'A latter-day Canterbury Tales ... Serious Money has a serious mission' The Times'Eye-opening
... part guide part indictment of a yawning wealth gap' Misha Glenny Financial Times'A
wonderful and vital account of a city ruled by and for extreme wealth' Anna Minton author of
Big CapitalLondon is a plutocrat's paradise with more resident billionaires than New York
Hong Kong or Moscow. Far from trickling down their wealth is burning up the environment and
swallowing up the city. But what do we really know about London's super rich and the lives
they lead?To find out more about this secretive security-heavy elite sociologist Caroline
Knowles walks the streets of London from the City to suburban Surrey via Kensington Notting
Hill Mayfair and elsewhere. Her walks reveal how the wealthy shape the capital in their image
creating a new world of gated communities and luxury developments. A move behind closed doors
takes us ever further into the dark heart of the plutocratic city from multimillion-pound
mansions to high-end hotels and gentlemen's clubs. Along the way we meet a wide and wickedly
entertaining cast of millionaires billionaires and those who serve them: bankers aristocrats
tech tycoons Conservative party donors butlers bodyguards divorce lawyers and many many
more.By turns jaw-dropping enraging and enlightening Serious Money explodes the fiction that
wealth is a condition to aspire to revealing the isolation and paranoia which accompany it
when the plutocrat's recompense - a life of unlimited luxury - ultimately proves hollow. It is
a powerful reminder that it is not just the super-rich who get to make the city: we make it too
and could demand something different. Because serious money is good for no one - not even the
rich.'An eye-opening deeply disturbing fast-moving journey through the lives homes and
affairs of the filthy rich of London' Danny Dorling author of All That Is Solid'Fascinating
punchy thought-provoking' Frances O'Grady
