LIVING ON the Isle of Dogs, with the River Thames in all its moods and splendour rolling by outside the window, is a joy few Londoners experience. But living on the Isle of Dogs, post September 11, 2001, also meant living in the shadow of the Canary Wharf tower, which had become a symbol of fear.
I had two nightmares associated with it. In one I was with my baby son, fighting to get on the last Docklands Light Railway train before a dirty bomb hit the tower; in the other my once desirable townhouse in Caledonian Wharf was barricaded and barbwired, while I tried desperately to contact my husband on a phone that refused to work. It was time to move. I had lived in the South of England for 17 years, since university. Our decision to move back to Barnsley, where I grew up, was fuelled by that peculiarly Yorkshire mixture of sentimentality and hard-nosed business sense.
We took our son Jack to meet his Yorkshire relatives when he was six weeks old. As we drew up near the site of the pit where his grandfathers had worked, the Jupiter movement from Holst’s The Planets came on the car radio.
Tears sprang to my eyes. It was the tune to which I had sung the hymn I Vow To Thee My Country at primary school, as I gazed out over the slag-heaps to the rolling countryside beyond. That piece of music has always anchored me to my roots. As I looked at Jack on that autumn evening, with the smell of coal fires in the air and the ghosts of his ancestors all around, I knew that, one day, we would be back for good.
But within six months I realised that, if we didn’t act quickly, we would be living in a two-up, two-down with no central heating. If we were lucky.
Barnsley, emerging from post-industrial gloom, easily commutable to Leeds and Sheffield, and surrounded by glorious countryside, has become a property hot spot. House prices have risen by at least 30 per cent over the past two years, and although they remain cheap compared to the country overall they are on a steep trajectory. The average price for a detached house in Barnsley between July and September, 2003, was £144,477, according to the Land Registry. Three months later this had gone up to £153,505, even though the last quarter of the year is normally the quietest. (The average price nationwide is £248,803.)
Last Easter a nearly new, five-bedroomed, stone-built house in a good village was on the market for £285,000. Still a bargain, relatively speaking, but not as much of a bargain as it had been almost exactly a year before, when it was up for £185,000. At the time I’d thought how we could buy that for cash with the equity we had made in four years on our London house.
It was now or never. Our four-bedroom townhouse went on the market for £320,000. Property websites were consulted on a daily basis. Local papers arrived every Saturday morning. Estate agents were cultivated and pestered at least three times a week. The search for a Barnsley home was on. It had to be detached, with a minimum of five bedrooms, ideally near public transport and with a large garden. The budget was £300,000 maximum.
Most people assume that moving out of London means moving to the countryside. But after exploring every village around the town, we admitted that fields and horses weren’t for us and concentrated our search in Barnsley itself. Considering that I couldn’t wait to leave the place when I was 18, this felt very strange. And it felt even stranger when, after viewing half a dozen houses that were all pretty decent but not The One, we saw a white and brown Edwardian monstrosity that I had admired since I’d toddled past it as a child. Witton Villa, seven minutes’ walk and countless worlds away from where I grew up, a five-bedroom detached house with a garden of about a third of an acre, cast its spell. It was on the market for £285,000, but needed some TLC. The vendor balked at our first offer of £272,000, but said that for £275,000 it was ours.
We finally sold Caledonian Wharf for £295,000, and it was a struggle to find and keep a buyer. When we drove by on our first visit back to London a few weeks ago, three houses around it, which had also been for sale when we left, now had “To Let” signs.
Since we arrived prices in Barnsley have shot up even higher. Last spring our budget of £300,000 could have bought us pretty much anything we fancied. A few weeks ago a four-bedroom, 1930s “gentleman’s residence”, about a mile away from us, went on the market for £630,000. There’s an offer on it already.
BARNSLEY’S BOUNCING BOOM
OUR plumber Steve has a theory about the property boom in Barnsley. “It’s middle-aged people inheriting money for the first time and investing it in the safest place — property,” he says.
In a town which the locally born novelist Joanne Harris (Chocolat, Blackberry Wine) once dismissed as a cultural desert with no discernible middle class, a new breed of savvy property owners is fuelling price rises. The headline figures are startling, but behind them is a property market finally catching up with nearby cities such as Sheffield and Leeds that have enjoyed high levels of home ownership for decades. Steve owns a large detached house — worth about £340,000 — in a highly popular village, and several Coronation Street-style terraced houses, which he rents out.
The average rent for a two/three-bedroom terraced house is about £400 a month. In the late 1990s an unmodernised one could be picked up for less than £25,000. Now they are snapped up at £60,000-plus.
Until the pits closed in the 1980s, mining was the main employer in Barnsley. Historically, the bulk of the population had been working-class and lived in either privately rented or council-owned houses. But thanks to right-to-buy policies and shifts in attitudes, 69 per cent of the population own their houses — the same proportion as in England and Wales. Wealth is beginning to filter down through the generations and people are spending it on their own home as well as buy-to-lets.
As Ian Butcher, a partner at Merryweathers estate agency in Barnsley, points out: “One of the main reasons why the property market in Barnsley has become so attractive to investors is because of the failing pensions market. There is so much uncertainty.
“People want to take control of their long-term investments and secure their own future, and property guarantees a return.”
