Nothing really. Just a snapshot from the council housing estate that makes up one half of our street. With nice crappy audio of bangs and shouts to give a flavour of the area.
The other half of our street - divided by a larger cross-street - 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...
