The collapse of Chinese investment in London property has left the capital with empty offices, a ghost neighbourhood at Royal Albert Dock, and towers that stood unfinished for years, as a decade-long boom in UK-China development deals unravelled under geopolitical pressure and financial crisis back in China.
Between roughly 2008 and 2016, large sums of Chinese capital flowed into London, funding property purchases and major construction schemes. The money was channelled through big Chinese banks, many of them state-owned, at a time when the Chinese Communist Party was encouraging outward investment of capital it could not absorb at home. London’s councils, short of cash and backed by central government, welcomed the wave. High-profile visits between London and Beijing, involving then-prime minister David Cameron, chancellor George Osborne and London mayor Boris Johnson in 2010, 2013 and 2015, set the tone. Chinese president Xi Jinping himself visited London in 2015.
From Buying Frenzy to Empty Sites
A property agent quoted in Caroline Knowles’s account in The London Standard described the mood as ‘a buying frenzy’: ‘The Chinese were buying everything. And I mean everything.’ Commercial property prices had fallen sharply after the 2008 financial crash, drawing a surge of Chinese capital. Sites near London’s financial centres, around Canary Wharf and the Bank of England, were especially sought after, marketed with promises of jobs and housing.
Several schemes became landmarks of the era. In 2014, Shanghai developer Greenland bought a site near Docklands at Westferry, planning a 67-storey tower called The Spire, billed as the tallest residential building in Western Europe. In 2013, Beijing-based Advanced Business Parks (ABP) took over 35 acres of waterside land at Gallions Reach, opposite London City Airport, planning an Asian Business Park that was projected to create 20,000 jobs and add £6bn to the UK economy. Also in 2013, Dalian Wanda began work on a commercial-residential scheme at One Nine Elms near Vauxhall.
As political relations cooled and China’s own debt-fuelled property bubble threatened to burst at home, the investment stopped. The UK’s vote to leave the European Union removed London’s appeal as a gateway to European markets. China tightened regulations on debt-to-asset ratios, making it harder for developers to borrow. Between 2017 and 2022, UK real estate deals by mainland Chinese investors fell by 88 per cent, according to analysts at Bloomberg, with the drop for development sites estimated to have fallen even further.
One Nine Elms: A £900m Project That Changed Hands Twice
The most dramatic example of the fallout is One Nine Elms. Construction workers walked off the £900m scheme in 2022 after not being paid by developer Guangzhou R&F, leaving two towers of 58 and 43 storeys standing unfinished. R&F had itself bought the site from Dalian Wanda after Wanda ran into its own liquidity problems.
The eventual resolution came through a further sale. According to Crosstree, R&F Properties agreed to offload the mixed-use project for £640m to CC Land, chaired by Cheung Chung-kiu and based in Hong Kong. Work restarted, and Building Magazine has reported that the delayed project is now on course for completion next November. Multiplex has confirmed that Phase 1 of the development has already reached Practical Completion, a formal construction milestone marking the handover of a finished phase to the client. After more than a decade of ownership changes, payment disputes and halted work, One Nine Elms is closer to becoming the neighbourhood it was designed to be than at any point since building began.
Not every stalled project has found that route out. The Spire at Westferry remains, after more than ten years, nothing more than a hole in the ground behind hoardings. Greenland is in dispute with Tower Hamlets council over profit margins and fire safety requirements, and no resolution has been publicly agreed. At Royal Albert Dock, ABP built 56,000 square feet of offices, retail and residential space across three rows of six-storey brick buildings, then ran out of money in 2019 when it failed to pay its creditors. The buildings are finished on the outside but empty inside. In 2022, London mayor Sadiq Khan terminated the £1bn agreement with ABP after what critics called a ‘wasted decade’. On Mandarin Street outside, nothing moves. ABP has left London what Knowles describes as ‘a beautiful ghost neighbourhood’.
The Super-Embassy Row and Chinese Investment London Property’s Political Dimension
The debate over Chinese investment in London property extended beyond development sites into a dispute with clear diplomatic consequences. In 2018, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) bought the freehold of Royal Mint Court near Tower Bridge for £255 million, planning to convert it into a 600,000 sq ft embassy. Tower Hamlets council unanimously rejected the plans in 2022 and again in 2024. Residents in the 100 flats at the back of the site, known as Mary Graces Court, raised concerns about espionage, the treatment of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, and the persecution of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Beijing was reported to be furious that a local authority could block the plans.
In January 2026, Steve Reed, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, approved the super-embassy scheme, on the eve of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s visit to China. A planning appeal is still pending, and building work has not yet begun. Even with that approval, the episode illustrated how completely the mood had shifted: the same capital that once rolled out a red carpet for Chinese developers now debates whether a Chinese embassy poses a security risk to the street next door.
Of London’s 391 developments currently in progress, eight large residential and commercial sites developed by five Chinese developers are listed as still in construction or halted part-built. Phase 1 of One Nine Elms reaching Practical Completion is, for now, the clearest sign that at least one of those sites is moving in the right direction.
