Property

Take a quick look at the UK buy-to-let market and you might find it tough to understand exactly what it is that makes it so very popular. Dealing with tenants is difficult and boring. House prices have a horrible tendency to go down as well as up (Londoners — ask anyone living in the north of England about this). And rents have long been so low relative to prices that getting a worthwhile net yield is all but impossible after costs. Given this, you might wonder, why on earth would 14.5 per cent of all mortgage lending in the UK in the third quarter of last year have been to

Sheila Pugh is 91 and in good health. She lives on her own in Congleton, Cheshire, where she takes pleasure in cooking for herself and moving about the place with a dustpan and brush, albeit a little gingerly at times. She has a private garden with a pond and views over arable land. A lot of her friends and a great number of people of a similar age have had to move into retirement or care homes, cashing in their savings and surrendering their independence in the process. Mrs Pugh’s good fortune and the difference between her and so many other ninetysomethings is simple: she lives in a bungalow. ‘It’s

That the Conservatives came up with the idea of extending the right-to-buy to housing association tenants was a symptom of their failure to believe they could win this year’s general election. Such an ill thought-out policy can only have made it into the manifesto in the expectation that it could be used as a bargaining chip in the coalition negotiations which were expected to follow. Today, communities secretary Greg Clark announced a significant weakening of the manifesto promise. He said he would consider an alternative scheme put forward by the housing associations themselves, which would exempt many properties, such as those funded by charitable donation. In some cases, tenants may

Lant Street would be easy to miss, if you weren’t looking for it. Charles Dickens lodged on Lant Street as a child, during his father’s stay in Marshalsea debtors’ prison nearby. The Gladstone Arms is about halfway down, doors open to the narrow street on a warm afternoon in August. Inside, an old man nurses a pint in late summer light that falls through mullioned windows. The grain of the oak floors has a dark patina of London grime. There is nothing spiffed-up about the place. But it’s beautiful, and in decent nick. A black and white cat sits on the piano. This tiny place is also a live music

If a political subject is inconvenient to both Left and Right then the chances are that it won’t get addressed, however serious the problem. And so it has been with house-building; we have a desperate need for more homes in this country, but the Tories don’t want to discuss it because the obvious solution is to build more homes in Tory areas where the locals oppose it; Labour don’t like to because the subject of immigration upsets them. More generally both globalist Left and Right, represented by a spectrum encompassing the Economist, Financial Times, City AM, the Times and Guardian, like the idea of an economic model which depends on

I write this half-naked, sucking on ice cubes, breaking off sentences to stick my head in the fridge. In the flat below, one neighbour dangles out of her window, trying to reach fresh air, while another keeps having to go to hospital because the heat exacerbates a life-threatening heart condition. We live in a beautiful new development on the banks of the Thames. Fancy pamphlets in our lobby boast of our building’s energy efficiency. In winter, we bask in a balmy 24ºC, without having used the radiators in two years. The insulation in the walls is super-thick; our energy bills are super-low. But from spring to autumn, whatever the weather,

Which is worse, morally and reputationally — to be Thomas Cook, shamed by its refusal to show proper human concern, for fear of being taken to admit responsibility, over the death of two children by carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty boiler while on holiday in Corfu; or to be Barclays, fined almost $2.4 billion (heading a list of banks fined more than $9 billion between them for similar offences) for conspiring to manipulate the foreign exchange market over a five-year period? Ethicists could agonise over that one for weeks. But in terms of customer response, it’s clear that the travel agent — whose mistake was not to reject legal advice

This election will see me up all night until the last results are in. It will have me knocking on doors, handing out leaflets and driving old ladies to the polling stations. All this is a first for me — and for the many others I find myself doing it with. Why does this election galvanise like no other? One issue has made it up close and personal — Labour’s mansion tax. As one neighbour canvassing with me yesterday remarked, ‘It is landing us in the shit.’ We are all of a certain age. We range from the comfortably off to the quite poor. We have lived in our houses

‘I love my new kitchen heart of the home let’s fill it with friends happy.’ So says the thought bubble in the current ad for the estate agents Rightmove, part of their ‘Find your happy’ campaign. Don’t even get me started on the lack of punctuation — or the use of ‘happy’ as a noun. What I’m worrying about is the kitchen itself. Glimpsing Ed Miliband’s second kitchen last week, we came face to face with the drabness of today’s hyper-hygienic kitchen. Is the kitchen really ‘the heart of the home’ in Rightmove’s imaginary domestic paradise, or is it in fact one of those spotless, minimalist, metallic kitchens, all hard