lawn is lush. Thrillingly, the basement now appears to have a pool.
It’s been a struggle to get a viewing. The house is rented to tenants from the Middle East, who are rarely in the country. Like so many of the houses here, its inhabitants are merely part-time visitors. I walk up White Lodge Close and am immediately greeted by a wall of battered black and dark green hoarding, stretching almost all the way up the close. A sign says, ‘New Build Refurbishment Conversion Maintenance’.
I haven’t been up here in decades and it’s a shock. If Bishops Avenue was never a place where neighbours just dropped by each other’s houses, there was still a sense of community in the close.
At its bottom lived our family friends (who had made the same journey from Iran) Gladys and Edward. Next door lived a boy in my year at school, while opposite was a boy in the year above. I would occasionally play in the close with them, and friends that came by to visit me.
Now these houses sit empty, though the estate agent assures me several are owned by a successful property magnate and, once they’re redeveloped, will make property prices soar.
I look around and realise I am not looking at family homes as I once knew them, but investment vehicles.
I enter my old house and feel the decades melt away. Everything is the same yet utterly different. The memories swell.
David with his grandfather, a self-made tycoon who had fled Iraq
To my left across the hall are the stairs I would once charge up and down to gentle admonishment from my mother and growls of displeasure from my grandfather. But their thick carpet is gone, in its place polished wood with glass siding. In place of the Persian carpets that once smothered the floor is yet more shiny wood.
It was a long journey from the Middle East to The Bishops Avenue for my grandparents, who left Iran in the 1970s as Islamic fundamentalism, led by the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, began to grow. They saw the writing on the wall early.
They were Iraqi and had already fled Baghdad after the situation became dangerous for Jews following the founding of the state of Israel.
It was to Hampstead they decamped with their two daughters (my mother and aunt). After my parents met, my father moved in, and I came along. I lived here for the first few years of my life until the early 1980s and then came back for family get-togethers almost every week until I was around 15.
On my grandmother’s side, my family included socialites, rabbis and politicians like my great-grandfather Reuben Somekh, MP for the Iraqi city of Basra. They were also close to the Iraqi royal family for many years.
My grandfather was a self-made tycoon who made fortunes in both Iraq and Iran through – from what I could gather – something to do with ‘piping’. In the UK he rebuilt his fortune again, this time through property.
Family lore has it he was offered the chance to buy the Oxo Tower on the south bank of the Thames, but turned it down. Had he said ‘yes’, I would probably be living off its rents. He was a powerful figure in my early life: a man of strong opinions and settled tastes, which included drinking iced water from glass tankards, making his own pickles, and the films of Charles Bronson.
Walking up the stairs with the estate agent, we arrive at what was once his office area.
He would sit behind a thick, ornately carved wooden desk, on which sat a colossal ashtray and a gold Cartier lighter. It is now staff quarters.
A smiling, dark-haired lady sits folding laundry. I walk downstairs to one of the two garages, which used to house my grandmother’s gold BMW. ‘Well, it was the 80s and they were Iraqi,’ says my brother as we reminisced following my visit.
Here the staff have hung their washing up to dry in a line stretching across the room. It’s extraordinary they aren’t using the tumble dryer that surely must be here.
As we walk back through the hall to various living and dining rooms, I notice several small heaters plugged into the wall. It seems that central heating is also off limits. It’s clear this is not a home where people spend much time.
I walk through to the kitchen; to my right is the garden. The verdant lawn is gone, replaced by an expanse of dark soil interspersed with the odd patch of green.
I remember how proud my grandfather was of this garden. He once agreed to pay me 50p for every pebble I removed from its flowerbeds, which I did for about 30 minutes before giving up and lying down on the grass.
David outside his old family home. He describes everything as the ‘same yet utterly different’
‘What are you doing? You’re supposed to be working!’ he snapped when he found me about 20 minutes later.
‘It’s boring, papa,’ I cried.
‘Of course it’s boring!’ he replied. ‘That’s the point! I’m trying to teach you… oh never mind. Where’s your mother?’
Being self-made, he understood how important discipline was. More than this, he had a strong belief that he had come to Britain, which had offered him sanctuary from Iran, and it was his duty to contribute. This country wasn’t just a legal jurisdiction or an arena of property speculation, it was his home.
All this went double for his grandchildren. We, too, would one day contribute. And for that we needed to learn responsibility – and early on. We were all given jobs, no matter how small. My cousin Sarah was responsible for filling his tankards of iced water with the correct levels of ice (an incorrect amount would invariably provoke barking displeasure).
Aged around seven, my brother Phillip set up a shoeshine business. Delighted with this entrepreneurial zeal, my grandfather presented him with 50 pairs of his shoes, all spotless. It was a morning of trauma Phillip remembers to this day.
Back in 2025, the tour continues. If the garden is a disappointment, I am keen to see the new pool area. Alas, I can’t – it doesn’t actually exist.
‘Those images on the website are what it could look like,’ the agent tells me.
If The Bishops Avenue tells a story of family and of immigrant aspirations, it also tells another: of modern London.
After the viewing, I walk around the avenue with the photographer and pass a house I remember from a story my father once told me.
At some point in the 1980s it was put on the market for £20million. Who on earth, an aghast journalist asked the estate agent, buys a house for that sort of money?
Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers painting recently sold for £24million at auction, the agent replied. What sort of house do you think the buyer would hang it in?
Even as a child I remember thinking that this was a good answer. Neither my father or I, though, would have dreamed just then how far prices would climb.
It’s also little surprise that the tenants in my old house are hardly ever there – that seems to be almost the norm here. I pass several more houses that are clearly empty; others are a sea of cranes and scaffolding.
Properties here are often just viewed as investment vehicles and their owners feel no need to pay for upkeep (let alone live there) because they know blue chip London property will rise over time regardless of condition.
I stop outside one house, set back from the road, with boarded windows and an overgrown front garden. It looks like something out of the Amityville horror TV series.
Part of the problem is that it’s unusual for a London street to have such large plots in such a desirable area with relatively modern buildings, which are therefore unlisted.
This makes getting planning permission easier, meaning one, houses go up that are sometimes of questionable taste; and two, the road ends up as a permanent building site. Often, the owners then either run out of money or lose interest as they are abroad.
Add to this, 60 per cent of the houses on The Bishops Avenue are reportedly owned by ‘hard to scrutinise shell corporations registered in foreign tax havens like the Bahamas, Panama and the British Virgin Islands’.
For 35 per cent of properties owned by overseas shell corporations, law enforcement agencies do not even know the true identities of the beneficial owners. The estimated value of foreign-owned houses in London is now £55.2billion, with more than £2billion of that belonging to sanctioned Russian oligarchs.
In the City of Westminster alone, 13 per cent of homes are owned by foreign nationals; in Kensington and Chelsea it’s 11 per cent. A 2023 study found that more than 70 per cent of properties held via overseas shell companies (109,000 of 152,000) do not publish information about their owners.
Empty houses are owned by absentee foreign oligarchs, who use the properties to hide and launder cash. Meanwhile Londoners struggle to find houses, and with the price rises that result from all this. That is, in many regards, the story of our capital today.
Dusk falls and it’s time to leave. I reach the top of the road and look down it, thinking wistfully of my grandparents, and parents, now all dead, and of the London that has died along with them.
