Alan Crosby on the history of house ownership in Britain

For many of our ancestors, home ownership was a distant dream, says Alan Crosby

My daughter and her partner are buying their first house. They live in South Wales, where property prices are (relatively) sensible, but even so it’s alarming that the house will cost exactly ten times what my wife and I paid for our first home, back in the 1980s. And no less than 68 times what my parents forked out in the late 1950s. It really is hard to believe that Mum and Dad were able buy a house at Woking, Surrey, for £ 2,500!

But this housebuying was something of a novelty then. My maternal grandparents and most of their forebears, back into the mists of time rented, either as tenant farmers in their rural past or as occupants of tiny terraced houses when they’d moved to the city. For them the idea of owning their home was never even considered – they hadn’t the remotest chance of doing so, even if they’d wanted to. It’s easy to forget that a century ago only a minority of people in the UK owned their own house (in 1918 it was 23 per cent, mostly in the South East).

My grandparents’ house in Manchester was the property of an absentee landlord, who had a couple of dozen other cheap terraced properties in the same area. My great grandmother, who died in 1945, was the keyholder. In return for a few pence a week the landlord gave her keys to all his houses. In principle she had the right of entry and certainly she had the task of checking on the occupants to make sure nothing dodgy or dubious was going on (illicit lodgers, women who had lots of ‘gentlemen’ visitors, dirty rooms and filthy yards, that sort of thing). She was 4 feet 10 inches tall and formidable. The neighbours were suitably respectful!

A friend told me about his family in a poor area of South London in the 1920s, who (this is a classic picture) regularly “did a moonlight flit” when they couldn’t pay the rent. Leaving secretly, piling their portable belongings on a barrow, adults and children carrying bags and bundles, they moved on to somewhere sufficiently far away to be anonymous and settled down in a new home until the issue of paying the rent arose again.

I don’t think my family ever did that (my grandmother could not have endured the shame, and my grandfather and all his family were – let us be charitable – careful with money) but it was a familiar tale.

Later on things changed. One of my grandad’s brothers was employed as a clerk (almost all the other men in the family were labourers in the engineering works) and he married a girl a bit higher up the social scale. Before long they moved from inner city Manchester to a leafier southern suburb, leaving the grime and the poverty behind.

He was spoken of in very respectful tones, but not half as respectfully as they talked about their other brother, who worked in a small business and eventually achieved the greatest of all working-class Mancunian ambitions – a Cheshire address. He moved over the River Mersey to a bungalow on the edge of Stockport. The magic word “Cheshire” went on the envelopes (he and his wife very rarely saw my grandparents in person again). “Of course, our Len lives in Cheshire” was the sort of phrase my grandmother might drop casually into conversation if someone else was putting on unwarranted airs and graces.

It was a far cry from their own father, born into poverty in the late 1860s. As a boy he and his brother (illegitimate twins) had been in effect homeless. They slept in a dirty stable off a cobbled yard in Ancoats, which was then one of the poorest areas of Manchester. Times have changed: Ancoats is fashionable and full of designer flats and wine bars. It’s a funny old world – now my grandma might say with pride: “Of course, he lives in Ancoats”.

She had the task of checking on the occupants to make sure nothing dodgy or dubious was going on