Uneasy Streets

Empty apartments, trainless railways, restless investors—a bottom-up look at China’s erratic economic and social footprint in British cities.

From Thames Water to Heathrow Airport, Pizza Express to private schools, Chinese investors have pumped billions into UK property and business. Foreign capital ready to regenerate Britain’s crumbling infrastructure is an enticing prospect. But how much is reality and how much a dream?

In Uneasy Streets, Caroline Knowles illuminates China’s global influence from the bottom up. Focusing on London and Manchester, she explores Beijing’s grand claims of urban renewal against the ramshackle physical evidence she finds at street level: a series of half-finished buildings and abandoned holes in the ground. This isn’t just a British phenomenon: wherever they emerge, China’s global cities are patchworks of incompleteness—the products of relentlessly profit-driven urbanism that disregards the people it claims to serve. All along the continent-spanning Belt and Road network lies a trail of broken promises: a phantom university, a non-existent smart city, ghost ports and neighbourhoods.

China’s soft-power city-making falls far short of the dreams displayed in glossy brochures; all those smiling mayors, investors and local businesspeople. Combining urban observation with sharp commentary, interviewing property developers, Chinese migrants and other city-dwellers, Knowles paints an intimate, nuanced portrait. This is the financial, material and human fabric of Chinese Britain.

Caroline Knowles is an urban explorer and ethnographer who writes about the built and human infrastructures of city streets. She is best known for Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London and Flip-Flop: A Journey Through Globalisation’s Backroads. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The i Paper and other publications.