The property bubble is waiting to burst

10 February 2010

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Andrew Gimson asks why, in the middle of a violent recession, London property is still so hideously overvalued. The real pain may be yet to come

All the same, I cannot help feeling that there is something unhealthy in our willingness to spend the greater part of our lives toiling to become the owners of houses which are not in the slightest bit remarkable. Tolstoy described this better than anyone in his story ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’.

Ivan Ilyich is tremendously proud of his new house, but as Tolstoy says:

In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others like themselves: there were damasks, dark wood, plants, rugs, dull and polished bronzes — all the things people of a certain class have in order to resemble other people of that class. His house was so like others that it would never have been noticed, but to him it all seemed to be quite exceptional.

That was one of the most depressing things about looking for a house: so much money had been spent in order to make most of them look identical to each other. In those days, I had a profitable line in what one of my patrons described with a merry laugh as ‘the journalism of humiliation’: the description of my failure to find somewhere for my family to live. But if it was awkward for me in the years 2000 to 2002, when I had just returned from Berlin to London, how much more difficult it must be now. It may be that a proper crash is on its way. Until we get one, London will remain a barbarously expensive city.

Andrew Gimson is the Daily Telegraph’s parliamentary sketchwriter.