please empty your brain below

That's really fascinating, thanks for posting!

What amazes me is that 1999 seems so "recent" for someone of my age (mid 50s).

When I moved to London in 1984 (bedsit in Surbiton for £25 a week) I remember looking at local house prices and they were around 90k in Wimbledon and more than 100k in Surbiton - way out of reach for me, earning £55 a week :-)

Steve
We took out our first mortgage (for £8,000)in 1973. The minimum deposit was 10%. The maximum size of any loan was three times my salary or two and a half times our joint salary.

Generally the Building Societies were only lending to established savers, in our case Abbey National. Also, most branches had a limit on the total amount they could lend each month. so there was a queue of people waiting for a loan.

In our case I was on a company move and the funds came from the employer's "pool" so the branch manager was delighted to be able to give us an instant mortgage.
You don’t need to wonder. You could ask the author, as her email address is on her website.
Great post. It’s interesting how few of the properties have gone into the loft; maybe they’re not quite big enough.

Less than £500k seems quite good value especially compared to my 2 bed flat with no garden I’m imminently going to try to sell in a rubbish bit of Islington.

“Stratford Village” is a nauseating term (mentioned in the estate agents listing).
I'm puzzled by the mention of railwaymen's houses. They look a bit posh for that and railway cottages would generally be next to a station, depot or line unless there was a whole railway village, which I don't think is the case here.
Bought our first 2 up 2 down in Chestnut Avenue, Forest Gate in 1983 for £21000. Couldn't afford, Stratford. Looking at prices now they seem to be more than in Tennyson Rd. Having moved out of Forest Gate in 2012 we would now struggle to buy our old 2 bed for what we would get for our current house, let alone the 4 bed we sold. When we sold that house the estate agent said that a lot of the people looking had a flat in Stratford or Hackney but couldn't afford a house there.
Do read the article.

“Tennyson Road's two-up, two-downs were built at the end of the last century and sold to the workers of Stratford's huge railway depot for £90 a piece.”
This is what I love about this blog.
Not only does DG write a fascinating piece, he often has a scrap of ephemera from bygone years to connect it!!
I sometimes think your flat must be a bit like walking into a museum!
Emma Brockes, who wrote the 1999 piece, is now based in New York -- still writing for the Guardian.
Looking at where Tennyson Road is, while I imagine many were bought by railway employees (of whom there would have been many in the area), I wouldn't think they were specifically railwaymen'e houses, more for the general lower middle class. And they would have been bought by salaried clerks (and the like) rather than the wages graded manual workers. From what I can gather, these would have been on salaries of £100-£200 - which makes the £90 quoted house price comparable to their salary.
I used to have a very similar house in Leytonstone. 2 bedroom terrace, tiny front garden. The whole area was being built on in the 1890s, so when the 1901 Census became available I looked up the occupants of my house.
A drapers assistant and his wife, with 2 children named Ethel and Ernest. Of course there's no easy way to find out if they owned the house or were renting, which is perhaps more likely.










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