Two-fifths of homes sold in city so far this year went to buyers fleeing capital’s high prices

The sun-drenched platform at Bath Spa station was thronging with lawyers, consultants and executives making their regular commutes to London on Friday.

Adam Conlon, 38, says he left the capital in part because buyers can get more for their money in the elegant west country city, which enjoys Unesco world heritage status and attracts millions of visitors a year.

“We’ve just bought this year. It’s a mile up the road. It’s a proper doer-upper,” he says, checking the overhead monitor for his train to Paddington. “I spend three or four days in London a week. I love to go in to get the buzz but I love to get out so I can breathe again.”

Conlon, who was renting in London before moving to Bath, is far from alone in seeking a better life in the west. Although the capital’s housing market is slowing – with UK house prices recording the biggest month-on-month fall in six years – figures released by the estate agent Hamptons International last week suggest 42% of all homes in Bath and north-east Somerset sold in the first half of 2018 were bought by Londoners.

Many of the London leavers, who pay on average £550,000 for a home in the West Country, commute the 115 miles each way to the capital. Assuming there are no delays, the rail journey takes about 90 minutes.

However, this influx of money from London’s troubled but still inflated housing market has helped push house prices and rents beyond the reach of the city’s lower-paid workers and young people.

According to the National Housing Federation, average house prices are now 14 times the average earnings in Bath and north-east Somerset – a figure that has nearly trebled since 1999. A family must earn at least £87,106 to afford a mortgage in the area.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Spike Llewellyn earns £17,000 as a bookbinder and lives with his partner and her mother. Photograph: Tom Wall

Spike Llewellyn, who earns £17,000 a year as a bookbinder in a city centre shop, and his partner, who works part-time, can only dream of buying a family home in Bath.

“We are living with my mother-in-law in a very small cottage in the middle of Bath. There’s us and our baby sharing a bedroom and my partner’s mother in the other bedroom.

“We’d like to be looking for our place but my income and my partner’s income is not enough to buy in Bath,” he says.

Tom Erickson, who earns £16,000 a year as a support worker for people with learning difficulties in Bath, can’t afford soaring rents in the city, which rose to an average of £1,190 a month this year.

“I grew up in Bath but I’ve had to move to the outskirts of the city,” he says. “It is a bit of a struggle to pay the rent but I’m just about doing it at the moment.”

Erickson cannot envisage a situation when he might be able buy in the city. “I feel like I’m being pushed out,” he complains. “It’s not my city any more.”

None of this comes as a surprise to the city’s MP, Wera Hobhouse, who speaks for the Liberal Democrats on housing. “Bath is becoming more and more expensive. Wages are not keeping up with the price of housing,” she says, from her busy constituency office.

“Key workers like nurses and teachers, as well as people working in the city’s huge hospitality industry, cannot afford to live here.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Adam Conlon spends three or four days a week in London. Photograph: Tom Wall

She says London money has undoubtedly inflated house prices and rents in Bath. “It is always nice to live in a popular city,” she says. “But there has to be a balance so that people who are actually working here can afford to live here.”

Bob Goodman, the Conservative council’s housing cabinet member, thinks there are other factors at play. “Airbnb and student accommodation have been more of an influence than Londoners,” he says. “We are losing a vast amount of housing to student houses in multiple occupation.”

There are about 4,200 people on the council’s waiting list for social housing but only 166 affordable homes – which can be up to 80% of market rents – were completed in Bath and north-east Somerset in 2016-17.

Some residents complain that developers are building luxury riverside apartments, student accommodation and hotels but providing little in the way of genuinely affordable housing.

Nola Edwards, who led a successful campaign against plans to demolish the post-war Foxhill estate, says Bath is in danger of becoming a city of the rich. “You can see the fancy shops where you can spend more than my month’s wages on a coat and you also see people sitting on the church doorstep waiting for someone to give them something to eat,” she says, from her home on the estate.

Edwards would have been forced to leave the city if she hadn’t been given a council flat when she was younger. “There are still council estates in Bath but they are not building new ones,” she says. “It means that everyone on low incomes is struggling.”

But she doesn’t blame Londoners priced out of the capital. “They are just trying to improve their lives – it’s the wider economy that’s at fault. We just need more affordable housing,” she says.

30,000

The number of homes bought by Londoners outside the capital in the first half of 2018. The figure has risen 61% in a decade.

£424,610

The average price paid for a home by a Londoner moving to other UK towns or cities – a record high.

42%

The share of homes in Bath and north-east Somerset bought by Londoners in the first half of this year.

Source: Hamptons International