How the dream of owning a home turned to a nightmare

With average deposits of £144,000 for first-time buyers in London, homeownership has never been more unattainable. Zoë Beaty investigates how stability became such a luxury

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When I was a child, my mum and I had a favourite hobby. At night, after tea, probably with Corrie playing in the background, we’d sit cross-legged on the living room floor of our little house in Lincolnshire making mood boards. The process was simple: potential dreams were ripped from piles of magazines and hopes meticulously pinned on a corkboard from Woolies.

Some nights we “redecorated” the house, or planned out what our lives would look like when we were finally rich. We'd have a car, for example, she wouldn’t have two jobs, we’d go on holidays that weren’t bought via coupons in The Sun. And sometimes, mum would clear the board, hand me the pins and say: “So. You’re 30. What does it all look like?”

I had no doubts. I would live in London, I told her, working as a writer at a big magazine or newspaper. I would be happy - I'd perhaps have a partner, maybe I’d have children, too; more certainly I would have a flat, or my own little house to decorate. It was all, objectively, a bit unlikely.

But having come to political consciousness to the sound of D:Ream and Tony Blair promising that “Things Can Only Get Better”, it made sense: I was raised in a generation taught to believe that, regardless of where I came from, hard work reaps reward and, if I really put my mind to it, that predictable rhythm of adulthood - work hard, earn enough, buy a place, build a life - would come. So that’s what I did.

Iam, then, what you might consider a success story. Over the years, I’ve done everything that I was told would lead to stability: I studied hard, got an expensive degree, built a career now 16 years strong, lived within my means wherever humanly possible and gained that coveted status of “working class done good”.