Hampstead is still home to the chattering class

Have they read all the works of Sebastian Faulks? Can they tell a Gewurztraminer from a Riesling?

According to "new research" - that catch-all euphemism for half-truths and dodgy assertions - Wandsworth in south London can now be considered "the spiritual home of the chattering classes". An outfit called Experian Business Strategies, commissioned to examine urban demographics, has found that Wandsworth contains a higher proportion of people who espouse "metropolitan values, attitudes and spending patterns... the chattering classes in other words," than any other urban area.

What a load of gluten-free poppycock. The spiritual home of the chattering classes is Hampstead in north London, and long has been. The spiritual leaders of the chattering classes, from Melvyn Bragg to Fay Weldon, Simon Callow to Doris Lessing, simply would not dream of living anywhere else.

Moreover, where are the "chattering classes" jokes about Wandsworth, as relentlessly cracked by the comedian Arnold Brown about Hampstead? The Hampstead branch of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, Exit, according to Brown, is called Ciao. Even people who live in council houses in Hampstead, he likes to suggest, have council houses in the Mendips that they go to at weekends.

This latter gag, of course, while irresistible, is not really about the chattering classes so much as the monied classes. And that is the misconception of Experian Business Strategies: million-pound houses and children in private education are not the badges of the chattering classes. Wandsworth may well be more affluent than Hampstead, but I doubt whether it has a higher proportion of liberals who make their own aioli. And as the author E Arnot Robertson once said, "Hampstead is not so much a place as a state of mind". When did anyone say that, or indeed anything worth quoting, about Wandsworth?

Obviously I generalise. In her maiden speech to the House of Commons, the MP for Hampstead and Highgate, Glenda Jackson, stressed that there were more people in her constituency on supplementary benefit than there were collecting royalty cheques. She did not, incidentally, explore that bit of the Venn diagram comprising those on benefit and collecting royalty cheques, which would have been fascinating. Nevertheless, her point was well made. Yet for all that, I can't help wondering how many times the MP for Wandsworth has played Hedda Gabler?

Besides, does Wandsworth have a newspaper quite like the Hampstead & Highgate Express? Does anywhere? When I cut my teeth as a reporter there, in the late 1980s, regular contributors to the literary pages included Michael Foot, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Drabble. The paper even had a full-time art critic, an unusual woman who didn't say much to anyone but expressed herself mainly through her writing. Her greatest hour, by the way, was when she delivered an obituary of a local ceramicist. "The highlight of Alison Corrigan's career," she wrote, in a rare burst of comprehensible prose, "was the week she displayed her jugs in St Martin-in-the-Fields."

As for the many local pressure groups whose meetings I covered, among the most formidable was the exquisitely-named PHAFF, memorable acronym for Primrose Hill Against Flash Floods.

If the chattering in chattering classes is held to mean the erudite natter around dinner tables of the urbane, arty and perhaps slightly smug folk who know Tuscany far better than they know Brixton but support famine-relief in Africa as vigorously as they encourage flood-prevention at the bottom of their road, then just how much more chattersome can you get?

Wandsworth may have more than its fair share of bonus-toting City bankers and brokers, but they are not remotely representative of the chattering classes. Have they read all the works of Sebastian Faulks? Do they watch Newsnight? Can they tell a Gewurztraminer from a Riesling? On the whole, I doubt it. London NW3, on the other hand, has been the spiritual home of the chattering classes since at least the 1920s, when Virginia Woolf observed drily that "everybody in Hampstead wears brown corduroy".

It is undeniable, though, that corduroy-wearing liberals are slowly being driven out, forced down the hill to Camden Town or even northwards towards Golders Green. The bankers and brokers are colonising Hampstead as they already have Wandsworth. In neighbouring Highgate, Victoria Wood recognises their wives as toned women with expensive hair who each morning double-park their enormous four-wheel drives, with bumpers constructed to repel marauding rhino, while depositing their children at the Fluffy Bunny Montessori School.

The spiritual home of the chattering classes may, therefore, eventually relocate. But it won't relocate to Wandsworth.

In the meantime, the failure of Experian Business Strategies to understand the term "chattering classes" perhaps lies with the term itself. After all, the verb "to chatter" is defined in my dictionary as "to talk rapidly or incessantly, especially on a trivial subject", or to utter "a rapid series of short, inarticulate, speechlike sounds". In which case, perhaps it is not Melvyn Bragg but Jamie Oliver who properly embodies the chattering classes. And where does Jamie live? Curiously enough, in the heart of Hampstead.

b.viner@independent.co.uk