So, this is the central hallway of the basement,
and you can look through this glass screen into the pool.
The super-rich are maximising property value
in the heart of London as never before.
One person's large is another person's not large enough.
But they're not building up,
they're digging down, creating mega-basements.
The base of the house, which is the area that you see down there,
is probably one of the deepest basements in this particular location.
Some streets, three or four are all being done at once.
And then no sooner has one finished than the next one starts up.
Down here we've got the lower ground floor.
It looks like an Alcatraz prison.
People who are living here are multinational
who've probably got a house like this in two or three other countries.
They're hardly ever there, are they? No, this is the Russians.
Oh, they're Russians, are they?
In the last ten years, an estimated 2,000 new basements have been dug
in central London, removing three million tonnes of soil.
If this was happening in other places in the country
they would serve ASBOs on people for the amount of noise and disruption.
People find they're living
in what looks like part of strip mining in Kazakhstan.
But, with fortunes to be made by digging down,
the basement building boom looks here to stay.
My drains are blocked and I'm flooded as a result of concrete.
Central London is now
one of the most expensive places to live on the planet.
Buy a flat with a posh postcode
and you'll have small change from £1 million.
Leafy Hampstead is one of the wealthiest areas.
Houses here can fetch in excess of 20 million.
This eight-bedroom Hampstead home looks substantial already,
but it's got hidden depths.
So, if I take you out here -
sorry it's a little wet and rainy today, England -
you can notice that there are some skylights out here.
So, you've got two here,
which, when we go downstairs I'll show you,
the light comes into the hallway.
We have two skylights back there, which is in the gym,
and then, if you come out even further,
all of this and up to about where that skylight is,
our pool is under that area there.
By digging up their garden, Manal and her husband created
a whole new living area for themselves and their four children.
So I'll take you down into the lower ground.
We don't call it a basement.
Apparently, I was told that, because of the wonderful high ceilings,
I should not be calling it a basement.
Why not? That's a bit odd.
Because, as you come down here you'll see,
you've got something special - you've got very high ceilings,
you've got this wonderful stone being carried across,
so I guess when you talk about basements in a traditional sense
you're thinking something that's cold and dingy and dark,
but we tried to achieve the opposite.
So we call it the entertainment floor.
SHE LAUGHS
The one-floor basement, about the size of a tennis court,
took over two years to build and cost £1 million.
In here we've got the cinema.
You don't miss going out in that old traditional way?
Sometimes. Sometimes it's quite nice to do that,
and not everybody you want to bring into the home,
so there might be some people you want to go out and see a film with.
This is where we entertain people,
and if you want to make an impression you want to make sure
that when they use the cloakroom
they're going into a nice room there, as well.
We also have speakers in the ceiling
so they don't miss any part of the movie.
So, this is the wine cellar.
You've drunk all wine.
It's being depleted very quickly,
and I'm not replenishing it, so, yes.
SHE LAUGHS
We have two sub-zeroes here, and we've got a humidor, as well.
Why did you want a wine cellar?
We thought that, even if we may not have been avid collectors,
we need to have something like this in here.
It has to be something special for the next person to come in
because, if there's somebody with millions of pounds,
that person can get maybe down the road the same property with a pool.
So we had to do these...
We felt we had to do these special things that we've created.
This is the Crestron system
and it controls everything from the heating to lighting to audio-visual.
And so now I'm going to turn on the waterfall for you. So there you go.
Wow.
You sort of have a luxury hotel.
I've been told that it's better than The Four Seasons sometimes.
SHE LAUGHS
I think it's definitely helped with the value of the property,
because if we kept the house at 5,000 square feet
I would anticipate maybe seven million
and, now that we've doubled it, I would say about 13 million.
A couple of miles south is the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
Some of London's most valuable real estate is here,
nestling within its four and a half square miles.
In this part of the world
the average price of a small terraced house
is £3.5 million and rising.
Property prices in central London have, on average,
doubled every decade for the past 100 years.
Flats that we're selling today for a million,
in 2024 will they be worth two million?
Yes.
In fact, there's a strong suggestion that they'll probably be worth more.
Blooming heck! HE LAUGHS
Blooming heck!
And Geoff should know -
he's been selling property in Central London for 15 years.
This is Holland Park,
which is one of the more
sought-after locations in Central London.
Most people around here are so wealthy
they don't even have a mortgage.
The Beckhams have recently just bought here,
reportedly for about £40-42 million.
That's a staggering amount of money.
Yeah, it certainly is.
The record price around here per square foot is £8,500.
That's 20 times the national average.
So digging down makes sense.
In the last sort of ten years it's become the fashion
to excavate not just underneath the house,
but also to then push out underneath the garden, as well.
It just comes back down to the value that one can add.
You know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands
or millions of pounds in profit by, you know, excavating a basement.
And that's why you see so many of these houses
with basements being dug.
In fact, in 2001 there were only 46 planning applications
for basements in the borough.
Last year there were nearly 450.
And so Kensington has found itself at the epicentre
of a subterranean building boom.
You know, I guess a lot of these people, their net worth now,
if you believe in what you read in the things like The Sunday Times Rich List,
I think Simon Cowell's worth is £250 million.
And I think if you asked the vast majority of the general public
if they got £250 million, you know, would they extend their house
in London to the absolute capacity?
Would you have all the boys' toys?
You know, I think, honestly speaking, the majority would.
So, if you've got megabucks and want a mega-basement
then one of the go-to architects is David Wolff,
creator of some of the biggest basements in London.
Not cheap, is it, this basement building?
It's not cheap at all but, in the market we deal with,
people obviously have the income
and the money to afford these properties,
and we obviously facilitate doing it for them.
David's client list ranges from Arab royalty to multinational CEOs.
So, to get a brand-new spanking basement,
you're talking what kind of figure?
The work we do, they cost between one to two million,
going up to almost five million,
and then we could spend the same again on the finishes.
So, the basement in this house has got all the leisure facilities.
It's got a swimming pool, gym, sauna,
all the staff accommodation, auxiliary spaces, garages...
We try and keep the heights in the basement actually
to be higher than those on the ground floor,
so you'll find that the height on this level is about three metres,
and then when you go down into the pool area we increased it
to four to five metres to give you that extra feeling of space.
It's very splendid.
The intention here is really that when you are in a basement
that you don't feel as though you're in a dark dungeon.
So, we're coming into the hair salon area, which is over here.
This is where the ladies can have their manicures and pedicures.
It's very large.
It is large, but I think
it just reflects the current times, actually.
People can, luckily, afford big mansions.
This is the garage. It's built to accommodate five cars.
This is the client's choice,
and it's supposed to imitate a Ferrari red.
Am I taking it to think the client might have a Ferrari?
I've got no idea, actually.
He's got Bentleys.
Right.
How much did it cost to make this house?
Could you say, roughly? I can't. I really better not. OK.
Do you mind? I mean, the millions, you know.
Millions and millions, you know.
Do you think this is rather good, this design?
I love this one. What, you'd like to live here?
I could be forced to.
But living alongside the building of basement perfection
can feel like a nightmare for neighbours.
Lots of people accuse us of just being Nimbys
but it's not about that.
For a start, I've never objected to any of the developments
where they've actually been building housing.
Most of these aren't for houses, for space, anyway.
They're actually for cinema rooms and gyms and trophy projects.
This pretty little street is just a stone's through from Hyde Park,
and is typical of much of Kensington.
Well, there's one that's up at the moment at number one.
There's number eight, that's happening now.
With its period features and rich architectural history,
it's protected by a conservation zone...
There's another here at number three that is just completed.
..which means owners can't build up or extend out,
but they can dig down.
One here goes down three levels,
but it has a really, really tiny cinema room,
which you couldn't swing a cat in,
it had a utility room below that, and it had a wine cellar below that.
It was such a nonsense!
There are seven basements already on the go,
and one more is awaiting planning permission from the council.
I've had seven years of digging next to me,
more a less constant, for the last seven years.
It's absolute hell, it's a form of torture.
That's relatively small
compared with some of the ones that come down the street.
The great thing is that everything's...
It's complete chaos for hours and hours a day.
Because, you know, one of the things about basement work
is it's substantively different form ordinary building work.
Building up can be noisy and unpleasant,
but digging down, the house shakes constantly while they're doing it.
The drilling noise is horrendous.
Some of the builds that I've lived next door to
took two and half years to build.
You can see now that lorry is on its way back.
My car's paid the price.
I just couldn't afford to put a new wing mirror back on.
£300 every time it came off. How many times has it fallen off?
Four times. Four times?!
Four times. You can see, look what's happened here -
two lorries in less than ten minutes.
And that's every day, all day.
It's crazy. And nobody does anything to help.
Absolutely no help at all.
Last year, Kensington council was up to its neck
in a record number of complaints about basement building.
If you look down there, that's a beautiful piece of landscape,
I mean, there was always a basement there in the first place.
Whether there's another basement underneath, I don't really know.
There's one down there, you see. That's a basement.
You can always tell a basement cos you can see the grinder.
And that thing that goes over the pavement is the conveyer belt,
and you put all the earth on there, you see,
and it grinds up, and it goes into a skip,
and then the skip lorry comes and takes it away.
On this street it looks like there's one down there, as well.
Oh, I'm sure. They're everywhere.
It just changes the character of the street.
Tim Coleridge fronts the council's basement policy.
His inbox is over-flowing with e-mails from angry residents.
There we are - the earth of Kensington and Chelsea leaving the borough.
The borough's getting smaller every day.
It's quite expensive earth, as well.
Very expensive earth, yes, that's right.
As part of its drive to combat the mega-basement craze,
the council has frozen all new multi-level basement applications.
I find it, as an elected member, quite embarrassing,
because when residents say "Please, please do something about this,
"our lives are becoming a misery,
"the borough has changed, it's not like it was 20 years ago,"
if you're elected you feel a great sense of responsibility for that.
But, of course, we have to work within planning law,
so to some extent we have been helpless,
and we don't like being helpless.
So what we're doing now is making a real effort to change our policy.
We're not going to ban basements,
but we will actually rein back the worst excesses of it.
And the council's freeze on basements
is bad news for property developers like Alan Waxman.
When I'm out on my scooter looking at opportunistic sites,
I mean, generally what we look for is knackered old buildings.
Some agents call me "The Mole" because of the digging down.
Other agents may have more juicy words for me, I don't know.
He's been in the basement game for 15 years and has made millions
digging mega-basements under some of London's most prestigious postcodes.
The first mews house I did, I didn't even think of doing the basement.
But now it's really like a necessary evil.
Without doing it, you can't get the numbers to stack up.
His latest project was green-lit before the council's ban,
and this one wasn't found on a scooter sortie,
but during an evening out.
I met a girl at Annabel's nightclub in London,
and then I negotiated with her to purchase her property from her.
Was there a tingle? I beg your pardon?
Did a tingle...? Do you know what I mean? Is there a...?
You must have developed a sort of instinct for these things?
Obviously, I wouldn't have bought it if I didn't see the potential.
Erm... Was it very expensive to purchase?
The purchase price was just below the million mark, which,
for what it was, was a lot of money,
but for the potential, what you could do with it,
that was the view that I had to take.
This, looking straight on is, obviously, the front elevation.
Having demolished the original building,
Alan's creating a three-storey house with a double basement underneath.
To make the basement, he's dug down to the depth
of two double-decker buses.
This is going to be a fabulous property.
It's going to be one of the only new built houses in Notting Hill.
Here we're going down to the bottom of the property,
erm, where we've got the glass doors,
but this can be used as either a gym, a bedroom,
or, as it says there, a "romping room", whatever that could be.
Fun, whatever it is. Yeah.
That's a lot of seating area.
Having a large seating area makes people feel popular,
cos they think, "Well, if I'm going to buy this house,
"I'm going to have lots of friends."
The build is in Kensington's trendy Notting Hill,
home to supermodels,
pop stars
and the odd politician.
Alan's meeting top estate agent Mark Somerville
to make sure he's creating a basement that will fit
the exacting requirements of the average millionaire.
Over here we've got the kitchen. Yeah.
Behind, we'll have the dining area.
Glass spot there?
That will be glass, yes.
With your car on top of it?
Exactly.
Then here we'll have like a snug
going out to a glass, double height ceiling.
The works have been going on for over a year,
and there's another to go before they're completed.
So, what have we got down here?
So, two potential bedrooms here.
On the first floor, we've got the master suite
and then on the second floor,
we've got two further bedroom suites.
Yeah? That means...
Your in-laws are down here. Or cleaner.
When that's £3,000 a foot,
this will certainly be 1,500, you know.
So the pound per square foot, it wouldn't be worth doing
if you were outside the M25,
but when you're here,
it's very, very advantageous.
This land below your house is priceless.
When Alan finishes this, how much do you think
he should try and go to market for?
It should be north of five million.
In 2008,
Alan put something in a basement that is so unique
you couldn't make it up.
A lot of wealthy people have very boring lives
and they like things to talk about, so we thought,
"Well, let's put in a ten and half metre water fall."
Oh, my God! Has anyone done that?
No-one's done that in London, that you know of?
Not in a private residence, no.
And especially not in a mews house.
So, here, behind you, if I...
Where's the water?
When the water's running, we have lights underneath here.
You start to get a feeling of the ambience.
It's very, very large.
Erm, people seem to like it.
With this project, we won Best Interior Design in the country,
Best Development in London.
I mean, you're seeing this, James, for the first time,
and...I think you can agree,
you didn't expect to see what you saw.
I beg your pardon?
Cor, you wouldn't want to fall down there!
I would say that a house like this is reassuringly un-child-friendly.
You know, it's got lots of sharp edges.
It's not great for kids.
Alan sold the mews house in the depths of the last recession
and its hard edges didn't seem to bother the buyers.
We sold it to a French and Russian couple.
They paid about seven and a half million for it.
Kensington Council's new policy
may mean that the mega-basement gold rush,
for developers like Alan,
could be coming to an end.
But there's still a few digs that got the go-ahead before the freeze,
as one local resident knows only too well.
Oh, look!
I appear to have some masonry here.
Jeremy works from home in a basement flat
next door to one of the borough's biggest excavations.
Charming!
So much for health and safety.
A nice builder's cigarette thrown out of the window.
OK. We have a nice crack here.
You can see through to next door's garden.
This wasn't here before. My surveyor's been round to look at it
and his view is that this wall, as a result of the excavations
next door, has moved in the direction of the building site.
It's a disruption to my own existence.
It's a complete lifestyle change
where you have no life.
This is a very simple transaction next door.
They're looking to attract overseas money and make a big return.
The original house above has been hollowed out
and below they're digging a double basement
deeper than the depth of an Olympic diving pool.
Excavations on this scale can take over two years to complete
and have earned the nickname "icebergs"
because there's more house below ground than above.
They're going to be putting in a sauna,
Jacuzzi, cellar room,
all the trappings of the super-rich.
Is that what upsets you, or is it...?
No, it's the manner in which they conduct their operations.
They're entitled to do works on their site,
but they have ample room to do those works on their site
without pervading into everybody else's lives
and controlling everybody else's lives.
Originally, when the developers came in, the message was very clear,
"This is going to be difficult for you, we're here and we're available.
"Here is my number. Here are my details.
"Any time of the day or night."
Nothing of the sort.
It disappears quicker than you've had hot...
Well, it just disappears.
The whole thing is stacked in the developer's favour.
They know the games, they know how to play them.
What's going on down here?
Erm, I think we have a concrete delivery today.
One of a number, I guess.
Modern basements aren't made out of bricks
but reinforced concrete.
A dig like the one next to Jeremy will use 2,000 tonnes,
which means over 100 separate loads of concrete
delivered by specialist tankers.
The volume of traffic means that every dig has to have
a traffic management plan agreed by the council...
..and Jeremy is monitoring every transgression.
That is a breach of their traffic plan.
They're not supposed to reverse up this road.
Erm, I've seen it happen seven times on a single day.
This is having impact for residents, businesses,
everybody going about their daily existence.
You are basically inundating this road and taking it over,
and the net result is...
Well, contractually they are in breach.
It's that simple.
It demands an injunction.
An injunction would stop the building work?
Yes, an injunction would stop the building work,
until such time as they agreed terms
and agreed to respect those terms.
What are you doing?
I'm sending a copy of the video I've just taken
to the Council Enforcement Team for action.
I need a new phone.
Why?
I've got far too many exhibits on here.
I have had to dispense with the normal things that people
have on their phones...
e-mails, music...
You've got lots of pictures of ground risers and concrete mixers?
I've got, approximately,
4,000 to 5,000 exhibits.
Wow.
Despite the current freeze,
the dig next door to Jeremy is just one of 200
taking place across the borough.
And it's a fleet of grab lorries that are daily shipping
over 10,000 tonnes of soil from central London.
And they like to start early.
I've got all my flashing, my beacons.
They'll think it's Quatermass.
This is it. Can't wait.
Mark's been shifting muck around London for four years.
The last time I done this job, I was actually on the crane,
doing the grab, and one of these...
There's a lady that lives along here,
she pulled up behind me and said to me, "Look, you've got to move
"because I've got all my shopping and it's defrosting."
I said, "I'm very sorry, I can't move."
She weren't happy at all.
"All my shopping's defrosting," she said to me.
If you've got any conscience,
you won't make a grab driver.
You've got to be as ignorant as pig shit. You have.
Strict rules prohibit grab lorries starting work before 8am.
Break them, and the developer can be fined thousands of pounds.
It's time to wake up Kensington and Chelsea.
HE MIMICS AN ALARM
It's eight o'clock, it's eight o'clock!
I'd love to get up at eight o'clock.
I don't even get up at eight o'clock on a Saturday.
And it is absolutely chock-a-block, this one.
Full to the gunnels.
That'll do us.
This sand and rubble will be recycled back
into the building industry.
And the muck that's left will be used to reshape the fairways
of some of the most exclusive golf clubs in the south east.
Don't stand there!
RESIDENT SHOUTS There's no need to swear.
I'm just trying to do my job, sir.
RESIDENT CONTINUES SHOUTING
There you are, you've got an argument. He's coming round.
He wants to get his kids to school.
Any normal person would just sit and wait, wouldn't they?
But not him.
The joys of being a grab driver.
I think that's what you need, not just the HGV
and the licence to drive the crane, and that.
I think you should really have a black belt in judo or taekwondo,
or something, so you can look after yourself.
Progress, it's called.
Pays my bills.
For one long-time Kensington resident,
news of the freeze on mega-basement builds
hasn't come a moment too soon.
This one's been at it for at least two years, probably three.
You talk about it like they're involved in some criminal endeavour?
That's what it feels like.
Public suggestion box.
I was going to put my little Shakespearean quotation in there,
but everybody told me not to.
Why? What were you going to write?
As I told you the other day,
"Down, down, down to hell, and say I sent thee thither."
Annabel lives here, just off Kensington high street.
Looming at the end of her road is a large mansion block
that was due to be revamped with a double basement garage.
The council's freeze means that,
for the moment, at least, it's on hold.
There's lots of plans for Allen House.
The car comes in here
and goes down, and gets trundled along
on a kind of... It is exactly like a conveyor belt,
until it comes back to the lift.
How noisy do you think this is going to be?
Working on a building like this is going to be terrible.
It's going to be "bang," "crash," "wallop" all day long.
We're going to wait and see first whether they get their permission
and see how bad it is.
But I think we will need a place as a bolt hole just to run to
when we can't take it any longer.
Annabel has reached the end of her tether with basement digs.
Her street is one of the most developed in the borough.
Half the houses are being done up,
most with basements,
doubling their value from five
to £10 million.
Annabel and her husband Stanley have lived here for 23 years,
and for the past eight, have been hemmed in by building work.
I mean, we've tried so hard to stop all these developments,
and all to no avail.
I mean, the local planning officer gets these letters
and they mean absolutely nothing.
And they allow these permissions, for one floor, two floors below,
and we have this nightmare on our hands.
DRILLING NOISE You can hear now,
this goes on all the time.
All along the row, out of 12 houses,
we've got six of them at it.
That's a lot of developments.
It is and it's practically every other one,
so everyone in the whole terrace has got a naughty neighbour.
It's torture.
HE MIMICS A DRILL
Well, the first 15 years that we lived here
we never had any problem from any sort of neighbour.
They were all lovely and they were all friends.
And now that has all gone.
Is it like being at the dentist?
Is it what? Like being at the dentist?
It is actually, yes. It is like being at the dentist.
Oh, it's awful.
With two more of her neighbours waiting to hear
if the council will green-light their basement builds,
Annabel is heading to a local estate agent
to hatch an escape plan.
Perhaps we may have to think of getting a place to use as a bolt hole.
I'm not interested in anything so called "modern".
Super. Understood. And how many bedrooms do you need, Annabel?
Well, we need two. OK.
Of course, I'm not very happy about the idea of selling it to the enemy.
As you know, within the Royal Borough
there are so many planning applications,
which they're currently stalled up at the Royal Borough
of Kensington and Chelsea Planning Department,
and working out whether they're going to approve or decline.
But I think there are very few streets left
in Kensington and Chelsea
where you won't have some form of building work going on.
That gives us a huge difficulty of where do we go to?
It's four weeks since Kensington Council declared
a moratorium on mega-basement applications.
'BBC London 94.9.
'It's 07:47.
'We're joined by Conservative councillor Tim Coleridge,
'cabinet member for planning policy for Kensington and Chelsea.
'Morning, Tim.' 'Good morning.'
'We do have an issue with space in London.
'What's the problem with building downwards?'
'It is extremely trying for our residents when street after street
'sometimes have two or three basements being dug at the same time.'
'That's increased tenfold in the last 11, 12 years...'
It looks as if digging double basements, known as icebergs,
may be banned completely if the council can get government approval.
I suspect every council in London will be looking to see
whether we get this, and they will almost certainly follow suit.
Westminster is a neighbouring borough
that's paying close attention because, here in Belgravia,
a basement build went so badly wrong
that it's become the stuff of local legend.
The house is what I would describe as the benchmark case
for disasters with property development in London.
You mention Chester Row
and the taxi driver will throw back his head and laugh,
and he goes, "Oh, that's that house with the skip in the road."
And I go, "Yeah, that's us."
This is a Christmas card that we did the first Christmas it happened.
The Evening Standard printed it on their Christmas Eve front cover.
INTERVIEWER: So you're sort of famous?
SHE LAUGHS For the wrong reasons.
Four years on, the Hue-Williams
still have a quarter of a million pound repair bill,
plus their memories of an eventful night with a sunken skip.
Well, um, it was actually in the morning.
It was around about 5 o'clock in the morning
and I had been asleep and I'd been with our housekeeper, Lin,
and my family were away at our country house,
and she came and woke me up.
God almighty, it looks extraordinary.
What had happened to it?
The skip had fallen and sunk into the street.
Oh, my God.
The soil had been there for a substantial amount of time,
and when it rained it became a lot heavier
and the road where they'd been doing a double basement underneath -
they were building a cinema or something -
it had fallen in through the road and had destroyed all the piping,
so water was going through their house and into our house,
into our basement, and destroyed the bottom and foundations of our house.
And we were asked to come out,
and luckily we didn't have the dogs here,
otherwise they probably would have drowned!
This is a video of it after the skip had been removed.
That's a lot of water.
Yeah, it's a lot of water.
Lucca's dad, Michael, called in a structural engineer
to look at the damage.
He didn't like coming in this room.
He just basically said, "I don't want to be in this room
"until we get some acrow props.
"Once the acrow props are in, it's perfectly all right
"to be in here, although it's obviously unsightly."
We realised that the Party Wall Act was completely insufficient
and therefore we would have to try to sue the people next door
just to put our house back in order.
The property was owned by a company in an offshore tax haven.
Both it and the basement sub-contractor
have since closed down.
Then we had absolutely nobody to go against
for restitution or rebuilding costs.
I mean, forget it, there was just absolutely nobody there.
INTERVIEWER: You do sound angry, I have to say. You do.
Of course, I'm angry underneath it. I think it's disgusting.
I don't really want anybody to feel sorry for me,
but I do want people to learn from this process
and realise that, actually, when people do this kind of thing
it's completely irresponsible.
The law is absolutely insufficient to protect home owners.
Back in Kensington and Chelsea,
the dig next door to Jeremy has been going on for 15 months.
And the reality of living day to day so close to one of the biggest
excavations in the borough is taking its toll.
Stop it!
You never stick to your area.
You have another frontage the other side and you have it this side.
So you just stop doing it!
If you're reasonable, I'm reasonable.
But when you overstep the mark
the answer is not, "The work is here, it has to be done."
Not at my expense and not at my inconvenience.
There's a middle ground.
Well, I think I'm perfectly within my rights to say,
"Listen, guys, you have your area, it's a double frontage.
"If you want to use that double frontage, fine,
"but, at the end of the day, you don't come across mine,
"and if you want to come across mine then you ask to do so."
It's that simple.
Another thorn in Jeremy's side
is the army of grab lorries servicing the dig.
We've seen examples where these things have been here
for nearly an hour at a time.
On average, we've had our road blocked
for three and half to four hours a day.
You can see it can't get round.
It's totally impractical for this road.
It's been passed by the council. It's totally impractical.
They won't be able to get through here because there are two Transits.
They're going to back it up.
So, we'll just start the process we normally start.
There's no way they will be able to get through that.
It's almost like going for your driving test
and doing a three-point turn all over again.
Well, he's obviously a more skilful driver then I thought.
Do they always manage to get through?
No, it's, erm...
I would say it's probably a 50% chance, to be honest.
Though the council are investigating Jeremy's catalogue of complaints,
they're just not moving fast enough for him.
I can't believe that, er...
the council authorities will not attend to this
for the remaining duration of the build.
It's not as if it's three months - it's over a year.
We pay taxes and we pay these council officers' salaries,
so why should they not be accountable to us?
I'm worried that you're getting overwrought.
I wouldn't...I wouldn't necessarily say that it's stressing me out,
but the fact is, it's...
It's complications you could do without.
These things could be sorted out and should be sorted out.
I don't understand why they take so much time,
I don't understand why they're so problematic.
Is there an agenda here?
Away from the bitter battles in Central London
and pushed along by rising property prices,
the basement craze is spreading.
Do I look as if I've got to brush me hair?
How long have you lived here, John?
50 years. Yeah.
And how's the neighbourhood changed?
Gentrified. Is that the word? Yes.
Yeah. People moved in, judges, doctors, lawyers and all that.
These houses have gone from, within the time I've lived here,
from 30,000 to 1.5 million.
I mean, that's kind of a bit freaky.
The East End was always classed as a slum area,
and now suddenly everyone wants to be in the East End.
What's it like having all these basements dug nearby?
It doesn't really worry us at all.
I don't worry about things like that.
But, as local basement builder Roger knows only too well,
not everyone is eager to jump on the basement bandwagon.
I've observed what's happening up there.
There's a couple of basements that have been going on
for about a year, I should think.
Well, that's because there's, like, five in a row,
so we've gone from one to the next one...
Is that you, as well? Yes. Oh, bloody hell.
People who are having it done or are thinking of having it done
are absolutely fine.
But the people who've got no intention of having it done
are obviously not keen on it in any way, shape or form.
Roger's been in the basement building game for six years.
The starting price for one of his digs is £160,000.
We started off doing one, and then the neighbour saw it,
and it just kind of snowballed from there.
How long have you been working on this street, Roger?
Been working on this street for well over a year now,
and I think it's going to be for a few more years to come, as well.
Hopefully I'm not becoming a hate figure.
The trouble is, it is classed as major structural engineering works.
You can't make an omelette without smashing a few eggs.
One of his current clients is Jo.
For her and her husband, digging a basement is about
keeping a home in London for themselves and their two children.
We've outgrown the house.
Tried buying locally, it's just there.
Our offer was not even responded to.
So this was our option for staying in London.
You know, past 14, I don't think our kids would ever forgive us
had we left London.
But we've got this next eight years of kind of kid madness
to get through, and it's how we do it without us going mad.
So their solution is to spend £210,000.
But Jo won't be adding a wine cellar or a swimming pool,
just some vital living space below stairs.
This whole kitchen area will start at this wall
and go to the end of the conservatory,
and that will be the footprint of the family room downstairs.
Ron next door, who is an 87-year-old ex-flamenco dancer,
he said he doesn't care.
This area, there'll be a bathroom area and a walk-in wardrobe.
Our other neighbours on the other side
that live in a council property,
they're fine about it, they've been really helpful.
This footprint will be a bedroom, master bedroom.
It would be odd for it suddenly to meet resistance, you know,
cos everyone's sort of, "Oh, yeah, we understand the houses are quite..."
You know, and everyone's struggling to fit in with kids.
Roger's dug 50 basements this year,
and he's on target to triple that next year to 150.
Thank you, cheers.
We've just completed a basement for a guy who's a fork-lift driver
and lived in London all his life,
and scraped the money together, re-mortgaged his house,
and we've just completed his basement.
In the country, people just wouldn't consider digging a basement.
Down around there you just put your house on the market
and buy a bigger one.
It's just the London boom.
Back in Kensington and Chelsea,
it's the moment of truth for the council.
After two months' consideration,
the government's Planning Inspectorate
has finally reached its decision.
'BBC London 94.5. It's 7:47, and Kensington and Chelsea
'has become the first council in the whole country
'to restrict basement development.'
'The message is that the Royal Borough really does mean business now.
'It is a historic moment, I think.'
For the media who've been reporting on basement saga,
the wait is now over.
It's a huge story for us.
I mean, Kensington and Chelsea have been fighting a legal battle
with the developers and the construction companies
for a couple of years now, and in fact have taken them
to the Planning Inspectorate, which ruled in favour of the council.
The decision means that
in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
you can only build a single-storey basement.
So, today I'm off to see Tim Coleridge,
Head of Planning at Kensington and Chelsea council.
What I really object to is when they build underground rooms,
they say they're going to be
like children's playrooms or an underground sitting room,
and then they actually put their staff in there with no daylight.
So, I want to talk to him a little bit about their new policy
and what it might mean for the borough.
There was an application which was granted some years ago
where the owner loved diving off a very high diving board.
So he built a swimming pool in Notting Hill Gate,
which is high enough to dive off a 20ft board
into his very deep swimming pool.
But you might put off billionaires from living here
cos they might think, "Right, we'll go to Marylebone instead."
They're very welcome to do so.
How are you? Very well, thank you.
Good to see you. Nice to see you again.
It's not going to stop people applying and building modest
one-storey basements, which will have their own difficulties. Yeah.
But they'll have to make that choice, won't they?
Do they want the single-storey basement to be the swimming pool,
or do they want it to be the wine cellar?
What a terrible choice. Tough choice.
What a tough choice to make, you know.
So that's the end of the iceberg home as we've known and loved it.
What are we going to write about?
What do you have to do now?
You have to go and cut that all up in little bits? Yeah.
Get it down to three seconds! HE LAUGHS
I thought that was very interesting.
I still feel, however, that, um,
even single-storey basements
are going to carry on in large numbers,
so I don't think it's the end of basement hell
for central London, by any means.
And so the divisive iceberg home has run aground in Kensington.
There will be no more double or triple basements built here.
But for basement digs already on the go, and for developers,
builders and neighbours caught up in them, the journey is far from over.
The Royal Borough of Kensington magazine. I saved it for you.
"The end of iceberg homes."
But they're still allowing one floor down.
Isn't that a good thing?
Well, it's a good thing that it's not three floors,
but one floor's bad enough.
The answer is not, in my view,
one where one should just walk away from it and allow developers,
who are making massive profit margins at the expensive of the common man,
to just get away with this without any accountability whatsoever.