The 'other' housing market, where house prices have regressed 60pc - Telegraph

The 'other' housing market, where house prices have regressed 60pc - Telegraph

Even the row of terraced houses in North West London where I live has managed to put the housing crash behind it; these relatively modest late Victorian properties again sell at record prices.

Yet stray beyond London and the South East, and you see an altogether different picture, one that goes largely unrecorded by the established indices for measuring the UK housing market – Halifax, Nationwide, Rightmove and so on.

To see this "other" housing market, I've been to Newcastle and its surrounding areas in the North East, the region that gave birth to the folly of Northern Rock.

Like all property markets, prices in the region are highly calibrated. There remain sizeable pockets of prosperity, where values, though still significantly off, have held up reasonably well. As in many parts of London, it's easy to imagine from these relatively well to do districts that there never was much of a housing crash.