London is the beating heart of European luxury. But for how long?

Every so often, the luxury world produces a report that reads less like market data and more like a mirror. Walpole’s State of London Luxury, in partnership with Cadogan, is exactly that, an X-ray of a city that insists, against all rivals, on remaining the gravitational center of European wealth and shopping.

While the headline sounds familiar: London is confirmed as Europe’s most powerful hub for luxury and wealth, what catches the eye is not the numbers themselves, though they’re staggering, but what they reveal about the magnetism of the British capital. Seventeen million overnight visitors in 2024, four million more than Paris, and 352 centi-millionaires calling it home, compared with Paris’s 227. The sheer concentration of money, power, and taste is unmatched.

What fascinates, however, is not simply that people come to London, it’s why they come. They come to shop in Bond Street boutiques, to dine at one of the city’s 85 Michelin-starred restaurants, to sleep in five-star hotels where a night costs more than a month’s rent in most of Europe. And they come for the theatre of it all: Chanel pop-ups in Covent Garden, Louis Vuitton x Murakami activations in Soho. London excels not just at selling luxury, but at staging in an endless rotation of experiences designed as much for Instagram as for consumption.

The report notes that high-spending tourists, those who stay in the best hotels, spend fourteen times more than average visitors, funneling 30 billion pounds into the economy. These are not just tourists; they’re patrons underwriting museums, galleries, and heritage institutions. In other words, the cultural wealth of London is subsidised by its financial wealth.

Yet there is no doubt that underneath lies a flicker of anxiety. London’s hotel pipeline is booming, the largest wave of openings since 2014, but competition is intensifying. Paris has sharpened its edges post-Olympics, Milan has its fashion-fueled momentum, and Dubai, with its frictionless luxury and tax advantages, remains the city everyone compares themselves to.

Prime real estate

London, it turns out, is becoming a capital not just of couture and commerce, but of “luxury living” where saunas, cryo-chambers, and circadian lighting are marketed with the same aspirational fervor as a Birkin bag. Wellness, once the province of retreats, has been built into bricks and mortar, fetching premiums of 10–25 percent. In this sense, the future of luxury looks less like Sloane Street and more like a Mayfair townhouse fitted with a yoga studio and oxygenated pool.

Almost every industry figure surveyed admits the city’s dominance feels precarious. Incentives for international shoppers have been stripped away, the cost of doing business in the UK remains punishing, and the bureaucratic drag of post-Brexit Britain lingers. Luxury may be resilient, but it is not immune. London’s cultural draw is still mighty, but taste, as anyone in fashion knows, can be fickle.

So yes, the report tells us what we already knew: London remains Europe’s luxury capital. But reading between the lines, it feels more like a warning shot than a victory lap. Cities don’t remain powerful simply because they once were. They must seduce, surprise, and reinvent. And if there’s one thing London has always excelled at, whether in fashion, food, or finance, it’s reinvention.