London's property bubble has got people energetically expanding their
property, digging out sub-basements -- and the insane bubblenomics of
London housebuilding are such that it's
cheaper to just bury the digger and abandon it than to retrieve it. London's accumulating a substrate of entombed earthmoving machinery.
A new solution emerged: simply bury the digger in its own hole. Given
the exceptional profits of London property development, why bother with
the expense and hassle of retrieving a used digger – worth only £5,000
or £6,000 – from the back of a house that would soon be sold for several
million? The time and money expended on rescuing a digger were better
spent moving on to the next big deal.
The new method, now considered standard operating practice, is to cover
the digger with “hardcore”, a mixture of sand and gravel. Then a layer
of concrete is simply poured over the top. Digger? What digger? The
digger has literally dug its own grave – just as the boring machines
that excavated the Channel Tunnel were abandoned beneath the passage
they had just created.
How many of these once perfectly functioning and possibly still
serviceable diggers are petrified underneath central London, like those
Romans preserved cowering in the corners of houses in Pompeii? Estimates
vary. One property developer I asked reckoned at least 1,000; another
put the figure at more like 500. In some of London’s newest luxury
conversions, “sub-basements” are being tucked beneath the existing
basement conversions. But developers are stumbling on a new kind of
obstacle as they burrow deeper still: abandoned diggers from the last
round of improvements.
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