Capital

previous decades but with systematic make-overs in the knocking-through, open-plan style that became fashionable in the seventies and never really went away. People converted their lofts; when the council veered to the left in the 1980s and stopped giving permission for that, a group of residents banded together and fought a test case for the right to expand their houses upwards, and won it. Part of their argument was that these houses had been built for families, and that loft conversions were entirely in keeping with the spirit in which they were built – which was true. Someone in the street was always doing up a house; there was never a time when there weren’t skips outside, builders’ vans hogging the street, and all the banging, crashing, drilling, pounding, roaring, and turned-up transistor radios of builders and scaffolders that came as part of the package. The activity slowed down for a little after the housing crash of 1987, but began to pick up again ten years later. By late 2007, after many more years of a new boom, it was usual for two or three houses in the street to be undergoing some sort of major renovation at the same time. The fashion was for people to install basements, at a cost usually starting around £100,000 a time. But as more than one of the people digging out the foundations of their house liked to point out, although the basements cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, they also added at least that much to the value of the house, so looked at from a certain point of view – and because many of the new residents worked in the City of London, this was a popular point of view – the basement conversions were free.
    All this was part of a big change in the nature of Pepys Road. Over its history, almost everything that could have happened in the street had happened. Many, many people had fallen in love and out of love; a young girl had had her first kiss, an old man had exhaled his last breath, a solicitor on his way back from the Underground station after work had looked up at the sky, swept blue by the wind, and had a sudden sense of religious consolation, a feeling that this life cannot possibly be all, and that it is not possible for consciousness to end with the end of life; babies had died of diphtheria, and people had shot up heroin in bathrooms, and young mothers had cried with their overwhelming sense of fatigue and isolation, and people had planned to escape, and schemed for their big break, and vegged out in front of televisions, and set fire to their kitchens by forgetting to turn the chip pan off, and fallen off ladders, and experienced everything that can happen in the run of life, birth and death and love and hate and happiness and sadness and complex feeling and simple feeling and every shade of emotion in between.
    Now, however, history had sprung an astonishing plot twist on the residents of Pepys Road. For the first time in history, the people who lived in the street were, by global and maybe even by local standards, rich. The thing which made them rich was the very fact that they lived in Pepys Road. They were rich simply because of that, because all of the houses in Pepys Road, as if by magic, were now worth millions of pounds.
    This caused a strange reversal. For most of its history, the street was lived in by more or less the kind of people it was built for: the aspiring not-too-well-off. They were happy to live there, and living there was part of a busy and determined attempt to do better, to make a good life for themselves and their families. But the houses were the backdrop to their lives: they were an important part of life but they were a set where events took place, rather than the principal characters. Now, however, the houses had become so valuable to people who already lived in them, and so expensive for people who had recently moved into them, that they had become central actors in their own right.
    This happened at first slowly, gradually, as average prices crept up through the lower hundred thousands, and then, as people from the financial industry discovered the area, and house prices in general began to rise sharply, and people began to be paid huge bonuses, bonuses that were three or four times their notional annual pay, bonuses which were big multiples of the national average salary, and a general climate of hysteria affected everything to do with house prices – then, suddenly, prices began to go up so quickly that it was as if they had a will of