G U Y S A LT E R
Cultural Capital w What have the ups and downs of the past decade taught us about London’s luxury market?
Guy Salter ► Guy Salter OBE MVO is a long-standing specialist retailer and investor. His pro-bono work includes founding London Craft Week, the GREAT Britain Campaign, and 19 years with Walpole, including establishing the Crafted programme in 2007.
Illustration ► Ana Yael
Déjà vu but different. An inelegant way to sum up how things feel now compared to this time ten years ago, when the 2012 London Olympics were on the horizon. Then, as now, I felt a significant opportunity within touching distance. Albeit one that could easily slip away from us. In 2011, my itchiness was around how the UK could take advantage of those millions of eyeballs and visitors to boost our reputation and business. Now it’s about how we shore up and rebuild. Then I saw an important role for the luxury sector. Now is the same. The differences are self-evident and 2012 seems a world away. A distant era of optimism, when the UK seemed more at ease straddling old and new, sure-footedly navigating East and West. Europeans envied us and spent their euros here, as did Americans their dollars and Chinese their yuan. The Arab Spring was still warm. Pre-Covid, Trump, Brexit. Then I felt the worst that could happen is we shot ourselves in the foot by missing or fumbling that moment. Now, my sense of urgency is more about saving ourselves. And those who rely on us to be stewards. Whether, after everything we’ve been through, we can seize the day with sufficient vision, ambition and panache. Maybe, though, there is more similarity in the mood now and then. It’s easy to forget that we were downbeat about the chances of us pulling off the Olympics. And little sense we were living in good times, especially given the post-financial crisis austerity. National self-doubt was its usual drag on positive thinking. The one thing most of us felt we
were getting right then was London. It seemed to symbolise our most optimistic vision of what we could become and our place in the world. More confident, more diverse, a creative and commercial powerhouse with global pulling power. This feeling was shared by many others, others who matter, as evidenced by numbers of students, visitors and investors. To say nothing of those who chose London for product launches, fashion shows, to start up their business, for their HQ or home. It’s London, and other great cities like it, that encapsulate both a pressing opportunity and a challenge. One that our sector can do much to influence and contribute to – and get the greatest return from. Without people, a city becomes pointless. So much, so self-evident. But nonetheless starkly illustrated by shuttered shops and empty streets. During the bleakest mid points of our lockdowns, I was struck by how we were existing on the thin gruel of memory for all those urban-based, life-enhancing, simple pleasures we’d taken for granted, from a Monmouth espresso sipped in the early summer sun to an ethereal experience at the Royal Opera House. With those worst of times receding, maybe the best we can do is repair our balance sheets, adjust our business model, hope that the consumer spends that hoarded up cash and time – and our cities will look after themselves, bouncing back along with everything else. Certainly there’s no doubting the deep resilience of world-standard urban centres. London has not only survived far worse but gone on to thrive every time.
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