Wouldn’t you rather have the Windsors than the Trumps? No offense to the “No Kings” protesters, but here in the U.K., our monarchs aren’t so bad. After all those centuries, they’ve finally learned their place!
O.K., so they too put on the occasional military parade—Trooping the Color, which commemorates the King’s official birthday, happened a few weeks ago—but they wouldn’t dream of calling up the Royal Air Force to quell dissent. It would interfere with teatime, as well as with Parliament.
Is it any surprise that, for many of the United States’ best and brightest, the new American Dream is to move over here?
With its good looks, endless charm, common language, and respect for the rule of law, London is an obvious choice. Tom Ford, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, Lena Dunham—they all live here now. “Donald Dashers,” the Daily Mail calls them.
They tend to congregate in Kensington, Chelsea, Notting Hill, and anywhere else featured in a Richard Curtis movie. In 2024, 40 percent of properties over $15 million were sold to American buyers, according to data from Sotheby’s International Realty.
And not all of them are as flush as Eric Schmidt, the former C.E.O. of Google who paid $57 million for a Victorian pile in Holland Park. In Kensington, where my husband and I moved to from New York three years ago, the real-estate market is more compelling than the new season of Love Island. (Although there’s a lot of action in both.) Our neighborhood is very international—well, it used to be. Now each day brings a gaggle of new listings and price reductions from Zoopla, the StreetEasy of London. The house we currently rent is for sale. So is the one next door and another across the street. So why haven’t we seen any showings?
Perhaps you’ve heard of the “non-doms,” the non-domiciled foreigners who live in the United Kingdom but don’t pay taxes on their overseas income. For decades, they flashed cash all over this town, inflating the prices of real estate and luxury goods while employing battalions of housekeepers, drivers, personal trainers, and nannies.
Now those economic tentpoles are out of luck. In April, the new Labour government switched things up, ending the centuries-old non-dom scheme and obliging London’s wealthiest residents to pay income taxes, regardless of where that income was generated. But it’s the inheritance taxes that will hurt the most. Anyone who stays in the U.K. for more than 10 years will now owe an eye-watering 40 percent on their worldwide assets. (It was recently reported that Chancellor Rachel Reeves may be “softening” this legislation.)
The good news: We shouldn’t have to deal with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez anytime soon. And if you’re a billionaire, you’re probably moving to Milan or Lisbon, where the fiscal regimes are designed to attract wealth, rather than repel it.
In 2024, the United Kingdom lost more than 10,800 millionaires. That’s a lot, especially when you consider that a total of only 16,000 had left the country from 2017 to 2023. Foreign Investors for Britain, a lobbying group, estimates that out of the approximately 74,000 non-doms in the U.K., 12,000 have already fled.
So if you’re in the market for a pied-à-terre near Sloane Square, seize the moment. Housing prices in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea have fallen to their lowest levels since 2013, according to the Financial Times. We recently bought a home for 21 percent off the asking price. (Just be prepared to pony up for stamp duty, a property-transfer tax. It varies based on the sale price, the number of homes you already own worldwide, and your residency status. The highest level—for wealthy foreigners with multiple homes—is 17 percent.)
The foreign exodus is affecting everything, not just real estate. I’d gotten used to waiting my turn for the treadmill at my gym in Knightsbridge. That’s no longer an issue, since my fellow regulars have disappeared—Katya back to Russia, Mark to Portugal, and Andy to Dubai. Of the 35 pupils in my daughter’s fourth-grade class, three (that I know about) are moving abroad over the summer.
One thing—many private schools are now 20 percent more expensive than they were 12 months ago. Last October, the Labour government ended their V.A.T. (value-added tax) exemption, and tuition-paying parents now shoulder most of the burden. That’s sending some families into the public-school system, and others, as Air Mail previously reported, are moving their children out of the country entirely. But don’t despair. Thomas’s Battersea, attended by Prince George and Princess Charlotte, may cost $39,559 a year for kindergarten, but that doesn’t look so bad compared with the prices in New York City, where tuition at Nightingale-Bamford—the inspiration for Gossip Girl—runs $64,470 (snacks included). And your princeling’s chances at Eton have never been better!
For my family, sitting out the latest scourge of Trump’s America was a happy accident. And, yes, while there is a strong sense that the U.K.’s economy is perpetually declining, and the weather can be soul-crushing, and we may soon have to deal with Nigel Farage in a much more consequential way, we just love it here. The taxi drivers know where they’re going, the streets are free of fentanyl, the health care is gratis, and lawmakers are not routinely arrested for asking questions. My kids could definitely use a few more players on their football team. Go, Patriots!
Ashley Baker is a Deputy Editor at AIR MAIL and a co-host of the Morning Meeting podcast
