Wealth, class and the house with the columns

When I was a kid, you knew someone was rich because they lived in the house with the columns outside.

You know the sort. Big detached house, enormous driveway, probably a Jaguar or Mercedes parked outside. Every town had one, and everyone knew the people who lived there had money.

I was thinking about this recently when something occurred to me. Whatever happened to the self-made man? It’s a phrase I remember hearing regularly growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s. Someone who’d started with nothing, worked hard, built a business and made something of themselves. You don’t seem to hear it much anymore.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps people still use it all the time and I simply don’t notice. But it got me thinking about what the phrase meant, and whether our understanding of success has changed.

When being a millionaire meant something

Growing up, a millionaire was properly rich. Not necessarily private-jet rich, but certainly someone who had achieved something extraordinary. Today, being worth a million pounds doesn’t necessarily mean you’re living an extravagant lifestyle. Property prices alone have changed that calculation.

A reasonably successful business owner with a nice house and a pension might be a millionaire on paper without having anything approaching a million pounds in the bank. But I think something else has changed.

When my parents were growing up, their exposure to wealthy people was relatively limited. They might have known the local businessman with the big house. They might have seen wealthy people on television or read about them in newspapers. But they weren’t routinely watching people holidaying in the Maldives, flying first class or sailing around the Mediterranean. Now we see that every day.

Open TikTok or Instagram and within minutes you’re watching someone showing you around a £10 million house in Dubai. The reference point has completely changed. That house with the columns hasn’t become any less impressive. We’ve just seen a thousand bigger ones. And I wonder whether that has fundamentally altered our perception of success.

Wealth, or the appearance of it?

There’s another complication. We don’t actually know who’s wealthy anymore. Someone driving a £100,000 car might own it outright. They might have it on finance. They might be leasing it through their business.

Someone taking five expensive holidays a year might be extraordinarily successful. Or they might be paying for everything on credit. Of course, people borrowed money in the 1990s too. Mortgages, hire purchase and credit cards aren’t new inventions.

But consumer finance has developed, and the opportunities to present a lifestyle that doesn’t necessarily reflect your net worth have expanded considerably. You can look extraordinarily wealthy without owning very much at all. Meanwhile, someone who has spent twenty years building a profitable business, owns their home and has accumulated substantial assets might drive an ordinary car and go on holiday to Spain once a year. Which one is successful?

We increasingly seem to judge wealth by what people consume rather than what they’ve created or accumulated. And perhaps that’s part of the problem.

The working-class connection

I think there’s a class element to this as well, particularly in the northern industrial towns where I grew up. For my dad’s generation, working life often followed a fairly predictable path. You left school and went into the factory, the pit, the steelworks or whatever industry supported your town. Your dad might have worked there. Your mates probably did too.

There was nothing wrong with that. These were skilled jobs, often supporting entire families and communities. But the person who left that environment and started their own business was doing something different. They weren’t necessarily becoming enormously wealthy. They were changing their position within society.

They’d gone from working for someone else to creating something of their own. And I wonder whether that’s where the phrase self-made man had particular meaning. Not simply someone who had made money. Someone who had made themselves.

The phrase is much older than industrial Britain, of course. But I think it took on a particular cultural significance in communities where your occupation, your family and your social class were so closely connected. The self-made man was someone who had taken a different path.

Have we lost that distinction?

The working class hasn’t disappeared, but the traditional industrial working-class identity has certainly changed. Factories closed. Industries declined. Employment shifted towards services, logistics, retail and office work. The shared experience of entire communities working in the same industries became less common.

And perhaps, as those traditional class identities weakened, the distinction between someone who followed an established path and someone who created their own became less obvious. We still have entrepreneurs, founders and business owners. But those words describe what somebody does. They don’t tell us anything about where that person started.

Someone who inherits a successful business from their father might be a very capable business owner. Someone whose parents provide £200,000 to launch a startup might become an excellent entrepreneur. But neither has had the same experience as someone who started a business without financial backing and spent fifteen years building it.

That’s not to diminish their achievements. Running an inherited business successfully takes skill. Growing it takes skill. Some people inherit successful businesses and promptly destroy them. But surely there’s a distinction between maintaining something, growing something and creating something from nothing?

I think there is. And I think self-made was one of the ways we used to recognise it.

Nobody does it alone

There’s an obvious objection to all this. Nobody is truly self-made. Everyone benefits from other people. Education, infrastructure, employees, family, friends, customers and the society in which they operate. And that’s entirely fair.

In fact, I discovered that Frederick Douglass was making essentially the same argument more than 150 years ago. In his 1872 lecture Self-Made Men, he acknowledged that nobody could be entirely independent of the people and generations who came before them. But he still considered the expression useful. For Douglass, the important distinction was between those who benefited from favourable circumstances and those who achieved something despite lacking those advantages.

I rather like that. Because I don’t think describing someone as self-made ever needed to mean they accomplished everything entirely alone. It meant they hadn’t simply inherited the position they occupied. They’d had to build it. And there’s a difference.

Perhaps we’ve changed what success means

I’ve spent a good part of my adult life building a business. It started without inherited money or outside investment, and over the years it’s grown into something that employs people, supports families and has genuine value. I’m proud of that, although I wouldn’t pretend I’ve done it alone. I’ve had an education, opportunities, people who’ve helped me, and a team who’ve contributed enormously to what the business has become. I’ve also been fortunate in ways that other people haven’t.

But I sometimes wonder how someone from my parents’ generation would have viewed a business like mine. Not because it’s particularly extraordinary, but because I think they might have measured the achievement differently. Among the people I spend time with today, owning a business isn’t especially unusual. I know people who’ve built companies far bigger than mine, and others who’ve made considerably more money. My reference point has changed, just as everyone’s has.

Perhaps that’s part of what interests me about the phrase self-made man. It wasn’t necessarily a claim that someone was exceptional. It was a way of recognising that they’d changed their circumstances through something they’d built.

And I wonder whether we’ve become so accustomed to seeing extraordinary wealth that we’ve started overlooking more ordinary achievements. Not just in business, either. Someone becoming the first person in their family to go to university, learning a trade and establishing themselves, or building a stable life after a difficult start deserves recognition too. None of those things requires a Ferrari or a house with columns.

Perhaps we’re looking at the wrong things

Maybe the phrase has simply fallen out of fashion. It’s undeniably masculine and rather old-fashioned, and perhaps we’ve replaced it with more inclusive language. Or perhaps it was always a slightly romanticised idea, one that overlooked the advantages some people had and the contributions others made.

But I wonder whether we’ve lost something useful along the way. A way of recognising achievement that wasn’t exclusively about the amount of money someone possessed. A way of acknowledging where someone started, rather than simply where they ended up.

Someone who inherits £5 million and turns it into £10 million has undoubtedly achieved something. But so has someone who builds a modest business without financial backing, becomes the first person in their family to go to university, or creates a stable and comfortable life after a difficult start. Those achievements might look rather ordinary when compared with the lifestyles we see on social media, but that doesn’t make them insignificant.

I don’t know whether the phrase self-made man really has disappeared. I’d be interested to know whether other people remember hearing it more often. But I do think we’ve become so accustomed to seeing extraordinary wealth that we’ve started overlooking ordinary achievement.

And perhaps that’s a shame. Because I still think there’s something worth celebrating about someone who starts with very little and makes something of themselves, whatever that happens to mean to them.

Even if they never end up living in the house with the columns.