Invasion of the Euro Sloane

The Chelsea Sloane is severely under threat. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea was once the almost exclusive habitat of the urban British upper classes, but now the Alice-band, pashmina and pump brigade is facing extinction, and its place is being taken by a far more cosmopolitan crowd.

The Euro-Sloane has invaded SW3 - sweeping up from Cheyne Walk and on to Knightsbridge, modernising the restaurant menus, sanitising the bathrooms and occupying the flats where the Spencers and Lord Sebastian Flytes used to live.

Brideshead accents, meanwhile, have been elbowed out along the Fulham Road, confusing the new Italian, French and German incumbents who came to Chelsea hoping to practise their English.
Aleksander Borev, a Bulgarian doctor, has lived in SW3 for the past four years. "Kensington and Chelsea is about money," he says, "and money these days is fluid, so the people who are here are the people who are everywhere. Europeans, mostly."
But Peter York, author of The Sloane Ranger's Handbook, and a keen anthropologist of the posh, compares the displacement of the upper classes to that of an indigenous people, forced off their land by loggers.

"The whole area is just utterly, utterly changed," he says. "The predominance of the City - the need to be more professional - has ruined Chelsea life. It has become much younger and smarter, and faster-paced."

Is that such a bad thing?

"Well, you find yourself searching in vain for something lovely and stagnant."

He says that Europeans are attracted to Chelsea "because they've heard of it, and because they want to meet girls who look like Jodie Kidd".

But these girls have migrated to Fulham, and the young parents to Nappy Valley, which stretches south of the river from Battersea to Balham. They still come in to Chelsea for the shops and pubs, but can no longer afford to live there.

Jane Winkworth, a lifelong Chelsea dweller and owner of the French Sole shoe shop on King's Road, has seen her English customers drift far down the Fulham Road. "You've still got dowagers and duchesses in Peter Jones, but the traditional Chelsea girl, whose parents might have bought her a flat on King's Road, now lives out in Fulham or Battersea." They come back, she says, as ghosts of their former selves - at least in terms of their ability to buy shoes from her shop. "We now find it much easier to sell to a moneyed European than her English counterpart. The 19- to 20-year-old Chelsea girl will buy one pair of ballet flats, while the Spanish or German girl will be buying three or four pairs."

The reason is spiralling property prices - there has been a 13 per cent rise in prime central London property prices over the past year - which the traditional Sloane can no longer afford.
"Most English people would rather buy a smaller peripheral property now," says Howard Elston, associate partner at Aylesford, a Chelsea estate agency. "Overseas money has pushed prices up to an extent that is not justified by the UK economy."
Now a massive 90 per cent of buyers at the top of the market come from overseas. He tells me that various nationalities come over in waves, in direct relation to exchange rates.

"The super-wealthy are keen to get out of the eurozone right now, and are also taking advantage of the strength of the euro against sterling. In the spring of 2010 we had an influx of Italian buyers. Now it is rich Greeks who are relocating."
The influx of foreign buyers has even brought with it a change in interior design. Chelsea apartments have been stripped of their carpets - and the British bathroom is particularly under threat.
"It all started with an American who walked into a Chelsea bathroom and said 'I wouldn't wash my car in this'," says Elston.

Restaurants have also begun to adapt to the Mediterranean climate around SW3. The Bluebird restaurant on King's Road used to have a private room in the back "full of people sitting on old sofas, sipping whisky" according to its marketing manager. Now the members are mostly European and it has also adapted its menu to the EU palate - serving pickled herrings, scampi and escargots.
Local businesses have started to operate on a cyclical, seasonal basis, all but closing down as Europeans flock home for Christmas, and gearing back up for business in the spring.