Chinese investment in London ghost neighbourhoods, stalled tower blocks and empty waterside offices has left a visible scar across the capital, as a decade-long property boom unravels into holes in the ground and broken promises of jobs and housing.
Between roughly 2008 and 2016, large sums of Chinese capital flowed into London property at a pace that surprised even those arranging the deals. One property agent described the period to Caroline Knowles, writing in the London Standard, as ‘a buying frenzy’ when ‘the Chinese were buying everything. And I mean everything.’
How Chinese Investment Shaped London’s Skyline
The money targeted prestige addresses. Sites near Canary Wharf and the Bank of England were especially attractive. In 2014, Shanghai developer Greenland bought a Docklands site at Westferry to build a 67-storey tower called The Spire, intended to be the tallest residential building in Western Europe. In 2013, Beijing-based Advanced Business Parks (ABP) (a property developer) took over 35 acres of waterside land at Gallions Reach, opposite London City Airport, proposing an Asian Business Park that would push London’s business district eastwards.
Also in 2013, Dalian Wanda, one of China’s largest developers, began work on One Nine Elms near Vauxhall: a £900 million twin-skyscraper project of 58 and 43 storeys. All of these were sold to Londoners as generators of jobs, housing and economic activity. High-profile political visits reinforced the optimism. David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson each made trips to Beijing in 2010, 2013 and 2015, and Xi Jinping himself visited London in 2015.
The Greater London Authority (GLA) did not track how much Chinese capital entered London during this period, and no central record was kept. But what is clear is that the big Chinese state-owned banks financed much of the buying, encouraged by a Chinese Communist Party policy of exporting capital it could not deploy at home.
The Collapse and Its Aftermath: Chinese Investment Left London With Ghost Neighbourhoods
The turning point came around the time the UK voted to leave the European Union. No longer a gateway to the EU, Britain became a less attractive destination for Chinese capital. Political relations cooled sharply. Then China’s own debt-fuelled property bubble began to collapse in 2020, and Beijing tightened regulations on developers’ debt-to-asset ratios, making it harder for them to borrow and build abroad. London’s unfinished projects became entangled in Chinese domestic politics almost by accident.
The consequences at One Nine Elms were acute. Construction workers walked off the site in 2022 after Guangzhou R&F Properties failed to pay them. The development had already changed hands once: R&F had bought the site from Dalian Wanda after Wanda itself ran into a liquidity crisis. According to Crosstree Real Estate Partners, the project was valued at more than £1bn but R&F agreed to sell it for £640m to CC Land, controlled by Cheung Chung-kiu. The scale of what changed hands is considerable: Mingtiandi reports that the development covers 1.1 million square feet (106,300 square metres). The towers have since been completed under CC Land’s ownership, but only after years of delay and unpaid workers.
R&F’s losses were not confined to One Nine Elms. In the second quarter of 2022, the company agreed to sell its 50% stake in the Thames City development, also in Nine Elms, to CC Land for £270m. Crosstree Real Estate Partners reports that the sale represented a £190m loss on R&F’s initial investment.
The picture elsewhere is grimmer still. The Spire at Westferry remains, after more than a decade, a hoarding-covered hole in the ground. Greenland is in dispute with Tower Hamlets council over whether the scheme can meet both the developer’s profit margins and the council’s fire safety requirements. At Royal Albert Dock, ABP built 56,000 square feet of empty office, retail and residential space in handsome six-storey brick buildings, then stopped in 2019 when it failed to pay its creditors. In 2022, Mayor Sadiq Khan cancelled the £1bn agreement with ABP after what critics called a ‘wasted decade’. The buildings stand finished on the outside, silent and unused within. Beside them stretches a giant unbroken hole where phase two was supposed to begin. ABP never broke ground. Analysts at Bloomberg estimate that UK real estate deals by mainland China investors fell by 88 per cent between 2017 and 2022.
The debate over a proposed Chinese super-embassy at Royal Mint Court near Tower Bridge has sharpened these tensions further. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) bought the freehold for £255 million in 2018. Tower Hamlets council rejected the embassy plans in 2022 and again in 2024. Steve Reed, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, approved the scheme in January 2026, on the eve of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s visit to China. An appeal against that planning approval is pending, and building work has not yet started. 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. The rehabilitation of those sites is, for now, unfinished business.
