Martin Wainwright

guardian.co.uk,

It is easy to be cowed by the twin gods Supply and Demand, which have a nasty way of rounding on those who try to meddle with their proceedings. This is especially the case when they are in league with the estate agents' holy trinity – location, location, location – as with the Land Registry's new figures on English regional averages for house prices.

These show prices in the northeast of England falling below £100,000 (to £99,464) while most of London shows a rise to £345,298 (but not all; eight of the capital's boroughs including "Olympic" Newham have registered falls). It is easy and tempting to respond: well of course; demand outweighs supply in London, where the jobs are, and the opposite applies in Middlesbrough or Hartlepool, where they aren't.

This is true (in a crude, broadbrush way) but not immutable. Like all markets, housing prices depend to an extent on confidence and consumers believing that as things are, they will remain. Time and again, innovators have been able to push at this. Older readers will remember how Charlie Ware, later famous for his Morris Minor centre in Bath, drew scorn for his belief in the 1960s that Islington could be "gentrified".

Those of us of that generation will note an interesting thing about today's world. Continued .....

Derelict boarded-up terraced houses in Middlesborough could be ripe for redevelopment. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian.