The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook: The First Guide to What Really Matters in Life

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By the end of the decade, smart Sloane survivors in London were consciously drabbing down the vowel sounds but smartening up the dress codes, avoiding anything that said old-world amateur. Going modern.

This was also the year, 1982, when Kate Middleton, the future Duchess of Cambridge (Downe House, Marlborough College, University of St Andrews, History of Art) was born. Did the rising Middletons pore over the Sloane Ranger Handbook and then the Good Schools Guide?You probably appreciate the MO of the original Range Rover from a thousand articles and mentions across car media. You know; it could plough and crash its way across farmland from dawn until about tea-time, and then serenely cruise its way along the M4, past Heathrow, crest the Hammersmith Flyover and then pull up somewhere behind Harrods at dusk. A final gurgle from the V8 and its charges were safely delivered to Knightsbridge. an OK county. And private education – which meant elaborate, impoverishing saving schemes and tapping up kindly old parents. And buying some equally battered 18th-century portraits for the drawing room at the bin end of an auction so the house could look the part. Yet surely few now would embrace the description, as they might have 40 years ago. Then ‘Sloane Ranger’ may have been used affectionately, latterly more derisively. Perhaps the Sloane has become more a figure of fun than one of aspiration. After all, even they have been priced out of the heart of west London, pushed all the way to Earl’s Court, less able to congregate in sufficient numbers to define an area. Sloanes were squeezed out – geographically but also culturally – by the holders of brash, new, huge money who came in, gobbled up all the Sloane institutions and imposed some meritocracy. In 1989, the Sunday Times Rich List noted that two-thirds of the wealth of those on its register was inherited; by 2000, three-quarters of it was self-made. The story is local and global. This January, Oxfam weighed in too with the unforgettable big picture story that “Oxfam expects the wealthiest to own more than 50 per cent of the world’s wealth by 2016. The world’s 85 richest people,” they said, were about to be “worth as much as the poorest 3.5bn of the world’s population.”

I got the credit for the brilliant anecdotes and details Ann had extracted from her own early low-tech version of Facebook – writing to everybody in Sloaneshire, asking for Sloane stories. By 2021, there seemed to be every possible shade of Sloane around in London. But were they really Sloanes at all? It looked as if the only way for a Sloane to succeed was to UnSloane themselves. ( Made in Chelsea was a positive festival of international rich kids, not Sloanes). Does the Sloane Ranger still exist today? Downton Abbey, The Crown and even Megxit has led to enduring interest in all things upper class. The always dapper Prince of Wales has even launched his own clothing line. The entertainment industry now has an atypical share of poshos – from James Blunt to Eddie Redmayne – seeing as though coming from the streets used to be the essential calling card for any ‘authentic’ artist. And certainly it’s been argued that Kate Middleton, born the year that The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook was published, has helped revive the type, with Prince Harry doing the same for the men. Hugh Grant and then-girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley in 1997For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Preppies and Sloanes became icons around the same moment. Both books demonstrated in satirical—if loving—terms, that while status was something with which you were born, the trappings and wardrobe of a certain kind of social elite could be practiced and adopted. Who needs a country estate in Surrey or Kennebunkport when you have a handbook and the J.Crew catalogue? Exclusion became aspiration. After what had seemed like decades of an intellectual moratorium on big picture discussion of class and inequality, it was everywhere (I’d been told by broadcasters before 2008 “that’s so not today’s issue,” when I’d wanted to look at the rich as anything but lifestyle options, and immediately after 2008 it was off the table). A welcome side effect of this anti-French dressing was that clothes became far more comfortable. Eighties’ Sloane Rangers also made relaxation a priority. One glance at Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson in muddy Barbours or colourful jumpers proves that they prized being able to move freely above quite a few other considerations (including, sometimes, taste). Diana, Princess of Wales with Sarah Ferguson at the Guard's Polo Club, Windsor, June 1983. Georges De Keerle/Getty Images

Two years ago, over coffee in a literary agent’s Soho office, I was asked if I would be interested in collaborating with the style-writer Peter York on a new version of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook. (Not much of a boast, I realise.) Aside from the scant appeal of working on a retread, I remembered all too clearly how the original book fell on my generation of privately educated undergraduates in the early 1980s like an asteroid from space, releasing a virulent pathogen. Cooler, Faster, More Expensive: the Return of the Sloane Ranger (2007), with Olivia Stewart-Liberty.There can be little doubt that the Hooray Henrys of 1980s Chelsea would have felt right at home in Regency England. One look at the second series of Bridgerton, which launched on Netflix last week, shows just how the early-19th century elites paved the way for the Sloane Rangers who followed in their footsteps. She was interested in everyone’s opinions, but kept her own to herself. She would emit high shrieks of laughter when she read or heard something funny, but had a slightly forbidding manner; you wouldn’t lightly interrupt her. A quiet, gentle, vulnerable, kind woman, she also had a darker side, and her anger would leap out unexpectedly. There was not much grey about her: you were either right or wrong. The term is a pun based on references to Sloane Square, a location in Chelsea, London, famed for the wealth of its residents and frequenters, and the television character The Lone Ranger.