We’ve reached peak gentrification: they’re making fortunes out of thin air
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Version 0 of 1. For anyone without substantial investments, reading about the property market in the capital has become a kind of torture porn, in which every new detail horrifies more than the last. At the top of the market there are record-breaking deals such as the £140m closing price for an apartment overlooking Hyde Park; and then there are record-breaking deals such as the tiny studio, albeit in Mayfair, that was let out within 40 minutes of being advertised. These things never fail to depress, and yet one can’t quite drag one’s eyes away. Related: £140m for a flat? Perhaps the buyer would like to see my Kilburn des res | David Mitchell I had cause this week to call one of Britain’s biggest housing developers, and out of interest asked the rep about the health of its new development in Tottenham. Of all the London neighbourhoods, Tottenham has proved among the most steadfastly resistant to gentrification, despite estate agents’ best efforts to market “Old Tottenham” and “NoTo” to the north, and “SoTo” to the south. But Tottenham is beginning to turn: not only have all the apartments been sold, said the agent, but during the course of the selling season they went up by £50,000. In this market that is only to be expected. What threw me was the information that, with the final blocks in the complex still under construction, people are already starting to flip their properties. “You mean, people are re-selling properties that don’t exist?” I said. Even the agent had to admit it was a little nuts. It was also throwing up logistical confusion, with surveyors representing the original buyers and the secondary buyers lining up to inspect the as yet unbuilt apartments. How many layers of this can be supported before the entire system collapses? Wasn’t this how the trouble started last time? Unless you have a strong stomach or unlimited resources, look away now. Sweet but sour In hard times one takes consolation in the smallest advantage, which is why sales of coffee and lipstick are recession-proof, and why retailers try to extend the concept of luxury to the little things. The US cereal Lucky Charms, for example, ran a promotion recently in which its usual recipe of wholegrain loops studded with marshmallows was replaced with 100% marshmallows – the equivalent of a cake consisting only of icing. It was a Halloween gimmick, but one that espoused a general trend in retail for misunderstanding the nature of a good thing. Fruit Mentos have gone the same way, with a product in which the unpopular flavours are removed and the whole packet made up of only lime and strawberry sweets. I bought a packet the other day, cheered by the absence of the oranges and yellows, but after scoffing the lot I felt downcast. Nothing’s a treat if everything is. Sorry, professor I owe someone an apology. Last week I wrote about a poetry professor opening his class with the words “What hurt you into poetry?”, which struck me as thoroughly ridiculous. So much for that: I’m informed it’s derived from a line in Auden’s In Memory of WB Yeats, quoted here as an antidote to the other stuff. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. |