Forget space tourism and blood diamonds – the latest way to flaunt your wealth is to build your very own underground Batcave. In London's Chelsea and Belgravia, where property is at such a premium that even Russian oligarchs struggle to make the rent, millionaires are going underground. After all, digging down to convert the basement is cheaper than buying more land, and provides space for their home IMAX theatres and Swarovski-encrusted velodromes. Snazzy basements are de rigueur. Actually, Andrew Lloyd Webber, the UK's most famous cellar dweller, has got two, which he's knocked together to make a gigantic super-fabulous luvvie bunker. He probably sits down there all day at the piano, picking his nose and humming Memory. Oh, how the other half live.
The only drawback is that basement conversions are rather controversial, even among the 10 people in Britain who can afford them. Aside from the possibility of finding a forgotten Chilean miner while you're plumbing in the en suite, the neighbours absolutely hate them because of the endless noise, dust and displaced rats. It seems that no matter how rich and famous you are, basement conversions are a vulgar irritant – a posh version of Jack and Vera Duckworth's stone cladding.
To get a sense of how emotive "basementing" has become, witness the effect it's had on Charles Saatchi. Charles and his wife, Nigella Lawson, are so incensed by a planned garden conversion next door that they've decided to sell their £36m Chelsea home. Already furious that scaffolding for another renovation project was obscuring his view of Nigella's Milky Bar and Potato Waffle cheesecake, Saatchi ordered some workmen to remove the eyesore, reportedly damaging £50,000 worth of marble tiles in the process. (In Eaton Square, chipping one's marble is worse than murdering one's puppy.) In fact, the fashion for basement conversions is getting so out of hand that earlier this month an overloaded skip in Belgravia sank into the Earth's core – an ominous symbol of this country's collapse if I ever saw one.
Of course, if you were being frightfully generous, you could say that basement conversions are one of those "we're all in this together" money-saving compromises that the Tories are always on about. The rich forgo a few windows in their billiards room; we sleep rough in a supermarket trolley, using the Littlewoods catalogue as a blanket. It's all part of the "big society", with everyone working together to get through these difficult times.
However, for most people with real jobs and mortgages, these subterranean displays of extreme wealth set a disturbing trend. If the super-rich are retreating like demented foxes into their underground lairs, expanding their palatial townhouses ever downwards, where does that leave the rest of us?
The middle classes can hardly extend their mortgages, let alone convert the cupboard under the stairs into a boutique nightclub. For them, property aspiration came to standstill somewhere between Kirstie Allsopp becoming a Tory housing adviser and Sarah Beeny's seminal show Help Me, My House Is Minging! Add to that barely manageable debts, tumbling house prices and an extinct buy-to-let market, and the middle classes have had to give up their fetish for property. No more painting everything white for a quick sale or worrying about kerb appeal. Instead they've got to make the best of what they've got – frantically covering up the damp in the study with posters of Benedict Cumberbatch.
Then there are poor people. Even if they wanted to add an attractive conservatory to their cardboard box, they wouldn't be able to afford the bulldog clips from Staples. They would have to borrow the money off a loan shark at 3,367% APR, and then their benefits will be cut anyway and their cardboard box recycled to become limited edition Smythson diaries. If the "Kosovo-style social cleansing" that London mayor Boris Johnson predicts actually happens, there will be nowhere for those affected by the caps on housing benefits to go. Like those displaced basement rats, impoverished Londoners will soon be fleeing into the streets in search of food and shelter. With thousands of people reduced to Baldrick-esque peasant status, a subsiding skip in Belgravia will become the most sought-after place to sleep in town.
This will no doubt cause the rich to retreat and become virtually invisible, conducting their business strictly below stairs. Lawson will have gone to live in a £40m-Beatrix Potter rabbit hole in the country with Flopsy, Mopsy and Saatchi. Lloyd Webber will communicate with the world via furious letters to Transport for London, complaining that the vibrations from the District Line are disrupting tiffin. Above ground, the capital will be lawless, nothing but a smoking wreck of crumbling slums, potholes, closed libraries and desperate people chewing their own legs off.
Happily, the solution is staring us in the face. If Lampard and Lloyd Webber's underground conversions are as roomy and fabulous as they sound, there should be plenty of space to accommodate every member the 17,000 London households who will be affected by benefit cuts. Just think – they could turn Christine Bleakley's teeth-whitening suite into a playroom for the children. Convert the reclining home cinema seats into beds for the elderly. Transform Lloyd Webber's walk-in trophy cabinet into a progressive, non-denominational school. It could be social utopia down there – rich and poor living as one, with everyone queuing up in the morning to use Lampard's gold toilet. Just as long as nobody tries to claim single person's housing benefit on a £750,000 basement conversion in Chelsea, it should all work out fine.
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