Well-heeled

To be well-heeled means to be wealthy and well-to-do. Perhaps wearing nice shoes is where “well-heeled” comes from.

On Professor Solanka’s street, well-heeled white youths lounged in baggy garments on roseate stoops, stylishly simulating indigence while they waited for the billionairedom that would surely be along sometime soon.

The world changes, consumerism marches on, and things once considered luxuries for the well-heeled are now taken for granted by us all — homes with 2½ bathrooms, air travel, cars with power windows.

These public artworks only arrived a few weeks ago, Winterson explains, as part of a grand plan to pedestrianise the area, and make it more buzzy, just at the moment that the sort of well-heeled office workers who bought upmarket chocolates are abandoning it owing to the Covid pandemic.

Mum had worked there as a teenager and once recalled her duty of having to meet the charabancs that brought the well-heeled to the baths from Droitwich station before the war.