Thursday 20 March 2014

The North Circular Fence

Two days ago I made the effort to get out to the North Circular Road at Brent Cross. For those unfamiliar with Brent Cross it is famous for...
Brent Cross Shopping Centre
I went by tube and subsequently travelled South upstairs on a bus and very quickly snapped the image that sits at the top of this blog. It's a rather poor image technically and I may change it one day - in case I do, it looks likes this...


I was not expecting to find that they have already fenced off the North!

Wednesday 12 March 2014

A return to Kentish Town (dream on!)

Let's spell it out up front. I've benefited from getting into - and out of - London. Sufficiently to live a lifestyle from the age of 44 (in 2002) in which I have been able to do more or less what I wanted (albeit modest things!) and heve the freedom to do them when I've wanted to do them.

I still had to work, but did it for myself, latterly as a photographer. My family grew up. The two children completed school where we wanted them to complete school and went off to university. Most holidays were in our VW campervan.

This blog is not meant to be an autobiography but there will be references to personal stuff so it makes it useful to know the timeline. It looks like this:

1956: Get born in Rhondda Valleys. Grow up. Go to University in London.

1978: Leave University, become a nuclear physicist based in Derby, quit after 4 months

1979: Start working for Peat Marwick Mitchell (now KPMG) in London. Rent housing with friends.

1985: Spend two years working with KPMG in Toronto

1987: Return to London. Buy 1 bed flat in Kentish Town.

1991: Now married with one child, move to 2 bed flat in Kentish Town

1994: With second child, (you guessed it) move to 3 bed maisonette in Kentish Town

2000: Move to 3 bed house in Thames Ditton (Zone 6, so some would still call it London)

2002: Take voluntary redundancy (after 22 years with KPMG)

2009: Sell house, renting accommodation in Kingston area for 18 months before buying in Brighton where we are now.

The return to Kentish Town takes me back to 1987. Having spent two years living in Toronto and returning to London, I absolutely wanted to live centrally.  Property prices had more or less peaked but I did not know that at the time. Like everyone around me, I wanted to get on the property ladder and, before going to Canada, having lived in a room in a flat above the Job Centre in East Finchley for £51.50 per month, I had enough saved up for a deposit.

I was drawn to Kentish Town, home of the Town and Country Club (now the Forum) and the Bull and Gate, favourite live music venues that I loved and they were less than 5 minutes walk away. And they are still there today:

The Town and Country Club (as I prefer to know it!)

The Bull and Gate - a poster on the window said 'temporarily closed'

I took out a 95% mortgage sold to me across a desk by none other than Ray Boulger (yes he of John Charcol and the numerous TV appearance). I was firm about wanting a repayment mortgage and to his credit (despite the high commissions) he did not try and push one of those now-known-to-be-well-dodgy endowment mortgages. Had I gone that way the finances would have been well and truly screwed up by one of the first financial sector selling scandals. But still, Ray messed something up and it resulted in Charcol's halving their fees. I was probably kind to them because whatever it was probably cost me more.

But there I was with something like a £80,000 mortgage on a property I had bought for £84,000. Status wise, I was 31 years old manager - being away for two years I was making this move into property later than many of my contemporaries but I was there, in 76 Lady Somerset Road, Kentish Town - this is it today

Top floor flat now would be £300,000 - wall and fence flat too - bargain!

'Spacious loft conversion'
That one bed top floor flat has now been converted into a maisonette. In 2012 the asking rent was £1,647 per month. http://www.zoopla.co.uk/property-history/flat-a-c/76-lady-somerset-road/london/nw5-1tu/17684402

Zoopla now prices one bedroom flats on Lady Somerset Road in a range from £290,000 to £370,000. Crappy outside but smart inside is the way these places tend to be - had I stayed living in one bedroom top floor isolation, I would now be able to get £300,000 for the property.

So could I move back, to London, to this flat?

No. It's now a probably unaffordable maisonette. But, if it was still a one bed flat and if I wanted for me and my wife to move back to the street where we first live together, we could afford it, although it would swallow up a major chunk of our savings given the upward price differential between it and our four bedroomed, two bathroomed (count them) house in Brighton.

And of course this flat is tiny. With no back garden access. And with front 'garden' walls and fences fallen down (no change from 25 years ago!) it's a sign of what you have to live with as being quite normal when living in a leasehold flat in a shared building. All too often, nobody cares about the shared areas. Or if they care then they cannot afford to do anything about it.

Five years ago Zoopla tells me that the flat was worth £200,000. Then I could have swapped it for the Brighton home and had cash left over. But since then there has been a £100,000 gain on such one bed flats in the last five years.....

What does it take to live there now?

Well, a manager with a big 4 advisory firm could live there. With salaries now around the £60,000 pa level for 28 - 30 year olds, it would be possible. With a 95% mortgage, the 5% deposit would be £15,000.

Under the government's Help to Buy scheme the interest rate would be about 4.8% and mortgage repayments about £1500 per month. But with over £3000 per month flowing in this is apparently as affordable now as it was for me back in 1987. Or probably more so, since interest rates are so low.

But let's put this in proportion, it's way above what is affordable for a shop manager. Or a tube driver. Or a nurse. Even if somehow they could have saved up the deposit.

Does a fourfold increase in prices mean gentrification for Kentish Town?

There are very few signs of that - witness the state of housing on Lady Somerset Road and Kentish Town generally. It's still outwardly shabby, but when you live there you don't notice that, or put up with it.

What has happened to the area? Not much. The most noticeable thing for me is just across the Highgate Road and 50 metres from the flat - a burgeoning warehouse complex with Highgate Studios at the centre "A former Victorian warehouse and newspaper factory, now a creative workplace featuring character studio spaces, cafe and breakouts" - a breakout space is the new media buzzword for meeting room. Creative workplaces are all the rage as the London 'creative' and  'tech' industries grows and Kentish Town is pretty close to the centre of it all.

Kentish Town Meeja City
Or should I say Highgate Studios? Not much evidence of a Bond film being made
The pub one minute from our front door is now a gastro-pub called The Vine. And the pub at the other end of Lady Somerset Road, The Junction Tavern, is an even more up-market gastro-pub. Back in 1988 these were both regulation Kentish Town pubs where Irish accents were much in evidence. Not now....


Super posh gastro-pub  - The Junction Tavern
The Vine on Highgate Road

So, is there anything profound to come out of this visit?

Perhaps not. Compared to 1988, it seems that things are much the same. Salaries for your young urban professionals seem to have increased so that the property that I could afford in 1987 is still affordable now. To them anyway.

In fact, with low interest rates on offer and the Help to Buy scheme in place, it is salaries and demand for those salaries that have driven the property inflation. However, with the current low interest rates not being sustainable, there could be a shock to the system on the way, the same shock that I faced, leading to the reality of negative equity at the start of the 1990s.

But I suspect most professionals in London will find themselves cushioned.  In denying calls for financial sector reforms that would make the majority of us safer, the Government continues its support and the financial sector has the power to shape the London market to do what it must to survive, which includes keeping its workforce in their housing. 

From outside the North Circular, or at least the M25, it would seem that it is only a financial sector collapse that could correct the position so that we on the outside could buy into London again as we once could. But, I forget, we had one of those crises five years ago, and I'm pretty sure that it was the rest of the country that was made to suffer, not London.

Friday 7 March 2014

The concept of the North Circular Wall

The economy of London, the prices of sandwiches, transport, beer and homes is now inextricably linked to the presence there of the financial sector and related service sector industries sitting alongside the wider establishment, press and burgeoning new media. 
Despite keeping all these people happy, there is another view on this.

Over the last 30 years, from the time I first moved to London from the South Wales valleys, Londoners have found themselves living together in an enclave that becomes more and more exclusive as its population gets wealthier and wealthier. But if things continue in this way, and the differential between London and the rest of the country escalates such that enough people outside London smell a rat, how will London react to keep out the pesky northerners and the like?

The North Circular Wall is a fiction that in a literal sense will never happen. But it already exists in the sense that many of those inside the wall want to keep others out and succeed. This desire for exclusivity is mainly at a sub-concious level right now, Boris would never admit to it, but it is the way things are developing.

Right now I’m not sure how exactly my project will evolve around new photographs I will take and those I have previously taken. At a personal level, once I was part of things and now, just over three year after I left the London area and twelve years after choosing to leave a life of work in a major accounting firm in the City , I feel quite removed from it all. I could even say excluded if I consider whether my wife and I could move back there.

So I intend to visit places where I have lived and look at on what terms it would be possible to move back now. And places where I worked to see how they have evolved, who went bust and who is still there. I may even revisit one or two places where I bought a beer, and the North Circular Road - just to check that it is still passable…
(Photo ©Scott Hortop - the peace camp set up by various activist groups in Parliament Square, May 2010)