London's most expensive things

Just incase Donald Trump, Alan Sugar or Jimmy Carr are reading this we've put together a list of ways to spend your hard earned millions in London.

Entertainment

London is one of the 25 most expensive cities on the planet to live in. Furthermore, a 2012 TripAdvisor survey ranked the British capital as the priciest city in the world for a night out. We’ve put together a list of London’s most expensive things - it soon becomes easy to see how all those dinosaur bone-encrusted iPhones can result in a hefty bill.

Buy a property in Knightsbridge. A penthouse flat at One Hyde Park (yes, that is an actual address) sold for a very cool £136 million in 2011, surpassing Eaton Square as London’s most expensive residence. Your neighbours will be billionaire Eastern European businessmen who travel a lot, minimising the risk of awkward silences in the lifts. Plus, despite the extravagant price tag, you can rest assured you’ll be living in a borough with one of London’s lowest rates of council tax.

Eat a meal at Le Gavroche. This French restaurant entered the Guinness Book of Records in 1997 for serving the world’s most expensive meal, a total of £13k for three diners. There must have been a fair bit of vintage wine tasting going on for such a remarkable price, however some of the starters here cost around £40. By choosing carefully it is possible to inflate the cheque to astronomical heights at any fine dining establishment. Remember the broke filmmaker who was arrested following a series of “eat and run" incidents? Over the course of two weeks he impressed his girlfriend with costly meals, including a £572 bill at L’Autre Pied, and racking up £986 at Hélène Darroze at The Connaught. As a result he was banned from much of central London, so this behaviour is not advised.


Glug champagne at One For One. Lacking the funds to be able to road test the drinks cabinet of every private member’s club in the city, we’re pretty sure the £80,000 price tag of their Armand de Brignac Champagne is the most expensive. Bear in mind it’s for a Nebuchadnezzar, which is 15 litres rather than a regular bottle. That would just be bonkers.
\n\nBuy a television at Harrods. Their 152 inch Panasonic is £600,000, for which you get a screen resolution of 4096 x 2160 and motion picture resolution. We’d hazard a guess that means it’s very good.

Get a £20k haircut. Yep, that’s £20,000 at Stuart Phillips in Covent Garden. He may not be as famous as John Frieda or Charles Worthington, but as the official hair stylist of the BAFTA awards he must be doing something right. But although we don’t doubt he must have a nifty way with scissors, there are some added extras included in the price (you didn’t seriously think a mere trim is worth £20k did you?), such as a luxury car service, a champagne lunch, a goodie bag of hair products according to the customer’s hair type, and the hairdresser’s undivided attention, naturally.

Go to the cinema. It’s downright frugal compared to some of the other activities on this list, however movie-going has been an expensive pursuit since videos and DVDs became household items. The Curzon and the Electric Cinema are among the priciest (not counting the Odeon chain which charges extortionate rates in the West End), with tickets costing around £15. The Electric also offers two-seater sofas for £32.

Join Third Space gym, which is £129 a month. This swish gymnasium has a large array of classes open to members, a huge swimming pool at their Soho branch, a complementary therapy medical centre and generally swanky surroundings. Alternatively Chelsea’s Harbour Club gym has membership starting from £114 a month, yoga and zumba lessons aplenty, and a 14 metre waterfall pool.
\n\nShop on Bond Street, the street with the highest rent per square foot in the country. Unbelievably, this is set to soar to over £1,000 per square foot per week in the not too distant future. The shops inhabiting this moneyed street are suitably luxurious, including Tiffany & Co, Chanel and Alexander McQueen, but should you ever feel guilty for spending £900 on a handkerchief (don’t we all?) you can rest assured that you’re merely helping the shop pay its rent. If your taste in dressing is more casual, splash the cash on T-shirts instead. London brand Superlative Luxury make tees using solar energy and then emblazon them with diamonds, selling them for almost half a million pounds. It must have made sense to someone along the line.

Purchase a Ferrari 250 GTO, nowadays worth over £20 million. The vehicle can reach a speed of 174 miles per hour, but with that price tag would you risk taking it out on the road? One reckless driver did and duly crashed it in France in July 2012, becoming the world’s most expensive car accident. Enough to send anyone careening into a mid-life crisis.

Give your money to Apple, or rather to designer Stuart Hughes, who is responsible for creating the most expensive phone ever. It costs £6 million and has diamonds, gold, and a whole host of precious jewels we’ve already forgotten about, however it does boast authentic pieces of dinosaur bone, from a T-Rex no less. Now that is luxury.

Use a £10,000 toilet. Yep, that’s the going rate for one of the loos at the May Fair Hotel, although you’ll only have to fork out around £2k for a night’s stay here. More robot than toilet, they come equipped with massage jets, power deodorisers, and a “triple-jet tornado flush". It sounds terrifying, so for a more relaxing experience we recommend the lavatories at Sketch, where each cubicle is an egg-shaped pod, and there is no risk of a hurricane rising from the cistern.

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