Islington is a by-word for middle class aspiration. The area is relatively close to central London, without being as famously expensive as somewhere like, say, Kensington and Chelsea. Given that the average price of a terraced house in the borough of Islington today is about 1.7 million pounds, the relative cheapness of the area is unlikely to reassure someone looking to buy there today. To those on six figure salaries, such a sum is essentially out of reach. To those on a normal salary, it is—almost—laughably unobtainable. The median salary in London is £35,900, which stacks up to the Islington terraced house price as a 47:1 ratio.
This is the state of play today. What about when these fortune-eating houses were newly built? Much of Islington’s streetscape is defined by 19th century architecture, with a few earlier Georgian buildings. These structures coincide with the first detailed records on occupation and ownership that we have. In other words, it is possible to get an understanding of where people lived and how they managed to live there. Are we crying over relative luxury, or have things got even less equal? Who lived in these houses worth a fortune today?
We have to start by narrowing things down, so I’ve chosen to pick a particularly desirable place with a mixture of different houses: Highbury Crescent. This half-moon shaped plot of land is split by a green park, and has sets of detached houses on the curved part, and a long line of terraces on the straight road, Highbury Place. The Crescent houses are tall villas built in the 1840s, most of which still exist, while the Place is dominated by a denser, less decorated terrace from the 1770s. Almost the entirety of this terrace is Grade II listed today, and all of the villas that survive in their original condition are also Grade II listed.
Now we’ve chosen a place, we need to choose a time, and it turns out that the 1840s are the perfect place to start looking since they feature both the ‘Tithe apportionments’ that tell us who owned a place and who lived in it, as well as the better-known censuses that tell us the other occupants and family members who lived with them, and their jobs.
Who lived in Highbury Crescent in 1848? The first name of interest is a certain Raphael Newnes Carvelho, perhaps with Portuguese heritage, though we know from census information that he was born in Jamaica. He lived in No.6 Highbury Crescent, so in one of the larger villas built only a handful of years earlier. According to the 1851 Census, taken three years after he is plotted on the map at the same address, his occupation was as a ‘West India Merchant’. Raphael lived with his wife, Rachel, who was 37 years of age, while Raphael was 41. They are an unusual couple in that they lived alone in the house. Victorian society is well known for the abundance of cheap domestic labour, and Highbury was no exception.
A few more characters: on Highbury Place, the denser terrace, we have Edward Grant, a 66 year-old leather seller who lived with Harriett Grant, his wife, 62 years of age. An Elizabeth Humphrey is also in the mix, 49 years of age, who was Harriett’s sister. This group of four people have not one but three servants. Their names were Elizabeth Mills, 40, Mary Taylor, 25, and Geoge Elliott (not to be confused with George Eliot!), 21.
In these two households we have a higher-status job (but by no means outstandingly wealthy in the same way as a contemporary banker would be considered) and a lower status job. Who owned the Carvelhos’ ‘newbuild’ constructed a few years earlier? Not Raphael or Rachel, but a man called Henry Dawes. Who owned the Grants’ house? Not Edward or Harriett, but Henry Dawes. In fact, every single property on Highbury Crescent and Highbury Place was owned by Henry Dawes. All in all, Dawes owned 67 properties let out to different tenants in the Parish of St Mary, Islington, alone.
There are a few things to learn from this microcosm of 19th century life. The first is that the vast majority of land was held by a tiny elite of owners. The concomitant of this is that renting was the absolute norm for most of the middle classes. Class was separate from age: these middle-class renters had reasonably well-paying jobs and were in their thirties, forties, or sixties. They still rented in spite of these earnings, and they still could afford multiple servants.
Early Victorian society, and even early 20th century society, was dominated by renting. House ownership was the exception rather than the norm. Still, for those middle class people like the Carvelhos and the Grants, you might be surprised by how much smaller their rental costs were in comparison to other essential items such as food. A bank clerk in the 1840s is reported as having budgeted £25 for his annual rent, a fair sum in 1840s Britain—but he spent £18 on meat, £6 and 10 shillings on beer, and £5 on potatoes.
If you spent a fifth of an average year’s rent in Islington today, (£29,484), on potatoes, you would be buying over seven metric tonnes of the tubers. While this is partly an illustration of how expensive food was in the ‘Hungry Forties’ (the 1840s), it demonstrates that some very strange things have happened to the value of consumables in relation to dwellings. We are wrong to assume that housing costs have always outweighed other expenses in the degree to which they do today. Food used to be much dearer—but housing wasn’t in relative terms.
For the Carvelhos and the Grants of Highbury, their descendants would have enjoyed a steady drop in the costs of housing from the year 1850 until the early 20th century. Industrialisation increased the speed at which buildings could be built, and major but basic inventions were vital in this process—most bricks had to be made by hand until well into the mid 19th century. Real wage growth continued at a similar pace while dwellings were built to be filled by productive new households. If the Carvelhos had great grandchildren, by 1912 they could have bought a house for something in the region of 4 times an annual salary. Today, the average price of a house in Islington is 22 times the median salary for the borough.
The ability of vast numbers of people to own their houses rather than rent them, including those on less generous salaries, is a historical marvel. If one goes back before the Islington families of the 1840s, the ownership of land simply gets more and more consolidated, with society being dominated by noble, monastic and royal ownership and agrarian tenants.
This remarkable progress from the 1850s to the 1930s has been reversed, but not through any deliberate policy programme. The very practical barriers to building that existed in the 19th century have been replaced by man made-barriers to building in the form of planning legislation since 1947. In each decade, parties of entirely different stripes have added to these laws, little by little. The result is a stranglehold on new building, a public-sector mirror to the land monopolies of the 19th century: the graph which plots the relationship of wages and house prices is not a symmetrical V shape for nothing.
If nothing changes, Islington of the mid 2000s will look very much like Islington of the mid 1800s. The spiritual successors to men like Henry Dawes in Victorian London will consolidate more and more property as it becomes unavailable to those without vast amounts of free capital. If we are to claw back historical progress, we must borrow one thing from the Victorians, what they called “Go!”: in this case, the boldness to build. To make an impression on our cities requires self-confidence as much as civic responsibility. We must build at volume, and we must do it beautifully. This is what the Victorians did, and they did it specifically because they were beset with housing problems (chiefly overcrowding and poor sanitation) that had to be solved. Our problems are slightly different, and perhaps more complicated. But the solution is exactly the same, and it is very simple indeed: build more houses.
