With money in the bank and dollars to burn, it’s a good time to be an American in London. The US’s chief gripe about the UK capital used to be that the pricey pound made everything here so expensive. But last year the post-Covid pound tumbled, hitting an all-time low against the dollar in the aftermath of Liz Truss’s “mini-budget” and providing hefty discounts. America is bouncing, and it’s making itself at home.
First came a royal flush of Middle Eastern oil money, then the Russians to keep London afloat. Now, it’s American investors, once again riding in from the West. Restaurants and theatres are stuffed with American visitors, London’s real estate market is turning red, white and blue, and US investors are chasing UK businesses like they’re going out of fashion. “I feel like during the pandemic older Americans were thinking: we’ve got to travel, we have the money and we need to travel together because we have the money and who knows what could happen in the future,” says Stuart Procter, chief operating officer at The Stafford hotel in St James’s, which has enjoyed a surge in American visitors. “What are we going to do, be the richest people in the graveyard or have some fun?” In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Londongrad has bitten the dust — all hail Londonland, America’s 51st State.
“In case we ever forget it, London is a leading global city,” says Jonathan Goldstein, the British developer who bought Chelsea Football Club with US billionaire Todd Boehly for £4.25 billion in May last year. “It has every entertainment, cultural, spectacular attraction that one would want to have in a leading city, and a strong foundation in its rule of law and a common language that remains the most spoken in the world.
“That’s why it remains a beacon to those who wish to have a home here and those who wish to set up business here. It’s very easy to write off capital cities. But they have a stability and a resilience to them which underpins and smooths out the risks even if you’re in difficult times.”
And US investors spy big growth opportunities in British start-ups. Arm, the UK chip-maker, is expected to be worth £58 billion when it’s floated on the New York Stock Exchange later this year — a float that has angered those who believe that the UK Government is allowing its golden eggs to be pinched by foreign investors. But it’s not just deep-pocketed US investors benefiting. Gordon Sanghera, the CEO of Oxford Nanopore Technologies, a £2 billion London-listed DNA sequencing business, recently noted that American pension funds have simply been far bolder in backing British start-ups like his. Teachers in Texas are raking it in.
Elsewhere, the London property market has also proven a draw. Taylor Swift reportedly wants to beef up her £123 million property portfolio by house hunting in St John’s Wood and Hampstead — even as real estate agent Knight Frank says combined price declines and currency drops have created an effective discount of 19% in London’s sought-after Chelsea neighbourhood and 17% in Knightsbridge. In Zone 1, says Knight Frank’s head of UK residential research Tom Bill, prices are 15% lower than they were in 2014, meaning there are bargains close to the capital’s hot spots. Beauchamp estates, another upmarket agency, estimates that half the homes valued above £15 million went to American buyers — about £620 million worth of luxury property, and around a fifth of top-end sales.
It’s not just hedgies buying up palatial London addresses. High-paid execs at Apple’s shiny new HQ in Battersea Power Station and both Meta and Alphabet’s digs in Kings Cross have to live somewhere: Zuckerberg deputy Nick Clegg and Instagram boss Adam Mosseri have moved to London. Indeed, according to reports 10 of the 30 families who bought homes at No 1 Grosvenor Square, the former US embassy, were US tech leaders, often spending £30 million on the property in question. West Coast Venture Capitalists, long reluctant to back start-ups beyond America, became bigger investors in the UK during the pandemic: Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley VC firm which invested early in Google, Apple, YouTube, Airbnb, Nvidia and Cisco, opened a UK office in trendy Marylebone in 2022. Young, whizzy Silicon Valley types are cashing in too: J Russell DeLeon, an online gambling billionaire, bought a four-storey, seven bedroom house near Notting Hill last year.
Rising cost of living, inflated house prices, a surging dollar and political uncertainty at home have given a notoriously domicile American population — the US State department estimates only 37% of Americans have a valid passport — itchy feet. ‘It’s a combination of politics and the fact that gun safety is a huge concern for everyone I know,’ says Whitney Bromberg Hawkings, the Texan founder of luxury flower service Flowerbx, who has lived here for 20 years but now says ‘most Americans I know are moving — or moving back — to London’. Gun control is dividing America. ‘The danger of getting shot at when you go to a store is very real [in the US],’ she says. ‘And now you look at like the abortion laws, the anti-LGBT laws, it’s like going back to the Dark Ages.’
A cataclysmic drain of top talent from the US is surely unthinkable since American wages are the most competitive in the world. But if you’re lucky enough to be paid in dollars, the City is your oyster. ‘I’ve started making up excuses about why I can’t go out with my US colleagues to Annebelle’s on a Tuesday,’ says one British financier. ‘I just can’t keep up with their spending.’
Americans who move here seem perennially awestruck by the capital’s diversity. ‘I base a lot of my core values around diversity and being surrounded by that,’ says Austin Allaire, 26, a strategic consultant from Iowa and Chair of the UK LGBTQ+ Caucus at Democrats Abroad. ‘I’d just come out as a gay man when I came to London and being in a city where that is not only accepted and celebrated helped me to really own that identity.’ What’s more, in the age of Trumpism, it’s more agreeable to be a democrat abroad. ‘Even the most raucous of debates here don’t hold too much of a flame against the temperature of the political climate in the US,’ says Allaire. This strikes a chord with others. ‘Being a black American woman it feels like here I’m an American first, which gives a whole different perspective’, says Candace Salter, 25, a London-based US marketing consultant who runs a blog, Candace Abroad. ‘Living in the States things can be so race based. London was the first place I felt like I could fully be me.’
But while London’s rusty charm may be quaint to America, it comes at a price. Financiers complain that UK companies are unnecessarily handicapped by tradition. Outdated UK financial practices — for instance, raising large amounts of capital still requires that shareholders are contacted by post — means that UK companies take months to do what US companies can do in weeks. To be listed on the London Stock Exchange, a company needs three years of audited financial statements — if you’re a fast growing tech company, you don’t necessarily have that. It’s no surprise that the Financial Conduct Authority has embarked on the biggest rewrite of listings rules since the 1980s (the snappily-named Primary Markets Effectiveness Review).
At The Stafford, Proctor says that it’s ‘Englishness’ — our old country’s old ways — that keeps the American market interested. But no one wants to be a graveyard of ambition. In January, George Freeman, the UK’s minister for science, research and innovation, told the Financial Times that the government’s ‘entire mission’ is to shift the UK from being an ‘academic powerhouse to a science superpower’ — a country fit for tomorrow. ‘We’ve got lots of start-up fuel,’ said London Stock Exchange chief executive Julia Hoggett. ‘But we’re not running the engine.’ It’s nice to roll out the welcome mat. But London means business, too.
