Bexleyheath & Erith Property Market in Crisis: Who is to blame?
"An Englishman’s Home is his Castle” is a phrase coined in Victorian times, as the UK had a reputation for being a country of home owners. Today, the cliché is not exactly true. In a league table of the top 46 economic nations of the world, where owning your property is permissible, the UK is ranked only no. 37. As I mentioned recently, at the end of the First World War, 77% of people rented their homes. Most rented from a private landlord, as council housing was still very much in its infancy. Homeownership rose very slowly in the 1920s and started to grow with the economy after the Great Depression. However, after the Luftwaffe had flattened huge swathes of housing in the early 40s, the priority was to get people into clean, decent accommodation. Local authorities, councils, took up the baton and built large council estates in the 1950s and ‘60s. As the UK economy got back on its feet in the middle part of the 20 th Century and wages rose, people decided they wante...