25 May 2023
Financial Times As the great and the good have descended on Chelsea this week for the annual flower show, the streets of this well-heeled south-west London neighbourhood have been transformed by colourful floral displays. The theme of the Chelsea in Bloom festival, now drawing to a close, is “flowers on film”. A Jurassic Park-inspired T-Rex has been planted in Sloane Square, an enormous gold Oscars statuette is on Pavilion Road, and there are floral tributes to Mary Poppins and The Lion King. Unlike the plants, however, the housing market in Chelsea has been wilting recently. Rising interest rates have damped activity and the number of property sales in the first three months of this year was 31 per cent below the same period last year, according to LonRes, which tracks the prime property market — though it remained 11 per cent up on the average between 2015 and 2019.
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