Do foreign investors own all of London?
(Spoilers — no).
First of all, I want to say, I don’t like the question in the title. Really, I wanted to call it, ‘Why do people keep telling me foreign investors own all of London’.
But that seemed like a weird title. But I do keep being told one of the key reasons for high house prices in London, is that they — foreign investors — are the problem.
I’m always wary of statements that identify a group; a ‘they’. It implies that things that are ‘foreign’ are to be distrusted, and things that are “British’ are always going to be safe. In my view it creates a division when we need more clarity in understanding the details of what is actually going on.
But even if you want to make the argument that foreign investors own a lot of London, from the data I can see, they don’t.
It’s worth saying first of all, that we don’t actually know who owns all of London.
There are many people who have been working hard to try and find out, do check out the work of Guy Shrubsole and Anna Powell-Smith and their website ‘Who Owns England’. Yet even with a lot of digging, there is still quite a lot of stuff that we just don’t know.
There is a register of land — the land register. It’s just there are quite a lot of gaps on the register. Teachers…
