£56k for a house 70 years ago

Average cost of a home has quadrupled during Queen’s reign, says Vicky Shaw

The average UK house price was around £56,000 70 years ago in today’s money, according to analysis carried out to mark the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

Estate agent Savills said the typical house price in early 1952 was just under £2,000 – equating to around £56,000 when taking inflation into account.

The average house price nowadays is more than four times this sum – at £260,000.

Lucian Cook, head of residential research at Savills said: “House price growth over the past 70 years has meant that the nation’s housing stock has become a vast source and store of household wealth during the Queen’s reign.

“But the ability to benefit from this has largely been dependent on the year you were born, meaningthecapitalappreciation we have seen through different housingmarketcycleshascreated a marked divide between the housing ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.”

MrCookaddedthathouseprice upswings “have been magnified by a systemic undersupply of housing over the past 40 years”.

Savills said the start of the Queen’s reign coincided with a major national housebuilding programme.

Following economic volatility in the 1970s, there was some strong house price growth in the 1980s under former prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme.

Mr Cook said: “This period fundamentally altered the way in which we looked at our home as a route to financial prosperity, fuelling the nation’s obsession with house prices.”

Savills said a longer period of rising property prices took place between 1995 and 2007.

During this time the average multiple of their income that people borrowed increased from 2.3 times their income to 3.1 times.

MrCooksaida“sizeablewedge” was created between those who were and were not able to get onto the housing ladder.

Looking at today’s market, he said: “With a strong employment market, mortgage regulation having stress tested borrowers’ ability to sustain rate rises, and many having already locked into historically low interest rates, there don’t appear to be the triggers that have fuelled previous market downturns.”

And to mark the Jubilee an insurance giant has delved back 70 years in its archives to reveal more about what everyday life was like then.

Aviva’s records reflect how homes and pastimes have changed over the decades.

Seventy years ago, the tech cover available included “wireless” (radio) and television installation insurance for households owning such items, Aviva said. Cover extended to accidental death or injury caused by these devices to any person not belonging to the household.

Electric vehicles, mobile phones, laptops and e-bikes are among the tech items Aviva insures nowadays.

Anna Stone, group archivist for Aviva, said: “Our documents from 1952 reveal a world where TVs were luxuries and therefore benefited from their own insurance; cattle and horses were more common on UK roads and it wasn’t unheard of to take a typewriter on holiday.”

Looking at home insurance, Aviva found that comprehensive household insurance offered protection against events still seen today, such as fire, burglary and storms – although some of the 1952 policy wording has fallen out of favour, including cover for “thunderbolt”, “larceny” and “tempest”.

Properties were covered against damage caused by motor vehicles, as they are today, although impacts from road vehicles were grouped together with damage from horses and cattle.