President Trump has criticized the new U.S. Embassy in London again, insisting it’s in a “lousy” location, that it’s “horrible.” He says the old one was at “the best site in all of London.” What the president’s missing is that this is exactly the point. He really should know this, given his own background in real estate.
As we all know, there are only three things to consider in real estate: location, location, and also location. You put the grand apartments where people who can afford grand apartments wish to live, retail space where people congregate with already loaded wallets ready to shop, and so on. The important implication of this is that it doesn’t matter where you put the things that people must go to. Therefore you put them in the cheap areas.
As the diplomatic types themselves said, there were security concerns about the old building. It simply wasn’t possible to upgrade it to the modern standards deemed necessary, given truck bomb attacks on embassies elsewhere in the world and so on. But since they’re diplomatic types, they haven’t made the impolite point I’m about to make: Nine Elms (where the new embassy is going) isn’t a great part of London, it’s nothing like Mayfair (where the old embassy is). That’s exactly why an embassy should move from one to the other.
Nine Elms isn‘t all that bad, it’s not some wasteland. I lived there for a time, but that’s a good indication of how not good it is – an area of London I can afford to live in isn’t going to be delightful. But it’s no more than a morning walk to Big Ben, Downing Street, Whitehall, and the political heart of the city. In some ways London is a very small city – all of those buildings are within 5 minutes walk of each other. It used to take me perhaps 15 minutes to walk from Nine Elms along and across the river to get to work concerning the House of Lords and the parliamentary press gallery. True, parts of Vauxhall are interesting, and it can be slightly disconcerting at 8 a.m. to be passing the more vibrant gay clubs letting their clientele out, but London is a vibrant city. One version of that walk from Nine Elms to Westminster does take you past them.
But that’s very much the point of moving the embassy. Lots of people want to live or shop in Mayfair, which is why it’s the most expensive part of London. It makes great sense to move from that area of very high land values to one of considerably lower. Anyone going to the U.S. Embassy has to go there – no one just drops in for tea. The embassy isn’t trying to attract the passing crowd, so we can place it where people wouldn’t go without needing to, where the land is cheap(er).
The president is absolutely correct that the old location on Grosvenor Square in Mayfair was delightful, absolutely in the beating heart of London. The new one at Nine Elms is an old industrial estate on the unfashionable, southern side of the river. But that’s the entire point of the move, an odd thing for a real estate expert to miss. Buildings that people have to go to should be in cheap parts of the city, and we can leave the expensive places to the people willing to pay higher prices.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
