ABSTRACT
For most of the postwar period commentaries on housing problems were confined to the private and public rental sectors. Indeed, until the 1970s both home ownership and council housing were regarded generally as relatively unproblematic tenure forms providing different routes from a declining private rented sector. Substantial research effort has gone into the measurement of house price movements and differential asset appreciation across different section of the population in a range of national contexts. A variety of factors contributed to the housing market conditions of the late 1980s in Britain including financial deregulation which improved households' ability to borrow funds for house purchase, changing macroeconomic conditions, government policy and demographic change. The shock to the system which occurred in the late 1980s was therefore not solely in terms of the depth and severity of the fall in nominal house prices but in terms of its geography.
