London Houses

"For the cost of a small family house in Fulham you could buy a street in Sunderland. For the amount some of the world’s wealthiest people are willing to pay to own a home in Kensington, they could also buy a small town if they looked hard enough."

Indeed the 10 most expensive boroughs in London, which include Camden and Richmond, have a combined property value of £552 billion. This is identical to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland combined

A six-floor mansion in Eaton Square has been put on the market at £70 million. The cost is the equivalent of £6,500 a square foot. This same house changed hands in 2005 for “only” £9.5 million, and again for £33 million in 2009. Granted, the current owner — Hong Kong property billionaire Joseph Lau — now has a gold-lined swimming pool, a cinema, gym and mews house. Those who can no longer afford Chelsea move to Clapham and Fulham instead and push prices up there. People displaced in those areas in turn try a bit further out in their turn and the ripple of rising prices spreads ever wider. The result is that prices rise in parts of London an oligarch does not even know exist. Over the past five years, the average increase for London as a whole, according to Savills, is 14.2 per cent (but 49 per cent in Westminster and 37 per cent in Kensington and Chelsea). But the average house price is already heading for £250,000, which requires a deposit of £100,000. It is hard to see how people could get on the ladder on those terms even with a 100-year loan. People have to live in London because the bulk of the population has to be able to live close to where the work is.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the country, house prices have been falling. The falls, from Wales to the North-East, range from 14 to 19 per cent, but the drop in Northern Ireland has been an  50 per cent. The value of the entire housing stock of the province is about the same as Wandsworth.