A brief history of the UK housing market  1952 – 2022

Across these seven decades we have seen different factors influence the market in different ways during different economic cycles. This article gives a brief history of what has happened and why.

Our first interactive chart allows you to track what has happened to both nominal and real house prices over the past 70 years. Simply hover over any point on the chart to see where prices were at any given date.

During this period we have seen….

• a post war boom in local authority housebuilding that is now a distant memory….
• the Barber Boom give way to the oil crisis of the early 1970s….. 
• a prolonged upswing in prices through the 1980’s brought to an end by the double digit interest rates of the early 1990s as we left the ERM…..
• an unprecedented period of price growth from the middle of the 1990s until the credit crunch of 2007, which fundamentally changed our relationship with housing…. 
• a subsequent period tension between government ambitions to restore home ownership and the regulators desire to ensure responsible lending and….
• a wholesale reassessment of what we want from a home reignite a housing market in the wake of a pandemic that means prices have finally returned to where they were in 2007 on an inflation adjusted basis.
  
  

Our second interactive chart be allows you to look at house price growth during each of 13 distinct phases of the housing market over past 70 years.  You can switch between total and annualised price growth by using the toggle function.

Our brief history lesson continues with a time line that looks at what occurred and why in a bit more detail.  It highlights the impact of different levels of housebuilding, government policies’ such as the Right to Buy, the rise of Buy to Let, stamp duty & other tax measures and mortgage regulation. 

That reminds us that the UK housing market is driven by a variety of economic, political and societal factors which together have fed a national obsession with house prices.