Lowri Griffiths on watching her postcode change one letting agent window at a time

I have lived on the same three streets in North London for eleven years, which in this city now qualifies me as some kind of elder statesman of the postcode. I say this with no pride whatsoever. I say it the way you might mention you have survived eleven winters without a working boiler.

This week I walked past the letting agent window I have walked past a thousand times, the one with the peeling laminate and the photos of flats that always look slightly wider than they turn out to be in person, and did the thing I always do, which is stop and read the prices like they are a weather report. Grim. Getting grimmer.

The Maths That Stopped Adding Up

A one bedroom flat two streets from where I am currently typing this is listed at a monthly rent that, when I first moved here, would have covered a small mortgage. Not on a house. On a flat. With a bathroom you have to enter sideways.

I am not writing this to be the millionth person to say London is expensive, because you already know that, you are already living it, you already do the small private arithmetic every time a bill lands. I am writing this because the specific texture of it, who exactly gets pushed out and who exactly gets to stay, has started to feel less like an economic trend and more like a quiet sorting process happening to my actual neighbours.

Who Stays, Who Goes

The family who ran the newsagent for as long as I have lived here left last spring. Not dramatically. No sign in the window, no farewell notice. One week the shutters were up at seven and the next week they simply were not, and a new tenant moved in who sells, as far as I can tell, artisanal reed diffusers to people who do not appear to live locally.

My neighbour Denise, who has been in her flat since the eighties and still remembers when the corner shop was a proper butcher’s, told me over the fence that her landlord has started “asking around” about her plans, which is landlord for something I do not think Denise has fully clocked yet.

Meanwhile I know at least four people my age, professionals, employed, entirely sensible with money, who have simply given up looking for anything within a forty minute commute and have quietly relocated to towns I had to look up on a map. Not because they wanted adventure. Because the maths finally refused to cooperate.

The Numbers Behind the Vibe Shift

Research from housing charities and the Office for National Statistics has tracked private rental growth outpacing wage growth across London for a sustained period, and North London specifically has seen some of the sharpest increases as buyers priced out of more central postcodes push further out, which then pushes the people who were already here further out still, in a kind of slow motion game of musical chairs where the music never actually stops, it just gets quieter and quieter until you realise there was never enough seating to begin with.

I am not an economist. I am a woman who knows what a flat white cost in 2014 and what it costs now, and can extrapolate from there with reasonable confidence.

What The Council Says, What The Street Says

Local council meetings on housing supply are, I am reliably informed by people with more patience than me, well attended and full of earnest discussion about planning permission and affordable housing quotas that developers meet on paper by building flats nobody who actually needs an affordable home could plausibly afford.

Denise’s assessment, delivered over the fence with a cup of tea going cold in her hand, was somewhat more concise. She said the street “doesn’t feel like it belongs to anyone who lives on it anymore,” which I have not been able to stop thinking about since.

The Reed Diffuser Question

I do not actually have anything against reed diffusers. I own one. It was a gift. It sits there doing whatever reed diffusers do, which as far as I can tell is very little beyond looking expensive.

But there is something about watching a genuinely useful, genuinely community anchoring business get replaced by a shop selling a mood rather than a service that feels like a small, specific grief. Not a tragedy. Nobody died. A newsagent closed and a candle shop opened. But it is one more thread pulled from the actual fabric of a place, and eventually enough threads get pulled that you look up and the fabric is gone and what remains is, essentially, a very well lit corridor of shops selling things nobody local strictly needs.

What I Am Not Saying

I want to be careful here, because this piece could easily curdle into the kind of nostalgic moaning that pretends every change is decline and every new arrival is an invader, and that is not what I mean. New people moving to a neighbourhood is not the problem. New people is how neighbourhoods have always worked, mine included, built as it was by generations of people who were themselves once the new arrivals somebody else grumbled about.

The problem is a rental market that has stopped functioning as housing and started functioning as an asset class, where the actual human need for a stable, affordable place to live has become almost incidental to the underlying investment logic. That is not gentrification in the simple sense people mean when they use the word as an insult. That is a market failure with a very pleasant looking coffee shop sitting on top of it.

What Happens Next

Denise, for what it is worth, says she is staying put until they carry her out, which I believe entirely and which I hope very much does not become a metaphor rather than a joke. The newsagent family, last I heard, are running a similar shop two boroughs over, in a spot with slightly lower rent and, presumably, a smaller queue of people asking where the good scratch cards went.

As for me, I am staying for now, mostly out of stubbornness and a genuine, possibly irrational attachment to a postcode that increasingly does not seem to want people like me, or Denise, or the newsagent family, in it much longer. I will keep walking past that letting agent window. I will keep reading the numbers like a weather report. And I will keep hoping, with diminishing conviction, that the forecast eventually improves.

Further Reading

For more of my scattered observations on London life, you can find my other pieces at my author page at The London Prat, and further coverage of city affairs is available at Bohiney Magazine. Related material on housing and city life is collected at NewsThump.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com