A slum for half a million

It was pretty barmy ten years ago but now it’s downright insane. When I last dabbled in the London property market, prices were rocketing and there were half a dozen buyers for every property. These days it’s a whole lot worse but I’ve got no choice. My wife and I have a toddler nearing his first birthday and it’s becoming impossible to lug everything up the 58 steps to our top-floor flat: baby, toys, pushchair, Cow & Gate formula, books, food, wine, beer. And it’s really not healthy. I could easily have a heart attack watching her doing all that carrying.

Our home, in which I’m writing this piece, went on sale just after Christmas. We chose a swanky top-end estate agent, (‘We charge you the earth — for a very small piece of it’), calculating that they’d attract the kind of City high-flyers who’d be seduced by the look of our warehouse-style flat with its big airy spaces, pock-marked brickwork, chrome sink and all that cobblers. It worked. Within a week we’d sold for ‘the full asking’ as our charming negotiator put it. Tally ho. It was time to go house-hunting.

The London market is so overheated right now that new properties are like movie stars. You have to make an appointment just to get a glimpse of them. Block-viewings are scheduled for Saturday mornings, when ten or more hopefuls are given a quarter of an hour each to scoot around their future dream-home. There’s barely time to take off your shoes, charge up the beige stair-carpet, whisk around each of the bedrooms, one, two, three, tap your knuckles authoritatively on a random piece of plasterwork (yes, we all do it) and peer into next door’s garden to check for freshly dug graves. Having ascertained that a) the house will withstand a light westerly breeze and b) the neighbour isn’t a serial killer, you’re hustled out into the street just as the next set of buyers are taking off their shoes and leaving them on the doormat.