ABSTRACT
For much of the time since the Depression years of the 1920s and 1930s there has been a prominent ‘North-South divide’ in the prosperity of England, notwithstanding pockets of prosperity in the North (for example in parts of Cheshire or North Yorkshire currently) and localised areas of poverty in the South (such as in parts of inner London for generations). There has also been a disparity between the prosperity of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on the one hand, and England on the other. Since it is broadly agreed that demand rather than supply is the principal determinant of property values, the disparity in living standards across the United Kingdom is inevitably a fundamental cause of housing surpluses in some regions and housing shortages in others, but also a major cause of regional variations in house prices and rents.
