Welcome to Big Venice: How London became a tourist-trap city

Queuing to gain admittance to the pavement of Westminster Bridge on a ferociously hot Sunday afternoon recently, I found myself trapped. Pinioned by a road to one side, a stall selling models of Big Ben and snow-dome Buckingham Palaces to the other, and bordered by the great bronze statue of Boudicca, I was caught in a corralled mass of tourists and going nowhere fast. It occurred to me that the last time I experienced such a peculiar blend of urban misery was in Venice. This might have been the Rialto in August.

But it wasn’t the Grand Canal that we were crossing, it was the Thames, and it started me thinking about the similarities of life in London and Venice. And I don’t just mean being photographed occasionally by a tourist as if you were one of those rarefied Venetian gondoliers. It’s also the scary realisation that our city is being bought up — brick by brick — by rich foreigners, mostly representatives of a new pan-national global plutocracy. As a result, the average Brit looks up at the stuccoed terraces of Notting Hill or South Ken like a tramp pressing his nose against the glass of the Ivy.

According to Savills, the upmarket estate agent, the people buying up the nice bits of central London are mainly foreigners. Take what it calls ‘Prime Central London’: a severely desirable portion of land stretching from Chelsea in the south to St John’s Wood in the north, Notting Hill to the west and Mayfair to the east. In this area, six out ten property sales were made to buyers from overseas in 2011-12. Of these, 37 per cent were bought as a holiday home, meaning that one in five properties is now empty most of the time. The figures are even higher with new-build properties.