New wave of rich home buyers are pushing out the middle classes

 
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Exploding London property prices have created a new phenomenon of “super-gentrification” that forces “ordinary” middle-class residents out of newly smart neighbourhoods, a report claims today.

The research, commissioned by poverty charity the Cripplegate Foundation, focuses on Islington, one of the first inner London boroughs to be targeted by prosperous buyers who snapped up and restored Victorian homes in formerly working-class streets.

It warns that Islington is now fast becoming a borough of extremes as City professionals and foreign investors move in, with the wealthiest and poorest living next to each other but keeping a “social distance”.

Local house prices have doubled in a decade so that “what a median income earner may have been able to afford 10 years ago, now only the highest earners can attain,” according to the study, written by the New Economics Foundation think-tank.

It means that so-called “chattering class” professionals such as teachers, civil servants and journalists are priced out of the areas that they colonised during “pioneer” waves of gentrification in the Seventies and Eighties.

Report co-author Faiza Shaheen said that while the process was most advanced in Islington it could also be seen increasingly in other areas of inner London such as Camden and Hackney and “even parts of Walthamstow where I grew up”. The polarisation is reflected in contrasting high streets that are either dominated by expensive coffee shops and gastro-pubs or betting shops and pawn brokers.

Islington, once an overwhelmingly working-class area, has now become one of London’s most desirable and expensive districts. Tony Blair lived there before he became Prime Minister and Mayor Boris Johnson has his family home there.

The richest enclaves such as Barnsbury and Canonbury are now increasingly dominated by City bankers and high-earning lawyers and accountants, the report says. The borough has also attracted celebrity residents such as Kate Winslet, Emma Watson and James McAvoy.

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