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Ooh, let’s hope not, because that wouldn’t suit any of us at all well, would it? It may have taken some of us longer than others, but chances are, if you are Generation X, you own some element of the home you live in. You might have a whopping mortgage, but yes, you’ve done it – you’ve clambered on the ladder and you can look down pityingly on those grasping around beneath you.
Maybe you are one of the really lucky – or simply older – ones who got in early, played the market and are now sitting in something substantial, or even own more than one property. Maybe you’ve got a weekend pad, or a holiday home, or you are part of the buy-to-let industry making a tidy sum from some Millennial tenants on the side.
You may have been able to upgrade your home several times, and maybe now your house is detached, with a garden, a paddock, a pool, or a tennis court. Maybe you live in a smart part of town, and obsessively check in on Zoopla several times a day to see how far local prices have gone up. What fun, playing that fantasy property game – if I flog off my home now, we could swap it for something twice the size in the countryside (and become subsistence farmers!), or move abroad (and learn Italian!), or downsize (and have no mortgage!). Perhaps your chic little Clapham maisonette could buy you a Georgian rectory in Leicestershire – the commute wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Or your Acton two-bedder could get you a starter house in Colchester (then we can have a garden!). Or a chateau in France, or a finca in Spain. Or maybe you could move to Surbiton, pay off your mortgage, and never work again. Just think what your life could be like …
It has been a feverish pursuit, a golden ambition, for much of the last 40 years, owning your own home, ever since it was enshrined as a social right by Thatcher with her Right to Buy policy. Only now is the dream receding, slipping from our grasp. Boomers have had the best of this asset inflation in the property market, and are properly dug in. Many of Generation X have also managed to reap the rewards. Many of us got in at the last minute, through a shared ownership scheme or a dodgy mortgage provider, and are clinging on by the skin of their teeth. And as so many of us have all our equity in our houses, all our savings, our pensions even, a crash would be disastrous.
‘We have no plan beyond our houses,’ says Annabel Rivkin of The Midult. ‘Millennials on the other hand are much more agile, they are much more like New Yorkers or Parisians, less obsessed with owning a piece of the world, happy to up sticks and move wherever life or work takes them.’ But for Generation X, approaching or deep into families, our house holds a lot more jeopardy.
As a result, we love our homes. In fact we fetishise them, pouring as much love and attention into them as we once did our wardrobes or our record collections. Farrow & Ball paint charts are now as keenly observed as new season cruise collections. Graham & Green furniture helps us look a little artisanal, and we pepper in some industrial chic or upcycled factory clobber for ‘originality’. On the walls you’ll find digital art, framed family photos of everyone looking relaxed and picture-perfect on a Scottish loch, Cornish rock, park picnic rug or Maldive beach (delete as appropriate). Neon signs, wall hangings, graffiti art, Abigail Ahern’s artisanal cacti collection, Sophie Conran’s earthenware kitchen pots and Henry Holland for Habitat cushions – you can dress your home now almost as quickly, cheaply and fashionably as you can yourself. And for a generation obsessed by cool and lifestyle, it is only right we should extend the same indicators to our living space.
Thank God, then, for Ikea, the H&M of the interiors world. This other high-volume, low-cost Swedish megabrand has, like fashion, democratised home-styling, at the same time as encouraging rampant consumerism and the disposability of goods. Everyone can afford a new kitchen now you can get them from Ikea on interest-free credit for less than a grand – and we can splurge on scatter cushions and shelving called ‘Bobby’ whenever we fancy now, as it’s so goddamn cheap. For Generation Rent this is a boon – every time you move into a new letting, you can afford to do it over just how you want it.
Meanwhile our homes have changed to accommodate our new flat-structure households, ones where friends live together well into their thirties, and kids are afforded the same importance as their parents. Obsessively we knock through to create the sort of one-space living areas that reflect our family and household values – hey, we’re really fluid about our eating/living/relaxing, everyone just hangs out together. The kids are just like us, they shouldn’t be locked away (although I’m increasingly jealous of friends who have hived off a space that is kids only – a playroom where they can stash all the plastic coloured crap kids trail around; or better, somewhere that is adults only – Daddy’s porn room as one friend likes to call it, ‘My mum cave,’ says another).
Everyone hangs out round the kitchen island, where we are busy fetishising our food and our cooking, now the focus of the home. It’s here we have our discos after dinner – here’s a mirror ball to prove it, we still love a dance, you know. Opulence in a townhouse, mid-century modern in a cottage, contemporary Italian in the loftspace, vintage in the studio: we knowingly reference our nostalgia as we refashion it for the way we want to live.
And now that we are in our forties, we go out less and so our living space has become even more important. Going out costs too much money, we have kids, we’re tired, we work from home, there’s Netflix. We’re still social, but not in clubs or raves any more, we do it at home instead. We want big, long dining tables on which we can throw inclusive kitchen suppers – sure, bring who you like, come when you like, we’re so relaxed around here. Just turn up if you feel like it. Bring a bottle and we can recreate those Nineties rave communities right here in our kitchens. Why bother with a nightclub (when you don’t even know the doorman any more), when you can DJ for yourself at home? There’s room for our record decks (vinyl’s back in, which is great, because we’ve all still got it from the first time round) and our bars are well stocked (wheel in the vintage drinks trolley, Steph – so Abigail’s Party, we just love it!). Bookshelves line our walls, carefully curated to show how well read we used to be (before kids and Kindles), with backdated issues of Vogue, The Face and Q to show off our historic style credentials.
The objects that equip our homes define us – our NutriBullets and KitchenAid mixers (ah, but what colour?), our Daunt cloth book bags, our animal skin hides, Tom Dixon lampshades, Neptune kitchens, fluffy Berber rugs and Le Corbusier armchairs. Our copper-bottom saucepans, our Ercol sofas and G Plan sideboards – the antiques Boomers treasure so much are not modern enough for our tastes. Twentieth-century furniture is what we collect now.
Yes, we love our homes. They are the safe harbours from the madness outside, dressed to express who we are and how we want to live in these confusing times. And aren’t we lucky if we own them. And – yes – smug.
But what if you didn’t make it? What if you are still renting in your middle age – is it so bad? Some of us did not manage to make that deposit, didn’t have that conversation with the mortgage lender.
‘I worked abroad between the ages of 25 and 29, like loads of people did, and came back just at that critical moment when house prices were starting to accelerate,’ says my friend Flo, 44. ‘Within a year or two of being away, all my friends in their late twenties had suddenly become totally obsessed with house prices – I came back and it was all they could talk about. I found it bizarre. I had been in Australia with a whole group of itinerants, and then in New York where it was quite normal to rent, so this new obsession just seemed weird.
‘I didn’t have any money at the time – I was working, but living hand to mouth, and my boyfriend was really pressurising me to buy. Eventually we borrowed some money for a tiny deposit and bought a one-bed flat in Walthamstow – this was way before Walthamstow was in any way a good place to live. It was in the wrong part of town and I found the flat stifling for my spirit. A year later we split up and sold it. We made a bit of money, but not much.
‘Everyone kept going on about how I had to get on the housing ladder, but prices were going up so quickly. I didn’t buy the one-bed flat in an odd part of town again, because I just wasn’t thinking like that. Instead I was shocked – really shocked by how commercial everything had got. I still am shocked.
‘Now I find myself in this big bucks world, and I have to keep a check on myself when I visit friends. Ones who bought a tiny terrace in Bristol and now live in a seven-bedroom house in Frome. I have one friend who married someone rich and moved to the South Downs. I crashed at her house after a party once and when I woke up in the morning and walked into her kitchen I almost fell over – it was an atrium. Absolutely mind-blowing. All my closest friends live in vast houses because they have spent the last 20 years working their way up the ladder, whereas I was earning without any sort of view to building up equity.
‘But my values are still the same. I don’t need much money to be happy. When I visit my friends I have to remind myself that we are all the same people, they are no more happy than me, they have mortgages to worry about. I have to remember to keep these things in proportion.
‘As a renter you are an itinerant – I don’t mind as I never get bored. But the pay-off is I’m not settled. Not settled in my personal or professional life, I’m always flitting from one thing to the next. I actually spent last summer staying at my parents’ house, because I had to move out of my rental as my landlord was selling it. Maybe I’ll be able to buy something in Margate eventually, but it will be tiny and I’ll still be coming to London to work as that’s where all my work and connections are.
‘I have to remember not to get caught up in the idea that you have to have a lot to feel like you have succeeded, as it’s really pernicious.’
Flo is a wonderful exception. She doesn’t talk about property or schools when she comes round, she consciously doesn’t measure herself or how well she is doing or where she lives or what she owns: instead it is her friendships, her work, her social life, her passions and her cultural inquisitiveness that define her. Remember that next time you wake in the middle of the night sweating about catchment areas, Ofsted ratings and loan to value ratios. Think of Flo next time you sit next to some bore at dinner who bangs on about their property success and how clever they have been: ‘Well, when I was in my twenties I bought a flat in Notting Hill, and sold it for this, made two hundred thousand. Then, I borrowed another couple of hundred, bought a house, now it’s worth a million, and that’s tax free. Took some capital out, bought a buy to let or two, done very well, haven’t I?’
Living in a time of cheap money, we and the Boomers have been able to over-leverage, and so far there has been little punishment for it. It’s not only in property prices – inflation has happened in virtually all assets from gold to oil, art to fine wine, watches to classic cars. For a certain class and age group, every time they spent money, they made it. Wealth just came.
‘The ease of wealth creation by simply buying a property with a large mortgage and waiting for its value to rise has no skill to it, it’s pure luck,’ says Anton Bilton. ‘Those who have benefited from this asset inflation have created their wealth not from entrepreneurialism or saving, which previous generations would have done, but have instead lucked-out on continually rising property values. It’s given them a false sense of entitlement.’
Bilton has created millions out of property investment in the last 25 years. And it worries him. ‘I bought my first flat 30 years ago for £100,000 and I borrowed £80,000. But now, that flat is probably worth £800,000. So, how would a young person today get the deposit he needs to buy the same flat and the earnings requirement to borrow the rest? For those who don’t have family financial help it’s impossible, which means if they want to live and work in London they have to buy at the far edge of the city or outside and commute. It’s wrong and it’s a politically motivated social mistake.
‘By allowing wealthy, non-resident foreign investors to buy into London, residential prices have spiralled out of the next generation’s reach. As a nation of house lovers we have blindly sold our children’s birthright to live in their capital city to speculators.’
It’s not just in town centres, either – it’s happening in the countryside, too, where second-home owners have forced out locals by pushing up prices. X-ers might just about be okay if we managed to hang on to their coat tails, but the size of our mortgages may be more than we can handle if prices start to go the other way. Boomers, as we know, are sitting on fortunes. And hanging on to them too – they have little intention of downsizing their big houses and freeing up the market. Why should they move out of the homes they have lived in all of their lives? But for the generations below us, the property game has changed forever.
And now our capital city is littered with half-empty towers built by Chinese investors for super-rich foreigners. Foreigners who may not either want or be able to afford them any longer. Much of London’s prime central property is a safe haven for cash moved out of unstable foreign economies, repositories for mystery fortunes of dubious sources. ‘The American authorities have recently initiated a law for New York and Miami that any buyer purchasing an apartment over £3 million must name the true beneficiary,’ says Bilton. ‘So its ownership can’t be hidden behind Cayman Island companies, or anything else. They suspect, and quite rightly in my view, that city residential property is the great money-laundering instrument of the world. The way to unfathom the money flows is to start seeing who the real owners are.’
But there is a more pernicious effect from this economic golden age. Those who grew wealthy off the back of asset inflation have not had to struggle for their wealth; they have not known a war or loss or atrocity. And so, there’s less gratitude. As a result, ‘There’s a lack of pioneering spirit and entrepreneurialism,’ says Bilton. ‘Instead wealth creation has been modelled on the back of other people’s wealth – the hedge-fund model. It’s shocking that such huge fortunes have been made by people who simply manage other people’s money with no shared downside risks to themselves.
‘You also see it in executive pay. FTSE 100 company chief executive salaries with associated bonuses today can reach £10 million a year,’ he says. ‘If somebody made £10 million 25 years ago it was because they had come up with a clever idea, worked hard all their life and sold their business. Now, you get that for managing a business someone else built.’
One CEO I know was let go after just three years, having taken the company down a disastrous route. I used to walk past him at the lifts at 6 pm sharp every day, coat on, briefcase in hand, rushing to his chauffeur-driven limo to get home. Most of the rest of the building were still working. When he left, not only did he collect an enormous severance payout; he also took his negotiation to the wire over a lifetime allocation of the company’s Twickenham and Wimbledon tickets. This attitude and renumeration policy doesn’t create novel thinkers or pioneering leaders. It creates politically minded, difficult people, whose vested interest is not in the quality of the company’s product or the well-being of its workforce, but the short-term share price by which their bonus is measured.
‘The managers who earn these salaries have an overwhelming tendency to cronyism,’ continues Bilton. ‘Twenty-five years ago, a senior partner in an accountancy firm or a legal firm probably earned £250,000 a year, a huge amount of money. But then that person had dedicated their life to becoming intellectually advanced, focused, dedicated to their profession, providing good advice to their clients.
‘Now, that would be the salary of a mid-level accountant or lawyer, and instead senior partners are earning millions a year. They can charge this much because of an unspoken cabal that exists around the provision of advice to big corporates.
‘Chief executives of large listed companies surround themselves with crony advisors – merchant bankers, lawyers, accountants – and it’s in everyone’s interest to maintain a high level of fees, because when it comes to remuneration committee reports, everyone wants to maintain the evidence that “this is what it costs to run a big company; this is the cost of the advice I need – I get paid this much because he does over there.” It feels that in the higher echelons of management everyone looks after each other and leaches the system. Legal, accountancy and investment banking fees have far exceeded average wage inflation over the last 20 years and simply shouldn’t be where they currently are.’
This is the system Generation X are inheriting from self-interested Boomers who have not been paying it forward, who have taken as read the idea that society just keeps on getting richer – so pocket what you can in the process. The Digital Revolution has begun to disrupt these big businesses and many of them do not have the wit or the talent to cope. Big business deserves to fail if it can’t get its house in order, but it’s causing enormous damage in the process, whether that’s in a BHS pension scandal or a BP oil spill.
And digital disruption is not going to level the playing field – in fact, quite the opposite. Just as the Digital Revolution looked set to recalibrate the system, the new X-er-led hegemony of big tech has started to flex its muscles. Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google, the four horsemen of the digital apocalypse, are buying up anything that looks remotely like a threat and behaving with the arrogance and imperialism of the very structures they looked to replace. They have huge monopolies now, and as they get bigger they are swallowing more in their path. Business as a force for good, don’t be evil – did someone forget something here?
The Mark Zuckerbergs, Sergey Brins and Elon Musks – the Rockefellers of our generation – are megalomaniacs. Zuckerberg may have set aside 99 per cent of his $50 billion fortune for charity – but only in a structure that he controls. The vast wealth they are amassing is confined to limited workforces. What’s more, they are not paying taxes but funnelling their profits through tax havens.
The Nineties may have been the decade where class barriers came crashing down, but somehow in the Noughties we allowed money to build them all back up again. The enormous glut of stock-option wealth generated by the explosion of financial markets, new technologies and the management of the investment of these absurd windfalls has created a new strata of the privileged classes.
In front of us, they have created a parallel universe of big boats, five-star holidays and crystal-encrusted bikinis. They have second, third, fourth, fifth homes in London, Hong Kong, New York, Gstaad, St Barths. Their children are taxi-ed around the world in private jets, and they have pushed up house prices and private-school fees, the cost of luxury goods, travel and hotels. Costs that leave everyone else barricaded on the other side.
They have run away from the rest of us, and the gap is only getting wider. The top 1 per cent of the world’s wealthiest now own more than the rest of the world put together. One in nine meanwhile do not have enough to eat. Oxfam reckons the world’s richest 80 people have seen their wealth double between 2009 and 2014.
What should we do about it? We, the X-ers, who are in charge now, and the Millennials, who will be soon. These are Oxfam’s suggestions:
Meanwhile, and irritatingly, the rich have stolen some of our pursuits and made them distinctly uncool. ‘Going to nightclubs in the late Eighties it was about what you wore, who you knew,’ says Kris Thykier. ‘Yes, it was hierarchical, but there was some sort of democracy in terms of how you got in with that crowd. Now, nightclubbing is simply about how much can you pay for a table, that’s the charge of entry. Money as social currency has become central.’ Nightclubs are suddenly about sparklers and champagne buckets. Being on the guest list is simply a purchase, not a signifier of being in the know.
Maybe this is the inevitable conclusion of commodifying cool. Nightclubs have become vulgar playpens for the uninteresting. Likewise the acquisition of stuff – watches, handbags, designer gear – no longer seems that desirable. Once your Hermès handbag or your dad’s Patek Philippe said something classy about you. Now they are edging on ‘nouveau’. Buying things for the sake of buying them is something of a social disease – and given space in our homes is at such a premium, where do you store it all anyway?
‘We have reached peak stuff,’ declared the chief sustainability officer for Ikea, which is a marvellous example of having your cake and eating it. But then there is such a glut of ‘stuff’ these days, it seems to be losing its value. It’s like when you chuck out the mountain of kids’ toys that have lain unplayed with for months: when only a plastic lorry and a spinning top remain, they suddenly find they can play with both again.
‘I’m streamlining everything at the moment,’ says Alice Temperley. ‘Selling the house in the country. Flogging off my vintage cars. All these things – you just don’t need them. You need your health and your family and there’s no point in all this clutter.’
Experiences are where we are choosing to spend our money instead – holidays and travel, food and good wine. ‘There was a period where the acquisition of stuff was a route to fulfilment,’ says Kris Thykier. ‘But actually if you had a better watch, a better car, a better suit or pair of shoes, would that be as fulfilling? Nowadays I spend my money on food and drink. I like being generous and hosting, I like going out and seeing people, and I travel. These are the things that I enjoy. I probably spend much more money on experience than I do on stuff.’
‘People are definitely becoming less materialistic,’ says Tom Hodgkinson. ‘They want to do things instead – just look at the way festivals are booming. We were asked to set up an Idler tent at the Secret Garden Party. It was challenging what we were asking of people – I was amazed they wanted to come and listen to talks about Socrates at 11 am on a Sunday, but they did. People seemed to like learning stuff, so out of that we grew the Idler Academy of Philosophy, Husbandry and Merriment. The idea is with philosophy you’re studying the arts of good living; husbandry is the practical things like how to bake bread and keep bees, and merriment is the third element of a fulfilled life – singing in choirs, dancing lessons and playing the ukulele. At Festival no. 6 last summer we had 400 people doing swing dancing to hip hop outdoors in the rain – it was so joyful!’ And a long way from a magnum of Cristal in Chinawhite.
It may well be that the experiences we sought so relentlessly from our rave days have now passed through a period of over-consumption in the Noughties, left us feeling slightly sick and moved us on. After buying and spending, acquiring and amassing, we have come out the other side looking for skills and education. Kitesurfing and Tough Mudders, growing your own and learning Latin.
‘Hedonism still defines us as a generation,’ says Tom, ‘so we are always going to bring a sense of fun and community to whatever it is we do. Education is the new drugs! It’s such good fun, you do it in groups, you laugh. There’s something empty about hedonism eventually and it’s not very good for your health. Education is about discovery and mind-expansion, new perspectives, showing an interest in other realms out there.’
Meanwhile we need to rethink property for a generation that may not know home ownership. We need accommodation that is accessible to those who work on public-sector salaries – doctors, nurses, firemen and policemen who are integral to the smooth running of our towns and cities. We need to create spaces that cater to a new, flexible live/work model, for a society that is always on, 24/7, that will no longer be housed in offices. We need flexible work/live spaces that encourage communal collectives and can accommodate short-term, project-based teams.
The prototypes of these new co-living spaces are just opening. One, based in London’s Old Oak Common, charges from £225 rent per week and includes bills, concierge, linen and cleaning. Also included is a co-working space, a spa, rooftop terrace, themed dining rooms and ‘disco’ launderette.
This all sounds good for freewheeling Millennials, but what about those of Generation X who are still stuck in flats and maisonettes with multiple children because we can’t afford a terrace house with a patio garden? What’s going to happen as we get older? Do you really think Generation X are going to accept the care-home model?
‘I’m hoping we make brilliant old people’s homes,’ says Miranda Sawyer. ‘The way we treat old people is a disgrace, so I hope we reinvent that. It should be similar to the way clubs work – you could have like a rave old people’s home and a Britpop old people’s home, but mix up old and young. It should be: your name’s not down, you’re not coming in – because you know which old people you’ll want to live with, in your club, you can see them a mile off. Why not take over those awful caravan parks in seaside resorts? Everyone living separately but together.’
Annabel Rivkin has the same vision. ‘I think we might end up in communes. There’s a place in Paris called Babayagas’ House, which is a women-only old people’s community care home that I rather admire. Me and a few of my friends want to sell our houses and pool the proceeds – a bit like free schools, we might do free care homes. And probably single sex.’
Babayagas’ was set up by a group of Parisian women who wanted to keep their independence but live communally. A bit like the Golden Girls, if you like. Publicly funded, the building contains 25 self-contained flats with 21 of those adapted for the elderly, while the ground floor houses a university for senior citizens. Maybe chuck in a disco ball and a wine bar and that would suit us very nicely.
As one of the first Babayagas’ residents declared as she settled into her new home: ‘To live long is a good thing, but to age well is better.’