It seems a bizarre thing to go picking on. A £3.20 bowl of cereal sounds a lot, but it’s something I, as someone who earns below the average national salary and flipping loves cereal, wouldn’t begrudge paying as a treat. In the same way people will go out for a meal as at treat. Or buy a cake as a treat. I suspect there are restaurants and bakeries across Camden that are also a little expensive- it doesn’t mean they are directly responsible for Camden becoming unaffordable because the prices are going up and the wages aren’t.
I’ve been very generous and googled the address of where they ought to have gone protesting, at a place where the blame for a lack of growth, low wages and rising property prices thanks to the wallets of foreign millionaires and tax breaks for wealthy friends can squarely be pointed.
http://www.hampsteadandkilburn.org/contact-us
I think you’re missing the point, it’s not about cereal or what it costs – it’s about making areas seem more palatable than they once were by making them ‘cool’. London is suffering it’s own ‘housing crisis’ the top of the market is being squeezed by foreign buyers who are buying up high-end stuff which has an knock-on effect down through the market – for some people it’s a real winner – I recently saw a programme about “million pound homes” everything from a castle in Scotland with a leaky roof down to an ex-council house in East London, the owner bought it in the 80’s during ‘right to buy’ for a pretty small amount of money – £50k maybe, he was a council worker himself, not sure what he did but we wore high viz and rubber gloves to work – he was selling his house to a developer who was going to turn it into 4 flats.
Can you imagine what that sort of change does to a community? Where once stood a basic family home worth £50k, 25 years later stands 4 flats worth £400k or so – such is the way of world everyone who owns anything in the area is now either selling for 7 figure sums or demanding a huge rent rise from their tenants. Within a few years that community is gone, yes that area is not much ‘nicer’ but what happens to it’s former residents? With less and less parts of London now affordable they stuck between a rock and a hard place – leave everything they have and everyone they know and leave London or try to squeeze into another affordable bit?
Commuting is largely out of the question when it costs fortunes to live anywhere within a 2 hour train journey and the costs are huge – effectively leaving London unaffordable to anyone who isn’t wealthy within a few years – how will public services cope?
It might sound far-fetched, but if you look at New York, the first city to really follow the ‘gentrification’ path there are now only 3 areas of New York which are affordable to the majority of people Canarsie, Bay Ridge, & South Shore, but at least in NY it’s not so hard to commute from the cheaper areas.
