Why London thrives on new money

It's hard, in general, to feel sorry for Premiership footballers. If their eighth Ferrari gets a nick in the car park, I don't weep. If this week's haircut provokes national mirth, I join in. World peace seems like a bigger issue than their groin twinges. It has taken Peter York, the man for whom the term "style guru" was invented, to provoke a sudden rush of sympathy for this pampered breed.

York is upset that Sol Campbell of Arsenal and Steffen Freund of Tottenham Hotspur have bought a Victorian house in Hampstead. Fans of either club might be upset that the two are talking to each other, let alone dabbling in property together, but that's not York's gripe.

"Footballers have so much money now. They're not out in Barnet any more," he frets, "they're buying properties in Knightsbridge and Hampstead. It's a whole new class - a footballers' class."

The suggestion is that Campbell's ability to bring opponents to a bone-jarring halt does not necessarily equate with the refined sensibility needed to renovate a Victorian home.

There's a word for this, which is snobbery. No surprises there, as "style guru" is really a different way of saying snob. It is the same lipcurl that has greeted the selfmade through the ages. It also fails to understand that cities die without new money, and footballers are simply following in the footsteps of the sugar barons and shopping magnates - and the actors and rock stars - who, in the past, have moved into the city's smart areas.

London's most treasured houses and districts were created by rich people, and not always of the most established or dignified kind. Number 8, Addison Road is a gaudy, multi-coloured, house built a century ago. Now it is seen as one of the finest in Kensington, but it was built for the shopping millionaire Sir Ernest Debenham, whose money was just as new as Campbell and Freund's. If it wasn't a recognised part of London's heritage, it would be called vulgar.

So would the former Midland Grand Hotel above St Pancras Station, built to satisfy the taste of brassy Birmingham industrialists, and one of the most-visited places in London when it opened on the annual open-house days.

Or take Fitzroy Square - grand-looking, posh-sounding. It is named after Henry Fitzroy, the illegitimate son of Charles II who, before dying at the age of 27, fought and whored his way through life in a way that would get any footballer fired. Fitzroy means "bastard son of a king", and it would sound a little less swanky if it were called Bastard Square. Other grand homes and districts of London are built with the ill-gotten gains of noble families.

The Earls and Dukes of Bedford, who built Covent Garden piazza and Bloomsbury, gained their start in life from an ancestor who helped Henry VIII destroy Britain's monasteries and shared the loot.

On the whole, the ability to kick a ball with supreme skill seems like a more admirable way to wealth than beating up monks or having a mother who caught a randy king's eye. Chelsea's gentlemanly Italian Gianfranco Zola is more of an adornment to Eaton Square than Lord Boothby, the politician who used to entertain the Kray twins in his flat there.

And, as the wealthy change a city, the city changes the wealthy. Who, for example, would have thought that a career in Led Zeppelin would qualify someone as a custodian of a masterpiece of Victorian architecture? Such was the destiny of the band's Jimmy Page, who for more than 20 years has lovingly cared for the extraordinary Holland Park house that the Victorian architect William Burges built for himself. Who, in the 1960s, would have thought of Mick Jagger as a respectable home owner in Richmond?

It is happening with footballers. As they move in from Hertfordshire to Chelsea and Hampstead, they are opening their minds to architectural possibilities beyond the fake-Georgian. Thierry Henry, of Arsenal, lives in a house designed by Richard MacCormac RA, a subtle and tasteful modernist.

Gianluca Vialli, manager of Watford and formerly of Chelsea, had his flat - also in Eaton Square - designed by Terence Conran. Now he is moving to a house in Hampstead fitted out in contemporary style.

The attitude of the central London footballers seems preferable to that of Spurs' Sergei Rebrov, resident in the traditional footballers' haven of Chigwell, who complained to a Ukrainian newspaper about "the Arab areas" he saw from his car window on the drive into central London. It's true that most of these metropolitan players are foreign, the M25 being a boundary few English players are prepared to enter, the exceptions being the " intellectual" players, like Pat Nevin and Graeme Le Saux. But Frank Lampard, also of Chelsea, who grew up with his footballing father in Romford, now lives in Knightsbridge. If more want to venture outside their neo-Geo ghettos and into London proper, why should the likes of Peter York send them back?

It should also be remembered that footballers are role models. The Government, with the help of Lord Rogers of Riverside, keeps telling us to live in vibrant and dense cities rather than chewing up the Green Belt with sprawls of detached houses. If footballers make compact city living glamorous, they'll do more to save the Green Belt than all the Urban Task Force reports and Planning Policy Guidance notes ever written.

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