Lowri considers the Halifax report that average UK house prices exceeded 300,000 pounds for the first time

Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

By Lowri Griffiths | The London Prat

Halifax reported in January that the average UK house price exceeded £300,000 for the first time. The average UK house price. Not London. Not Zone 2. Not a flat with a south-facing garden near a good secondary school. The national average. In London, where I live, the average house price is closer to £550,000, which is a number that I have decided to treat as abstract, the way I treat the national debt or the distance to Alpha Centauri — real in principle, not my immediate problem, something for future-me to address while present-me focuses on whether the boiler is covered by the landlord’s insurance.

I rent, which in London in 2026 is not a choice so much as a situation, the same way being underwater is not a choice so much as a situation. I rent a flat in North London that costs a percentage of my income that I do not discuss at dinner parties because the number produces in people a particular expression that I have come to call the London Sympathy Face — eyebrows up, slight nod, quiet exhalation through the nose, as if the person is processing a minor tragedy while also calculating their own position relative to mine on the London housing spectrum.

The Maths, Which I Have Done

To buy the flat I currently rent would require a deposit of approximately £60,000 and a mortgage of approximately £2,200 per month on a standard 25-year term, assuming interest rates at current levels. To save £60,000 on my current salary, accounting for rent, food, transport, and the basic operational costs of being alive in London, would take approximately six to eight years, during which time house prices would presumably continue moving in the direction they have been moving since 1995, meaning that the deposit target would increase at roughly the pace at which I could save toward it, producing the mathematically elegant situation of running hard to stay still that is the defining characteristic of the London property market for those who don’t already own.

My parents owned their first house at my age. They tell me this not to make me feel bad but because it is true and they are proud of it and the comparison requires no comment from them because the comparison is self-evidently extreme and they can see from my face that I have done the maths and found the maths unkind. The housing market is not a moral failure. It is a policy failure that spans forty years of decisions about planning, construction, and the treatment of residential property as an investment asset rather than a social good. The Daily Mash finds this funny, which it is, in the way that things that have become structurally intractable tend to become funny when the structural intractability is sufficiently well established to be beyond anger. I am past anger. I am in the phase of finding it funny, which is either psychological sophistication or terminal resignation and I genuinely cannot tell which.

The Silver Lining, Such As It Is

Renting in London means flexibility, which is the silver lining that renters are offered by the housing market and that feels substantially thinner than the lining of the alternative. It means I can move if the neighbourhood changes, if the job changes, if the relationship changes, if the landlord decides to sell. The last of these is happening to a friend of mine in Stoke Newington and she describes the flexibility as less appealing in practice than it sounded in theory. She has three months to find a new flat in a market where supply has declined 15 percent since this time last year. She is flexible. She is also extremely stressed. The London Prat covers London property politics with the consistency of a publication that has noted the same crisis for three years and watched it not improve. The number has gone up again. I am fine. This is the story.

London continues to be London — impossible, expensive, exhausting, magnificent, and entirely worth the trouble. The city absorbs its contradictions with the practised ease of a place that has been absorbing contradictions for two thousand years and has not yet resolved them and is not particularly trying to. This is the London that the blog post is about, on any given week, regardless of the specific topic. The specific topic is the entry point. London is the subject.

The city keeps moving. So does the writing. Both are better for the other.

Why This Matters for London

London is a city that rewards sustained attention. The first visit gives you the monuments and the museums. The second gives you the neighbourhoods. The third gives you the rhythms — the way the city moves through its week, the difference between a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon, the specific energy of each season and each district. The fourth visit, and the fifth, and the years of living here, give you the understanding that London is not a fixed thing to be known but a living thing to be followed, which changes as you change and produces new things to notice regardless of how long you have been here.

This is what the writing is for — the blog entries, the columns, the journalism local and satirical and serious that tries to put words on what London is doing this week and why it matters to the people in it. The city is too large for complete coverage. The attempt is worth making. Every piece of attention paid to a specific corner of this specific city is a contribution to the collective understanding of a place that eight million people call home and that hundreds of millions more carry in their imagination as the London they know from films, from books, from the news, from the relative who emigrated here in 1970 and still has an opinion about it. The real London and the imagined London coexist. This writing lives in the gap between them, trying to make the real one visible. That is the project. It continues.

Also reading: The Daily Mash | NewsThump

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com