London is dotted with unfinished towers, empty construction sites and “Coming Soon” billboards advertising neighbourhoods that were never built, the legacy of a wave of Chinese investment that transformed swathes of the capital’s skyline before collapsing and leaving councils, developers and residents to deal with the fallout.
The issue was thrust back into the spotlight earlier this year during weeks of heated debate over plans to convert the Royal Mint near Tower Bridge into a 600,000 square foot Chinese super-embassy. That row, however, also drew attention to a much broader and less visible legacy of China’s relationship with London — one written into the city’s physical landscape in the form of half-finished megaprojects and abandoned development sites.
Between 2008 and 2016, relations between Britain and China reached a high point, with Chinese capital flowing into London at a scale no public body ever fully tracked — not even the Greater London Authority. The financial crash of 2008 had left commercial property prices in the capital attractively low, drawing a surge of investment from major Chinese developers and state-owned banks, encouraged by Beijing to deploy capital it could not absorb domestically.
The era left its mark on some of London’s most recognisable buildings and sites. The “Walkie-Talkie” tower at 20 Fenchurch Street was bought by a Hong Kong company in 2017. In 2014, Shanghai-based developer Greenland acquired a site near Docklands at Westferry to build The Spire, a planned 67-storey tower. A year earlier, in 2013, Chinese property giant Dalian Wanda began work on a commercial and residential development at One Nine Elms near Vauxhall, while Beijing-based Advanced Business Parks took control of 35 acres of waterside land at Gallions Reach, opposite London City Airport, with plans for an Asian Business Park designed to extend London’s commercial ties with China eastward.
The investment was accompanied by high-level political engagement on both sides. Prime Minister David Cameron, Chancellor George Osborne and London mayor Boris Johnson all made visits to Beijing in 2010, 2013 and 2015, while Chinese President Xi Jinping visited London in 2015. Johnson established London & Partners, funded by taxpayers, to promote the capital through offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. London’s councils, often under financial pressure, embraced the wave of investment, with deals between developers and local authorities striking a markedly different tone to today.
The momentum began to unravel around a decade ago, coinciding with the UK’s vote to leave the European Union. No longer offering a gateway to the EU single market, Britain became a less attractive destination for Chinese capital, and investment in major London developments began to collapse. Diplomatic visits between London and Beijing largely dried up alongside it.
The clearest example of the fallout is One Nine Elms, once held up as a flagship of London’s development boom. Construction workers on the £900 million project walked off site in 2022 after going unpaid by Guangzhou R&F, the developer that had purchased the site from Dalian Wanda after Wanda itself ran into liquidity problems. The 58- and 43-storey towers stood unfinished for years before the development was sold again, this time to Cheung Chung-kiu, chairman of Hong Kong-based CC Land, under whose ownership the towers have now finally been completed.
Across the capital, the result of this collapse is visible in holes in the ground, scaled-back projects awaiting new developers, and billboards still promising neighbourhoods that, for many Londoners, remain little more than computer-generated mirages of a city life that never materialised.
