Life's too short for the young to own a home

By Rosamund Urwin

 It is probably lucky that the TV in our flat doesn't work. For if I switched it on to see yet another set of smug fortysomethings building a new home from scratch or choosing between a charming cottage in Cornwall and a house on the beach in Spain, I would probably weep.

As a member of Generation Rent (distinguishing characteristics: no mortgage, no hope but an abundance of cardboard boxes ready for the next time we're turfed out), these shows make me feel like an alien, peering in at a world I can't understand. The recession should have killed them off, Kirstie Allsopp should have had to get a new gig. At the very least, it should have spawned a spin-off show: Repossession, Repossession, obviously.
Yet property porn persists, I suspect because the housing market - though it has slowed - has escaped relatively lightly from the downturn. I had thought that one of the few positive side-effects of recession for us young 'uns - the hope in the Pandora's Box of pain - would be that house prices would plummet. Instead, in London, they are not far from their peak, aided by a paucity of homes coming to the market.
With youth unemployment close to a record and employers seeing little cause to give anyone a pay rise, the idea of holding the keys to a place you own is a fantasy for many of us twentysomethings.
A survey this week suggested that more than half of potential first-time buyers have given up the dream of owning a property altogether. But why is it our dream? The worst thing that the baby-boomers did for us wasn't the years they spent driving up prices, it was infecting us with their obsession. In Britain, we equate renting with flushing money down the loo. Our parents - many of whose wealth stems in large part from the property boom - have drilled it into us. "You are paying off someone else's mortgage!" they opine. And most of us nod.
We shouldn't. We need a new approach to housing and can look to much of the continent - where renting is the norm - to find it. Renting in London is exorbitant, but it needn't be. Rather than buying into the cult of home ownership - a cult which has surely been shown to be bogus - we should be building more properties specifically for the young to rent.
Renting has its advantages. The leaking ceiling, the shower piped backwards, that bust television: none of it is my responsibility. And as the US sub-prime crisis proved, the safest investments do not have picket fences wrapped around them.
We have been handed a miserable property legacy; why repeat our parents' mistakes? It would have the added bonus of clearing a little space on the TV schedules.

French get a fashion lesson

It is fashion transfer season and the style-obsessed are currently gripped by whispers of who is going where. Marc Jacobs is tipped to be made creative director of Christian Dior, a spot sitting empty after the sacking of John Galliano in March. In this game of modish musical chairs, this would leave a vacancy at Louis Vuitton, where British designer Phoebe Philo is being mooted as Jacobs's successor.
The ultra-cool Philo, who still lives and works in London, has already led two French fashion houses. First she helped to turn around Chloe, now she has made Celine ultra-covetable again. She is not perhaps an obvious fit with Louis Vuitton - Philo has made Celine the epitome of stealth wealth style, while LV is all about ostentation and glitz - but we should be proud that a former party-girl from Harrow is showing the French how to do fashion.

Upstairs to a great hive of creativity

The Royal Court's theatre upstairs has enjoyed an impressive run of late. The Acid Test, by the depressingly-young Anya Reiss, was even smarter than her first play, Spur of the Moment. Romola Garai, from BBC2's The Hour, was hilarious in The Village Bike as a pregnant woman who craved sex while her preachy husband fretted about all things bump-related.
Last week, I went there to see part of the theatre's Rough Cuts season where works-in-progress and experimental pieces are put on. The biannual performances are intended to help writers to develop their ideas (Laura Wade's Bullingdon Club-inspired Posh was spawned there) but they can also be treats for the audience. For only £8 - just a penny more than I pay on a Saturday in my local cinema in Peckham - we saw God Bless the Child, a play by Molly Davies about a behavioural expert sent to deal with a difficult primary school pupil.
The stage was bare, the actors read from scripts and occasionally stumbled over their words but Davies's wit meant that none of that mattered. When the play returns in a fuller form, as I am sure it must, I would advise booking swiftly.

Lend me your stilettos, Posh

Amid all the Libyan coverage there was a danger that we might miss the really important story of the week: woman with back pain wears ballet pumps. Victoria Beckham is suffering from a slipped disc following her pregnancy and has been instructed by doctors to swap the stilettos for flat shoes. But since the main attraction of ankle-endangerers is that they make you look slimmer, Mrs B was the last woman alive to need them anyway. Now, if she fancies doing a wardrobe clear-out...
Source http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/