Christopher Hapeshis looks up at the glass riverside towers a short walk from his small shoe repair shop on the south bank of the Thames, near Nine Elms.
The business he and his family have run for more than 60 years was started by his father Michael in 1962, and Hapeshis often wonders what his father would think of it now. Luxury apartment blocks have replaced the low-rise streets that were once village-like and full of families. The local customers who brought in worn-out trainers and work shoes have been replaced by wealthy businessmen from China, Japan and South Korea, dropping off designer loafers and barely scuffed sneakers worth thousands of pounds a pair.
And with them, he says, something else has disappeared: any real sense of community, replaced by a strange transience — a feeling that people are here, but not really living here.
In the glass towers of St George Wharf — a cluster of luxury Thames-side blocks built in the early 2000s nearby — some lights flicker on at dusk, but not many of them. A large proportion sit there with their blinds down, rarely used by the international owners who’ve bought them up over the past two decades. Hapeshis has met a handful of those who have moved in. “I’ve been told that a lot of the owners haven’t even come to collect their keys.”
I’ve been told that a lot of the owners haven’t even come to collect their keys
What is happening along this stretch of the Thames might feel like a local story of rising wealth and fading community. But it forms part of a wider portrait of London that is now drawing attention around the world — precisely because these subtle, street-level shifts reveal something much bigger about what our capital city and others around the world are becoming.
In a new true-crime book published this month, London Falling, New York Times bestselling author and New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe investigates a tragedy at a glass fronted luxury apartment block called Riverwalk, not far from Hapeshis’s cobbler, and what it says about London as a place that welcomes nefarious characters with money to hide.
Keefe’s London is one where anonymity thrives — a place where immense wealth and fluid identities can allow people to slip between worlds unnoticed. His book tells the story of 19-year-old Londoner Zac Brettler, who died after jumping from the balcony of a fifth-floor apartment at Riverwalk early one morning in 2019 after what his parents later discovered to have been years living a double life posing as “Zac Ismailov”, the son of a fictitious Russian oligarch.
A hollowed-out city
Though the story Keefe tells is extreme, the conditions that make it possible are less so. Just last week, an investigation by The Sunday Times and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project found that Su Jiangbo, a Chinese citizen wanted for running illegal casinos, spent tens of millions of pounds buying 85 luxury properties across London, from Islington to Chelsea — including seven in one day. Similar concerns have been raised in recent years about opaque overseas ownership in parts of central London like Marylebone and Notting Hill, where properties can sit empty for months at a time.
Together, these snapshots build a picture of a city where the global rich drift in and out, and homes are more assets than places to live. Part of the reason London is so exposed to this trend is its unique status as a global financial safe haven — with a stable legal system, strong property rights and a long-standing reputation as a secure place to store wealth. As Labour MP Phil Brickell warned recently, that same openness has also made the capital “a global hub for illicit wealth and corrupt actors”.
According to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, there are currently 93,000 empty homes in London and of these, about 38,000 have been empty for longer than six months. The figures are particularly stark in certain central London postcodes. Census data shows that in the City of London, nearly a third of homes are unoccupied at any given time, with similarly high proportions in Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea.
In the City of London, nearly a third of homes are unoccupied at any given time
This sense of London being hollowed out is not a new phenomenon. In affluent neighbourhoods like Knightsbridge and Mayfair, long associated with darkened windows and absent owners, the pattern has been visible for years. What feels newer is how far it has spread — into the glass towers of Nine Elms and the riverside developments of Bankside, postcodes once industrial and long associated with working London. So what does this mean for the city? As the capital becomes ever more desirable, do parts of it risk becoming places to invest in and pass through, rather than places to actually live?
Transient neighbourhoods
That depends where you look — and, increasingly, on which day you visit. At the same tower in Bankside, Triptych, where the fugitive Su Jiangbo bought 15 of his 85 flats, a concierge tells me many residents live there Monday to Wednesday before fleeing to their countryside homes. A staff member at a Turkish restaurant around the corner tells me their customers are almost entirely tourists, not locals. And a nearby letting agent confirms this. She wasn’t surprised to hear about Su’s story. “The majority of units held at that higher level are from clients of a similar profile,” she tells me.
Over at The Alchemist restaurant in Battersea, a stone’s throw from Hapeshis’s store and the St George Wharf complex, a staff member describes a steady stream of “rich under-30s from the UAE, Russia and China” who fill the bar during the week before disappearing again at weekends. Every hospitality worker I speak to in the vicinity paints a similar picture: this strange paradox of an area that has on the one hand never been more desirable, yet can feel oddly unlived-in in places. They tell me it’s a transient place; that they don’t know many locals; that there isn’t much of a community.
“It’s like a luxury playground for rich students: 19-year-olds getting out of million pound sports cars; spending hundreds of pounds in our bar each night,” The Alchemist waiter tells me. “These guys are so affluent they’re in here every single night — then suddenly they’re gone.”
The Battersea-Vauxhall-Nine Elms stretch feels like a particularly vivid expression of this paradox, with its reborn Battersea Power Station and its famous Sky Pool — a transparent swimming pool suspended between two luxury apartment blocks, a symbol of London’s glossy new skyline and its global appeal.
Walk past the riverside developments there on a Tuesday night and you might be forgiven for thinking there is a buzz about the place — bars filling up, lights flickering on across the towers. But return on a Friday or Saturday and the atmosphere can feel markedly different: fewer familiar faces, less of a sense of routine, a neighbourhood that seems to empty out almost as quickly as it fills.
“It’s possible people are simply using the city slightly differently”
Yet a growing body of analysis has pushed back on the idea of a “hollowed-out” capital, arguing that vacancy figures are often misunderstood, reflecting second homes, short-term lets and a highly mobile global population rather than widespread abandonment.
“There’s not much evidence that London has seen a big rise in empty homes,” says Anthony Breach, an analyst at the think tank Centre for Cities, pointing to data suggesting overall vacancy levels have remained relatively stable in recent years. “It’s possible people are simply using the city slightly differently — but London’s strengths are unchanged: high-paying jobs, strong businesses and a world-leading leisure and visitor offer.”
And yet, on the ground, that shift in how the city is used can still feel tangible. In parts of central London, falling pupil numbers linked to rising housing costs and shifting populations have already led to school closures and mergers, raising questions about the long-term sustainability of local communities.
The price of global success
Has London become too desirable for its own good — or is this sense of partial emptiness simply the by-product of its success as a global financial and cultural capital? For the family at the centre of London Falling, the Brettlers, that question is not abstract. In tracing their son’s final years in London, Keefe’s book paints a picture of a city whose global allure can create the very conditions in which people become harder to reach and harder to truly know.
For some urbanites, this is simply the reality of a modern global city. In places like New York City and Vancouver, patterns of intermittent living are often seen less as a sign of decline than of global relevance — evidence of cities that attract international wealth, talent and movement. Supporters argue that such investment has helped drive regeneration and keep cities like London economically competitive.
Hapeshis feels this shift more viscerally. He and his son may have adapted their business to cater to a wealthier, more international clientele, but at what cost? After more than six decades on the same stretch of the south bank, he has watched the neighbourhood around him transform almost beyond recognition — busier, richer, more polished, yet somehow less rooted.
As he prepares to close up shop for the evening, the lights in the towers above begin to flicker on — a few at a time. It is a familiar sight now: a city that is not empty, but not entirely lived in either.
