Imagine what would happen if interest rates reached that level now. In those days, though, we were used to it – just as it was normal to wait several weeks for the Post Office, later British Telecom, to provide a phone line. (As a journalist, I was, in this respect, lucky – I could claim that a phone was essential for my work).
When I got married in 1980, we soldiered on in the same small Battersea flat, in the lower half of an artisan’s cottage, whose garden, or rather yard, was principally occupied by a concrete air raid shelter. A cat had a litter of kittens in it, which my wife adopted, making the flat even more crowded.
Fortunately, having two incomes, we were able to cross the river to Pimlico – lighter and airier, with broader streets and more trees. Our original flat had, with inflation, gone up in value, but that was only because the whole market had moved: it did not make the new purchase more affordable.
We loved it, though – two floors at the top of a tall house, with sunlight streaming through the windows. Admittedly there was a bomb site opposite and a long stretch of derelict terrace, but the area was still struggling to rise above the reputation it acquired after the Second World War. The estate agent Roy Brooks summed it up in the headline of one of his notoriously unvarnished advertisements, later gathered into a book: Brothel in Pimlico.
By 1990, with hopes of starting a family, we were anxious to move. Once the punitive mortgage rates needed to bring down inflation had fallen, the Thatcher decade was good to home buyers. Nigel Lawson’s Big Bang, which liberated the financial markets in 1986, unfettered the imagination of mortgage lenders.
I got in with a financial adviser who could pull many a rabbit out of the hat (until, many years later, he went bust and we got stuck with a valueless investment in Dubai; to our relief, the FSA bailed us out.)
Imagine what would happen if interest rates reached that level now. In those days, though, we were used to it – just as it was normal to wait several weeks for the Post Office, later British Telecom, to provide a phone line. (As a journalist, I was, in this respect, lucky – I could claim that a phone was essential for my work).
When I got married in 1980, we soldiered on in the same small Battersea flat, in the lower half of an artisan’s cottage, whose garden, or rather yard, was principally occupied by a concrete air raid shelter. A cat had a litter of kittens in it, which my wife adopted, making the flat even more crowded.
Fortunately, having two incomes, we were able to cross the river to Pimlico – lighter and airier, with broader streets and more trees. Our original flat had, with inflation, gone up in value, but that was only because the whole market had moved: it did not make the new purchase more affordable.
We loved it, though – two floors at the top of a tall house, with sunlight streaming through the windows. Admittedly there was a bomb site opposite and a long stretch of derelict terrace, but the area was still struggling to rise above the reputation it acquired after the Second World War. The estate agent Roy Brooks summed it up in the headline of one of his notoriously unvarnished advertisements, later gathered into a book: Brothel in Pimlico.
By 1990, with hopes of starting a family, we were anxious to move. Once the punitive mortgage rates needed to bring down inflation had fallen, the Thatcher decade was good to home buyers. Nigel Lawson’s Big Bang, which liberated the financial markets in 1986, unfettered the imagination of mortgage lenders.
I got in with a financial adviser who could pull many a rabbit out of the hat (until, many years later, he went bust and we got stuck with a valueless investment in Dubai; to our relief, the FSA bailed us out.)
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