A neighbourhood adjacent to ours has its own version of Henman Hill.
Each year, for the Wimbledon men’s final, a committee of local traders applies to the council for a licence to close off the main thoroughfare, Northcote Road, where they erect a big screen to watch the tennis.
They set it up at the bottom of a junction with one of the side roads, a vast hill that sweeps up towards a local common. Hordes of glamorous people aged in their 20s and 30s gathered there in Sunday’s sunshine to catch the action, sitting on the tarmac all the way to the top of the hill.
As I casually observed the crowd, a couple of thoughts entered my mind. The first was that somebody should tell these affluent young Londoners that draught Guinness in a can should never be consumed straight from the tin.
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The second thing to strike me was puzzlement at how, as affluent as they are, any of these young people could afford to live around here. I certainly couldn’t. Our 20-minute stroll down to Northcote Road is an aspirational journey to see how the other half lives.
It is perhaps the most middle-class half-mile in south London, an array of elite boutiques with prices to match. My wife popped in to one of the fruit and vegetable shops on the street to buy a snack before the tennis. She paid almost £1 (€1.15) per cherry.
It is precisely the sort of place where you would expect to find a neighbourhood watch party of plummy young professionals, nourished by lakes of Pimms and oddly-consumed Guinness, glued to the action at the All-England Lawn Tennis Club.
But if a half-dozen cherries costs more than a fiver on Northcote Road, imagine just how much it costs to rent around there. Modest family homes on the neat little terraces nearby are priced at £5,000-£6,000 per month. Higher-end terraced properties top £10,000 per month.
This is not Mayfair or Knightsbridge. Locals say it was a regular working community with regular prices to match until about 15 or 20 years ago. Now it is an increasingly elite enclave where extortion seems to be the norm.
My wife and I called into a friend who is employed in one of the nearby charity shops and we marvelled together at the audacity of the Northcote Road vibe. If you want to gauge the sort of people who live locally, she said, just check out the men’s shirts on display in her charity shop. Sure enough, they all had cufflinked sleeves. “Local finance bros. They wear them a few times then donate them to us.”
She said the rule of thumb for local estate agents in this particular area is that your income should be at least 3½ times the annual rent of the property.
If a typical family home costs close to £70,000 per year, that meant a common household income in the area would be near £250,000. I looked again at the sweep of younger people gathered outside watching the tennis and concluded that if they weren’t finance bros, they must be sharers living cheek-by-jowl just to make their monthly rent.
Our friend working in the charity shop recently moved to Crystal Palace, a grittier part of south London. Even there, rents for ordinary homes are spiralling out of her reach. Her longer-term plan is to move to Poole, a seaside town in Dorset, two hours south of London. She said she could earn the same salary working in the retail industry there as she could in London, yet she could also halve her rent.
She was resigned to the fact of being inched further and further from the liveable core of her beloved home city. “There are communities like Northcote Road all over London. These were ordinary places. But the ordinary people are being forced out.”
The Labour government of Keir Starmer has staked its future on building 1.5 million new homes by the time of the next election in four years’ time. About £39 billion has also been set aside for affordable housing, albeit over the next decade.
Many of the new homes are earmarked for outer suburban areas and greenbelt zones where development has been stifled for years. But officials in London have also lobbied for a chunk of the funding to be spent on homes in hollowed-out inner-city communities.
Gentrification driven by higher property prices is a phenomenon of every vibrant city. But it is a particular feature of life in London, a city that is really more of a bubble with its own unique, baffling economic climate.
