I Grew Up in London. I’m Not Sure I Can Afford to Stay Here.

There’s a particular kind of quiet that descends when you open a mortgage calculator at half eleven on a Tuesday night. Not peace — more like that specific exhaustion of realising the numbers don’t work, closing the tab, and then opening it again five minutes later just to check you didn’t misread something.

I’ve been doing this for a while now. Long enough that it’s stopped feeling urgent and started feeling like furniture. Just another part of the background noise of being this age, in this city, at this particular moment in history.

I grew up in east London, in the kind of neighbourhood that people who didn’t grow up there now describe as “up and coming” — which is a polite way of saying that the corner shop you went to as a kid is now a natural wine bar, and the terraced house your mate’s family rented for twenty years just sold for seven hundred thousand pounds. Three generations of my family bought property in London. Each of them, in their own way, managed it. I’m edging toward my mid-forties, and I’m starting to think I might be the first one who doesn’t.

That’s not a sentence I expected to be writing.

My grandparents bought their house at a time when property cost less than half a year’s wages. I don’t say that to be dramatic — I’ve done the rough maths, and that’s genuinely where it landed. A home wasn’t something you strategised about for a decade. It was just the next thing you did. You worked, you saved for a bit, and then you bought somewhere to live. The transaction was almost ordinary.

My mother’s route was different. Right to Buy — Thatcher’s great gift to council tenants, depending on who you ask. A blessing in disguise, if you were in the right place at the right time, which she was. It wasn’t conventional homeownership, but it worked. It gave her stability, equity, something solid. Whether the broader policy was wise is a separate argument. For her, personally, it was the door that opened.

And then my father, buying in the late nineties. That sweet spot — the one that feels almost mythological now when you look back at it. Before the explosion. Before London property became a global asset class rather than just somewhere people lived. Interest rates were what they were, but prices hadn’t yet lost all connection to what ordinary Londoners earned. You could buy a decent house in east London on a normal salary and not feel like you’d pulled off some extraordinary feat of financial engineering.

Three different entry points. Three different versions of affordable.

I think about that lineage a lot.

I moved south a few years ago — the way a lot of east Londoners end up drifting, for reasons that are partly practical and partly just the gravitational pull of cheaper rent and a different kind of neighbourhood energy. South London has its own logic, its own loyalties. You either get it or you don’t, and once you do, it’s hard to imagine living anywhere else.

Which makes the current situation feel even more personal.

When I first started seriously thinking about buying — not idly, but actually sitting down and working out whether it was possible — I assumed I was just being impatient. London’s expensive, everyone knows that. But surely if you saved properly, lived sensibly, got your act together, it would eventually be within reach?

The reality, when I actually started mapping it out, was something else entirely. The average property in most of south London that doesn’t require forty minutes of mental preparation before you describe the location to someone sits somewhere between five and seven hundred thousand pounds. A two-bed in the parts of Lewisham or Southwark I actually know and like — closer to six hundred, if you’re lucky and patient. I started using a first-time buyer mortgage calculator to run the numbers properly, rather than just vaguely dreading them, and even that felt like an act of emotional bravery I wasn’t entirely prepared for.

The monthly repayments weren’t outrageous in isolation. But combined with a deposit that would take years to save — while also paying south London rent — the whole thing started to feel less like a financial goal and more like an abstract concept. And the uncomfortable truth that I don’t say out loud very often: I’m not twenty-eight with thirty years of earning ahead of me. The mortgage term question has a different character when you’re closer to forty-five than thirty-five. Lenders notice. The numbers notice.

The deposit is the wall most people hit first, and it’s the one nobody fully prepares you for.

Five percent of £575,000 is nearly £29,000. Most lenders would rather you put down ten or fifteen percent — somewhere between fifty-five and eighty-five thousand pounds. I started using a deposit savings calculator to model out different scenarios, and even in the optimistic projections, the timeline felt uncomfortable given where I actually am in life.

And while I’m renting, the deposit doesn’t grow in a vacuum. Rents have gone up sharply in south London postcodes that used to feel like they offered breathing room. Property prices haven’t stood still. The gap between where I am and where I need to be has a frustrating habit of staying roughly the same width no matter how fast I walk toward it.

A few friends have had help from parents. I don’t say that with resentment — but there’s something quietly uncomfortable about the phrase “Bank of Mum and Dad” becoming a genuine structural feature of the London property market. The people who can buy are, increasingly, the people whose parents could also buy — at a time when buying was cheaper, easier, and required considerably less endurance. My family bought. But the equity in those homes doesn’t automatically become a deposit for me, and even if it did, that’s not a system — that’s luck dressed up as inheritance.

I’ve become, without meaning to, a person who knows a lot about mortgages.

I know about loan-to-value ratios. I know that a loan calculator will show you your total interest paid over the full term, which is a number I’d recommend not looking at directly if you’re prone to mild despair — and it hits differently when your term is twenty years rather than thirty-five, because the bank isn’t in the habit of lending to people who’ll still be repaying at seventy-five. I know the difference between fixed and tracker rates, between a two-year deal and a five-year deal, and I know the best rate available to you depends on factors that feel almost deliberately arbitrary.

And I know how much I can theoretically borrow, because I’ve asked the question how much mortgage can I afford in enough different ways that I’ve stopped being surprised by the answer. The gap between what I can borrow and what things actually cost in the areas I want to live is, as they say in finance, non-trivial.

So you start looking further out.

This is the part nobody tells you as a kid growing up in east London — that there might come a point where you look at a map and start considering places based not on whether you’d want to live there, but on whether it’s commutable. Whether the trains are reliable. Whether it’s the kind of place that feels like giving up or the kind of place that feels like a rational decision made by an adult.

I’ve been on Rightmove at midnight looking at places in Kent. In Surrey. In towns along the southeastern commuter belt that I’d only ever passed through on the way somewhere else. There’s a strange dissociation in scrolling through houses you could actually afford, in places you have no emotional connection to whatsoever.

A friend of mine relocated to Sevenoaks a while back. She talks about it like someone who’s made peace with something. Her commute is longer. Her mortgage is manageable. She has a garden. She sounds, on balance, less stressed than she did renting in New Cross.

But here’s the thing — and this is the part I keep coming back to — there’s another option sitting right alongside the outer-London scenario, and it’s one that people don’t talk about enough because it feels like admitting defeat, even when it’s arguably quite sensible.

Keep renting. Invest the would-be deposit — and whatever you’d overpay on a mortgage — into the S&P 500. Build income. Build options.

I’ve run those numbers too. With a decent income, disciplined investing, and no mortgage hanging over you, the financial case for renting and investing is genuinely compelling. I’ve used a property ROI calculator to compare what the money looks like locked in bricks versus working in the market, and the honest answer is: it depends, it always depends, but the gap isn’t as obvious as homeownership culture would have you believe.

The thing is — I shouldn’t have to choose.

That’s the part that quietly enrages me, if I’m honest. The choice between owning a home in the city I grew up in and having financial security shouldn’t be a binary. For my grandparents, it wasn’t. For my father, it wasn’t. They got both. A home and a foundation. The fact that in 2026, a person with a decent income, savings, and their life reasonably together has to sit at a laptop weighing up “security through property” versus “security through equity markets” — as if those are the only two doors — says something fairly damning about where we’ve ended up.

There’s a tax layer to all of this as well, which arrives approximately when you think you’ve understood everything else.

Stamp duty, specifically. The relief for first-time buyers helps at lower price points, but I used a stamp duty calculator to work out what I’d actually owe on properties I’d been looking at, and the numbers are real. Several thousand pounds that need to exist on top of the deposit, on top of solicitor fees, on top of surveys. Buying a home in London is not a single financial event. It’s a cascade of them, each one reasonable in isolation and collectively a little overwhelming.

And if you do get there, there are further questions — whether to overpay when you have spare cash, whether the maths makes more sense to keep money liquid. There are tools for this too, like this overpayment calculator. Another decision. Another spreadsheet. Another Tuesday night.

What nobody talks about enough is the emotional weight of all this arriving at this particular stage of life.

There’s a version of this story that’s poignant at twenty-eight. Frustrated but young, time on your side, the market might shift, who knows. At forty-something, it sits differently. The sense that the window might not just be difficult to climb through but actually, quietly, closing — that’s a different feeling. Not panic. More like a slow, clear-eyed reckoning.

My grandparents didn’t agonise over it. My mother found her route, unconventional as it was. My father hit the market at exactly the right moment, almost by accident. And here I am — with more financial literacy than any of them probably had, more tools, more information, more calculators — genuinely unable to replicate what any of them did.

I sometimes wonder when I started thinking about the place I might eventually live in as an asset to be optimised rather than a home to be inhabited. That shift is something. I’m not sure it’s progress.

The London I grew up in is still here. The streets of east London are still there — even if the faces in the cafés have changed, even if the rents have doubled and the old communities have quietly dispersed to outer zones and beyond. The south has its own version of the same story. Pockets of Peckham, Lewisham, Catford — places that used to be genuinely affordable are now aspirational. And the people who grew up there are being nudged outward again.

I don’t know how this ends for me.

Outer London is on the table. Renting and investing is on the table. Some version of both, staggered and improvised, is probably also on the table. I have a decent income. I’m not starting from nothing. By any objective measure, I’m in a better position than a lot of people navigating this same question.

And yet.

The thing I keep returning to isn’t really about property. It’s about what it means that this is the calculation at all. That a person who grew up here, who has worked, saved, made sensible choices, who watched their family build stability in this city across three generations — that this person now has to strategise like a fund manager just to answer the basic question of where to live.

I should be able to have both. A home and a future. Security in bricks and security in savings. The generations before me didn’t have to pick. That they did, and I can’t, isn’t a personal failing.

It’s just London now. And I haven’t quite made peace with that yet.