Was central london affordable (ish) to live in in the 1990s?

[Theendofspring]

And when did it become completely unaffordable and the rougher areas gentrified a bit? Reading a book which got me wondering.

I'm guessing that London has always been more expensive than anything northern (I'm northern)
So when north houses were >10k back in the 70s, London houses would have been the equivalent that only the affluent could afford then.
My parents still always point out a house that they tried to buy back in '75 but it was out of their reach at £11k. That house sold for 600k recently!

I moved 200 miles north in the late 80s as I couldn't afford to buy a house. I lived in Deptford which I have heard is now somewhat gentrified. It was definitely rough then.

Its always been more expensive than the north and in the later half of the 1980s prices increased by large % as houses rose in price all over the country and then crashed, but not enough to make them affordable

               Jan 1995	  Feb 2022	   Change

Detached £134,000 £1,378,000 +928%
Semi £90,000 £1,350,000 +1400%
Terraced £73,000 £902,000 +1136%
Flat £46,498 £397,500 +755%

the above figures are for Peckham

I was there 91-94. Very low salary as basic grade NHS technician. Lived in hospital accomodation for a few months in Paddington, then rented a nice flat in Kilburn with a friend. Dont remember struggling too much, definitely managed to eat out regularly. There were some quite cheap curry houses on Westbourne Grove, and Chinatown was cheap enough to eat out. Went to the Red lion on Kilburn high road most weeks for Guiness and live Irish music. Great times. Only moved out because I wanted a better job and got an offer outside London.

In the late 90s you could rent a studio flat in Highgate on a shop-assistant wage . You could buy a 1 bed new build (warehouse) flat in Rotherhithe for £95k and a new build studio in zone 3 for £30k. Then successive governments prioritised BTL over home-ownership and now housing is completely screwed.

We lived there mid 2000’s and we all survived on salaries in the early £20k’s.

By survived i mean we rented a nice flat in Clapham, five minutes from the tube, and went out at least 2-3 times a week.

That said, I moved out to Birmingham and it was the same for our two bed house in a very nice suburb as I was paying for one room in Clapham.

I moved there in 97 and started on £10k salary in my first job. I was desperate to buy and remember looking at studio flats in ok areas for £30k ish. Always just one step out of my reach though and I had no deposit.
I had a brilliant social life and spent virtually nothing going out. Loads of free stuff to do and house parties every weekend!

Depends what ‘central London’ means to you. Zone 2 was affordable up until the late 90s with 95% mortgages and 2 salaries for a 1-bed flat. Further out Zone 3 or the less transport connected bits of south or NE bigger places. Zone 1 usually unaffordable for average people. Massive explosion in price after early 2000s.

I bought my first flat, 2 bed, purpose built, zone 1, in 1991 for £80,000. My salary was £20,000, so mortgage for three times salary, and £20,000 deposit. Sold in 2000 for £188,000, bought new flat, same area, for £295,000. The flat downstairs, which is smaller than ours, has just sold for £1.3 million. Don’t know how anyone gets on the property ladder these days.

My aunt got a wc1 post code 2 bed flat with out building and shared large outdoor space for 110k in the early 90s it's worth around a million now - stuns me every time (cause I'm northern and poor)

The scruffier parts of zone 2 and 3 were affordable up to 1999 - you could buy a one bedroom flat on a single twenty-something's full time income if you could scrape together a deposit, and two graduates in their mid twenties with a joint income of 40,000 plus could afford a nice flat or a small house. City graduate starting salaries in the early 90s averaged around 12-14,000: starting salaries above 20,000 were reserved for the exceptionally good/lucky - but 20,000 would be very achievable by the age of 25,000.

I got a one bed ground floor Victorian conversion fir 60k in 1999. It was in Tottenham so a bit ropey but lovely neighbours, easy to the Tube and zone 3. We loved it. Flat was huge with a garden. I was left about 10k by my grandma and was earning early 20s. My mortgage was £350 per month.

Sold 3 years later for 125k so did well. Bought an ex council house in zone 4 next with dh. Was in there 10 years but it only went up about 30k as we sold just after the recession in the early 2010s. I looked it up on zoopla a few years ago and it had tripled in price!

I don't think so. Not proper zone 1 London. Literally no one I knew had a central London flat in the 90s even though we were all turning 30 by that time and had decent jobs. But not City type jobs, iykwim.

Thatcher's neoliberal revolution saw a big London housing boom in the 80s
(exacerbated by Blair in the late 90s which saw further gentrification).

I think so, my parents moved there in the 80s as they were immigrants & it was affordable. The vast majority of my neighbours & school friends had only 1 parent working. In the 90s slump lots of property was cheaper but things started to gentrify late 90s I think.

this was z3 though

I had a friend who had a studio flat in Russell Square in the mid 80s. It cost £20,000. I'm guessing his salary was about £8000 at the time. Goodness knows what it would be worth now.

My mate bought a garden flat in Tooting in the mid 90s for £66k, it was rough as back then.

I've just looked: £350,000.

It was affordable. I lived in zone 1, so did many friends. No one had spent more than $80K

I bought in Kilburn, just off the High Road in 1987, for 62K and sold in 1998-ish for £182k, just after the Jubilee line was completed. We paid off the mortgage and stuck the rest into the pension, and are still stunned at what a great decision we made quite casually.

My DH bought a flat in crouch end in 1990 for 80k. Sold it in 2010 for 325k.

He didn’t even want to buy a flat! His dad talked him into using his work bonus to get on the property ladder.

Not central London but DHs parents bought their house in East London (Zone 3) for 40k in the mid 90s.

I bought a flat on the edge of Stoke Newington for £42k on a £14k salary in the early 90s. There were lots of repossessions around though as interest rates had soared to 13-14% and a lot of people had lost their homes.

I knew people living in squats and bed sits in Stoke Newington in the early 80s. It was quite run down.