We'll Always Have London

Brexit or no Brexit, the British capital will always be home for the Indian elite.

- Hindol Sengupta

These are dire times in London, a city of which if one is bored, said the littérateur Samuel Johnson, one must be bored of life itself. The latest Z/Yen Global Financial Centres Index shows that New York has overtaken London as the world’s premier financial hub for the first time since 2015.

Brexit hangs like a permanent cloud atop Westminster and when the bells ring, as they do before each service, at the Abbey next door, sometimes you can scarcely hear them above the roar of activist Steve Bray, 50, who shouts “Stop Brexit! It’s not a done deal” outside the houses of parliament every day. He is called Mr. Stop Brexit.

But do rich Indians care? No.

Last year, Indians poured more money into London than ever before. Foreign direct investment from India to London grew by 255% between 2017 and 2018, compared to a 100% jump in money invested from India into the whole of the United Kingdom (U.K.), according to analysis firm fDi Markets and fDi Intelligence data.

For a decade now, each year I have come to London to understand what makes the city the natural second home for some of the richest people in India, politicians, film stars, deal-hungry investors and, of course, those who don’t want to pay their bank loans back at home. When I realised that I feel completely at home each time I land at Heathrow, I decided to spend a year living in the U.K.—part of the time in London and partly in Oxford—an experiment, if you will, in learning the secret alchemy that makes the British capital so special to so many Indians.

The most fundamental misunderstanding about luxury, which I have seen again and