Monday 12th May

That is the latest statistic about London; it seems the streets really are paved with gold.   But what does it mean for ordinary people.  House prices are rising inexorably.  I thought I had done well in selling my house in Leyton for £325 thousand about 7 years ago, but it must be far higher than that by now.   It is all relative in a way, and selling when I did enabled me to start to sort my life out.  I really felt I could no longer live in that house any longer; two failed relationships and the very walls seemed to hang heavy with sorrow.   It was a cathartic change, after nineteen years I needed to move.   But of course the other side of the coin is that my own children cannot afford to live in London, even if they wanted to.  I see all over Docklands the rise of super-tall blocks of flats.  When I was young they were all council-owned and no-one wanted to live in them; the lifts broke or were used as toilets, piles of rubbish grew in courtyards and gangs of youths ruled the place.  Some are still like that.  And even if the shiny new blocks are clean and well-maintained I am sure the ground rent will be high, and when the time comes for re-furbishment it will cost the leaseholders a fortune.  And yet young couples are so desperate to get on the housing ladder that they are fighting for the chance to buy for two or three hundred thousand these tiny flats in the sky.

Where will it all end?  I don’t want to be a doom-merchant but every bubble eventually bursts, and this one is being inflated rather quickly.   Maybe the worst aspect is that the gap between London and the rest of the country is widening ever further.  All the investment seems to be happening here in the Capital.  I am sure if you live in the North you will have a different perspective on it all.  And of course the fact that these billionaires are living here makes not a jot of difference to the lives of ordinary Londoners who are paying above inflation tube fares and many have had no real increase in pay for years.  So it goes.