Transnational house-keeping: cleaning and security services for the wealthy in London and Southeast England

This thesis explores the relationships between wealthy households and the workers they pay to ‘keep’ their homes through cleaning and security practices. Since the London region has become a magnet for both rich families and domestic workers from around the world, it is important to examine these groups relationally, along with the intermediaries who broker these relationships. By combining interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis, I uncover tensions between the ‘global’ narrative of luxury mobility which transcends national boundaries, and the ‘local’ practices of staff who maintain the value and status of the wealthy’s homes, with and against the barriers of citizenship. House-keepers both maintain the façades of expensive buildings and perform the aesthetic labour of deference, combining the historic respectability of the formal household with the convenience of luxury hotel services. Wealthy employers and their house-keepers today are also internationally diverse and enmeshed in digital networks, but recruiters and managers reference cultural texts like Downton Abbey to give an English gentlemanly face to an industry stratified by nationality and gender. Because of these inequalities, employers simultaneously need their cleaning and security staff to protect their property while travelling, but also fear their intimate access to their private space. By highlighting this dependence, of the ostensibly ‘global’ wealthy upon staff working in and around London, I identify the distinct rhythms of transnational house-keeping and how they enable the leisure time of employers at the expense of their staff’s own private lives. The relationship of transnational house-keeping sits in a liminal position between ‘pre-modern’ servitude and ‘modern’ contract, with the national home of Britain and the wealthy households within it both reinforcing the ideal that some should serve while others should be served. As a result, this thesis contributes to the literatures of elite studies, migration, and domestic labour.