I have no special insight into the housing market. But it does strike me that 'established' places cannot become affordable, sort of by definition. If everybody can afford to live in SE21 then the prices will go up - that is supply and demand. There will continue to be people, like most of us on this forum, who choose to live in a very nice area of London which does not have premium prices. Just as prices in SE21 are governed by supply and demand, so are SE23 prices.

The difficulty in the 2007 housing market was that buy-to-let was pushing up prices (more so than massive mulitples, shared ownership, or anything else). This worked because there was an under-supply of housing in and around London as immigration to the capital from across Britain and Europe. Population has probably fallen in London in the last two years but, swine flu permitting, I suspect that the population will be higher in 2012 than it was in 2007. As such there should be demand in the market for houses to buy and rent.

From what I remember, in the last housing bubble at the end of the 1980s, there were plenty of people claiming that house prices would never rise to such high levels again. But that was when a ?100k house was about as rare as they are today, only that was the top of the market not the bottom. The doom-mongers were wrong then and I think they are most likely to be wrong again.

My prediction, for what it is worth, is that by summer 2012 house prices in SE23 will be higher than they are today (even if only by a few percent). I won't be making any bets as I have quite enough money riding on it already in the form of a mortgage.