“Remember the old days, when…” Oh great. Another infuriating, poorly spelled Boomer Facebook post about how kids were somehow superior in the past. And, as a drive-by, how coddled and swaddled young people are today.
Yeah, those golden summers when you could play in that dangerous quarry all day, swallow newts for a bet and chuck fireworks in people’s faces. “We didn’t need mobile phones or the internet then!” No mate, we were all dead from brain trauma, toxic paralysis and third-degree burns.
Then as young adults, of course, “we all worked hard, saved hard and didn’t waste money on fancy coffee and foreign food”. Those posts never remember ye olde property prices, do they? They never fondly recall the sheer luck of getting on the housing ladder in your twenties. Hey, who remembers that a long time ago in a Britain far, far away, young couples could get a LOCAL AUTHORITY MORTGAGE?
I do, because my missus and I got one.
It was 1979, and we were very lucky. Not every council offered mortgages, but Lewisham did. And amazingly no deposit was required – yeah you heard, sorry. These mortgages had been around since the 60s but were very shortly about to become extinct, because this was the year Margaret Thatcher won power on a bash-the-unions, curb-local-authorities and unleash-the-market ticket. Right to Buy was around the corner, and councils’ power to affect the local housing market, or indeed to stop council housing being grabbed and sequestered by the private sector, was coming to an end.
A great experiment was about to begin, in which wealth would be transferred from citizens to shareholders. Our everyday heroes would no longer be dedicated public servants but entrepreneurs with wide jackets and shit haircuts. Property was about to redefine itself – no longer somewhere to live, but a wealth multiplier.
In many ways, 1979 was a terrible year. Inflation reaching 17 per cent, unemployment at 1.4 million, the highest since the 30s. That year we urgently needed to leave our tiny rented flat in East Finchley, London, because my wife was pregnant. With interest rates nudging 15 per cent it wasn’t a brilliant time to be looking for a mortgage. However, we’d heard about a house on the other side of London going cheapish.
It was in the Corbett Estate, one of several terraced Victorian streets in Catford, south-east London. The house we wanted was going for £14,000. It was owned by the Worshipful Company of Weavers, who’d rented out some of the houses for generations. They were now selling them off, but only to relatives of residents. My wife’s sister’s husband’s mum lived in an adjoining street. That was enough to qualify us to buy, and the council didn’t care who was selling it, just that someone was buying it. Lucky days.
There was net migration from the capital at the time. In 1979, when we bought, the population was under seven million and falling, down from 8.6 million before the war. London boroughs, part-funded by the bold, brilliant Greater London Council, were on a mission to repopulate. Old houses in need of renovation were cheap. And property equity, of course, would be my generation’s great updraft.
It wasn’t just dumb luck you could stumble over then. Institutionalised luck was available too. Staff in the pre-privatised neolithic era were notionally there to help you, unlike our exciting, denationalised modern era, where the system shuns everyone from within a fortified maze of option-bots. Local authorities and benefits offices are catastrophe-managing shadows of what they once were but pre-Baroness Trunchbull, and the system still had some give in it.
I signed on for about a month in the early 80s. I’d gone freelance, I was in a band, my income had tumbled down the stairs. The DHSS was there to help. Of course it was shaming – you need to earn, not receive alms – but the system was human. If I’d done magazine hack shifts on, say, Tuesday and Thursday, they’d pay out for that week minus two days, even though I had a mortgage.
So while the Tories were drawing up their plans for transferring council housing (paid for by local authority residents) to the private sector (now charging exorbitant rents to their grandchildren) we went to see the council mortgage bloke. He couldn’t have been nicer.
We’ll give you a mortgage, he said, but let’s make it £16,000 instead of £14,000 – you’ll need to spend money on improving it. Not a condition of getting the mortgage, just municipal kindness. Imagine.
And it was a good call, as it turned out: the place had the feel of a whole life having been lived there, with no meaningful improvements or maintenance for decades. The tapless bath in the kitchen with a board over it, toilet by the back door, plumbing and electrics shot, the lot.
Also, get this. The council wanted us to make it work. If we ever got into financial difficulties we should let them know, and they would simply pause the repayments for up to six months. That’s right, you could literally stop paying your mortgage for HALF A YEAR. When we did go properly skint they, like the DHSS, were on it. We asked for a pause, they suspended payments for a few weeks, then when we were back on our feet we unpaused it.
We lived there for nine years, and sold in 1988 for £81,000. We loved it, but it was time for the four of us to move on. At that point, in the frenzy of rising house prices, there was no way that selling wasn’t lucky. We settled in Lancaster, bought a large semi-detached in 1988 for £78,000. Recession wiped out a lot of my income in the early 90s; we sold for £141,000 in 1993, traded down to a terraced house again for £75,000. We stayed there for 27 years, sold for £345,000 in 2020, and bought our current – and last – house in Lancaster for £445,000. We improved every house we lived in, but there’s no doubt that our lovely little Catford gaff got us on the property escalator.
In 2004, that Catford house we bought for £14,000 in 1979 sold for £250,000. In 2023, the house next door went for just short of £600,000. There are many reasons for state pensioners like me to be grateful. A state pension, for a start.
But come on you scowling, scolding house-owning bastards – we had all the luck, didn’t we? We certainly weren’t harder working than young people today. We weren’t geniuses at money management. We were lucky.
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