New American embassy opens quietly in London
President Trump attacked its locale as an ‘off location.’
LONDON— The gleaming new U.S. Embassy in London opened Tuesday with little fanfare and no official ribbon-cutting. President Donald Trump sparked a furor here last week when he tweeted that he wasn’t coming to open the $1 billion building the most expensive — embassy ever built — because it was a bad real estate deal and in an “off location.”
Many of those who live nearby took offense to Trump’s description of the location, but others said that the former New York real estate mogul makes a point.
The shiny embassy is located in Nine Elms, a massive redevelopment area on the south banks of the river Thames. The embassy is significantly larger than the old embassy, and is slightly closer to Westminster.
In interviews on Tuesday outside the embassy and in the surrounding area, it quickly became clear that one person’s “off location” is another person’s “up-and-coming.”
On Tuesday morning, the first day the embassy officially opened to the public, a small queue formed outside the entrance for consular services. A few yards away, dozens of construction workers in yellow vests and hard hats were hammering, drilling and banging.
“I can see why someone would say it’s (an) off location,” Sheron Cloyd, a 41-year-old project manager from New York, said over the sound of a chain saw. “It’s not in the city center, it’s south of the river.”
But Cloyd, who also lives south of the river — one of London’s physical dividing lines — said that the area near the embassy has become trendy over the last few years.
“When I first moved here, someone said Vauxhall used to be horrible. Not any more. It’s very expensive and trendy, kind of like Brooklyn — and as someone from Brooklyn, I would know,” he said. Like others standing in the line, he got off at the Vauxhall subway station and within a few minutes, noticed a giant U.S. flag flapping in the wind. It’s about a 10-minute walk to the embassy.
The old embassy was located in Mayfair, one of London’s most exclusive neighborhoods, and in a square steeped in American history.
But if Mayfair is the place of today and yesterday, Nine Elms is arguably the place of tomorrow.
“This is a lovely, large store. All that’s missing is the people,” said a sales clerk in a nearby grocery store.
Daniel Thomas, a journalist for the Financial Times, agreed that Trump had a point about the location.
“The new embassy is the centrepiece of the vast £15bn Nine Elms development that is at risk of being overbuilt and under thought. Some agents are already warning that the 20,000 homes will become a wasteland of empty buy-to-let flats owned by Asian investors.”
But others, like Yakine Abdullah, 22, a business management student from Iraq who was waiting outside the new embassy, said the area was alive and flourishing today.
“Four years ago, I lived in Vauxhall, and it was more dodgy,” but in three years, there has been a lot of construction, and the area has changed for the better, she claimed. “I now live very close to here, and it’s my favorite area to live in,” Abdullah said.