Jeremy Deller’s A Flag For London

“WHEN the general atmos­phere is bad,” George Orwell wrote in his essay Politics and the English Language, “language must suffer.”

This observation is as relevant today as it was when those words were penned in 1946, and it is useful in mak­ing sense of the housing crisis in which London is mired.

In anodyne turns of phrase that obscure the often brutal realities they signify, property management agents will advise landlords to “get better return on their property investments”, “find higher-value tenants”, or “supercharge rental yields”.

In these formulations, private tenants are just collateral damage in the impersonal pursuit of profit. People’s lives are hidden behind the smokescreen of management-speak. Young people are being forced from the neighbourhoods in which they grew up; mothers are sharing bedrooms with their teenage children; some are losing their homes altogether.

In April, average monthly rents hit £2,500, while the supply of rental properties on the market remains “constrained”, according to Rightmove. For “Generation Rent”, buying a home is a distant prospect.

After decades in which real wages and productivity have flatlined, rising house prices have served as a substitute for economic growth. So for normal people their home has become their savings, their pension and their legacy all rolled into one.

This is why rising mortgage rates offer the single-greatest threat to the government. In the absence of any meaningful improvement in living standards, every politician feels the imperative to keep the house price bubble from bursting.

Those locked out of this bubble are trapped at the mercies of the rental market. Many private tenants live precariously, signing contracts in the knowledge they may be served a “no-fault” eviction notice at any time. These conditions explain the general opprobrium that greeted a recent Telegraph article titled: “Generation Rent has forgotten how lucky it is.”

At a time when landlords go to great lengths to disguise the cold profit motive in their pursuit of “increasing rental yields,” we must look elsewhere to make sense of what is going on.

The artist Jeremy Deller gets right to the heart of the housing crisis with his “Flag for London,” displayed in Somers Town. He tells the story with two neat lines: one shows the steep rise in rental prices, the other the sharp fall in available rental properties.

As Barry Stilwell says, the flag is an appropriate symbol for Londoners because the housing crisis is “the one thing we all have in common. Either we’ve found a way of surviving here, or else others… have had to move out.”

But finding a “way of surviving” is not the same as living. London is one of the world’s richest cities, and we must demand better.