For northerners, the London housing crisis confirms what we’ve always known: the capital’s property market would one day be its undoing. But how does life in England’s only officially ‘affordable city’ compare?

Struggling to get your head around the British housing market? Here’s a traditional parlour game that might help. It’s called the “London garage test”, and it lets you assess the value of your home against the capital’s most exclusive outhouse.



In my home town of Hull, the proceeds from the “most expensive garage in Britain” – currently a £550,000 former coach house in Southwark – would easily buy you a large Victorian mansion in Newland Park, a neighbourhood so posh they’ve probably still got actual parlours there.

Hull is cheap; London is expensive. So what? It’s not as if I’m about to trade in my £150,000 three-bedroom terrace for a bedsit in the capital. I’d never have room for all my second-hand books. Hull suits my “relaxed” career path. And who cares if my paltry freelance earnings are barely enough to trouble the taxman most years? At least I can afford my share of the mortgage – something more and more Londoners are struggling to do.

For chippy northerners, the recent coverage of the housing crisis just confirms what we’ve always suspected about the “beating heart of our nation”: that its stupidly inflated property market would one day be its undoing. Just how long can a city function when the minimum income needed for a mortgage is now a cool £77,000? As for it being a place of opportunity – you can be as hard working and “career oriented” as you like, you’re still never going to outbid an oligarch for one of those “deposit boxes in the sky”.

There are no Russian oligarchs laundering their money here – just Polish builders washing their socks

While gentrification in London creates billionaires and paupers, in Hull it barely seems to register. The sort of mass speculative surges that price London’s poorest out of their own neighbourhoods and spawn hipster-owned cereal cafes just don’t seem to happen here. How could they, in a place where property values bump along at more or less the same happy level, year after year? There are no Russian oligarchs laundering their money here – just Polish builders washing their socks. In Hull, houses aren’t about making an investment – they’re for living in.

Is Hull really Britain’s last bastion of affordability? Officially, very much so: along with Southport and Barrow-in-Furness, it is the only place in England where the government’s new “starter homes” would be affordable for people on the proposed £9 minimum wage.

Hull’s cheapness (and presumably Southport’s and Barrow’s too) is usually explained by the lack of career and leisure opportunities here, in turn put down to our isolation from Britain’s economic centres. But are there benefits to missing out on the “growing menace” of gentrification? And what are the chances of my city staying safely under the property radar?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Humber Street, site of the former docks fruit markets, has been transformed into a burgeoning arts quarter. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for The Guardian

My first attempt to get a handle on these questions involves putting a call out to artists. With the contraction of affordable studio and living spaces having long priced skint creative types out of the capital, I’d heard that some of them were now considering Hull as an alternative.

One young artist who’s made that move already is Clare Holdstock. The 23-year-old Camberwell Arts School graduate was encouraged to return home to Hull following the success of its bid to become the 2017 UK City of Culture. But the real drive was economic: “When I was a student in London, I was OK because I had a grant,” she says. “But after I graduated, I had to work full-time just to pay the rent. It was impossible to make new work, never mind have exhibitions.”

Ironically, Clare had been inspired for her final degree show by the nearby Heygate Estate, the 1970s social housing development then in the process of being demolished to make way for luxury private flats. “The Heygate prompted my interest in modernist architecture. I saw some graffiti on a bridge there that could either be read ‘now here’ or ‘nowhere’, and it got me thinking about utopian design. Now all the residents have been forced to move, that graffiti has become very poignant.”

Things have started looking up for Clare since she moved home to live with her mum. A part-time pub job leaves her plenty of space for her art, and she recently contributed a public commission for Freedom, Hull’s growing arts and music festival. But her optimism is tinged with regret and anger at the way she was forced to leave the capital.

“I really miss London,” she says. “I miss the feeling of excitement that Hull doesn’t have. I think gentrification is a horrible thing. In the past, when artists moved into an area, it made it desirable. Now London has stopped making the most of its artists. It’s become a hyper-capitalist bubble.”

My first thought is: she won’t have to worry about hyper-capitalism back in Hull. But it turns out gentrification has longer tentacles than I’d realised.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hull is no more an owner/occupier utopia than anywhere else in Britain. In fact, buy-to-let investors are doing especially well here. Photograph: John Giles

I catch up with another London exile. Writer and creative consultant Leanne Cloudsdale was forced to leave the capital, her home for 13 years, after a split with the boyfriend who owned their shared flat left her with nowhere to live. “Friends were saying I could sleep on their sofas – but I was head of design at the time. I couldn’t turn up to work looking like that. As a single woman with nowhere to live, no savings and no options, the only thing to do was move back home to Hull.”

For the last two years, Leanne has lived a dual existence: mainly working in London during the week, then coming back to Hull at the weekend. Hard work has brought rewards: this summer, she managed the arts offering at another popular Hull festival, the Humber Street Sesh, and had a role in producing the latest promotional film for city of culture.

But despite all the work, Leanne still can’t get on the property ladder. That might be understandable in London, but even living somewhere as seemingly affordable as Hull, she feels resigned to never owning her own place.

Of course, Hull is no more an owner/occupier utopia than anywhere else in Britain. In fact, buy-to-let investors are doing especially well here. Attracted by low prices and high rental yields, an increasing number are shifting their focus from the capital to more affordable locations in the north.

This isn’t much comfort to Leanne or the other “generation renters” trapped in often poorly maintained properties with no security of tenure. Her home in Hull is a grand Victorian town house, split into flats for rent. The owner lives in London. “The couple in the flat above me are borrowing the deposit for a house from their parents,” she says. “I don’t have that option. I feel like I’ll always have to rent.”

Over 95% of Hull's houses were damaged during the second world war, and more than 150,000 people made homeless

One remedy for housing inequality is to build more affordable homes – a challenge Hull has faced in the past, with mixed results.

At the end of the second world war, the place was in ruins. The most heavily bombed British city outside London, it lost more than 1,200 people in the Blitz, with over 95% of its houses damaged and more than 150,000 – about half its population – made homeless.

The legacy of that destruction and the subsequent rebuilding was far too many poorly designed, system-built homes with made-up names and oddly shaped roofs. Coming across a stand of “caspons” in east Hull, tinned up and unloved, is a Ballardian experience. If it wasn’t for the late summer tangle of Buddleia and brambles choking up the pathways, you’d almost swear the residents had just popped out to the shops.

But the day of the caspons and “wingets” and all those other symbols of post-war housing failure is now, supposedly, over. The council has teamed up with private developers and housing associations to replace them with 4,000 new homes, a mix of council and affordable houses as well as properties for the open market.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hull was the most heavily bombed city outside London, losing more than 1,200 people in the Blitz. Photograph: Local World/REX Shutterstock

With the first stage of the £500m housing renewal programme about to begin, I was expecting councillor John Black, Hull City Council’s portfolio holder for housing, to be in a good mood when I met him at Hull Guildhall. Instead, I find a worried man.



An apparently throwaway announcement in July’s “emergency” budget is ruining his summer recess. Under chancellor George Osborne’s latest edict, councils and housing associations will be compelled to reduce rent by 1% a year for the next four years. Black is expecting the subsequent £120m revenue shortfall to delay Hull’s planned building programme drastically. On top of the limitations imposed by the Bedroom Tax, benefits cap, abolition of tax credits and removal of housing benefit entitlement for under 21s, it further threatens the city’s ability to build and let affordable stock.

“It’s on all fronts. I had to gasp,” the councillor tells me. “We’ve got 1,100 tenants, 21 and under, who won’t be able to claim housing benefit. We won’t be able to let [our larger] properties because the people who need them won’t be able to afford them.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A more modern Hull estate. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

He likens Osborne’s pursuit of more and more local authority revenue to King Henry VIII’s sacking of the monasteries, and says the uncertainty of funding flows has already put paid to one planned housing scheme – to build 500 new bungalows for older people, freeing up the three- and four-bedroom houses they’d previously occupied for families.

It’s the sort of provision they could badly do with on Preston Road, where Leanne Cloudsdale grew up. Instead, council houses are having to be adapted to meet the shortfall of suitable accommodation for elderly and disabled people.

“One’s got a lift through the floor and there’s another old lady having to sleep downstairs because the council haven’t got a bungalow for her,” local community centre volunteer Janine White tells me.

The larger homes aren’t much use either for people already struggling with benefit cuts. The majority, says Janine, are the “working poor”. On zero-hours contracts in part-time, minimum-wage jobs, they rely on the weekly food parcels the centre provides.

“There’s always a queue of people outside the courts who owe money because of the Bedroom Tax. They can’t afford to pay and there’s no housing for them to move to.”

If there is a demand deficiency in the economy, a few thousand new jobs won't make a real difference to property values Dr Mike Nolan

For councillor Black, who has been involved in housing for almost 40 years, the present political climate is uniquely grim: “It’s frustrating that Hull has the land but we’re unable to deal with the housing situation. We were almost ready to kick start it and then we were stopped in our tracks.”

But surely it can’t all be bad news? After all, Hull has just signed a £310m deal to bring Siemens’s new wind turbine factory here. It’s expected to create 1,000 jobs directly, plus many more through its supply chain, and boost everything from income to education in a city that desperately needs it.

What’s more, somehow we’re to be the UK’s next City of Culture, belated recognition for the place that gave the world Philip Larkin, The Housemartins and the pattie butty.

No one is quite sure how these developments will affect housing. Certainly, property prices in Hull are nowhere near as static as I’d thought. In the six years up to 2007, the median sale price for houses in Hull more than doubled. But Dr Mike Nolan, senior economics lecturer at Hull University Business School, isn’t expecting a speculative gold-rush.

“Property values should be buoyant,” he says. “But if there is some demand deficiency in the local economy generally, a few thousand jobs would not be likely to make a decisive difference. After all, some employees will continue to follow the current pattern, living outside Hull itself.”

The construction industry seems to be responding positively to the good news anyway – yellow signs for new estates are everywhere. Out on my bike in east Hull, I spot a newbuild that would make Clare, the London art school exile, squirm. “Camberwell,” claims the marketing blurb, offers buyers “great new homes in a great location.” None of your modernist rubbish here – just “quality two- and three-bedroom houses, built to exacting standards”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Siemens are set to develop the city’s Alexandra Dock into Green Port Hull, an offshore wind-turbine facility. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for The Guardian

The name, I’m told, is taken from the nearby Camberwell Way – but follows a time-honoured tradition of aping the capital. Back in the 1860s, local entrepreneurs banked on the snobbery of Hull’s bourgeois financiers and shipping merchants by naming a new development on the city’s then northern boundary St John’s Wood.

The modern-day equivalent is probably Kingswood Parks, a “new town” of boxy newbuilds wedged between a retail park and ring road. It’s not my idea of heaven, but for the young professionals they’re aiming at – soon to include employees from the Siemens turbine plant – Kingswood’s claims to be “the best place to live in Hull” might not seem that far-fetched. These are modern family homes in a “nice” neighbourhood, with plenty of choices for shopping and leisure nearby. The Kingswood formula seems to meet such an obvious need that the council and its partners, Keepmoat Homes, now want to repeat it next door.

Despite Philip Larkin’s famous quip about Hull being “nice and flat for cycling”, Wawne Road offers a panoramic view over alluvial wheat fields, undulating gently towards the market town of Beverley to the north-west. If the poet tried biking it up here, he’d be knackered.

I park my car up a country lane; nearby a space-age silver bus is surrounded by be-suited project partners overheating in the sun. They’re here for a public consultation exercise about the proposed new 1,600-home Wawne View development.



The scheme has its critics, among them local residents who have launched a petition protesting at the destruction of a valuable natural habitat. Why build on precious green belt when there are so many brownfield sites left undeveloped in Hull?

Hull City council’s partnerships and development manager, Mark Hill, explains that sites such as Wawne View help to leverage Hull’s more costly housing renewal schemes elsewhere. “Without it, we’d have struggled to bring forward development on Preston Road that really needs it,” he says. “We wouldn’t have been able to offer any new stock there without huge grants which just aren’t available.”

But are the houses even needed? Is there sufficient demand to warrant yet another estate in the area?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Empty houses in the Springburn Street area behind Hull’s Hessle Road. Photograph: Don McPhee/The Guardian

Matt Hesketh, assistant partnerships manager for lead developer Keepmoat Homes, insists there is, citing the popularity and affordability of schemes in other parts of the city. Construction projects, he says, also provide many jobs, because of the high quota the council sets for local labour. “Growth stimulates growth, I guess. If we didn’t have new jobs, we didn’t have construction, what would Hull be like? It would be a city in decline. What’s the alternative?”

I can see his point. What is the alternative? A couple of years ago, an Economist editorial suggested that Hull people would be better off giving up on our “urban ghost town” and commuting to thriving cities such as Leeds and Manchester instead. It’s a horribly dismissive argument. But are pseudo new towns like Kingswood or Wawne View really the answer?

The only trace you’ll find these days of Hull’s original gentrified quarter is the St John’s Hotel, a lovely, laid-back real ale pub, more redolent of Amsterdam than NW8. The middle-class suburb failed to take off, partly because new railway lines cut straight across the planned grand boulevards – and the intended residents settled in other parts of Hull and the East Riding. As Dr Mike Nolan suggests, those lucky enough to find work in the renewable energies sector may also opt to take their wealth elsewhere.

A couple of years ago, an article suggested that Hull people would be better off giving up on our 'urban ghost town'

Meanwhile, what will become of those left behind by the green boom? It’s the week of the 2015 Conservative Party conference, and the Tories’ 1980s retro-fest is in full swing. Every day brings new announcements of brutal welfare cuts, unconvincingly spun as ushering in a new “enterprise culture”.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, the richest member of the cabinet’s plutocrat club, suggests that the abolition of tax credits will make us harder-working – like the Chinese and Americans. The next day, still seething, I visit the Hull Families Project for a reality check.

The charity helps those in poverty – particularly the working poor – to overcome personal problems and to manage their finances better. The cuts of the last five years, says project co-ordinator Keith Wardale, have hit them “like two tidal waves”. “They’re beginning to overcome their own personal circumstances – things such as alcohol and drugs problems – and then they’ve got these external factors they can’t do anything about.”

The worst cases, he says, involve older people. “They’re having to leave homes they’ve been in all of their lives. The Blitz built a sense of community all across Hull – everyone had been through the same thing. Now that generation is being forced out because of Bedroom Tax. They’re very frightened. They think: ‘What’s going to happen to me if I have to move somewhere miles away?’”

I can imagine the same fears spreading across Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Haringey and all the other London boroughs where low- and middle-income earners can no longer afford to live. There, it’s gentrification breaking up communities; in Hull, it’s Tory welfare policies that are finally achieving what years of Luftwaffe bombing couldn’t. And if the place with the cheapest mansions in Britain is no longer affordable, where the hell is?

In his party leadership campaign, Jeremy Corbyn promised to build thousands of new social and affordable homes, damping down rampant speculation and providing decent rental accommodation for people subsisting on low wages and zero hours contracts. But the summer of Corbyn is over and, as the Tory juggernaut rolls on, some of Britain’s poorest people are facing the prospect of another £1,300 being lifted out of their pockets in tax credit cuts.

The protests have already started in London where gentrification of once affordable areas has galvanised dissent in Camden, Brixton, and at a certain cereal outlet on Brick Lane.

To Hull and back: the rebirth of Britain’s poorest city Read more

It’s hard to say where the flashpoint will come in Hull. I can’t see the city ever falling victim to gentrification in the same way London has. It’s not that we don’t have our well-to-do areas – I live near one of them. The Avenues are almost contemporary with the never completed St John’s Wood, and were originally aimed at the same clientele. These days, the massive Victorian and Edwardian town houses are home to lecturers, artists, broadcasters, musicians and writers as well as teachers, occupational therapists and social workers.

Middle class then – but not shamelessly so. In such an overwhelmingly working-class city, any pretensions are quickly punctured. Leanne Cloudsdale says her family in east Hull call the Avenues “the muesli belt” – but the residents of HU5 are as fiercely proud and protective of their home city as anyone. And I think it’s this down-to-earthness – as much as economics – that stops gentrification in its tracks somewhere west of Hessle.

Even some local Tories have got their feet on the ground. David Davis, MP for Haltemprice and Howden, warns that the tax credit cuts could be this government’s poll tax. If so, I predict a riot. The difference is, in Hull, it won’t be Rice Crispies that spark the snap, crackle and pop.

Steve Walsh is a freelance writer based in Hull. His essay Reinventing Hull appears in Writing Hull, an anthology of non-fiction.

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