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Notes -
Quite possible, I live in one of the nice but not elite areas of zone 2. Demographically speaking it is probably similar to the other nicer parts of inner London, low in white British but relatively high in general white population via Americans/Europeans, more (2nd gen/upper class) Indians and Chinese than Pakistanis/Bangladeshis etc. My exposure to the recent arrivals then are mostly through service job interactions and the swathes of food delivery couriers, and the tube. I have practically 0 interaction with the NHS, so this could be correct. Nigerians I think are almost certainly more balanced demographically. Given the huge changes in HMO licensing and rental patterns, I don't think that these new mostly male Indian arrivals have wives or girlfriends at home, but rather live 8 to a flat with other single 20-something men. A lot of the time the landlords for these properties are themselves upper class and/or 2nd gen Indians who extract/exploit the maximum they can from these new tenants.
Take the recent scandal from Jas Athwal, the labour MP recently as a slum landlord in East London. Anecdotally, a property I used to rent a long time ago I saw has been converted from a 3 bed to a 5 bed (by turning everyone room except the kitchen and bathroom into bedrooms). The landlady is (unsurprisingly) a 2nd gen East African Gujarati who rotates between London/Dubai/Kenya. This is quite a common pattern that I have seen from parents of friends and colleagues.
Edit: of course the other possibility is that a similar but gender reversed situation is taking place with Indian women, where they live in large HMOs and all work in the NHS, in some kind of parallel world. But I don't think is happening, at least not on the same scale as the men.
Are we talking like Islington / Maida Vale / Clapham tier, here?
Yeah, it’s interesting, natives are highly concentrated in the outer suburbs, the richest are strongly concentrated in Chelsea / Fulham / the immediate vicinity of The Surprise, with another large group slightly north around Holland Park / Notting Hill, and to some extent in Hampstead and leafier parts of North London (along with Jews and Indians).
Here in Mayfair there are almost no natives, it is predominantly Arabs, some Russians, Africans and Chinese (although the latter prefer Nine Elms / Battersea Power Station / South Bank Apartment buildings), and moderately large contingents of wealthy Americans, Italians and French (although in general French and Scandinavians prefer Marylebone), mostly young (men) who work in hedge funds or PE nearby. Marylebone also seems to have a lot of rich Aussies along with many Americans and a few Brits here and there, mostly older.
Yeah somewhere in-between one of the first and second groups of places you mentioned. I've just checked the data and it's actually around the 70th percentile for income for inner London, 90th percentile for London as a whole.
Different parts of London can be a bubble of course but I feel relatively confident talking about the demographics of the arrivals- I suspect many of them are living in zones 2-5 in North West as I see them on the tube and around baker street.
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