The United States of West London
There are three striking details about the 27-year-old New York native Maggie Klimuszko: her outré selection of outerwear (think feathered sleeves, cobalt blue leather gloves, green diamanté jeans and double-breasted plaid coats); her tendency to speak in superlatives (“Nothing makes me happier than good glassware”; “Paper goods are my favourite thing in the world to buy”); a proclivity to describe inedible things (clothing, cutlery) as “yummy”.
We meet in Hjem, a café in the nicer end of Kensington. Maggie has recently moved to London from New York with her fiancé; he was offered a relocation package by his insurance firm, so the pair packed up their West Village flat and secured a home in Holland Park – though she contends that Marylebone is London’s answer to her beloved, upmarket Manhattan neighbourhood. She plans to stay in the UK for three years.
With 54.5k followers on TikTok, Maggie enjoyed a lucrative influencing career in New York alongside her corporate job in trend forecasting. “Do you know the phrase ‘Dink’ [dual income, no kids]? I was like that, but in one person!” Since moving, her content has shifted from life in the West Village to flat-hunting, decorating, cutlery design and extensive research into stick-on wallpaper. “I’ve officially been in London for two months now,” she chirps at the beginning of a recent vlog, en route to buy stationery.
The UK is supposed to be in a moment of crisis: government debt is spiralling; an attritional war is raging on the Continent’s eastern frontier; kids on bikes keep stealing people’s phones. And a canon of anti-immigrant grievance has emerged: the “left-behinds”, “broken heartlands”, the “Red Wall”. An unhappy white working class channels its despair into political gambles – propelling Nigel Farage up the polls – or into violence on the streets.
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Meanwhile, Maga claims London is a third-world city ruled by sharia law and under the thumb of the extremist Sadiq Khan. A US national security paper warned that England faces “civilisational erasure”. And Elon Musk says Labour is governing straight from Stalin’s playbook. Civil war is inevitable, he rages.
It’s not quite the world we see through Maggie’s iPhone lens. Nor the story backed up by data. We know that Britain’s economy is unusually beholden to American influence: 1.5 million Brits work for US bosses. Look upwards in Canary Wharf or the City and you will see Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Bank of America. Meanwhile, the high streets of this country’s aspiring middle are awash with American venture capital cash: Gail’s, Waterstones, Majestic Wine. As for those heritage English brands? The owners of Arsenal FC, Liverpool FC and Everton FC are based in Missouri, Massachusetts and Texas, respectively.
Yet London, Scotland and pockets of south-east England are being flooded with American people, not just their abstract dollars. Citizenship applications have risen by 50 per cent since 2024. At the University of St Andrews on the Fife coast, one in five students is from the US – a palatable alternative for the Wasps who missed out on Harvard, Princeton and Yale. West London is turning into an exclave of the West Village, as a particular strata of immigrant – 30-something hedge funders, traders, lawyers, fiancés, wives, girlfriends and influencers – carve out the postcode for their Instagram posts and pre-child-rearing years.
Meanwhile, older mid-career executives line west London’s avenues with family-friendly 4x4s and private schools’ pockets with fees. Wealth managers who specialise in American assets tell me they have never been busier. In the prime London real-estate market the number of American buyers overtook Chinese buyers for the first time last year. Not one reported sharia law as the pull factor.
Sadiq Khan told the Guardian that this influx was all thanks to London’s liberal values, that this is just super rich Americans fleeing the moral and aesthetic aberrations of Maga. Let’s call them luxury refugee class. Comedian Ellen DeGeneres flew her wife and their two horses 5,190 miles from Santa Barbara to the Cotswolds. The ultra-wealthy are buying apartments in the Peninsula at Hyde Park – where residents’ dogs dine on the same cornfed chicken as their owners – as a hedge against a turbulent global economy.
But the obsession with the Trump-fearing, horse-shipping mega-rich distracts from the Americans really shaping the quotidian experience in London – those who make a Saturday on the Golborne Road in Notting Hill feel like heading into the trenches at Yorktown, who drive up rental prices with their strong dollar and American salaries, and apply to study at King’s College London at record levels.
These highly liquid, internationally mobile, largely apolitical expats are the foot soldiers, the reason for Britain’s evolution into a vassal state of America’s upper-middle. They certainly don’t subscribe to Musk’s version of events – who would move to a country on the brink of civil war? No, the London of their imagination is more Notting Hill, Richard Curtis’s 1999 romcom, they tell me.
Alex, 33, moved here a year ago with her miniature Schnauzer, Pepper, after a break-up. This blonde, former social secretary of her college sorority (Delta Delta Delta at Florida State University) is studying for an MBA at the University of East London, though she lives in the city’s south-west. She punctuates her video series – “Finding home in London” – with turbo-earnestness about being “an American who made her dream of moving to London a reality at 32”. Recently she has been into “hobby-maxxing”. When I ask what she likes about London, she gestures vaguely to “diversity”.
Brooklyn invites her TikTok viewers to join her on a day in her life, “in my thirties, starting over in London”. We watch her explain the perfect itinerary for a winter afternoon in South Kensington (“which is honestly a vibe”). A toastie at Pret a Manger, a wander down the high street. The camera lingers on a Zara store: “Honestly I don’t think I am ever going to get over the architecture in London.”
And you will find them in W postcodes. On Golborne Road are three of London’s sceniest restaurants: the Fat Badger, Straker’s and Canteen. So popular is Straker’s with Americans that the chef has cut out the middleman and opened in New York. A 20-minute walk away are the Cow and the Westbourne, where Ben, a 30-something hedge-funder here from Arizona via Dubai, says he spends Saturday afternoons with fellow Americans. “Every weekend is copy and paste,” he says, “in what I assume is this generic finance-bro district.” (Sort of!)
The staff tell me their American customers are unfailingly nice. And who wouldn’t be, given the circumstances? In Holland Park, near the Ladbroke Arms, houses are worth upwards of £5m. Inside the pub, a group of seven with Waspy accents are gathered around half pints, tennis racquets hanging off their chairs. This is a social universe engineered to host transient wealth and well-manicured smiles. Even a husky that strides past looks polite. But what can they get here that they can’t in America’s coastal cities?
“Living in New York is like getting punched in the face every day,” says Jack, a scriptwriter from Virginia. Another hedge-funder in his thirties says the problem with New York is that you spend too much time reverse-commuting to play golf, or to get to the Hamptons. London is easier to live in: the tennis and golf are close; the homelessness problem does not feel as acute. You get shouted at by strangers in the West Village, and “that would probably never happen in the equivalent area here”. (Marylebone, remember.)
Fleeing Trump’s America isn’t the story – not for this version of migrant. It factored “not at all” says one East Coast trader, his friends nodding in agreement. Several young finance-types tell me they are here because of a good expat package from their bank; that Singapore or Paris would be just as appealing; that London serves as a launchpad for European holidays (“Saint-Tropez or Mykonos, mainly”); that the city offers them a status that can never be found in the New World – access to a wholly different elite.
It’s Friday morning, and I am sheltering from a downpour in a young artist’s new studio in Camden. Behind AR Turner hang four canvases. One shows a mournful horse against a glittery background; another depicts a Mexican mountain range and sold for £14,000 at his recent Saatchi Gallery show. The trick to exhibiting there at 25? Making “beautiful stuff”, he says. I glance at the horse. He is able to do that, he says, because his family is quite well off – his grandfather is Ted Turner, founder of CNN.
This taciturn 25-year-old from Atlanta struggles to find much to like about London. It’s one of the best places to exhibit, the recent Royal College of Art graduate explains. He describes a kind of insulation system: between the Chelsea Arts Club and the few pubs he likes, he avoids the rest of London – the London that doesn’t suit him (the squalor of Camden around his studio, perhaps?). I recall something Maggie, the influencer, said to me: “In America, we like to cushion ourselves.” And then Jack, the scriptwriter: politics back home is stressful to think about. Then the chorus of hedge funders: why wouldn’t you live in Marylebone?
“Insulate, insulate, insulate,” is Sherman McCoy’s mantra for surviving New York, with its violent underbelly and obtrusive, dirty normies. The bond-trader protagonist of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities lives in a penthouse at 816 Park Avenue, looming not just figuratively above the mire of 1980s Manhattan. I think of Holland Park Avenue and boutique cafés in Kensington, an office on St James’s Square, the Chelsea Arts Club, Straker’s and the Fat Badger, the tennis courts in Regent’s Park – all insulated, with no need to reverse-commute to the Hamptons either.
[Further reading: The Ladies of London need our help]
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This article appears in the 25 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Easter Special
