The Story

For about two years the smart money has been saying London is finished. The non-doms are fleeing, the story goes; the wealthy are wiring their fortunes to Dubai and Milan; the restaurants are thinning out and the lights are going off over the City. Then you spend an evening trying to get a table in Soho or Shoreditch and a different city shows up. The bookings are gone weeks out. New rooms open every week. And the people who supposedly gave up on the place are quietly trying to buy more of it.

Who Wrote the Obituary

The number everyone repeated, “16,500 millionaires will leave the UK in 2025”, came from Henley & Partners, a firm whose actual trade is selling wealthy people second passports and residency somewhere else. Its data comes from a research outfit, New World Wealth, that tracks company founders and, in the relevant years, left property wealth out of the count entirely. The tax lawyer Dan Neidle and the Tax Justice Network both went through the method and came away unconvinced; Henley’s own latest figures show enquiries from UK clients up about 15 per cent, which is not the sound of a stampede. Set 16,500 against roughly three million UK millionaires and you get about 0.6 per cent. On the firm’s own numbers, almost nobody who was a millionaire here in 2013 has actually left.

None of which means nothing changed. The non-dom regime, a Victorian arrangement that let wealthy foreigners shelter overseas income for a flat fee, ended in April 2025, and a real if smaller group at the very top did go; the government’s own forecasters expected something closer to 1,200 departures than sixteen thousand. Prime central prices slipped around three per cent over the year. The losses are real enough; they are simply not the funeral they were sold as.

Why It Matters

This is the now-lens at work on a whole city. A feed with no memory takes a genuine wobble, tax changes and a soft prime market, and inflates it into collapse, because collapse travels further than nuance. The people with real capital are doing the opposite of panicking. Bank of London and The Middle East, a Gulf-focused UK bank, expects Gulf money in UK commercial property to reach £3.4 billion by the end of 2026 — the optimism of an interested party, but it points the same way as everything else. Agents report Gulf buyers circling what Property Week flatly calls “cut-price” prime stock, with the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar behind roughly 86 per cent of Gulf enquiries. American buyers have overtaken Chinese ones as the largest overseas force in prime central, a few of them leaving problems of their own at home. And the restaurant trade, supposedly a casualty, just had a bumper year: 146 new openings in 2025 on Harden’s count, with 2026 shaping up to match.

The Caveat

Hold the bunting. A market that drops three per cent and then gets called “cut-price” by the buyers circling it is a market that went down, whatever it does next. The £3.4 billion is still a forecast; nobody has signed those contracts yet. “Rising enquiries” is what every agent says in every market, good or bad. And the same now-lens that oversold the death will happily oversell the resurrection: two good years for restaurants and a wave of Gulf interest is a long way from a boom. The honest grade is recovery, early and uneven, off a low base.

What’s Next

The thing to watch is whether the money’s feet match its mouth. Rachel Reeves is reportedly weighing a partial reversal of the non-dom changes, which would quietly concede that some of the exit was real. If Gulf and American capital actually closes on prime central through 2026, and that £3.4 billion turns into deals, the obituaries will age as badly as obituaries usually do. London has been written off before: in the seventies, after the Blitz, after the 2008 crash. It has a long history of disappointing its undertakers.