Paved with gold?
London has often been a byword for wealth in provincial England—which is why we remember Dick Whittington not just for his cat but for London’s supposed “streets of gold.” But how true is this?
With so much trade and finance centred in London, property prices have always been higher, and—when so much wealth is tied up in bricks and mortar—that means there is indeed a wealth gap between London and the rest of the country. In the average wealth figures, this spills over into the capital’s southeastern hinterland, where a somewhat older population has had more time to build up more wealth.