Won’t Somebody Please Think of Belgravia?
How a tiny corner of the housing market became a national melodrama. Again.
There is nothing that I love more than starting my week off than with seeing someone have a full-blown fannywobble about nothing much1.
My usual go to’s for these tend to be between The Telegraph and the Mail, but more often than not, The Times loves to deliver as well - as was the case with an article I read this morning - a proper pearl-clutching, hand-wringing ode over wealthy non-doms who are selling up their London mansions2, only for said mansions to be snapped up by Arab, American, Chinese buyers and an assortment of other members of the global super-wealthy.
This, according to a terribly anxious estate from Beauchamp Estates3, means that “swathes of luxury London will become ghost towns.”
I can already hear the violins tuning up south west from where I’m sitting writing this.
The argument that is being made is a familiar to the point of boring one - the Chancellor closes a long-standing tax loophole, a few people with far more money than is humanly necessary decide they’d rather live elsewhere and property in some of the wealthiest parts of London change hands.
All of this is framed by The Times and its coterie of estate agents as not a marginal in an already very bizarre corner of the housing market, but as a looming civic catastrophe. London, we are told, is at risk. The soul Belgravia trembles4. The lights may just very well go out in Knigthsbridge.
Won’t somebody please think of the local communities!
Which is the point where I want to take the panicked journalist and estate agents by the hand, tell them kindly to simmer down to a panic, and actually have a good hard look at what’s actually happening - because it really isn’t as world-ending as they may very well believe it is.
One of the biggest reason that this hazard appears far greater than it actually is, is that it was based on an analysis of homes sold for £15m or more in 2025.
There were forty-one of them5.
Forty. One. In a city with circa 3.8m or so homes. Pulling out my trusty calculator of truth, this works out to 0.001% of the housing stock. This is simply not a trend that’s reshaping London. God, I struggle to even call it a rounding error!
In terms of value though, yes, the nearly £1.04bn in sales can make an ordinary person’s eyes water - until you suddenly remember that London’s property ecosystem is so incredibly vast and inflated that there are single developments, regeneration schemes or infrastructure projects that swallow sums like that without even chewing.
The whole picture is utterly insignificant - it’s like me saying to you that the NHS is on the brink of collapse because a consultant went off sick.
Even if we zoom in on the market itself, which makes up the tiniest sliver of a tiny sliver of properties within the capital, the story isn’t so much “flight” as it is “churn.”
What’s basically happened here is that a group of non-doms who previously enjoyed a nice little bespoke tax status that allowed them to live in our country and use our infrastructure without paying their fair share, have decided that the rules are far too draconic and have left in a huff. They sell their properties. They are replaced with other wealthy people.
The houses themselves have not vanished into thin air - they remain there, resplendent in all their glory in exactly the same post codes like nothing has changed.
Stamp duty gets paid. Beauchamps estate agents and the like get their fat commissions. Lawyers bill positively eye-watering hourly rates. Builders, interior designers and architects do what they do best - which is basically turn obscene amounts of money into marble staircases, absurd chandeliers, mood lighting and kitchen islands the size of some people’s flats. From an economic perspective this isn’t an unstoppable haemorrhage - it’s a substitution.
And the article itself, once you’re through the paywall and beyond the panicked headline, even admits as much. It lets you know that the London ultra-luxury market has been a bit flaccid for years and that sales volumes are down when compared to BC - before COVID. Prices are indeed slipping, and discounts are getting bigger with buyers negotiating harder than ever.
All of which started well before the 2024 abolition of non-dom status tax subsidies. All we’re seeing is the slow deflation of a speculative asset class that has spent decades floating ever so serenly above the rest of the economy and that has been insulated from the gravity known as reality by global capital and political indulgence.
The overall narration though is that this is a sudden exodus of Louis Vuitton clad saints6, when in reality it’s a genuinely small number of people responding to the loss of a tax privilege - the key point that all the ghost-town theatrics are trying very hard to not say out loud.
Because what’s always worth keeping in mind is that non-dom status wasn’t a weird but benign feature of the cultural and economic landscape of the UK - it was a deliberate choice made by numerous governments that allowed wealthy individuals to live in this country while benefiting from our schools, health system, roads, legal protections and cultural capital, while sheltering large chunks of their income off-shore.
The ending of this arrangement is not something that makes the UK hostile towards wealth - it just makes the tax system marginally less absurd. The fact that a few of the erstwhile beneficiaries have now decided to decamp to Dubai, Monaco, Milan or the Caymans isn’t evidence of national decline - it’s literally just evidence that an overly generous subsidy has come to an end.
And even in this, scale matters, because around 68,000 or so people benefited from this cushy tax-arrangement as non-doms, with the article suggesting that around 1,800 have now left. That works out to roughly 2.6%. We are being asked, however politely, to get into a frothy panic about a fraction of a fraction of the population, concentrated almost entirely in homes that most ordinary people will never set foot inside because an estate agent told us that this is the actual canary in the coalmine.
It also doesn’t help very much that the article leans a bit egregiously into the idea that these homes will be replaced by “holiday mansions” as though this is a shocking new development that we have never seen in the UK before.
Because we have. London, and especially Prime Central London, has been packed with lock-up-and-leave properties for decades if not longer - and many of these non-doms we’re now being asked to mourn for were not exactly the kind of people popping down to the local cafe every morning or chairing the neighbourhood watch. The areas referred to in this article have never really functioned as communities, and have primarily been repositories for global wealth for a very long time - and pretending otherwise is pure nostalgia - and not even especially convincing nostalgia at that.
None of this is to deny that London has real, serious problems - it does. But by and large, they’re just not located in Mayfair, Belgravia, Knightsbridge or Kensington - they’re found in the ordinary parts of the city where people struggle with rent, where social housing is becoming increasingly hard to come by and where public services are stretched paper-thin after a decade and a half of neglect.
The idea that the fate of the capital hinges on whether 41 houses went to a different kind of uber-wealthy investor isn’t an analysis worth it’s time, it’s out-and-out melodrama for attention - and this concoction of tremulous sofa-feinting shows you exactly who The Times actually worries about, and that’s most certainly not normal Londoners like you and me.
To end with, London is not Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Mayfair or Kensington, no matter just how loudly or often some publications may insist otherwise - it’s a vast, messy, gorgeous, overstretched city that’s held together by real people. People who worry about rent, whether the Central Line is going to shit itself again today, childcare and wages that just don’t seem to keep up anymore. It is not held together by whether a £17m townhouse is used for eleven weeks a year instead of eight, and trying to paint this as an issue of calamity is absurd.
This just isn’t London hollowing out, turning into a ghost town or collapsing in on itself - it is a very small group of very rich people changing seats.
If this piece spoke to you - or at least stopped you briefly wondering whether London is about to collapse because some very rich people changed postcode - Bearly Politics exists because readers back it, not because I’m funded by pearl-clutching thinkpieces. A paid subscription keeps the lights on without sanding off the inconvenient truths.
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Thank you for reading. It really does mean a lot.
This is not completely true as there are technically other things I love more - cheese, my husband, my fur daemon, sleep, among other things. But this does remain deeply satisfying.
To Arabs, no less, making the headline itself questionable, but that is a whole post on its own.
Estate agents, as a rule, are not terribly well known for underplaying risk or remaining calm in the presence of a microphone, and this becomes doubly true for ones dealing with the London property market.
This makes the rather reaching assumption that Belgravia actually has a soul, and that it isn’t currently parked offshore for tax efficiency.
For context, there are probably more branches of Pret in any given square mile of London than that.
Largely cannonised for their contributions to stamp duty receipts and bespoke wine fridgets.
Thank you, Bear. Now I can stop worrying about those poor non-doms and have another bowl of gruel.
So Belgravia has problems. Frankly, who cares. A loophole has been closed and the Times treats it like a national emergency. I hate to tell you this Mr Editor, but there's more problems facing folk who'll never be millionaires or billionaires than empty houses in a posh area of London