Checking through my box of millennium ephemera, alongside the Rough Guide, the lottery ticket and the travel guide, I found this 1999 newspaper article. I'm not sure why I kept it given I had no intention of moving to London at the time, but it makes for intriguing reading two decades later.
Tennyson Road wasn't the peak hotspot, just an example of a street in the borough with the fastest rising prices. The Olympics weren't even a pipedream at this point and Westfield was still twelve years off. But it was a good example of a lowly street on the up, only a couple of minutes from the town centre and less than half a mile from a freshly revamped station. [map]
I found myself walking past yesterday, so detoured down the street I recognised from the article to see if anything still felt special. No, it was all fairly ordinary for Newham.
Tennyson Road consists of long Victorian terraces, generally well kept, with teensy front and back yards, bay windows and intermittent satellite dishes. The street is broad with speed bumps and restricted parking. The residents I spotted seemed more diverse than would have been the case 22 years ago but not overwhelmingly from one ethnic group. All looked pleasant enough, but there are finer streets further out where Newham's middle class are more likely to congregate. How much did they say these were worth?
Wow, a two bedroom terrace for £70,000 - the late nineties were a different age! But yes, in 1999 house prices were already shooting up and well on their way to hitting six figures.
The newspaper article also includes interviews with residents who reveal how much they originally paid for their Tennyson Road properties.
• Charles and Kathleen paid £200 in 1950
• Phyllis paid £1500 in 1968
• Theresa paid £7000 in 1979
• Tony and Fiona paid £52,000 in 1993
• Shaun and Oonagh sold for £80,000 in 1999
It should be pointed out that average earnings increased dramatically over the same period, and those early house price rises are very much in line. But things accelerated dramatically in the 1990s with Stratford property prices significantly outpacing wages, becoming very much the perfect investment.
The internet now makes it easy to track individual house prices so I've used a well-known property site to capture sales for all the houses on Tennyson Road since 1995. About 100 of the 150 properties have changed hands, several more than once, which produced a handy set of data. Most are two bedroom terraced houses so I was generally comparing like with like. Admittedly the sample size for each individual year is small so you shouldn't read too much into the annual averages, but they do create this rather convincing graph.
The average house price in Tennyson Road doubled between 1997 and 2000, then doubled again by 2006. Things stuttered somewhat around 2009 with the onset of the financial crisis, but recovered within a few years and returned to the previous upward trajectory. Prices pushed through the £400,000 barrier in 2016 and peaked the following year nudging half a million. They've dropped back a little since, and may continue to do so if London becomes less attractive post-pandemic. But the house with the For Sale board in my earlier photograph is currently on the market for £459,950, so anyone who bought before 2016 is sitting on a tidy potential profit.
For those not on the housing ladder things look considerably bleaker. A house in Tennyson Road would have cost 5 times average salary in 1999, so within the boundaries of possibility for a first time buyer, but that ratio had risen to 8 times by 2010 and is currently more like 14. As the newspaper article mentioned these were originally railwaymen's cottages, somewhere basic for the Victorian working class to live, but they've since become monstrously unmortgageworthy for anyone on a vaguely average wage.
I wonder what the journalist who wrote that story back in 1999 would think now if you'd told them prices in Tennyson Road would eventually top £400,000... five times more than was deemed headline-worthy at the time.
