This, then, is Middle Eastern London, part of an influx of wealth that has transformed the West End and cities right across Britain. It is all generated by the Middle East’s energy exports, which have created the fortunes of Gulf State sovereign wealth funds and the private wealth of ruling dynasties whose family offices expand their property empires. Yet it might not last forever. With the US-Iran war persisting unabated, and the Strait of Hormuz still closed, the Gulf’s black gold is no longer such a safe bet. And, as my walk round Mayfair hints, a red line on an accountant’s laptop in Doha can have profound consequences here at home. That’s true in the cars on the streets and the restaurants and the clubs — but also in the influence that foreign money can buy.

Middle Eastern London has been decades in the making. After the 1973 oil crisis, Gulf money made inroads into London’s property scene, with Saudi Arabian and Lebanese investors buying up the Dorchester Hotel two years later. These days, the scale of Gulf oil money in Britain is truly bewildering. Alrayan, a Sharia-compliant bank, estimates that $112.45 million landed on London real estate between March 2024 and March 2025 alone, a significant increase on the previous year. Spears magazine used data compiled by estate agent Frank Knight to suggest that private Gulf investors last year deposited £245 million into UK commercial real estate.

These estimates aren’t particularly reliable considering how much money is routinely hidden offshore. But they nonetheless hint at the scope of Gulf wealth and also imply a striking resilience. Of course, the rise and rise of private wealth is global. But the fact that Gulf assets are currently battered by war — yet still continue their march from the Middle East — neatly evokes the affluence of oil royalty.

This is clearest in the London property market. Qatari Diar, the country’s eponymous property development business, is behind a string of prestigious London hotels, including the Ritz and Claridge’s. Luxury stores like Harrods, the iconic Shard building, and the Canary Wharf Group that operates London’s Docklands — all these are part of Qatar Diar’s portfolio too. So too are some of the most prestigious residential properties in the city, including the spectacularly redeveloped Chelsea Barracks.

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It’s striking, too, that the footprint of Qatari investment now extends far beyond London. Qatari Diar is behind multi-billion pound urban developments in Glasgow, Manchester and Leeds. When it comes to private individuals, meanwhile, the Guardian discovered that Qatar’s ruling Al Thani family hold more than 4,000 land titles throughout Britain: from luxury mansions and hotels to industrial estates and ordinary terraced houses. Other Gulf monarchies have similarly vast holdings, with the Saudi royal family owning a portfolio of West End properties which dwarfs that relative pauper, the Duke of Westminster.

Not that you need Companies House to understand the Arab impact on London. For that you can just walk the streets of somewhere like Knightsbridge. With Harrods as its commercial center, the area is notorious for its “dark” streets and partly empty blocks, giving the neighborhood a ghostly under-occupied feel. Knightsbridge is part of the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which has the highest concentration of vacant, underused and second homes in the UK. Many of these apartments are used by their Middle Eastern owners for only a few weeks a year, when the weather in the Gulf is at its hottest. These dead streets are not a London asset. On the contrary, they look a bit abandoned.

Or else there are the luxury hotels, shops and art galleries, where displays of wealth and entitlement play out on a daily basis. Especially during the annual summer migration, young men fly their luxury cars to London from Riyadh or Muscat, speeding about in noisy displays of wealth. This too can cause problems: late-night races keep residents up, while eye-watering insurance bills result when crashes inevitably occur. There are also questions of accountability when foreign nationals are involved in accidents; Saudi Arabia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Britain.

Not that these screw-ups are really a problem: there just are so many incentives for foreign plutocrats to park their cash in Britain. Last year, Alrayan Bank reported that Gulf investors told them that they like the diversity of UK property, from modern blocks with concierges to period mansions like the Saudi embassy. They also like the favorable terms of purchase and the well-developed infrastructure in banking, accounting and legal services that supports international investment. The UK’s political stability, legal structures and relative financial transparency make it a good place to store their money.

None of this really helps the Treasury, as visitors and foreign investors add little to the UK’s tax take or collective prosperity. And what’s bad for Knightsbridge ear drums can also cause more profound tensions. The Qatari-funded redevelopment of Elephant and Castle resulted in the demolition of social housing, with residents relocated to more distant parts of London and beyond. Gulf money in Britain has other second-order consequences too. Housing shortages keep property prices and rental yields high, benefiting Gulf investors who can’t grow their money as effectively at home. None of this helps hard-up British professionals forced to commute to central London from Zone 5.

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What, though, might change in London and other British cities if the Hormuz crisis continues — and the financial and symbolic power of the Gulf States erodes? What if investments slow, stop, or are withdrawn altogether? In the first place, it’s likely that a drop in Gulf money would shrink displays of conspicuous consumption in places like Knightsbridge. Considering the various downsides, that might not be such a bad thing, allowing these West End neighborhoods to open up to more than property speculation and the super-rich.

In a sense, we don’t have to speculate what this might look like. All wars are different, but when Russia invaded Ukraine, the symbolic, political and financial authority of Russian oligarchs living in London quickly ebbed away. Roman Abramovich, Oleg Derpaska, Igor Sechin and their compatriots left the city — once dubbed “Moscow-on-Thames” — as government sanctions froze their assets and imposed travel bans. Today, their mansions are empty and their yachts motionless. Evgeny Lebedev, Boris Johnson’s friend, media baron and member of the House of Lords, may still live in London’s Regent’s Park. But his celebrity parties are no longer high-profile society events.

Of course, wealthy Middle Eastern investors aren’t the only international plutocrats in cities like London — though, like the Chinese, they are significant contributors in making the city what it is. All the same, might a decline in Middle Eastern clout lead to a rethink of the importance placed on international investment and wealthy foreigners in making these places special? Alongside iconic skyscrapers, Middle Eastern contributions to British cities are often seen as signs of vitality, a way of creating exciting city life, and a pathway to underscoring a certain global panache.

But allowing overseas investors to dump money in Britain also makes life painfully expensive for the rest of us. Nor does it have to be like this. After all, Canada, Denmark and New Zealand are just three of several countries that ban international investors from buying property. The UK, though, lets anyone with money to buy whatever they like. To that extent, the Iran war might be a good moment in which to pause and reconsider the impact of the oil money parked on British streets. In the end, does this wealth embellish people’s everyday lives? Or does it just make spots like Berkeley Square unlivable?

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A previous version of this piece incorrectly named the President of the UAE. We apologise for the error.

Just nearby is the “New Vic” development, another mass of skyscrapers. Like 40% of Manchester new builds, these apartments are raised to house generation rent. They look finished outside, but are still looking for tenants when I walk past. Slogans in the letting-office windows announce that they are “For the enlightened”, “For the adventurous”, “For the curious” — for, in other words, the University of Manchester graduates who want a “curated leisure area” even as they slog all day to pay for it. Despite the obvious fact that the 15,000 new homes announced on the billboard as “coming soon” are not yet finished, passersby are advised to “reserve your home today”.

A bit further along, I see that much of the Angel Square development is also coming soon. A student accommodation building and an abandoned coroners’ court sit nearby, off the fraying city side streets. The whole area looks crumbling, uninviting, not joined up to anything. I turn onto Dantzic Street, which later becomes Collyhurst Road, passing more building sites, and more lonely holes in the ground, until the city fades into light industry and logistics.

All this is Manchester. But it is also Chinese Manchester. Take the New Vic. It’s partly funded by Chinese money, though we don’t know how much because the local council keeps it secret. Or else there are the developments at Dantzic Street. Pinnacle, a UK developer, failed to build a pair of tower blocks there and at Angelsgate. Pinnacle went into administration in 2017, leaving off-plan buyers in Hong Kong, who pay deposits to secure apartments in buildings that are not yet built, short some £31 million. Manchester police and the Serious Fraud Squad were brought in to investigate irregularities, but in the end no charges were laid for lack of evidence. A Hong Kong company — Far Eastern Consortium — then bought the site and plans to develop it. Construction is delayed, and Manchester’s building-site aesthetic endures.

This is how Chinese money lands in Manchester, from Far Eastern Consortium, Beijing Construction Engineering Group International (BCEGI), CR Construction and the rest, aided and abetted by the council. Flush from his victory in Makerfield, we shouldn’t forget that Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism” is partly Chinese too, even if this sea of foreign cash churns largely in private. Asia, not China, features in council reports as a major source of capital: for all that real estate is now part of the story Manchester tells itself, locals may not be happy to learn how it’s funded.

The ragged China on the streets of Manchester is at odds with that other China — gleaming, self-confident and widely understood as the coming superpower of our century. That country was most obviously on display during the so-called “golden era” of Anglo-Chinese relations, spanning from 2008 to 2017, when the UK was keen to hitch its sluggish economic wagon to China’s high-speed train, anticipating a fast ride to prosperity.

Billions in Chinese investment flowed into London, Manchester, Liverpool, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rushed to invest capital it couldn’t absorb at home. The UK, for its part, was equally keen to secure investment for under-capitalized utilities, infrastructure and other city-making projects. All the while, warm words and photo ops celebrated the golden era at the highest levels. “Let’s stick together and create a golden decade for both of our countries,” proclaimed Chancellor George Osborne in 2015, as he, Mayor Boris Johnson and Prime Minister David Cameron all toured Beijing throughout the 2010s. Xi Jinping visited the UK in 2015, describing Chinese investment in Britain as an extension of his country’s much-touted Belt and Road initiative.

UK-China relations began deteriorating from 2017. The CCP no longer wanted to offshore capital needed for development at home, especially when a property debt bubble threatened to upend China’s economy. Big Chinese developers building in Britain pulled out of projects without finishing them. Political developments hardly helped. The crushing of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement; controversies around planning permission for the new Chinese super-embassy in London; the steady drip of spy scandals — all these brought diplomatic relationships to a new low. By 2020, China was no longer the wealthy and beneficent investor it had been in the golden era, but a ruthless authoritarian state threatening Britain’s national security.

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Since 2017, cities like Manchester have been living in the debris of the golden era. Because the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) never kept track, we still don’t know how much Chinese money washed through their city, or how it landed on the streets. But what’s clear is that by buying so many tickets for the China Express, Manchester and cities like it are now stuck with the consequences: a shattered urban landscape with empty lots and half-finished buildings, as old developers pull out of projects, and their replacements scale back plans to save money.

Beyond the city center, Manchester Airport City is a good example of what this means in practice. The project began as a joint venture between Manchester Airports Authority and BCEGI, a Chinese state-owned enterprise. But then BCEGI quietly withdrew from the venture, and a more modest development, with a couple of hotels, is now being built instead. That’s a far cry from the major logistics hub and shopping complex advertised on the billboards — and, as usual, locals are left to pick up the pieces.

Even so, my street-level journey offers opportunities for other reflections. High-level political debates on the People’s Republic typically focus on whether and how much the UK should engage with China. Wander down Corporation Street and these questions feel irrelevant: we already live with China on intimate domestic terms. But this China is more ramshackle, improvised and buffeted by circumstances than the country we imagine as an all-powerful global force. This is doubly true when many Chinese developers have fallen foul of new liquidity regulations, passed by the CCP in 2020, requiring higher debt-to-equity ratios. Some 30 major firms have already breached these regulations, leading to investigations and arrest aplenty.

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Diplomatically speaking, anyway, it’s clear that China is not just one thing — not merely the all-conquering threat to Britain’s way of life, nor only the disordered builder. There are many Chinas, and it might be more effective to deal with each of them practically and pragmatically in turn. Diplomatically and politically, certainly, the muddled China that exists on our streets might be a better starting point in improving UK-China relations than the authoritarian monster of think-tank imaginings.

What might that mean in practice? For one thing, the future of British cities and the wellbeing of people who live in them clearly depend on electing more transparent councils, which are, after all, responsible for how global capital can operate locally. If councils were less secretive, council-tax payers would know where redevelopment cash came from. Local authorities pretend this doesn’t matter. But it does: Beijing money operates differently from Dubai money. Not every government controls investments abroad as thoroughly as the CCP, and not every government can force investors to nix foreign projects.

At the same time, greater transparency would force councils to be honest about how much money is invested and how it’ll refashion city neighborhoods. The Manchester combined authority responded to my FOI about Chinese capital by again insisting that it doesn’t collect this kind of information. Perhaps it should. Greater honesty would also mean explaining how developments might change as a result of uncertain funding landscapes; how long construction will take; and what sites might be like to live with in the meantime. Instead of treating people like targets of public relations campaigns, dupes who need to be “sold” the benefits of epic redevelopment, communities could instead be involved in deciding their city’s future for themselves.

There’s a broader problem here too. A shining city of towers is the dominant iconic image of urban life in the 21st century. But towers won’t solve the housing shortage, nor improve the quality of everyday life in Manchester, at least without local intervention to ensure improvements happen. What the GMCA and its mayor — or PM-in-waiting — lack isn’t capital. What they lack is the imagination to craft a viable city for the masses, something no amount of Chinese cash can buy.

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Caroline Knowles’s Uneasy Streets. How Chinese Money is Remaking Urban Britain (Hurst) is out now.