Not everyone likes One Hyde Park, the new Richard Rogers-designed luxury residential complex in London’s Knightsbridge. A commentator in the Financial Times’s House & Home section thought the four iron-shuttered glass towers “could have been teleported from Dubai”. But people are buying. The developers say more than 50 of the 86 flats, the most expensive in the UK, have been sold. Ninety per cent of the buyers are from abroad.

It is not just One Hyde Park. Buyers, many from the Middle East, have been piling into other prime London properties too, pushing city centre prices up 2.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2011, even as the rest of the UK’s housing market stagnated. Yolande Barnes, research director at Savills, the estate agents, says that above the ￡15m level, almost the entire market is foreign.

But while housing investors have been swarming into London, bankers, anxiously scanning Monday’s interim report from the Independent Commission on Banking, have been threatening to leave. Perhaps some will. Just possibly, a bank will shock the City by moving its headquarters. More likely, bankers will hint darkly that, when it comes to adding staff, they will send them to New York, Hong Kong, Zug or Shanghai instead. London will become less important.