LONDON CALLING:The UK's main lenders are withdrawing competitive mortgages almost as quickly as they offer them and this has borrowers in a spin, writes Angela Pertusini.

FOR REASONS known only to themselves, the UK's main lenders have started playing an increasingly cruel game of "love you, love you not" with the nation's borrowers.

Mostly it's love you not, raising rates despite Bank of England cuts to base rates, excluding anyone needing 100 per cent mortgages, then 95 per cent and becoming pretty sneery about those looking for a 90 per cent loan (75 per cent for buy-to-let).

It is all very startling and confusing after seven years of being feted and wooed by the very same institutions: "What, you don't think we deserve six-time salary advances? You expect us to give you a realistic return on your loan? And pay upfront fees? But, I thought we were friends."

Every so often, though, they really try to mess with our minds. Having cudgeled us into abject misery about our prospects of ever being able to afford to remortgage again one of them decides to introduce a competitive rate and sneaks a "product" out onto the market with interest fixed at about the mid 5 per cent range. Great, everyone breathes a sigh of relief and the crunch's grip seems to be loosening only for the offer to be withdrawn within days - sometimes hours - of its introduction amid gripes about the bank being deluged with customers.

First Direct, the telephone banking arm of HSBC, raised its 5.49 per cent mortgage to 5.99 per cent after a few days of this deluge and the Halifax, the UK's biggest lender, is set to change its rates for the 20th - yes, the 20th - time since January.

It's pretty grim both for domestic buyers and overseas investors. The philosophy among buy-to-letters has always been that should things get tough, they can always sell but as details dwindle dusty and untouched in estate agency windows, that is looking an increasingly difficult option to pull off. While many predicted that the boom couldn't go on for ever, very few - if any - thought that it would be the very financial institutions who had boosted it all along with their cheap loans that would cause its implosion. It's bad enough if you're British but, with the added blow of sterling reaching a shocking low against the euro, I bet you are wondering why you ever bothered in the first place.

• Two stories that appeared on the same day on theratandmouse.co.uk website give insight to the current state of the London market. The first concerns a rumour about the Highbury Square development - the smart Arsenal development next to the Emirates stadium (hilariously, on the location map, they manage to make it look as if it is just around the corner from Piccadilly and Buckingham Palace rather than half way up shabby Holloway Road). Launched two years ago at prices touching £300k, the flats are now nearing completion but there is nervousness about how many of the buyers of the 550 units will be able to carry through. We've heard about investors waving goodbye to their deposits in some of the more downmarket northern city developments but this is the first time it has been publicly mooted as a possibility in a prestigious London project.

Meanwhile, in south London, it's "credit crunch? What credit crunch?" as the future of Battersea's iconic power station is once again debated. The Irish entrepreneurs behind Spencer Dock, Richard Barrett and John Ronan, are proposing a complex of 743,224sq m (8 million sq ft) of commercial space and homes for 7,000 people on the listed, Thames-side site. It doesn't quite marry with the current economic climate but the pair are prepared to wait out the gloom by delaying work until 2012 and completing in 2020. Property, we are told, is a long-term investment but whoever thought it would take 12 years to make a few quid?

• I am loving the latest series of Location, Location, Location, the most prestigious of Channel 4's huge raft of property shows. Each week, the presenters, Kirstie Allsop and Phil Spencer, look for a new home (in its heyday, two!) for unusually photogenic and moneyed buyers. The current programmes were filmed pre-Northern Rock in the summer of 2007 and are generally steeped in schadenfreude, so loathsome are the couples on the search.

Despite some late nights for Kirstie and Phil in the voiceover and editing suites - inserting nuggets such as "but the market could turn and so we really need to find value for money" - the general vibe of the show is that the buyers must compromise, compromise, compromise because property prices are always going to go up and they mustn't dither looking for somewhere they really like or that suits their needs. Last week, however, featured a rather sweet young pair of first-time buyers who had secured five-times salary mortgage and were seriously stretching themselves to find a £250,000 flat in west London. After much huffing and puffing about the unrealistic budget from the presenters, they were shown grotty offering after grotty offering and seemed worryingly enthusiastic, putting in bids to buy two of them. It was heartbreaking, nerve-shredding stuff and nothing short of a merciful relief when, at the end of the programme, they succeeded in securing neither and had decided to keep on renting for the foreseeable future.

Wimbledon stars aims to net £20M

With Wimbledon in full swing, Savills will be hoping to attract some interest in a hotel investment near the All England Tennis Club that's on the market at a cool £20 million (€25 million). The four-star 46-bed Cannizaro House Hotel claims a host of regular celebrity tennis guests including Boris Becker, Pat Cash and John McEnroe.

Gerard Nolan, director of Savills, says: "Cannizaro House presents a fantastic opportunity for an investor to purchase an extremely profitable hotel with the best location in Wimbledon."

The 18th century building was originally a private residence before being bought by Viscount Melville, secretary of state for war under William Pitt the Younger, who lived there until the early 1800s.