In the news today, London house prices are very high and there is often talk of a housing crisis. Halifax began tracking UK house prices in 1980. When they started tracking, the average London house price was around £50,000, and the average salary was around £6,000 per year (for the UK, not London-specific). That means the average house price was still 8x the average salary using those rough numbers I googled.
That had me thinking - London has been a big city for a long time and has probably been unaffordable for a long time. Are there historical records of Londoners complaining about house prices?
From what I have been reading, in Victorian London, home ownership wasn't particularly common. But someone would be buying and building and owning them. Was it not common because it was so expensive?
There were also a lot of events in London which may have affected house prices - the Great Fire, the plague, wars, etc.
So I guess my questions are:
What are some early complaints about London house prices? What is the earliest complaint about London house prices? Has London ever been actually affordable?
OP says:
When they started tracking, the average London house price was around £50,000, and the average salary was around £6,000 per year.
This seems like an inaccurate figure, because generally, both wages and cost of living in London has been significantly higher than the rest of the UK.
How has this fluctuated over time?
Has London always been more expensive than the rest of the UK (ie. in the middle ages, and through the industrial era), and is its relative cost growing or shrinking?
When they started tracking, the average London house price was around £50,000, and the average salary was around £6,000 per year (for the UK, not London-specific). That means the average house price was still 8x the average salary using those rough numbers I googled.
Average salary in the UK today is £26,500.
26,500 x 8 = 212,000
According to this article, the average house price in London in July was £527,349 (and this was after a £30,000 drop in the month following the Brexit vote). If this data is accurate, house prices in London have increased around 2.5 times faster than the average UK salary since 1980.
Not answering the question of whether Victorians complained about house prices but I just thought I'd set the record straight - relative to income, house prices in London are much higher than they were in the 1980s.