A few maps and notes today as I try to catch up with the latest release of the HPSSA house price data from ONS. HPSSA? It stands for 'house price statistics for small areas', and it covers England and Wales. There are loads of different datasets and sometimes finding what you're looking for can be a bit fiddly so I put together a very basic, single page with links to them all. The good news? You can get small area house prices going back a full quarter century now, to the final quarter of 1995. Yes, way back in the mists of time. This is what the house price map of England and Wales looked like then - this is for the four quarters from the final quarter of 1995. Get yourself a time machine and snap up a bargain in central London - treat yourself!
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| Snap up a bargain while you can! |
Fast forward 25 years and, you will be shocked to learn, the pattern is much the same and unless you have access to giant wads of cash, you are not going to be buying a big house in London any time soon. You really did need a map to tell you that, right?
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| Amazingly surprising patterns |
But of course these maps don't change very much over time, save for a few little pockets here and there, or a bit of spread outwards from London or a few other high price areas - which I've tried to label.
What I find most interesting - apart from this consistency over time, and the eye-wateringly expensive areas in inner London - is the extremes and the spatial patterns. So here are a few maps on that, below.
By the way, I've chosen a £250k cut-off for the middle category as it's close to the average house price at the end of 2020. Or at least one version of the average. The London average is a bit over £500k now but my last category starts just a little bit below that. If you look at the maps below it's easier to pick out the 'southern bits in the north' (e.g. Wilmslow) or the 'northern bits in the south' (e.g. Portsmouth?) - at least as far as prices and perceptions of them sometimes go. I don't want to start one of those north-south wars that seem very popular on Twitter these days, particularly since all these places are incredibly far south anyway 😉.
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| The high and low categories together |
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| Just the most expensive areas |
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| Just the least expensive areas |
Want the data? Here's my web page list with all the data - take your pick. The data I've used here is from dataset 46 and was last updated at the end of March 2021. How will the Covid-19 situation pan out in relation to house prices over the short, medium and long-term. No idea, but I'll keep following Neal Hudson's latest updates to keep on top of all that.
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| It's a bit ugly, but it still works |
1996, eh? Now that seems like a loooooong time ago. Mind you, so does 2019. Is there any kind of north-south divide in house prices though? Hmm, hard to say.
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| Again, not exactly surprising |
And one of those 'how it started, how it's going' things to end, since the data series goes back so far.
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| Quite interesting if you look really closely |
