What was the price of a house in UK in the XVIII Century?

by [deleted]

in a middle class distric and in a poor one. and the price of rent?

davepx

Frustratingly we don't have representative samples of house prices until the 19th century, but historians have used indices of costs of labour and materials to estimate the earlier figures, and we have some independent estimates of the total value of the housing stock and rents.

CH Feinstein (Capital formation in Great Britain, in Cambridge economic history of Europe vol 7 pt 1) indicates an average price of £70 c.1760 for a stock presumably approaching 1.4 million dwellings, though most would be worth under half as much (in 1860 nearly three-quarters are estimated to have been worth less than half the average).

We've even less to go on when it comes to housing in different areas or for different social groups. though the national average probably reflects what merchant and professional households might expect to pay. In 1860 half of the population paid on average under a quarter of the general average rental value, so a century earlier their rents may have averaged £1 annually on a property worth around £15-20, while the average or modestly well-to-do middle-class family might pay £4, rising to £6 at the end of the century.

It's worth noting that prices varied over the century, generally falling to the 1740s, then rising and finally shooting up at the end of the century when Henry Beeke values the stock at £200m, which agrees well with Feinstein's estimates: Gregory King's calculations for England & Wales in 1688 (an earlier price low) indicate a value of perhaps £50m for Great Britain with rents averaging rather above £2.