CORONATION ROUTE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 54, Issue 3895, 28 April 1937, Page 4

CORONATION ROUTE

PROFITEERING IN SITES. £3OOO FOR ROOF VIEWS. To a Bloomsbury boarding-house keeper recently, states the News Chronicle, came an affluent gentleman from the North of England, who said: “You have 20 bedrooms? I’ll take your whole house for coronation week and I’ll give you £5 a room for that week alone.” The Bloomsbury man's boarders are paying him 25s a week. But it was not on their account that he refused this offer. He turned it down because he was confident that he could easily get £lO each for his 20 bedrooms. He is now negotiating on these lines. He has already dropped a hint to the boarders that their rooms will be “reqfiired” for coronation week. What is going to happen to the hoarders? # > They are working Londoners. Nobody is going to give them a bonus to enable them to pay the hysterical prices that are being asked for accommodation within 10 miles of Charing Cross for the week beginning May 10. SOME BIG PRICES. Examples of these prices: An obscure hotel 20 minutes from Piccadilly Circus said that it had “a few rooms left” for coronation week at £2 2s a night. A flat with three bedrooms in South Kensington is “to be let furnished” at £lOOO for three weeks. A West End agent persuasively suggested as “a bargain, the way prices are at the moment,” a suburban four bedroomed house at £lOO for the month of May.

A landlady whose house is in a dingy street in South Landan, is offering a double bed and breakfast for two for three nights at £6.

For seats along the coronation procession route site charges are touching hilarious heights. The roof of one building was recently offered at £3OOO. A business firm sold two stories of its offices fronting on the route for £lBOO. Office rooms (with windows) "to hold 15 or 20” are offered at £367 10s each room.

In one place on the route is a narrow iron balcony, approached by two windows:

On the balcony is to be a row of chairs, on each of which it will cost £26 5s to sit. Behind every chair is to be placed one standing spectator, and he will pay £l2 12s for the privilege. DEALINGS OF AGENTS. The two windows come next; and behind the windows will be a third row of spectators, each of whom (the promoter of the plan thinks) will band over another £l2 12s for being allowed to peer over the others’ heads. It is fair to say that the owner of the room is not wholly responsible for these prices. He sold the space to an agent, and the agent sold it to another agent. . . . For seats, so far, there has been a steady stream of money; and a lot of it. has been American money. But there are still great numbers of seats. Sites are still being sold. New plans of new stands keep appearing. Whether the demand will be maintained, unabated, until May 12 is not certain. If it is not, some of the most recent purchases of sites whose owners have been holding out for bigger and yet bigger sums are likely to lose heavily. For accommodation in fancy priced flats and houses there is so far extremely little demand. The truth is that most London house agents have been kept busy so far answering inquiries, not by would-be tenants but by wouldbe lessors.