The problem with mummy and daddy's money

London is now an inheritocracy. It's both golden ticket and gilded cage

-  MICHELLE THOMPSON

To some, this may well be a familiar story; to others, it will reek of financial privilege.

In the 1980s, my mother bought an additional five-bed property for £28,000 with a mortgage just three times her salary. It was a wreck - no ceilings, no bathrooms, barely habitable - in Tooting Broadway, then deemed a rough part of south London. My parents scraped through the 1980s market crash and 1990s repossession surge, but by the 2000s, the property was appreciating at more than 10 per cent each year, far exceeding my mum's income.

The area changed too. The now familiar tale of urban gentrification reshaped Tooting. A pub that once hosted strip shows became a craft beer bar. Another, with a "last orders" collection for the IRA, started hosting James Bond-themed nights. Rents soared, and my sisters and I could no longer afford to live where we grew up.

My mother's decision to "invest" in a second property in London would define not just her future, but mine too. Fast forward to today and this house is worth over a million. It won't shock you to hear that I lived in it rent-free in my twenties as I built my career. In my thirties, with a husband and two kids, I was also incredibly fortunate to eventually buy the property off my mother, knowing that as an academic and journalist my husband and I had no chance of buying a family home in our area on our income.

London, once a city of opportunity, has become in my millennial lifetime a city of inheritance. If you are lucky (as I undoubtedly was) to have parents that either live in the capital or fund you through young adulthood, it is becoming the difference between whether you sink or swim, stay or leave.