Ian Schrager: I pick a city to go to intuitively, not intellectually. So I can give you a Monday morning reason why I came for the weekend. But in the ebb and flow of popular culture, it seems to be that–as in the ’60s–this again is London’s time. I have sensed that for the last four or five years. I’m not sure why it has happened. Perhaps it started with the breakdown of barriers in the Common Market. You can see it on a lot of different fronts. When I see a lot of restaurants opening up, it doesn’t [just] make me think about culinary things.
I can give you a million examples. The sink heights are different. The bathing habits are different. They are not more or less; they are just different. [The British] take advantage of the outside much more than Americans do, which is one reason why we wanted that courtyard garden [at the Sanderson]. The advertising here is much more humor-based, much more ironic. We don’t have that in America. I could go on and on.
Generally, half will be American and half will be from European countries. Of those from Europe, half will be from Britain. It is a British hotel.
The British like smaller portions. Can I give you a profound example of the difference between the two [countries]? If you drive through a bad neighborhood in America in a fancy car, the people will look at the car and say, “I want to get that car, too.” When you drive through a bad neighborhood in Britain, there is a little more resentment. You have got to be more restrained. It’s more delicate, more sensitive.
You are seeing a breakdown in barriers. There’s less of a distinction between the people who live in the great 24-hour gateway cities. And you can see it most clearly when you go to London, Paris, New York, Milan and Los Angeles. There is a certain common denominator between all the people. They are part of that club. But on a much more personal level, I think London has all the great things that New York has–without some of the bad things… Also, in the late ’80s and ’90s, you saw a lot of people moving from New York to California. California had the sort of sophistication that London has to offer and New Yorkers were used to. Now it seems almost like the world has tipped the other way and everyone is rolling into London.
There are lots of people out there from all different ages and all different walks of life that share a sensibility. It’s something I learned in the nightclub business. You’d see old people dancing with young people, rich people dancing with poor people, someone in a tuxedo dancing with someone in jeans. It’s a certain spirit, a certain feeling in the heart. I think there is more similarity between the people in New York and the people in London than between the people of London and those from the London suburbs.
What’s hot after London?
I am anxious to do a lot in Europe. It’s funny, I would rather do more in Europe than in some cities in my own country. We cluster our hotels in New York and in California. I will do certain cities in America, but I am more interested in coming to Europe than to cities like Chicago and Dallas. I only want to do a hotel in a city where I actually want to go. I can’t emphasize enough that this is not some great demographic, intellectual, market-driven, focus study. That’s not the way we do it. I rely on my instincts; I rely on my nose. I watch what is happening. I watch where the kids go. There is a groundswell. You can feel when a restaurant is hot. There’s an invisible set of tom-tom drums. There is a collective consciousness. You see it with hems. When hems go up, they go up all around the world. Why is that? I very much believe in the collective unconsciousness. London is hot right now. That’s why my strategy is to come in here and saturate London with multiple properties at various price points, maybe as many as seven hotels, and use it as a springboard.
I don’t think London hotels were lacking anything before I came. As a matter of fact, London hotels were an inspiration to me. Not the ones that I share the same aesthetic values with, but the Claridges … the Connaught. … My favorite hotels around the world are not the ones that share my approach.
I have never opened up a hotel so closely on the heels of another. In order to get people really excited, we had to be more radical this time around. We had to do something breakthrough. I look at this hotel as as much of a breakthrough as the Royalton [in New York City] in 1987. It’s a mix and match and a jumble of styles, creating a delicate balance that is original and a feast to the eye. And if you want something you can anticipate and expect, you should go somewhere else. This is the way the grand hotels of Europe were conceived. People would have their lunch there, their drinks there, their affairs there. It was part of the social fabric of the city. This is not a hotel for everyone. I am not looking to please 200 million people. But I don’t want people to be intimidated. If the critics like it and people don’t, then it isn’t a success.
title: “London Calling” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-25” author: “Virginia West”
The Russians are back–so much so that they’ve created their own virtual Moscow on the Thames. If Peter was drawn by the city’s naval greatness, modern-day Russians prize the city as the Wall Street of Europe–an English-speaking citadel of wealth and opportunity less than four hours by air from Moscow or St. Petersburg. The Russian Embassy in London estimates that there are 100,000 or more Russian nationals living in and around the British capital. And in 2002 another 100,000 applied for visas–a 13 percent increase from the previous year–taking advantage of the British Embassy’s new streamlined procedures for Russian visitors. So many Russians have bought [Pound sterling]1 million-and-up properties that they are known in real-estate circles as “the new Arabs.” Russia’s upper crust now sends its children to posh English boarding schools. The extraordinary number of frequent-flyer biznesmyeni landing at Heathrow persuaded British Airways to provide a VIP “Russian visitors service” to keep them happy.
The history of the links between these two countries on the far reaches of Europe is long and storied. Trade relations go back at least as far as the days of Queen Elizabeth and Ivan the Terrible, when the English Muscovy Company exported cloth to the Russians in exchange for furs, wax and rope. Russians have always envied the English for their liberal political culture. In the 19th century, expat dissident Alexander Herzen chose London as the home of his influential emigre journal. A generation of revolutionaries settled in London, and the Reading Room of the British Museum counted Lenin and Trotsky among its illustrious visitors. Later came White Russians who fled their country after the Revolution, and, later still, Soviet refuseniks in the 1970s.
If the Russian diaspora of old was disaffected, today’s community is more broadly representative of the motherland. It comprises students and shopkeepers, businesspeople and artists, people who have not turned their back on post-Soviet Russia, but rather brought a chunk of it with them. They’re here to make money, get an education or just get away for a while. The Russian Orthodox Church in London has been transformed by the new emigres. The newer immigrants are teaching the older ones, many of whom are now British citizens, “how to kiss the icons,” says the Rev. Michael Fortounatto. “It’s a bewildering experience because of the numbers. [The newer arrivals] are noisier, more demonstrative.” They are also more flamboyant–more Russian, in a word, than British. A sign in the church’s newly built social hall, which was funded by recent immigrants, hints at that: no stilettos or metal heels in the hall please.
Nostalgia is a binding force in Moscow on the Thames. The Russian community doesn’t dominate any one part of town. It is held together by a yearning for all things Russian. At the Spirit of Russia Charity Ball a few weeks ago, dozens of Russian entertainers performed for the [Pound sterling]100-a-seat extravaganza. One of them was 10-year-old singer and composer, Alex Prior, whose mother is Russian. He got a big burst of applause from his formally attired audience when he announced between numbers, “I was born in London–but I consider myself to be from the best country in the world: Russia!”
He’s not alone. In the Fulham area of London, Zina Kirk’s delicatessen imports Russian specialties, from sweet Georgian wine to its most coveted product, pickled herring. The first of more than 20 such stores in London, Kirk’s deli doubles as an information kiosk for new arrivals looking for a doctor or advice on how to fill out Home Office forms. The Old Street dance club Aquarium hosts a “Russian night” that draws 200 to 300 people every week, according to DJ A-Lex, himself part of the latest Russian wave. The Thursday-night scene, he says, is “for the Russian crowd, for those who feel kind of homesick.” The playlist is almost exclusively Russian, especially “the cheesy Russian pop that the girls like.” He says that those who come are mostly Russian students and those “who’ve come to London to earn a bit of money.”
Money is a big mover in this new diaspora. Pyotr Aven, president of Russia’s Alpha Bank, is a regular in Aeroflot’s first-class cabin to London. He stays in the city’s most expensive hotels, places like Claridge’s and the Lanesborough, and dines at Nobu, the celebrity-packed Japanese-Peruvian restaurant on Hyde Park. Or take Andrei Chervichenko, the art-obsessed president of Moscow’s Spartak soccer team. Checkbook-armed Russians like Chervichenko flock to Sotheby’s auctions, hoping to repatriate paintings by the likes of Serebriakova and Makovsky. At one recent auction of Russian art, Russians snapped up nine of the 10 most expensive paintings. Chervichenko consoled himself after Spartak’s 5-0 loss to Liverpool by dropping a cool [Pound sterling]300,000 on three paintings: two Aivazovsky seascapes–“and I can’t remember what the third was.”
If you can be blase about [Pound sterling]300,000, then you probably don’t flinch at fees of up to [Pound sterling]20,000 at boarding schools like Millfield and Winchester. In some cases, wealthy parents back in Russia are looking for more than just a good education for their children; they also want security from the rough-and-tumble world they inhabit back home. It’s not that unusual for Russian pupils to show up with bodyguards as well as chauffeurs, says Richard Harmon, headmaster at Aldenham, a boarding school founded in 1596, a hundred years before Peter the Great first set foot in England. Aldenham advertises in Russian magazines to tap the growing market.
Natasha Chouvaeva, publisher of the Russian language fortnightly The London Courier, has witnessed the transformation of the Russian community since she arrived in 1991. “Then there were the rich and the asylum seekers–the two extremes,” she says. “Now [the recent immigrants] are middle-class Russians who just want to try their luck in the West. We used to be an expat newspaper. We’d tell [readers] how to find a solicitor or how to find a good school for their children. But now people don’t need that. They just want to keep the cultural side up and pass the language on to their kids.”
Russian culture is not in short supply. The cultural invasion of London is “the new Russian imperialism,” jokes Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum. Not long ago Piotrovsky struck a deal with London’s Somerset House to bring regular exhibits of the Hermitage’s collection of more than 3 million works of art to the British museum’s Thames-side location. Russian music and dance performances are commonly featured in London playbills. Valery Gergiev, the brooding music director of St. Petersburg’s acclaimed Mariinsky Opera, brings his impassioned conducting to the Royal Opera House, the Barbican and Queen Elizabeth Hall for sold-out performances at least a dozen times a year. “We really love London,” says the maestro. “It’s a powerful cultural center.” The Moiseyev Dance Company was founded in Moscow during the harshest years of Stalin. The troupe’s high-leaping folk dancers recently packed in London crowds for a weeklong jubilee.
The transformation underway in London extends well beyond the Russian community. Veteran Muscovites on the Thames say long-held stereotypes of Russia–reinforced by Western ignorance–are finally breaking down more than a decade after the end of the cold war. As Russians broaden their horizons, it seems, Britons are doing the same. Aliona Muchinskaya, director of the Red Square PR agency in London, recalls her first visit to the British capital 11 years ago. “People asked me whether we had refrigerators in Russia. I said, ‘No. We use the snow.’ And they thought I was serious! Now people are much more aware of what is going on in Russia. They ask about [President Vladimir] Putin. It fills me with pride.”
The shift may be rubbing off on politicians, too. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has met Putin in more one-on-one summits than any other European leader. Blair helped to break the mold of British opinion when he became the first Western leader to visit Putin, then acting president, after Boris Yeltsin’s surprise resignation on Dec. 31, 1999. Later, while the rest of the world worried about Putin’s Soviet-era credentials, Blair quietly gave U.S. President George W. Bush the thumbs-up on the former KGB colonel. And since the September 11 terrorist attacks, Russia and the West generally have been drawn closer. “People look at Russia in a different light,” says Tania Illingworth, a descendant of Russian author Leo Tolstoy, whose family fled to London during the Bolshevik revolution. “People just aren’t quite so frightened.”
Against this backdrop, and against the backdrop of centuries of history, the changing face of London’s Russian community seems less an astonishment–and more like another chapter in a very long story. “We’re part of a living tradition,” says maestro Gergiev. “The bridge between Britain and Russia has always existed. We’re just walking freely over it again.”
