CHAPTER ONE - MONDAY 11 JUNE (EVENING)

 London is being re-made. In 10 weeks the city’s mop-topped mayor, a one man Beatles revival with added bleach, will wave the Olympic flag in Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium. Back home the construction of a twenty-first century stadium, velodrome and swimming pool has already begun. But the city’s re-making is much more than this. 

The first re-making is up. Skyscrapers are sprouting on the city’s face like a fungus. Southwark Towers − 24 floors of offices next to the south-east rail terminus − is being demolished. In four years’ time the 87 floors of the Shard will take its place. If you’re going places in London, you’re going up.

Ben Stillman is going up. He’s barely thirty and he’s chief of staff to a billionaire.

The city is being remade is back towards its centre. Everywhere people with money have been pushing out beyond their cities’ corsets, in London’s case the M25 orbital. In places like Johannesburg, after they moved they sent the removal vans back in to take their jobs with them. But most of the jobs that matter in London are still in the centre, and the people with money have come back to hug those jobs more closely. In London, the centre is the place to be.

Where Ben’s at in his career could not be more central. He is the hub of 26,000 people labouring worldwide in everything from chemicals and agriculture to re-insurance. Ben is Alex Bakhtin’s right hand.

The third re-shaper of London is glass. All the new towers are glass from top to bottom. Welcome to a new kind of power, which sees all and displays all. It has no need to hide.  Perhaps this power is modern and clean, democratic and accountable. But then a gust blows, a cable slips and a window cleaner’s fingers get caught in the winching gear. As detergent and blood smear the glass, we glimpse something older. The cable that once suspended a human halfway between heaven and earth was the divine right of kings.  

All-glass palaces: London’s new way to tell passers-by that they count for shit. You’re welcome to look in, because you’re so lowly that what you see has no consequence.