We have grown used to the idea that the only way to get a bigger house in London these days is to dig deep, to excavate a basement (or sub-basement if you already have one of the first order).
Until yesterday I had not realised that rich bankers are doing some excavations at the office as well. They need somewhere to store the gold – in all, an estimated 5,000 tonnes of the stuff, worth $290 million (that was yesterday’s price according to The Times).
I wonder what will happen if the current water shortage turns into a drought on the scale of 1976, which brought all sorts of subsidence problems in its wake.
We were, although we did not know it at the time, fortunate to have faulty, cracked drains; all the waste water produced by the occupants of the house had, instead of being carried through to the public sewers, seeped out to keep the clay subsoil moist & resilient instead of dry & cracked.
