What I Have Seen on My Trip to London

What I have seen on my trip to London does not quite match what I’ve been reading online. Those viral clips of streets overrun by chaos? Not what I encountered. What I did find, however, was fatigue — the kind that hangs in the air like London drizzle. The economy is sluggish, optimism practically extinct. Even the streetlights seem dimmer, as if the city’s trying to save on electricity — and mood lighting.

The Christmas decorations are already strung up on Oxford Street, dangling there like last year’s promises, waiting for someone to flip the switch. They look exactly the same as they did last year. Maybe the city’s running out of money. Or maybe it’s running out of ideas.

Then there’s the housing — or should I say, the collective delusion. Six thousand pounds a month for a two-bedroom, or £3,250 for a one-bedroom walk-up off Sloane Square. It feels like everyone’s trying to grab the last bit of cash before the market collapses, or before we all collectively agree that it’s absurd. Because here’s the truth: the math doesn’t work anymore. The capital isn’t circulating. The sparkle is gone. And yet, somehow, the rent keeps going up. A good friend of mine, born and bred in London, recently moved his family to the countryside.

“We just couldn’t make it work anymore,” he told me over coffee, his voice caught between guilt and relief. The city that once promised everything now priced him out of even the ordinary. London’s property market has become a museum of aspiration: beautiful to look at, impossible to afford.

Is London falling apart? Or is it simply tired — overextended, running on memory, pretending everything’s fine?

The Russian capital that once underwrote its luxury has vanished, leaving empty storefronts in Knightsbridge and Sloane Avenue where sales staff yawn behind immaculate counters.

Meanwhile, Britain’s new Labour government, led by Sir Keir Starmer, swept in promising change — but it doesn’t feel like the country’s on the up and up. There’s a national debate about digital IDs that’s drawn small pockets of protestors, not angry revolutionaries but exhausted citizens who’ve grown suspicious of anything that gives government more power and people less. It’s a strange sort of stagnation — the peace of resignation. “We’ve stopped expecting things to get better,” a café owner in Notting Hill told me, handing over my oat-milk latte with a half-smile. “We just keep going.”

The sudden evaporation of Russian capital is visible in more than property listings. The prime retail spots once kept afloat by oligarch shopping sprees now sit half-empty, their window displays trying a little too hard to look “exclusive.” Private schools whisper of declining foreign enrollments as Russian assets have been frozen and many could not continue paying the fees anymore.

London, long the global hub for wealth is waiting for the next tide of money that may never arrive. Without that cushion, the city’s flaws are harder to ignore: rents remain astronomical and wages lag behind prices.

The most revealing thing I saw in London wasn’t in Mayfair or Westminster — it was in luxury hotel corridors. Behind the polished marble and fresh lilies in the lobby, Ukrainians who fled the war now scrub sheets and polish glassware for guests who barely notice them. They are allowed to come to UK to work, but not to belong as they can’t file for asylum. It’s one of those contradictions Britain does so well: the country that draped itself in blue and yellow to show moral leadership in Europe has quietly turned its Ukrainian guests into a new service class. Britain may have armed Ukraine’s soldiers, but it has left its refugees to change the sheets. In America, it’s Mexicans mowing the lawns. In London, it’s Ukrainians making the beds.

From a distance, London remains what it has always been — beautiful, global, self-assured. But up close, its edges are dulled. A once-imperial capital caught between nostalgia and reinvention, waiting for someone to turn the lights back on — not in the streets, but in its spirit.

The United States is powering ahead with a high-growth economy. London, by contrast, feels constrained — overly taxed, over-regulated, and emotionally tired. The result is a London that feels less like a world city and more like a memory of one.

There is no chaos, no anarchy, no burning Britain. But there is an unmistakable dimming — a slow erosion of the energy that once defined the city I love. London still stands, still functions, still dazzles in parts, but the light feels thinner now, stretched over worry and fatigue.

In America, I can still feel possibility — that restless optimism, that belief that something extraordinary could happen tomorrow. In London, it feels cold around the bubble of what used to be the British dream. Life has become expensive—a constant negotiation between cost and comfort. The value isn’t there anymore — not in the small things that make life feel worth it. It’s hard to get on the train and commute. It’s also hard to drive around and get stuck in traffic, think about congestion charge and the place to park.

Unless you belong to that narrow, gilded percentage, it takes two full salaries just to breathe without counting.

And so people keep moving, keep adjusting, keep pretending it’s fine. The air feels emptied of opportunity, of risk, of that peculiar British momentum that once made life here seem possible. The air feels stagnant. The money just keeps sinking.

And maybe that’s the truest metaphor for all of it — not a crash, not even a collapse, just a slow death. The Bell Jar without a pulse, but with a bill wrapped around it.

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