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Why London is borrowing New York street names
The UK capital even has its own High Line and Midtown, in name at least.
What goes round comes round.
Some of New York’s famous names come from London — Soho, Greenwich Village, Chelsea — but now the tides have changed as British developers are increasingly co-opting the Big Apple’s well-known street names in a big to jump start high-end residential sales again, according to the U.K.-based property editor of House and Home Nathan Brooker.
In fact, he’s pretty upset about it: “They’re full-on rebranding swaths of the capital,” he wrote in a piece published by the Financial Times. “To appeal to the institutional investors and overseas buyers who might be convinced London is still a global city if bits of it are named after bits of another global city.”
But a superficial name change can’t hid the fact that London’s high-end housing market is in decline and has been for sometime — Q3 2014 to be exact, according to the Times. According to data from research firm Molior, half of the newly built housing stock that came online last year failed to sell as new anti-money laundering rules and tax changes combine to turn off ultra-wealthy buyers. [FT] — Erin Hudson