Is London property really booming again?

Press reports and housing market pundits are proclaiming a resurgence in London property prices - but if there really is a new boom forming in the capital, then MoneyWeek editor Merryn Somerset Webb can't find it. And a new monthly survey of house price growth confirms her suspicions...

I usually take my little daughter for her afternoon walks in central London's Hyde Park, but as the summer has gone on we have found it less and less peaceful.

With the sun come hundreds of young men with Frisbees, mothers with Bugaboo prams (which take up far too much space), hordes of tourists hunting down the Diana fountain and altogether too many dogs. So we've started boycotting it and have found a new place to go where we are always almost entirely alone the Paddington Basin development.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.