london

Are these prices going to fall back down again once Help to Buy stops, then? Or have they just permanently moved prices out of yet more people's reach?

Hopefully the end of HTB will mean some of the mad overheating stops but I don't get the expression we'll see prices actually fall anytime soon - it seems to take really bad conditions for prices to actually fall, I'm afraid. Most people seem to refuse to sell in a falling market unless they have to.

If interest rates shoot up, now that might be different.

NB I really don't know what I'm on about.

I do not think HTB has had a major impact yet. Interest rates rising could cool things but BTL rents could go up.

Was thinking interest rates rising could lead to a lot of repossessions? One thing holding me back from trying to get on HTB is that we could barely get a mortgage to cover a 2 bed flat somewhere out of the way around Waltham Forest as it is and that's with relatively low rates, if they go up I'd be stuck with huge mortgage repayments on some shithole. There must be a lot of people who are stretching themselves beyond their means?

That's a real concern when I see friends on new teachers' salaries looking to get a 95% LTV mortgage on a 250k flat. People seem to be judging repayments against what they're overpaying in rent now without really thinking about what happens if the rates go up. The challenge at a national level is that outside of a few pockets houses are not overpriced really and increasing rates to cool London could crash everywhere else.

outside of a few pockets houses are not overpriced really

Is this right? I heard the opposite when I went home for Xmas, unless Worcester is one of the pockets.

Was thinking interest rates rising could lead to a lot of repossessions?

Not necessarily. I mean, obviously if rates go up a lot it will lead to an increase in repossessions, but I think a relatively modest increase wouldn't lead to catastrophe. Firstly, a lot of people will have fixed rate mortgages. Secondly, people on variable mortgages who got them before the crash are paying considerably less now than they were pre-crash, so (assuming they still have the same income) they can afford for their mortgages to go back up again. Thirdly, people who bought even a fairly short time ago (e.g. a year) have probably seen the value of their property go up by 10% or more - if they became unable to pay their mortgage they could sell their property for a profit and move somewhere cheaper. Repossessions only really kick when people can't sell their property (usually because they're in negative equity).

xp Might be. West / South-west tends to be a bit more expensive, i think. Central England and the North is mostly a way off the peak of a few years ago. You can get a nice three-bed family home in Birmingham for about the same as a pokey studio on the fringes of London.

hell of a commute, though

fwiw Worcester is in Central England, albeit the south west part of it.

My sense of geography is awful, tbh.

Xp, my boss commutes from Coventry atm

currently searching for a flat to rent with my brother. demoralising. sometimes it feels like something could extend indefinitely and to so little reward that it could easily become a permanent activity or enforced recreation. going around looking at expensive small places you don't want to live in, and decoding estate agents' kaleidoscopes of lies.

This is starting to sound like a dystopian novel of the near future. Instead of "The Trial" it shall be "The Flat Hunt".

Yes, a part-furnished labyrinth of chambers in unheard of places, gumtree breadcrumbs, circus mirror photos - one small bedroom, one large bedroom, one small bedroom, one large bedroom. Might suit those with a yen for folly and traipsing around on rainy evenings. also, because everything is available NOW and is snapped up IMMEDIATELY, unless you are lucky you or have the spare cash to overlap two rents at once, you have to hand in your notice on your previous place before you've found somewhere you're moving into. So there's a wonderful jump into the void and a period of suspended nausea.

Oh! Email from brother:

'But no bedroom photos on one of them'

and another!

'Holloway property looks shit.'

Well, that's all sorted then.

you're welcome to look at my flat. I've got to go and live with my bride-to-be sooner or later.

Christ, thanks, woof. Certainly will include that in our currently ineffectual investigations. will be in touch.

isn't that down SE way?

yes - in Camberwell - going to Hither Green to be nearer my beloved/my beloved a205.

Congrats woof!

Having this thread in mind I looked at proposals for 'evil' crossrail and I am guessing areas that have not been exploited enough yet...the abbey wood/erith/belvedere 'triangle' does look ripe enough.

Also looks as if North Kent might join London, which makes a corner of my heart grey and sad.

Yay, Woof!

(But also yay to the idea of Fizzles moving to Sarf London for purely selfish reasons of ease of inflicting pints and book exchanges upon him.)

lol 'inflicting' pints and books. how will i cope. but yes, regardless of the ins and outs of arranging the move, sarf london is clearly where it's at. brother currently lives in Herne Hill, which is expensive, and apart from Brockwell Park, is a bit nothingy (prepared to listen to Herne Hill defenders if you're around). Oh, and it has 'Herne' there.

I am an endless defender of Herne Hill! The park! Herne the Hunter! The weekend market on the pedestrianised street outside the charming Victorian rail station! The fantastic little bookshop on the lane! Shoegaze gigs at the Half Moon (though I'm not sure that they have those much any more.) There's also lots and lots of really beautiful Victorian architecture around those parts - the Historical Society does walking tours which I highly recommend.

If it were not so expensive, I would live there, rather than here. Alas, it *is* very expensive (and all for a blip of a zone change).

nothingy status: rescinded. (i've never been in that bookshop, which is certainly an oversight.)

Truefact: The current book hostage you are holding comes from that very bookshop!

(I should probably attempt to get it back from you before you move and it disappears into boxed-up limbo, eh.)

i'm p good with keeping that sort of thing separate (i have a 'not my books don't take to indian restaurant' pile). i have finished it tho, so happy to do mid-frozen cold war forest hostage swap at any point.

herne hill is quite nice if I ever want to live in south london probably there. no tube though, obv.

Yes, the bookshop in Herne Hill is nice, and there is also an excellent oxfam bookshop on half moon lane. The half moon pub isn't going to open until the summer after the big flood. The Florence now has a creche. West Norwood FTW.

herne hill has a very lazy feel that i like, especially so close to the nonstop insanity of brixton

but yeah, it's been gentrified long before brixton went down that road, no?

yeah, no? no, yeah?

I found Herne Hill increasingly unbearably smug towards the end of living there, although this was probably due to the best pub, the Half moon, being closed for last 6 months, with the alternatives not being much cop and full of 4 years olds running around. Living within cycling distance of Brockwell Park has proved to be a good compromise personally, and I now live in a place twice the size of the old one. Also better connected now in comparison, although it's all buses and trains (as opposed to the Brixton tube).

I think the gentrification is a recent thing. My girlfriend thinks it's been within the last 5 years, and remembers her football team being thrown out of The Regent (for dancing on tables!) when it was an old spit and sawdust irish pub, and squats along Railton Road. Rent prices have certainly skyrocketed in the the 2 and a half years we were there.

My brother moved to Herne Hill in the mid-80s (he was a student and managed to get short life housing in one of the big houses up on Herne Hill itself, his room cost a princely £6 per week!) and the impression I have is that over that period HH started more (lower-)middle class than Brixton but the gentrification which has happened to HH has been Brixton led.

Quite how I've managed to pick up that impression I'm not sure; HH, as far as I can tell, never went through an edgy hipster phase, and I think Brixton's edgy hipster phase* surely started before Herne Hill had changed very much - I always thought it managed to appeal to people who liked the edgy-hipster element of Brixton but didn't necessarily want to live in the middle of it.

*think we still called them trustafarians in those days; I guess they were a bit different but probably performed the same shock-troops-of-gentrification purpose

edgy-hipster gentrification and yummy-mummy gentrification are pretty distinct things and i get the impression the latter is what's happening to herne hill? (also lower clapton)

herne hill as the stoke newington to brixton's dalston, or something

Yes, it's Yummy-Mummy Gentrification as opposed to Edgy-Hipster Gentrification, but, also, lesbians.

just like stoke newington!!

ehh there probably is a dalston-stokey causality given that we're nigh on 20 years of edgy east ldn

(I set 'em up, you nail the joke.)

x-post to Lex

Yes, Yummy Mummification nails it for Herne Hill, hence creches in the Florence etc. Although halfway up Railton Road (where the squats were based) sort of turns into Brixton anyway. If Herne Hill ever had an edge, it was based around the Half Moon pub. I guess the pedestriansiation of the square (in 2012) around the train station helped, turning it from little more than a fairly depressing junction to a place where you can do stuff. Sunday markets, outdoor films and the like.

stoke newington-dalston
herne hill-brixton
brockley-new cross

same thing? discuss

I dunno, when I moved here Stoke Newington had a rep for being (um, what was it called back then?) alternative, the cliche was the cider swilling end of the anarchist spectrum, right? There was never a great deal of that in Herne Hill, and what there was amounted to Brixton overspill as far as I could tell. Stoke Newington went through its own edgy -> yummy gentrification process, which seemed to me largely independent of what happened to Dalston (though it may have been partially responsble for what happened to Dalston, I guess?).

("When I moved here": here = London, not Stoke Newington, I'm firmly SE15/SE22 with a short sojourn all the way over in SE16; when = 1998.)

i feel like all these little micro-histories, growing patiently like moss and lichen - with the occasional kudzu vine bolting startlingly through the branches - have just been bush hogged, the whole thing plowed under. shitty fourth-floor council flats going for £385K in stamford hill and bow just makes a nonsense of this stuff.

I think that makes it more important to *remember* the micro-histories.

and to not buy shitty council flats in stamford hill for $385k

Remember though, Dalston and Stoke Newington were where people who couldn't afford Islington always wound up buying.

That's certainly been true for the last 10-15 years but Stoke Newington's position as somewhere with a bohemian, middle class reputation probably predates the rise of Islington as a particularly desirable neighbourhood.

Like Islington, it has always had huge pockets of deprivation and crime, though. I'm not sure it ever went through a phase of having an 'edgy' reputation as a whole, it's more like two separate places (one rough, one leafy and middle class) layered on top of each other.

When I first moved back to London (1998) right through the CTCL/beginning of Plan B years, Stoke Newington was a place of squat raves, edgey youngperson houseshares, free jazz basements and, yes, lesbians. There was a kind of leafy bit around Church St and the park, but that was Islington overspill, I guess, rather than the edgey gentrification that was coming up the A10 from edgey youngpersons priced out of Hoxditch.

Odd how so many views of different bits of London can coexist in people's minds.

aye, t'were nothing but fields when i moved here one score and four months ago.