Nothing really. Just a snapshot from the council housing estate that makes up one half of our road.
The other half is being 'gentrified' by people like me and Kate, with privately owned terraced houses rising 40-50% in value in the last two years. A 3 bed house is now worth ?600k ($1.2m). When I was working in Investor Relations, I used to find this estate a scary place to walk through, and avoided it. Now I walk through it at least twice a day to get the bus.
When I passed this Nokia box just now, I was in the middle of calculating that the retail price of my Nokia phone was around a month's salary on minimum wage after tax - and a quarter of a year or so on the dole.
On the plus side, I think 3 to 5 thousand people in the City take home bonuses of over one million pounds ($2m) each year, now (in addition to their 6 figure salaries, of course) - and in total around ?10 billion is given in bonuses in the uk. So I'm sure all that will trickle down soon enough. That's the theory, isn't it? Strange it hasn't...
